Lecture
A stanza is something like a paragraph in a poetic text, and the classic case should be considered one in which these "paragraphs" are relatively small (the approximate maximum — a dozen or so lines, the minimum — a couplet) and identical to one another in the arrangement of rhymed or unrhymed clausulae. It is more convenient when stanzas are set off graphically (by indentation, numbering). The term itself is taken from the Greek, and literally means "turn": the wheel has made a revolution — and other such revolutions will follow (precisely such: this is why stanzas ought to resemble one another in the configuration of their rhymes). In Russian classical lyric poetry, four-line stanzas — quatrains, predominate, and the variety most often used is abab.
1. It is not beyond dispute whether it is correct to consider paragraphs with the same rhyme configuration to be one and the same strophic form. Take, for instance, the same quatrain abab: after all, it may be written in disyllabic amphibrach as well as, say, in pentameter trochee. Will these be different stanzas or the same? The dissimilarity, despite the identical rhyme scheme, is too obvious. But one could also insist that the stanzas are nevertheless the same. If we study stanza form separately from meter, alongside it, then the properly strophic characteristics are entitled to be independent of the metrical ones. Everything comes down to how we agree to define things: whether or not to include metrical indicators in the concept of a stanza. There are insufficient grounds to insist exclusively on one solution or the other. It is permissible to consider all varieties of abab as one stanza, disregarding the metrical dissimilarities between them, although another solution is possible here as well.
2. And one more controversial point. What is to be done if segments of poetic text are not graphically set off? Pushkin's "I loved you: love still, perhaps..." is written down as an eight-line stanza abab vgvg. Whether this is indeed an octet, or two quatrains. There are arguments in favor of both solutions. One wants to single out abab as an independent quatrain, if only because in the remaining text (the second quatrain?) vgvg there is neither a nor b, i.e., both the first and the second quatrains have a self-contained rhyme system. But, on the other hand, Pushkin's "The Drowned Man" is deliberately divided graphically into octets of the type abab vgvg, with indentations between them (rather than between quatrains), so that the question becomes more complicated. And there are quite a few such controversial cases in Russian poetry. For example, couplets of the type aa, bb, etc. (probably because of their small size) are often not set off graphically but are written as continuous text. But the opposite also happens: a poet divides the text into stanzas but organizes it in such a way that the lines of one stanza rhyme with the lines of another stanza, as Lermontov does in the poem "In the wild north there stands alone...". This too is a case where the author's own will diverges from our notions of the unspoken laws of stanza form.
One must also bear in mind the possibility of the intonational non-closure of a stanza — even though, as a rule, stanzas are intonationally closed. In such comparatively rare cases we speak of the phenomenon of strophic enjambment. The classic example is Pushkin's "...onto the bench / She fell" in "Onegin", where onto the bench concludes one stanza and she fell begins the next. Among twentieth-century poets, Tsvetaeva showed a particular inclination toward the technique of strophic enjambment.
Moreover, some stanzas become associated with a single poet, if he invented or made his own a particular strophic form. This is how designations such as "the Sapphic stanza," "the Spenserian stanza," and "the Onegin stanza" arose. Anything written in the Onegin stanza is inevitably oriented toward the model of Pushkin's novel in verse ("I write Onegin's meter" — one of the opening lines of Lermontov's "Tambov Treasurer's Wife"). Almost everything written in terza rima calls to mind Dante's "Divine Comedy." The quatrain xbxb (the letter x denotes unrhymed lines — the phenomenon of half-rhyme) most often serves as a marker of the Heine tradition. It is appropriate to speak of the semantic aura of certain strophic formations. Otherwise it is hard to explain, for example, why the death-bed farewell poems of a number of Russian poets (among them Derzhavin, Dobrolyubov, Yesenin) are composed of two quatrains with cross rhyme, forming an eight-line swan song.
The richest strophic repertoire of Russian verse took shape mainly in the 18th–19th centuries. Original forms were developed, and foreign ones were assimilated. Bearing in mind that the development proceeded from simple to complex (and the simplest strophic formations have been shown above), it makes sense, in concluding this survey of stanza forms, to show the rhyme configurations of some complex and most "famous" stanzas. The most widespread variant of the odic ten-line stanza (decima): ababvvgddg (the odes of Lomonosov, Derzhavin, the Decembrist poets). One of the possible forms of the sonnet: abba abba vvg dgd (an impeccably strict form; lighter variants were also practiced). A gift from Italy to all of Europe — the octave: ababab vv (Feofan Prokopovich, Pushkin, Shevyrev). A chain of terza rima: aba bvb vgv ... yuyayu ya (the Dantean tradition in Russian poetry). The Onegin stanza: ababvvggdeezhzh. And let us call this stanza the "Lermontov stanza": ababavvggdd (the narrative poems "Sashka," "A Fairy Tale for Children," the poem in memory of A. Odoevsky; Turgenev also tried to modify this same stanza in the poem "Parasha," and it was widely used by Palmin). The Eastern ghazal aaba vagada.....ya (in Russian poetry first used by Fet, in translation: "Hafiz is slain..."; the first four lines of the ghazal, aaba, fully coincide with the strophic pattern of the Eastern rubai quatrain, introduced into use in Russia later — only in the 20th century).
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