SOURCE: Drage, C. L. “The Introduction of Russian Syllabo-Tonic Prosody.” The Slavonic and East European Review 54, No. 4 (October 1976): 481-503.

In following essay, Drage discusses the early history of Russian syllabo-tonic verse, including Trediakovsky's theories, and assesses Trediakovsky's indebtedness to his predecessors.

Unlike the prosody of Russian folk poetry, which appears to have changed little since early times,¹ the prosody of Russian cultivated poetry has undergone profound changes. This article is concerned chiefly with the replacement of the syllabic prosody of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by syllabo-tonic prosody in the 1730s, but some knowledge of the earlier prosodies is needed to appreciate the significance of this change. Four periods are covered: from the beginnings to 1664, the year in which Simeon Polotsky, Russia's leading syllabic poet, settled in Moscow; from 1664 to 1735, when V. K. Trediakovsky proposed a syllabo-tonic system in his Novyy i kratkiy sposob k slozheniyu...