Russian and Ukrainian “Voices” in David Guramishvili’s Prosody

Abstract

The article examines the prosody of the eminent Georgian eighteenth-century poet David Guramishvili, whose work introduced an unprecedented diversity of meters into Georgian poetry. This diversity is partly explained by his use of what he called the “voices” (khmebi) of Russian and Ukrainian songs in several of his poems. Scholarly interpretations of this practice have diverged: some researchers have argued that Guramishvili directly borrowed the poetic meters of East Slavic songs, while others have maintained that the term voice should be understood primarily as denoting a tune rather than verbal prosody. Our comparative analysis demonstrates that in all such cases Guramishvili relied on the melodies of East Slavic songs and, in some instances, reproduced their metrical structures, but not their verbal rhythm. This feature of Guramishvili’s verse is closely connected with the traditions of ancient Georgian hymnography and folksongs, whose dependence on melody presupposed the equalization and isochronism of heterometric lines in performance. Only a limited number of the rhythmic forms introduced by Guramishvili in imitation of Russian and Ukrainian sung poetry were subsequently reinterpreted as standard verse meters and incorporated into Georgian metrics as a system through their adoption by later poets.