K opisaniju russkogo sticha načala XX veka: avangardnyj opyt Ivana Aksenova

The verse forms used by futurist I. A. Aksenov (1884–1935) have not yet attracted the attention of scholars in early 20th-century Russian poetry. Yet in his poems one can notice a large amount of alternatives to syllabo-tonic versification: they are not only the echoes of tendencies generally found in his contemporaries, but also very original, though marginal, metric experiments, which cannot be satisfactorily described with the accep- ted classifications of Russian versology. Besides a special sort of “heteromorphic verse” (the initial syllabo-tonic form is replaced with a tonic or free one within the text, while the syllabo-tonic verse is at the end again), there are particular accentual verses with a tendency to a very similar (though never identical) number of ictus and syllables (we proposed the definition “moderately regular accentual verse”), extremely long (up to 50 syllables), rhymed verses, as well as experimental syllabic verses. Moreover, the identi- fication of the verse forms used can sometimes help to understand the meaning of the texts, according to the semantics usually inscribed in the metres: in one case, the recog- nition of a strange fusion of Christian verse and raešnyj stich underlines the sarcastic and, at the same time, glorifying character of the text.