V. K. Trediakovskii and A. P. Sumarokov in Polemics about the Sapphic Stanza

Abstract

The transition from syllabic to syllabo-tonic verse in Russian poetry in the 1730s — early 1740s years is connected to the activity of three outstanding writers: Vasilii Trediakovskii (1703–1769), Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765) and Aleksandr Sumarokov (1717–1777). This reform concerned first of foremost binary and ternary meters and paved the way for creation of more complicated meters, among them syllabo-tonic equivalents of ancient Aeolic verse. The Sapphic hendecasyllable was the most known and widespread of them. The sapphic stanza was likewise very popular in European literatures; it consists of three sapphic hendecasyllabic lines and an adonean fourth line. Russian syllabic poets eagerly created rhymed sapphic stanzas with a caesura after the fifth syllable in the hendecasyllables, with the stresses in all four lines unregulated. Trediakovskii composed such sapphic stanzas for his translation of Paul Tallemant’s gallant novel “Le voyage de l’isle d’amour, à Licidas” (Paris, 1663), printed 1730 in Saint Petersburg. In 1735, Trediakovskii published “A New and Brief Method of Composing Russian Verse”, which is considered the beginning of the reform of Russian versification. In this treatise, Trediakovskii proposed a more regulated sapphic stanza. The sapphic hendecasyllables were to consist of six trochees; the third of them, before a regular caesura, was catalectic. All lines concluded with feminine rhymes. In the second edition of this work (1752) Trediakovskii revisited his conception. At this point he understood the sapphic hendecasyllable as a combination of four trochees with one dactyl in the middle of them. Under the influence of Lomonosov’s “Letter on the Rules of the Russian Poetry” (1739) Trediakovskii became convinced of the necessity of alternating rhymes and for this reason decided that the first two lines in the sapphic stanza should have masculine rhymes. As a result he truncated these lines so that they contained only ten syllables. In his lost “Letter about Sapphic and Horatian Stanzas” (1755) Aleksandr Sumarokov expressed strong disagreement with Trediakovskii’s revised conception. He found decasyllables in sapphic stanzas unacceptable; he also came out against regular caesurae. However, Sumarokov treated the metrical structure of the sapphic hendecasyllable the same way as Trediakovskii had. In 1755 and 1758, Sumarokov published three poems in sapphic syllabo-tonic stanzas, rhymed and unrhymed, but always without a regular caesurae. In 1762, Trediakovskii translated two stanzas from Horace’s Carmen saeculare. Their form allows one to conclude that he took Sumarokov’s criticism into account: he rejected decasyllables in these stanzas. Only in the question of caesura did he remain unyielding.