The metrical evolution of Gavriil Deržavin’s lyric poetry and folk tonic verse

The article proposes the periodization of Gavriil Derzhavin’s poetry based on the evolution of his metrics. Accordingly, the periodization would be as follows: I. 1762–1778; II. 1779–1790; III. 1791–1816. Derzhavin’s poetry written from 1762 to 1790 demonstrates a rather limited set of meters — mostly iambic (iambic tetrameters, аlexandrines, free iambic verse); the presence of trochees (exclusively tetrameters) is modest, and ternary meters are completely absent. 1791 was a turning point. In that year Derzhavin published his polymetric cantata “To a Patron of the Arts,” which, though predominantly iambic, contains two dactylic and two trochaic passages. After that year he often used iambic trimeter as well as trochaic tetrameter, which was inspired by his rather late passion for anacreontics. Derzhavin’s turn to tonic folk verse has gone unnoticed until now. In the song “Fate has decreed that I must part…” from the early 1770s, which was not published until the 20th century, one finds a compilation of meters popular in folk poetry: pentasyllabic feet with fixed stress on the third syllable of each foot (lines 1–4) and dolniks (lines 5–24). Another example of the use of tonic verse combined with the same pentasyllabic feet is the poem “On the death of Katerina Yakovlevna, which occurred on July 15, 1795” (first published in 1933), in which Derzhavin imitated lamentations that are widespread in northern Russia. As the first collection of authentic bylinas, Kirsha Danilov’s “Ancient Russian poems,” published in 1804, awakened great interest in bylinas (oral ancient heroic songs) and their tonic verse. It also introduced wider possibilities for applying various kinds of folk meters to the new Russian poetry. Derzhavin was among the first to take advantage of these ideas. In his comic opera “Dobrynya,” some choruses are written in the same tonic verse as bylinas.