SOURCE: "Preliminary Remarks," in The First Encounter by Andrey Bely, translated by Gerald Janaček, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. xxiii-xxx.

Berberova is a Russian-born American educator, author, and critic. In the following excerpt, she discusses the metrical pattern and oral interpretation of Bely's narrative poem The First Encounter.

Andrey Bely's poem The First Encounter (Pervoe svidanie) is written in iambic tetrameter, the meter used overwhelmingly and successfully, by every Russian poet from Lomonosov through Pushkin, Tyutchev and Blok to Brodsky. The syllabo-tonic line based on the number of syllables and the number of stresses (or accents, beats, ictuses) produced stupendous results probably never expected from a binary meter. This fact has impeded and hampered the advent in Russian of blank verse and vers libre. (I am speaking here and elsewhere of blank verse not in the narrow English sense—unrhymed iambic pentameter—but in the broad sense of...