Über rhythmische Prosa

In his 1966 paper, Viktor Žirmunskij discusses “the essential points of rhythmic prose (as opposed to ordinary prose with its “free rhythm”)”. He begins with a brief overview of previous attempts, including the so-called “foot-adding theory” according to Belyj, the regulation of “phonetic bars” according to Peškovskij, and that of the mean syllabic size of colons according to Tomaševskij, as well as symmetrical groupings of stressed and unstressed syllables according to Scott. They all provide interesting insights into their respective rhythmic styles, but according to Žirmunskij, they do not capture the “constitutive basis of rhythmic prose”. Rather, he identifies it in “various forms of grammatical-syntactic parallelism”, supported by word repetitions. These formal features are joined by a specific lexical-semantic character of the text with “emotional tension, poetical imagery”. The second part of the paper presents examples of rhythmic prose of very different forms on the basis of text extracts analysed in detail from works by Gogol’, Turgenev, Bunin, and Dickens.