ABSTRACT
Someday an outside observer, say a Martian terrapaleophilologist with a statistical bent, might well decide that in the second half of the twentieth century the word “poetry” meant two different things in Russia and in the West. Russian earthlings continued the usage of their seventeenthto nineteenth-century ancestors and applied the term to a body of texts organized by specifi c constraints, such as the patterned distribution of syllables and stresses and phonic similarities between line endings; Westerners (Americans in particular) diverged from the usage of their forebears and applied the label “poetry” to texts that seemed at times to differ from prose only by the visual fact of lineation.1 Our Martian’s view is, of course, very schematic: clearly, a lot of rhymed and metered poems (including the most beloved ones) were written in America and Europe throughout the century; and quite a few Russian poets experimented with free verse. Still, statistically speaking, the twentieth century (especially its second half) was marked by the dominance of free verse in the West, but not in Russia. Not only is the sheer amount of Russian free verse minuscule compared to the ocean of rhymed poetry produced in Russia during this period; so is its symbolical signifi cance. All the canonical Russian poets-from the greats of the Silver Age (Blok, Esenin, Kliuev, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kuzmin, Mandelshtam, Gumilev, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Pasternak, Kharms, Vvedensky, Zabolotsky, et al.) up to the last universally recognized national classic, Joseph Brodskywrote primarily in rhyme and meter. Only toward the end of the millennium did a signifi cant and ever-growing free verse movement appear among the younger post-Soviet poets; however, traditional versifi ers still outnumber them in most literary camps.2
