Lecture
The intonational-syntactic structure of artistic speech is also connected with its rhythmic and tempo organization. The greatest degree of rhythmicality, naturally, belongs to verse speech. From very early times people have noticed that words arranged into orderly poetic lines are easier to remember (which mattered a great deal when the art of the word existed only in its oral form), are easier to perceive, and, most importantly, become beautiful and acquire a special effect on the listener (which is why, incidentally, in antiquity verse form was used not only in works of imaginative literature but also in scholarly works — for example, the famous scientific poem of Lucretius, «On the Nature of Things», is written in verse). These last two functions have remained primary for verse speech even today: to lend a literary text aesthetic perfection and to heighten its emotional effect on the reader.
In verse, rhythmicality is achieved through the regular alternation of speech elements – lines of verse, pauses, stressed and unstressed syllables, and so on. The specific rhythmic organization of a poem depends largely on the system of versification, which in turn depends on the features of the national language. Thus, owing to a number of features of the Russian language (the character of stress, the non-differentiation of long and short syllables in unstressed position, and others), the syllabic system, which proved highly fruitful in Polish and French, never took root in our versification; but in Russian versification syllabo-tonic verse, the dolnik, and the declamatory tonic system all found their place.
Thus, verse is rhythmically ordered, rhythmically organized speech. But prose too has its own rhythm, sometimes more, sometimes less perceptible, although there it is not subject to a strict rhythmic canon – meter. Rhythmicality in prose is achieved above all through the approximate commensurability of cola, which is connected with the intonational-syntactic structure of the text, as well as through various kinds of rhythmic repetition. Let us trace, for example, the rhythmic organization of a passage from Bulgakov's novel «The Master and Margarita» (the sign «//» marks the boundaries of the cola): «In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, // with a shuffling cavalryman's gait, // early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, // into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great, // there came out the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate». In the examples given, the rhythmicality of the prose text is clearly felt, but far more often it exists in prose in a kind of hidden form, making the sentences aesthetically significant without drawing particular attention to itself or distracting the reader from the ideas, characters, plot, and so on.
No less important than the rhythmic organization of a literary text is its tempo organization; in practice, however, these two aspects of artistic syntax are so inseparable from one another that one sometimes speaks of a work's temporhythm. The primary function of temporhythm is to create a particular emotional atmosphere in the work. The fact is that different types of tempo and rhythmic organization directly and immediately embody particular emotional states and have the capacity to necessarily evoke precisely those emotions in the mind of the reader, listener, or viewer; in arts such as music or dance, this pattern is very clearly visible. It can also be traced in literature. Let us see, for example, how temporhythm operates in one of the episodes of Chekhov's «The Lady with the Dog»: «Sitting beside the young woman who at dawn seemed so beautiful, soothed and enchanted in the presence of this fairy-tale setting – the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky – Gurov thought about how, in essence, if one thought about it, everything in this world is beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher aims of existence, our own human dignity.»
The role of the special, smooth, measured construction of the sentence in creating the emotional coloring of the scene is obvious; it is felt without any analysis. The solemn and elevated cast of the hero's thoughts is conveyed here through the tempo and rhythmic organization of the text with almost physical palpability. Say the same thing differently – in short sentences, for instance – and the psychological atmosphere would vanish at once.
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