On Stressed Russian Rhyme and Non-Rhyme Vowels

On Stressed Russian Rhyme and Non-Rhyme VowelsAuthor(s): Ian K. LillySource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 337-349Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4209551 .

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AND EAST EUROPEAN

REVIEW

Volume 65, Number 3-July I987

On Stressed Russian Rhyme

and Non-Rhyme Vowels

IAN K. LILLY

WHEN compared with other syllabo-tonic verse traditions, especially German and English, both of which have a dozen or so stressed vowel phonemes,' Russian poetry has at its disposal what seems a meagre range of only five such phonemes - /a'/, /e/, /f/, /6/, and /U/.2 Yet many poets writing in Russian turn this situation to their advantage and exploit the quite frequent opportunities that arise for sound patterning. Patterning based on the stressed vowels has taken two main forms: end-rhyme, and the repetition in close proximity of the same stressed vowel. It would appear that most poets sense the desirability of repeating the same stressed vowel throughout a line or stanza, particularly when they can thereby achieve synaesthetic effects.3

In the last twenty years or so, numerous analyses have been carried out on stressed vowel patterning in Russian poetry, both in the broad context of associations between sound and meaning and at the level of individual lyrics. If the studies of the former type are sometimes

Ian K. Lilly is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Auckland.

1 Thus, William G. Moulton, The Sounds of English and German, Chicago, I962, identifies fourteen German stressed vowel phonemes (pp. 6o-6i) and twelve English ones (PP. 73-74).

2 By convention, Russian poets regard 'bi' and 'm4' as equivalent. On the relevance of phonemic factors to the study of Russian rhyme and thus of Russian poetic language generally, see Dean S. Worth, 'Phonological Levels in Russian Rhyme', in Benjamin A. Stolz, ed., Papers in Slavic Philology, I: In Honor of James Ferrell, Ann Arbor, Mich., I977, pp. 314-19. Only stressed vowels are considered in this article, since Russian prosody is founded on the simple opposition of stressed to unstressed vowels, where the former, occurring no more than once per word, are invariably full and the latter in most cases are reduced. As a consequence, students of assonance in Russian poetry tend to pay little attention to the unstressed vowels.

3 On this matter, see above all Kiril Taranovsky, 'Zvukovaya faktura stikha i yeyo vospriyatiye', in Bohuslav Hala et al., eds, Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague, 1970, pp. 883-85.



338 IAN K. LILLY

unoriginal and lacking in methodological rigour,4 the latter do not always display caution in the interpretation of the patterns of stressed vowels.5 To their great credit, the more circumspect of the scholars working on individual poems avoid interpreting all but the most salient of vowel distributions. They may, as, for instance, P. A. Rudnev does in his study of Blok's 'Vsyo tikho na svetlom litse. . .', highlight the unusual distribution of a single stressed vowel only because there are good structural as well as semantic reasons for doing so.6 Alternatively, like Dennis Ward in his analysis of Pushkin's Ekho, they relate the distribution of the stressed vowels within a lyric to their distribution in non-verse texts.7 However, the use of quantitative methods to evaluate the frequencies of the stressed vowels in Russian poetry is still in its infancy. Despite the example of Ward, it is not clear that comparisons only with non-verse texts are the most relevant. Thus, Yu. M. Lotman would prefer to judge the relative prominence of a particular stressed vowel in a given lyric in the twin contexts of its author's poetic practice and of non-verse texts generally.8 Unfortunately, he is forced to observe that this kind of analysis is hampered by the lack of figures for the frequencies of stressed vowels in the work of his particular subject, Blok, to say nothing of other Russian poets.

The present article seeks to provide some of these figures while at the same time raising a related question. Scholars seem to have assumed that the distribution of the stressed vowels in Russian poetry occurs at the same level in the rhyming as in the non-rhyming segment of the verse line. Such an assumption needs testing, not least because, for reasons of poetic syntax, parts of speech such as conjunctions and

4 See Ian K. Lilly and Barry P. Scherr, 'Russian Verse Theory Since I 960: A Commentary and Bibliography' (International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, XXII, Lisse [Netherlands], 1976, pp. 75-I i6); and id., 'Russian Verse Theory Since 1974: A Commen- tary and Bibliography' (International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, XXVII, Columbus, Ohio, 1983, pp. I27-74). Current items in this area are recorded in Russian Verse Theory Newsletter, a biannual I have been editing and circulating to active specialists in Russian poetics sinceJune I983.

5 An international bibliography of structural analyses of individual Russian lyrics is sorely needed. Recent Soviet studies of this kind are identified by S. I. Gindin, 'Obshcheye i russkoye stikhovedeniye: Sistematicheskiy ukazatel' literatury, izdannoy v SSSR na russkom yazyke s 1958 pO I 974 gg.', in V. E. Kholshevnikov, ed., Issledovaniya po teorii stikha, Leningrad, I978, pp. 152-222, esp. section 3.2 (pp. I63-65); and id., Struktura stikhotvornoy rechi: Sistematicheskiy ukazatel' literatury po obshchemu i russkomu stikhovedeniyu, izdannoy v SSSR na russkomyazyke s I958g., part ii: 1974-ig80, vyp. I-3, Moscow, I982, esp. section 3.2 (vyp. I,

pp- 4I-54)- 6 P. A. Rudnev, 'Stikhotvoreniye A. Bloka "Vsyo tikho na svetlom litse..." (Opyt

semanticheskoy interpretatsii metra i ritma)', in M. P. Alekseyev, ed., Poetika i stilistika russkoy literatury: Pamyati akademika Viktora Vladimirovicha Vinogradova, Leningrad, 1971,

PP. 450-55. 7 Dennis Ward, 'Puskin's axo - Sound, Grammar, Meaning' (Studia Slavica Academiae

Scientarum Hungaricae, XXI, nos 3-4, Budapest, I975, pp. 377-86). 8 YU. M. Lotman, Analiz poeticheskogo teksta, Leningrad, 1972, pp. 228-29.



STRESSED RHYME AND NON-RHYME VOWELS 339

prepositions rarely appear at the rhyme position and because rhyme words are sometimes chosen for reasons of sound rather than sense (cf. Vyazemsky's dictum, 'In verse it is impossible to express every- thing: often you have to say not what you wish but what is dictated by metre and rhyme').9 Whereas the research of Ward and others does not break down the stressed vowels by position in the words concerned, such a procedure is necessary here in view of the separation into rhyme and non-rhyme words. Thus, in the AbAb quatrain, the commonest Russian stanzaic form and the focus of this study, there are equal numbers of feminine and masculine rhymes, so that half the rhyme words are paroxytonic (stressed on the second-to-last syllable) and the other half are oxytonic (stressed on the last syllable).10 However, in the non-rhyming segment, as in the Russian language generally,1' paroxytones are more frequent than oxytones -for instance, in the iambic tetrameter verse analysed here the ratio is about I.I5:1 - and proparoxytones, words stressed on the third-to-last syllable and thus entirely absent from feminine and masculine rhymes, make up about one eighth of all words in the non-rhyming segment of the iambic tetrameter AbAb quatrain.

The material analysed for this project was the original short poems of ten major syllabo-tonic poets that are set in perfectly repeating and typographically discrete AbAb quatrains and four of the most prominent measures in which that stanzaic form occurs - the iambic tetrameter, the trochaic tetrameter, the amphibrachic trimeter, and the anapaestic trimeter. The ten poets chosen were, for the period to the end of the nineteenth century, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Fet, and Nekrasov, and, for the first half or so of the twentieth century, Blok, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Mandel'shtam.12 All

9 P. A. Vyazemsky, author's notes to Stantsiya, in his Stikhotvoreniya, Biblioteka poeta, Leningrad, 1958, p. 183 (my translation). 10 There was a negligible number of (feminine) split rhymes in the verse surveyed; like the

equally small number of non-rhyming phrases featuring stress retraction (e.g., He 6buA, Hd

cnHHbI, both examples from Blok), they were regarded on the same footing as the other paroxytones and proparoxytones in the sample. 11 In the prose texts analysed for Table 6 below, the first 500 paroxytones occurred on

average in fewer pages than the first 500 oxytones. 12 Editions used are as follows: G. R. Derzhavin, Sochineniya, i-ix, St Petersburg, I864-83;

A. S. Pushkin, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, i-x, Moscow, i962-66; M. Yu. Lermontov, Sobraniye sochineniy, i-iv, Moscow and Leningrad, i96I-62; A. A. Fet, Polnoye sobraniye stikhotvoreniy, Biblioteka poeta, Leningrad, 1959; N. A. Nekrasov, Polnoye sobraniye stikhotvoreniy, i-i, Biblioteka poeta, Leningrad, I967; A. A. Blok, Sobraniye sochineniy, i-viIn, Moscow and Leningrad, i960-64; N. S. Gumily9v, Sobran!ye sochineniy, i-iv, Washington, D.C., I962-66; Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniya, i-II, [n.p.] and in, Paris, I967-83; Boris Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy, Biblioteka poeta, Moscow and Leningrad, I965, and id., Doktor Zhivago, Ann Arbor, Mich., I967; and Osip Mandel'shtam, Sobraniye sochineniy, i-nI, [n.p.] and iv, Paris, I967-8I.



340 IAN K. LILLY

completed short poems in the four forms known to have been written by these poets were included, with the sole exception of Blok's examples beyond his three main books of lyrics; this exception ensured that Blok's share did not exceed one third of the quatrains in any one of the four measures. The average length of the poems analysed was 4.7 quatrains for the iambic tetrameter and very close to five quatrains for the other three measures. The total number of stressed vowels identified and included in the first five tables below is 39,756. As for the details of classification, words in Roman script featuring stressed vowels unknown in Russian (all of which occur at the non-rhyming position) were ignored, and for Derzhavin the rule that rejects the change of /e/ to /6/ was followed in all instances except the rhyme pair 'OAHOM: Ayxe',M where rejection is not possible. Additionally, there was one rhyme pair with different stressed vowels, Blok's 'BecT4: cTpacTH';

this accounts for the odd numbers in the /a/ and /e/ rhyme-word figures of Table 3.

Table I presents the frequencies of the five stressed vowels in the rhyme and non-rhyme paroxytones of the ten poets' iambic and trochaic tetrameter AbAb quatrains. At the foot of the table are entered the totals for both measures - the 'observed' distributions - and beneath them the 'expected' distributions.13 If the two sets of variables, rhyme words and non-rhyme words, are independent, the differences between the observed and expected figures in each case will be minimal. In this table, at 400 rather than almost 500, /u/ is sharply under-represented at the rhyming position, while, to compensate, each of the other vowels is slightly over-represented. The extent to which this distribution is fortuitous can be measured by applying the chi-square test.14 The chi-square value here of 33.30 indicates that there is much less than one chance in a thousand of no relationship between the two sets of variables. In other words, /u/ may be described as occurring less frequently in the rhyme paroxytones of the verse analysed precisely because they are rhyme rather than non-rhyme words. Apart from Nekrasov's iambs, the figures for every poet bear out this trend.

13 The 'expected' distributions are the figures one would expect in the absence of a skew; they are derived by calculating the proportion of rhyme and non-rhyme words to total words against the total number for each of the five vowels. Thus, the expected number of rhyme words with /a/ is the total number of rhyme words (52 I6) divided by the total number of words in Table I (I 5144) and then multiplied by the total number of // words (4078); the result is 1404.57.

14 In this very common statistical test, the chi-square value in each of the ten cases is the difference between the observed and expected frequencies squared and divided by the expected frequency.



STRESSED RHYME AND NON-RHYME VOWELS 34I

TABLE I. Stressed Vowels in Paroxytonic Rhyme and Non-Rhyme Words Iambic and Trochaic Tetrameter AbAb Lyrics by Major Russian Poets

/ a, / /el/ /i /6/ /ul/

Derzhavin I R 86 56 62 54 12

NR I22 99 98 I 2 45 T R 46 8 I2 I0 0

NR 30 43 20 17 i6

Pushkin I R 50 48 i8 28 I0

NR 8o 59 62 59 33

T R 40 28 32 38 4 NR 73 52 42 6i 4I

Lermontov I R 58 28 i8 30 6 NR 53 55 37 6i 26

T R 4 6 2 I2 0

NR I I I2 6 7 10

Fet I R 224 i88 I 46 I 80 66 NR 362 348 245 364 147

T R 52 44 32 84 22

NR II7 87 68 129 49

Nekrasov I R 28 32 I0 22 24

NR 66 45 49 49 2 I

T R 24 i6 I0 38 6 NR 52 40 32 50 23

Blok I R 304 258 224 3I 2 120

NR 639 496 403 598 285

T R 8o 54 40 56 I 6 NR I38 I02 85 1 26 45

Gumilyov I R 88 80 66 74 28

NR I57 II9 II5 I65 69

T R 40 20 28 42 6 NR 7 I 37 47 76 32

Akhmatova I R 40 i 6 I 4 34 8 NR 68 50 33 52 I0

T R 20 i6 I2 22 2

NR 40 35 20 44 I 7 Pasternak I R I5o i o8 104 I64 24

NR 294 2I7 i6i 27I 8I

T R 36 26 44 40 i 6 NR 76 68 45 I 00 28



342 IAN K. LILLY

// /e/ If! /6/ hu!

Mandel'shtam I R 48 48 28 44 24 NR I05 6i 74 99 50

T R 40 24 22 46 6 NR 66 38 45 75 I5

OBSERVED I+T R 1458 I 104 924 I330 400 NR 2620 2063 I687 2515 I 043

EXPECTED R I 404.57 I090.80 899.30 I 324.32 497.01 NR 2673.43 2076.20 17I 1.70 2520.68 945.99

The distribution of the stressed vowels in the oxytonic words of the same corpus is not quite as clear cut (see Table 2), since two vowels rather than one do not occur at expected levels. Overall, at 760 rather than 855, /e/ is obviously under-represented and, at 1, 140 rather than about i ,o6o, /i/ is over-represented among the rhyme words. Not all poets illustrate these trends clearly. Thus, /e/ is not under-represented at the rhyming position in the Derzhavin sample nor in Man- del'shtam's trochees, while /i/ is not over-represented in the rhymes of Derzhavin, Gumilyov and Pasternak nor in the iambs of Nekrasov, Akhmatova, and Mandel'shtam. Lermontov's trochees are too few in number to show either pattern. Nevertheless, the skew in the total frequencies is of the same order as for the paroxytones, with a chi- square value for Table 2 of 30.79. It is also of significance that while /u/is sharply under-represented among the paroxytonic rhyme words, it occurs here at virtually its expected frequency, while /e/ is underrepresented among the oxytonic rhyme words but occurs in Table i at about its expected level.

TABLE 2. Stressed Vowels in Oxytonic Rhyme and Non-Rhyme Words Iambic and Trochaic Tetrameter AbAb Lyrics by Major Russian Poets

/a,/ 11// I/ /6/ /u/

Derzhavin I R 82 64 56 40 28 NR I36 120 I20 95 47

T R i8 20 I2 20 6 NR 46 36 28 25 24

Pushkin I R 42 24 50 30 8 NR 58 51 72 59 26

T R 36 22 36 40 8 NR 55 65 44 58 23




/a! /e/ If! /6/ /u/

Lermontov I R 26 i8 42 48 6 NR IOI 52 56 44 32

T R 6 6 8 2 2

NR IO 5 3 7 6

Fet I R 210 98 194 210 92

NR 403 219 273 354 I44

T R 74 30 48 62 20

NR I03 68 52 93 4I

Nekrasov I R 36 14 20 30 i6 NR 48 24 37 38 31

T R IO 20 28 26 IO

NR 35 38 20 37 I4

Blok I R 396 i8o 270 240 132 NR 6i8 323 381 499 206

T R I00 34 6o 38 14 NR 94 57 63 67 3I

Gumilyov I R II2 38 64 84 38 NR 153 69 IIO I38 56

T R 50 20 20 32 14 NR 55 47 29 54 14

Akhmatova I R 52 IO 22 24 4 NR 39 34 38 4I 22

T R I8 14 I4 20 6 NR 33 26 I2 26 8

Pasternak I R I76 78 io6 I34 56 NR 249 I43 I72 228 70

T R 42 20 32 54 14 NR 70 39 53 76 I7

Mandel'shtam I R 62 28 24 6o I8 NR 6o 29 33 33 i8

T R 34 22 34 30 i8 NR 50 24 23 6o 8

OBSERVED I+T R I582 760 I140 1224 5IO NR 24I6 I469 I6I9 2032 838

EXPECTED R 1534.48 855.52 1058-94 1249.69 5I7.38 NR 2463.52 I373-48 1700.06 2006-3I 830.62



344 IAN K. LILLY

As if to confirm the results described above, one might expect that the final stressed vowels of unrhymed quatrains in these two measures would be more similar to their counterparts earlier in the verse lines in their general distribution than are those of equivalent rhymed quatrains. Little suitable Russian poetry can be examined from this stand- point, but Karamzin is one poet with a quantity of iambic tetrameter XxXx (unrhymed, with alternating feminine and masculine clausulae) as well as AbAb verse. While his XxXx examples have occasional - perhaps involuntary - cases of rhyme pairing, the contrast in distribution between the final and non-final stressed vowels is greater for both paroxytones and oxytones in the rhymed rather than unrhymed material.15 This limited survey of thirty-nine unrhymed and fifty-six rhymed quatrains therefore supports the contention already outlined about the independence in distribution of rhyme and non-rhyme stressed vowels in the iambic and trochaic tetrameter AbAb form.

In turning to the tables for the two ternary forms surveyed, one notices a very different set of distributions of stressed vowels in the rhyme and non-rhyme words. In Table 3, as in Table i, the commonest stressed vowel in both the observed and the expected totals is /a/, followed by /6/, then /e/, /i/, and /u/, and in Table 4, as in Table 2, the pattern is the same except that /e/ follows rather than precedes /i/. There, however, the similarities end, for in both Tables 3 and 4 there is no measurable difference between the observed and the expected frequencies of stressed rhyme as compared to non-rhyme vowels. Accordingly, there was no necessity to present the figures for each individual poet; it needs only to be noted that neither Derzhavin nor Pushkin has any ternary poems in the AbAb quatrain and that Lermontov is represented only in the amphibrachs and then by a single poem.

In Table 3, on the paroxytones in the ternary sample, the only noticeable discrepancy between the observed and expected totals comes with /6/, which appears slightly over-represented among the rhyme words; this is due to uncharacteristic distributions in several of the earliest examples, which were written by Lermontov and Fet. Nevertheless, the very low chi-square value of 3.oo for this table shows the lack of independence in the distribution of stressed vowels between the rhyme and non-rhyme words. Table 4 tells the same story, except that the observed and expected frequencies could hardly be closer: the chi-square value for this table is 0.93.

15 The chi-square values are respectively 8.64 and 5.31 for the rhymed paroxytones and rhymed oxytones and 2.68 and 4.92 for their unrhymed equivalents. None of these distributions is statistically significant. The Karamzin materials were drawn from N. M. Karamzin, Polnoye sobraniye stikhotvoreniy, Biblioteka poeta, Moscow and Leningrad, I 966.




The question that obviously arises at this point is why the distribution of stressed vowels differs so sharply between the rhyme and non-rhyme words of the binary examples yet not at all between those of the ternary ones. Any explanation of this seeming paradox that has to do with the distribution of the other non-rhyme words, virtually all of which are proparoxytonic, is far from clear. To be sure, proparoxytones make up a higher proportion of the non-rhyme words in the ternary poems than they do in the binary poems, at I 733 versus 12.74 per cent. On the other hand, the frequency ranking of the proparoxytones across the five stressed vowels, as shown in Table 5, is very similar to that for the non-rhyme paroxytones in each case: for all but the amphibrachs, the order is /a/, /o/, /e/, /i/, and /u/, and for the amphibrachs it is /6/, /a/, then either /i/or /e/, and finally /u/.

TABLE 3. Stressed Vowels in Paroxytonic Rhyme and Non-Rhyme Words Amphibrachic and Anapaestic Trimeter AbAb Lyrics by Major Russian Poets

/a/ /e/ I/f /6/ /u/

Am R I45 95 56 I22 64 NR 252 I96 I50 256 I07

An R 248 I78 i88 258 92 NR 540 36I 320 422 2I6

OBSERVED Am+An R 393 273 244 380 I56 NR 792 557 470 678 323

EXPECTED R 40I.67 28I.34 242.02 358.62 I62.36 NR 783.33 548.66 47I.98 699.38 3I6.64

TABLE 4. Stressed Vowels in Oxytonic Rhyme and Non-Rhyme Words Amphibrachic and Anapaestic Trimeter AbAb Lyrics by Major Russian Poets

/a/ /e/ I/i /6/ /u/

Am R I38 88 96 ii8 42

NR I69 85 ioi II5 67 An R 278 I42 208 2I8 ii8

NR 34I I78 239 284 ii8

OBSERVED Am+An R 4I6 230 304 336 i6o NR 5IO 263 340 399 i85

EXPECTED R 426.02 226.8I 296.29 338.I5 158.72 NR 499-98 266.I9 347.7I 396.85 I86.28



346 IAN K. LILLY

TABLE 5. Stressed Vowels in Proparoxytonic Non-Rhyme Words Binary and Ternary AbAb Lyrics by Major Russian Poets

/a/,// /i,/ /o1/ / u/

14 538 410 333 445 205

T4 I64 107 87 122 53 Am3 96 68 73 100 48 An3 2I4 I51 138 I83 78

A more likely explanation for the similar frequencies of the stressed rhyme and non-rhyme vowels in the ternary examples lies in metrical characteristics. Where only the last strong position in the line in the two binary measures has to be fulfilled, in the two ternary measures unfulfilled strong positions are unusual (they occur in this material at a level of about I .5 per cent). This is to say that in the ternary metres as compared to the binaries poets face two equally challenging tasks -the creation of effective rhyme pairs and the fulfilling of the strict rhythmical demands of the ternary measures. As a consequence, no doubt, there is no discrepancy between the frequencies of the stressed vowels in the rhyming and non-rhyming parts of the verse line.

If this argument may be taken a step further, one might suggest that the distribution of the stressed vowels in the non-rhyme segment of the binary material bears a greater resemblance to that of prose than does the distribution at the rhyme position. This question was studied on the basis of analysing the vowels of the first five hundred paroxytones and first five hundred oxytones of randomly chosen prose texts by each of the ten poets. These prose works were Derzhavin, Rassuzhdeniye o liricheskoy poezii i1i ob ode; Pushkin, Grobovshchik; Lermontov, Taman'; Fet, Vne mody; Nekrasov, Peterburgskiye ugly; Blok, Devushka rozovoy kalitki i murav'inyy tsar'; Gumilyov, Lesnoy d'yavol; Akhmatova, Amedeo Modig- liani; Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago, chap. XIV; and Mandel'shtam, Yegipetskaya marka.16

The results of this analysis are summarized in Table 6; their implications are as follows. Among the paroxytones, /u/ occurs at the very low level of 7.67 per cent in the rhyme words but at I o.5 I per cent in the non-rhyme words of the binary poetry surveyed; in the non-verse texts its frequency is 9.oo per cent. And among the oxytones, /e/, although underrepresented at the rhyme position at 14.57 per cent, occurs in 17.54 per cent of the non-rhyme words and at about the same

16 All texts appear in the editions cited in footnote I 2 except for Fet, for whom see his Sochineniya, i-II, Moscow, 1982, and Nekrasov, for whom see M. V. Otradin, ed., Peterburg v russkom ocherke XIX veka, Leningrad, I 984.




level, 17.36 per cent, in these same poets' prose. Without pressing conclusions too firmly, one can say that both these stressed vowels occur at the rhyme position at an artificially low level, a level suggesting that in the binary measures the creation of rhyme pairs is a greater stricture than the formation of iambic or trochaic rhythms.

Now that the statistical analysis is complete, it is possible to turn to the relevance of these figures to problems of interpreting Russian lyrics generally. Two issues will be highlighted, the accuracy of remarks about stressed vowel frequencies in published research on individual poems and the identification of selected lyrics among those surveyed that display striking stressed vowel distributions.

TABLE 6. Percentage of Stressed Vowels in Paroxytonic and Oxytonic Words Prose Extracts by Major Russian Poets

/a, /e// I/i /o/ /6/

Paroxytonic 29.96 I9.32 I8.44 23.28 9.00

Oxytonic 28.40 I7.36 19.22 26.94 8.o8

One recent study might be singled out for discussion: the analysis by V. V. Kovalevskaya of Blok's K Muze, an anapaestic trimeter poem in eight AbAb quatrains.'7 In the course of her extensive exposition, Kovalevskaya remarks that /a/ and /e/ predominate among this poem's stressed vowels; much of her subsequent argument is built on this assertion. However, a comparison of the frequencies for the stressed vowels of K Muze with those for Blok's other poems in this form (not itemized in the tables) shows this claim to be unjustified. At the rhyme position in K Muze there are 6 /a/ and 8 /e/vowels, where 9.45 and 5. 1 5 would be expected, in other words the aggregate is about I 4 in each case. Among the non-rhyme words, /a/and /e/ occur at higher levels than expected, 27 and I4 rather than 20.28 and 10.78, yet these distributions are not statistically significant either. The simple fact is that in Blok's anapaestic trimeter AbAb lyrics, on average, /a/ makes up almost one third and /e/ just over one sixth of all stressed vowels, and so together about half the total.

In conclusion, it might be appropriate to suggest how Tables i and 2

may be used in research on sound structures in the lyrics of the ten poets surveyed. Reference will be made separately to distributions of stressed vowels in the rhyme and non-rhyme segments of the verse line.

17 V. V. Kovalevskaya, 'Kompozitsiya fonologicheskoy sistemy v lirike A. A. Bloka (K Muze)' (Voprosy syuzhetoslozheniya, no. 4, Riga, I976, pp. 130-46).



348 IAN K. LILLY

It is well known that Pushkin's celebrated 'Ya pomnyu chudnoye mgnoven'ye . . .' has an unusual distribution of stressed rhyme vowels: all the feminine ones are /e/ and all but the final pair of masculine ones are /i/. Tables i and 2 make it possible to measure the uniqueness of these frequencies in the context of Pushkin's iambic tetrameter AbAb poetry. Both these distributions - but especially the feminine one - represent a massive disruption of normal stressed vowel patterns in Pushkin's rhyme pairs, to say nothing of such frequencies in his non- rhyming verse segments or in his prose. At the same time, the distribution of stressed vowels in the non-rhyme words resembles the norm for his poems in this verse form.

While it is not difficult to identify the occasional poem from this corpus that has an unusual distribution of rhyme vowels - even if, like Pushkin's example, it involves the repetition of several rhyme words in successive stanzas - there are very few poems indeed with vowel frequencies in the non-rhyming segment that are significantly skewed. One such lyric is Pasternak's 'Opyat' Shopen ne ishchet vygod . . .' (I 93 I .18 In this twelve-quatrain iambic tetrameter work /a/ is clearly over-represented, particularly among the oxytones, where, on the basis of Pasternak's other poems in this form, twelve examples are expected, but as many as twenty-two actually occur.19 Moreover, /a/ is prominent, yet not quite at a statistically significant level, among the rhyme vowels, making up twenty-two of the forty-eight of them. The two trends converge in stanzas vi to viii, where /a/ is the sole stressed rhyme vowel and occupies sixteen of the twenty-five non-rhyme fulfilled ictuses; this concentration is echoed in the poem's last line, where all three stressed vowels are likewise /a/.20 Nevertheless, the real point here is that poems whose vowel distributions differ from the pattern for all other examples in the same metrical and stanzaic form by the same poet are very few, so few in fact that searching for any that do not involve refrains or some other kind of repetition (and the Pasternak example does involve repeated words) appears to be a rather unpro- ductive exercise.

18 Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy, pp. 366-68. 19 Where approximately 28 /a/ vowels are expected at the non-rhyme position, 43 in fact

occur, and, to compensate, /i/ and especially /6/ are under-represented. The chance of a skew like this is less than two in one hundred. 20 Discussing the formal characteristics of the second half of this poem, Krystyna

Pomorska, 'Music as Theme and Constituent of Pasternak's Poems', in Roman Jakobson et al., eds, Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, Slavistic Printings and Reprintings, vol. 267, The Hague, 1973, pp. 333-49, esp. 338-41, has alluded to the grouping of infinitives (many of which feature /a/ and occur in stanza viii), and Johanna Renate Daring, Die Lyrik Pasternaks in den Jahren I928-I934, Slavistische Beitrage, vol. 64, Munich, I973, pp. I43-44 and 2I8, has drawn attention to the repetition of'opyat" and the identity of stressed vowels in the closing line, but Pasternak scholars have, understandably, not elucidated the full effect of the vowel pattern detected by the present analysis.




The findings of this project may be summarized as follows: (i) the five stressed vowels do not occur in the iambic and trochaic tetrameter AbAb lyrics of some major Russian poets in the same frequencies at the rhyming and non-rhyming positions and should not automatically be assumed to do so in other binary forms; and (2) stressed vowel frequencies rarely vary by significant degrees among poems written by the same author and set in the same verse form unless some kind of repetition is involved, with the consequence that studies which identify unusual patterns of stressed vowels within a single poem, such as Rudnev's on Blok, appear to be more fruitful than those whose authors seek to place the distributions of stressed vowels in individual poems in a wider context.21

21 The final redrafting of this article was facilitated by comments kindly offered on an earlier version by G. S. Smith (Oxford).



Documents

On Stressed Russian Rhyme and Non-Rhyme Vowels