“Katerina, ty prichina, chto lishen muzhchina china” (“Katerina, You’re the Reason That a Man Has Lost His Rank”): On the Features of Nikolai L’vov’s Rhyme

This article investigates the distinctive features of rhyme in the lyric and lyric-epic works of Nikolai L’vov. His corpus is divided into four groups: completed poems and verse narratives included in the 1994 volume–the only published collection of his poetry to date; long poems; anacreontic verse; the poetic impromptues; poetic works that entered scholarly circulation after 1994 and remain in manuscript form. This division reveals both continuity and variation in L’vov’s versification: while many aspects of his rhyme remain consistent, he employed more elaborate and playful rhyme schemes in long poems; in the anacreontics he produced unusually half-rhymed odes, atypical for him; and in the last group he occasionally allowed looser rhyme patterns. Corpus analysis highlights several common features across these groups: extensive use of rhyme chains; incorporation of internal and contact rhymes; lexical inventiveness in many rhymes; relatively few open-iotated rhyme pairings; and occasional experiments such as dactylic and macaronic rhymes. Taken together, these features identify L’vov as a striking innovator in eighteenth-century Russian versification.

N.A. L’vov, Russian poetry of the 18th century, versification, L’vov-Derzhavin’s circle, rhyme, internal rhyme, contact rhyme