Matyash, S. (2017). Enjambement in Russian poetry (essays on theory and history). St. Petersburg: RGPU im. A. I. Gertsena. (In Russ.)

Abstract

S. Matyash's book is preceded by years of research. The author appears equally interested in individual examples of poetics and in typology. Findings concerning the function performed by enjambement in works of a particular poet are accompanied by definition of its structure and are considered in the context of the principles guiding the use of enjambement in a given historical period. In her definition of enjambements Matyash relies on gradation of the density of syntactic relations, a rule proposed by M. Gasparov and T. Skulachyova, and later M. Shapir, and suggests the use of this rule to avoid inaccurate definitions of enjambements and to discover new ways of their classification. Despite O. Fedotov's argument that syntactic relations should be considered jointly with metrical ones due to their mutually complimentary nature, the system used by S. Matyash to define enjambements can be viewed as an achievement in the fields of prosody and poetics.