Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov (1935-2005) was one of the greatest and most prolific russian literary scholars of the twentieth century.Though associated with the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Gasparov's writings were so diverse and multifaceted—and his scholarly personality so distinct—as to elude categorization.Gasparov's accomplishments are all the more remarkable when measured against the rigid Marxist-Leninist paradigms that ruled humanities education and scholarship in the Soviet Union. A philologist with a special interest in verse form, he managed to sidestep the procrustean bed of Soviet ideology, building instead on the barely tolerated work of the Russian formalists and structuralists. He embraced and developed their goal of turning literary study into an exact science by applying statistical analysis and probability theory to poetics. Gasparov's scholarship was based on unprecedented amounts of data, which he painstakingly compiled in the precomputer era. However, he was never satisfied with the data as such; he used them to reach profound and unexpected conclusions.

The present paper reviews a classic work of scholarship on Russian verse, Kiril Taranovsky’s Russian Binary Meters. The analysis demonstrates that the two sections of the book are tacitly at odds with each other, and that the more famous second part (on “regressive accentual dissimilation,” and more generally the evolution of rhythmic patterning in various meters) does not fully take into account the observations of the first part (on accentuation in Russian verse). In particular, two elements are missing from the second part: the role of hypermetrical stress and the relative strength of stresses on strong syllables. Taranovsky recognized these phenomena, but they are nowhere reflected in his statistical data and conclusions, presumably because to take them into account would require an element of subjectivity. Taranovsky and his followers were proud that they could produce verifiable (repeatable) results. However, these results can only be repeated by scholars who agree on the same strict set of rhythmic conventions. The author of this essay argues that these conventions are oversimplifications. By omitting the question of hypermetrical stress, Taranovsky ignores some of the most important and memorable lines of Russian poetry. And by disregarding the question of relative stress, he creates an “acoustical” model of poetry that in no way corresponds to how it is actually recited. The paper ultimately suggests that scholars of verse should be more concerned with poetry as performance and less with the attempts to turn verse rhythm into an exact science.

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The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry presents the major themes, forms, genres and styles of Russian poetry. Using examples from Russia's greatest poets, Michael Wachtel draws on three centuries of verse, from the beginnings of secular literature in the eighteenth century up to the present day. The first half of the book is devoted to concepts such as versification, poetic language and tradition; the second half is organised along genre lines and examines the ode, the elegy, ballads, love poetry, nature poetry and patriotic verse. All poetry appears in the original followed by literal translations. This book is designed to give readers with even a minimal knowledge of the Russian language an appreciation of the brilliance of Russian poetry.

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