Research On Rhythm in Poems
Bely's essay Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman is cited in Nabokov's novel The Gift, where it is mentioned as "monumental research on rhythm". Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the 'half-stresses' in the iambs. Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles and trapeziums. Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his old iambic tetrameters from the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy. Nabokov's essay Notes on Prosody follows for the large part Bely's essay Description of the Russian iambic tetrameter (published in the collection of essays Symbolism, Moscow, 1910).
Read more about this topic: Andrei Bely
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