Lecture
No less significant an area for the study of expressive means is poetic syntax. The study of poetic syntax consists in analyzing the functions of each of the artistic devices used to select and then group lexical elements into unified syntactic constructions. If, in studying the vocabulary of a literary text, the units analyzed are words, then in studying its syntax they are sentences and phrases. If the study of vocabulary establishes facts of departure from the literary norm in word choice, as well as facts of the transfer of word meanings (a word used figuratively, i.e., a trope, manifests itself only in context, only through semantic interaction with another word), the study of syntax requires not only a typological examination of syntactic unities and the grammatical links between words in a sentence, but also the identification of facts involving the adjustment or even alteration of the meaning of an entire phrase through the semantic relation of its parts (which usually occurs as a result of the writer’s use of so-called figures).
Attention must be paid to an author’s selection of types of syntactic construction, because that selection may be dictated by the theme and overall semantics of the work.
"But what is one to say of our writers who, considering it beneath them to express the most ordinary things simply, think to enliven childish prose with additions and lifeless metaphors? These people will never say friendship without adding: that sacred feeling whose noble flame, etc. They ought to say: early in the morning — but instead they write: scarcely had the first rays of the rising sun illumined the eastern edges of the azure sky — ah, how new and fresh all this is, as if it were better simply for being longer. <...> Precision and brevity — these are the first virtues of prose. It demands thoughts and more thoughts — without them, brilliant expressions serve no purpose. Verse is another matter..." ("On Russian Prose")
Consequently, the "brilliant expressions" the poet wrote of — namely lexical "embellishments" and a variety of rhetorical devices, syntactic construction types in general — are, in prose, a phenomenon that is not obligatory but possible. In verse, however, they are common, because the properly aesthetic function of a poetic text always considerably overshadows its informative function. This is proven by examples from Pushkin’s own work. Pushkin the prose writer is syntactically terse:
"At last something began to darken in the distance. Vladimir turned that way. Drawing nearer, he saw a grove. Thank God, he thought, now it is close." ("The Blizzard")
Pushkin the poet, by contrast, is often verbose, building long phrases with strings of periphrastic turns:
Playful philosopher and poet, Fortunate idler of Parnassus, Pampered favorite of the Graces, Confidant of the sweet Aonides, Why on the golden-stringed harp Have you fallen silent, singer of joys? Can it be, young dreamer, That you too have parted with Phoebus at last?
It should be clarified that lexical "embellishments" and syntactic "longueurs" are needed in verse only when they are semantically or compositionally motivated. Verbosity in poetry can turn out to be unjustified. And in prose, lexico-syntactic minimalism is equally unjustified when carried to an absolute degree:
"The donkey put on a lion’s skin, and everyone thought: a lion. People and livestock ran. The wind blew, the skin flew open, and the donkey could be seen. The people gathered: they beat the donkey." ("The Donkey in the Lion’s Skin")
The spare phrases give this finished work the appearance of a preliminary plot outline. The choice of elliptical constructions ("and everyone thought: a lion"), the economy of significant words leading to grammatical violations ("people and livestock ran"), and finally the economy of function words ("the people gathered: they beat the donkey") produced an excessive schematism in this parable’s plot, thereby weakening its aesthetic effect.
The opposite extreme is the over-complication of constructions, the use of multi-clause sentences with various types of logical and grammatical links and a great many means of expansion.
In the field of Russian-language studies there is no established view of the maximum length a Russian sentence can reach. An author’s striving for maximal detail in describing actions and mental states leads to violations of the logical connection between parts of a sentence ("she fell into despair, and a state of despair began to come over her").
The study of poetic syntax also involves assessing the extent to which the means of grammatical connection used in an author’s phrases conform to the norms of the national literary style. Here a parallel may be drawn with stylistically marked passive vocabulary as a significant part of the poetic lexicon. In the sphere of syntax, as in that of vocabulary, barbarisms, archaisms, dialectisms, and so on are possible, because the two spheres are interconnected: in the words of B.V. Tomashevsky, "every lexical milieu has its own specific syntactic turns of phrase."
In Russian literature, the most common are syntactic barbarisms, archaisms, and colloquialisms. A syntactic barbarism arises when a phrase is constructed according to the rules of a foreign language. In prose, syntactic barbarisms are more often recognized as speech errors: "As I was approaching this here station and looking at the countryside through the window, my hat flew off" in Chekhov’s story "The Complaints Book" — this Gallicism is so blatant that it strikes the reader as comic. In Russian verse, syntactic barbarisms were sometimes used as markers of high style. For example, in Pushkin’s ballad "There lived a poor knight...", the line "He had a single vision..." is an example of such a barbarism: the construction "he had a vision" appears in place of "there was a vision to him." Here we also find a syntactic archaism with its traditional function of elevating style: "No prayer to the Father, nor to the Son,/Nor to the Holy Spirit ever/Did the paladin utter..." (it should properly be: "neither to the Father nor to the Son"). Syntactic colloquialisms are, as a rule, present in epic and dramatic works in the speech of characters, for the sake of realistically reflecting individual speech style and for self-characterization of the characters. Chekhov resorted to colloquialisms for this purpose: "Your papa told me as how he were a court councillor, but it turns out he be only a titular one" ("Before the Wedding"), "Which Turkins do you mean? The ones whose daughter plays the pianoforte?" ("Ionych").
Of particular importance for revealing the specific character of artistic speech is the study of stylistic figures (also called rhetorical figures, with reference to the specialized scholarly discipline within which the theory of tropes and figures was first developed; or syntactic figures, with reference to that aspect of the poetic text whose description requires them).
At present there exist many classifications of stylistic figures, based on one or another distinguishing feature, whether quantitative or qualitative: the verbal composition of the phrase, the logical or psychological relation of its parts, and so on. Below we shall list the especially significant figures, taking three factors into account:
1. An unusual logical or grammatical connection among the elements of syntactic constructions.
2. An unusual mutual arrangement of words within a phrase or of phrases within a text, as well as of elements belonging to different (adjacent) syntactic and rhythmic-syntactic constructions (verse lines, cola) that nonetheless share a grammatical resemblance.
3. Unusual means of marking a text’s intonation through syntactic devices.
Taking into account the dominance of a given factor, we shall distinguish corresponding groups of figures. To the group of devices involving nonstandard connections of words into syntactic unities belong ellipsis, anacoluthon, syllepsis, illogism, and amphiboly (figures distinguished by an unusual grammatical connection), as well as catachresis, oxymoron, hendiadys, and enallage (figures with an unusual semantic connection of elements).
1. One of the most common syntactic devices, not only in artistic but also in everyday speech, is ellipsis (Gr. elleipsis — omission). This is an imitation of a break in grammatical connection, consisting in the omission of a word or series of words in a sentence, where the meaning of the omitted terms is easily recovered from the overall speech context. Elliptical speech in a literary text creates an impression of authenticity, because in a real-life conversational situation ellipsis is one of the chief means of phrase construction: in an exchange of remarks, it allows words already spoken to be omitted. Consequently, in colloquial speech ellipsis is assigned an exclusively practical function: the speaker conveys to the interlocutor the necessary amount of information, using a minimal lexical stock in doing so.
2. Both in everyday life and in literature, anacoluthon (Gr. anakoluthos — inconsistent) is recognized as a speech error — the incorrect use of grammatical forms in agreement and government: "The smell of cheap tobacco and some kind of sour cabbage soup wafting from there made life in that place almost unbearable" (A.F. Pisemsky, "An Old Man’s Sin"). Yet its use may be justified in cases where the writer is lending expressiveness to a character’s speech: "Stop, brothers, stop! You’re not sitting right!" (in Krylov’s fable "The Quartet").
3. If anacoluthon is more often seen as an error than as an artistic device, and syllepsis and illogism more often as a device than as an error, then amphiboly (Gr. amphibolia) is always perceived both ways at once. This duality lies in its very nature, since amphiboly is the syntactic indistinguishability of subject and direct object, both expressed by nouns in identical grammatical forms. "The keen ear strains the sail..." in Mandelstam’s poem of the same name — is this an error or a device? One may understand it as: "A keen ear, when its owner wishes to catch the rustle of the wind in the sails, acts on the sail as if by magic, making it strain" — or as: "The sail, swelled (i.e., strained) by the wind, draws attention, and the man strains his ear." Amphiboly is justified only when it proves compositionally significant. Thus in Daniil Kharms’s miniature "The Trunk," the hero tests whether life after death is possible by suffocating himself in a locked trunk. The ending remains unclear to the reader, just as the author intended: either the hero did not suffocate, or he suffocated and was resurrected — for the hero ambiguously sums up: "So then, life has defeated death by some means unknown to me."
4. An unusual semantic connection between the parts of a phrase or sentence is created by catachresis and the oxymoron (Gr. oxymoron — wittily foolish). In both cases there is a logical contradiction between the terms of a single construction. Catachresis arises from the use of a dead metaphor or metonymy and, within "natural" speech, is judged an error: "sea voyage" [literally "sea journeying," combining "sailing the sea" and "proceeding on foot"] — a contradiction between "sailing on the sea" and "walking on land"; "verbal directive" [literally "oral prescription," combining spoken and written modes] — between "orally" and "in writing"; "Soviet champagne" — between "the Soviet Union" and "Champagne." The oxymoron, by contrast, is the planned result of applying a fresh metaphor and is perceived, even in everyday speech, as a refined figurative device. "Mama! Your son is beautifully ill!" (Mayakovsky, "A Cloud in Trousers") — here "ill" is a metaphorical substitute for "in love."
5. Among the figures rare in Russian literature, and therefore especially conspicuous, is hendiadys (from Gr. hen dia dyoin — one through two), in which a compound adjective is split into its original constituent parts: "longing, railway-born, iron" [tоska dorozhnaya, zheleznaya] (Alexander Blok, "On the Railway"). Here the word "zheleznodorozhnaya" ["of the railway"] has been split apart, so that three words interact with one another — and the line acquires an additional layer of meaning.
6. Words in a colon or verse line acquire a special semantic connection when a writer employs enallage (Gr. enallage — exchange) — the transfer of a modifier onto a word adjacent to the one it actually modifies. Thus in the line "Through the fatty trenches of the meat..." from Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poem "The Wedding," the modifier "fatty" became a striking epithet once transferred from "meat" to "trenches." Enallage is a hallmark of verbose poetic speech. Applying this figure within an elliptical construction leads to an unfortunate result: the line "A familiar corpse lay in that valley..." in Lermontov’s ballad "The Dream" is an example of an unintended logical error. The phrase "familiar corpse" was meant to signify "the corpse of a familiar [person]," but for the reader it effectively signifies: "This person has long been familiar to the heroine precisely as a corpse."
A writer’s use of syntactic figures leaves the imprint of individuality on his authorial style. By the mid-twentieth century, by which time the notion of "creative individuality" had lost much of its value, the study of figures ceased to be of pressing interest.
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