This article by M.L.Gasparov was first published at Tartu in the Soviet Union in 1979 and has been translated and edited here with notes by Ann Shukman. Gasparov emphasizes four aspects of Bakhtin's thought: "his zeal for expropriating 'the other's word' "; "his zeal for dialogue"; "a nihilistic selection of values"; "the opposition of the novel to poetry." Ann Shukman's commentary places Gasparov's article in context.
Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov (1935-2005) was one of the greatest and most prolific russian literary scholars of the twentieth century.Though associated with the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Gasparov's writings were so diverse and multifaceted—and his scholarly personality so distinct—as to elude categorization.Gasparov's accomplishments are all the more remarkable when measured against the rigid Marxist-Leninist paradigms that ruled humanities education and scholarship in the Soviet Union. A philologist with a special interest in verse form, he managed to sidestep the procrustean bed of Soviet ideology, building instead on the barely tolerated work of the Russian formalists and structuralists. He embraced and developed their goal of turning literary study into an exact science by applying statistical analysis and probability theory to poetics. Gasparov's scholarship was based on unprecedented amounts of data, which he painstakingly compiled in the precomputer era. However, he was never satisfied with the data as such; he used them to reach profound and unexpected conclusions.
It is hard to imagine more versatile a scholar of poetry than Jaak Põldmäe . In the course of his short life (particularly short for a humanist scholar) he made a significant contribution to the development of various areas of verse theory and the dissemination of knowledge of poetics. Põldmäe paid equal attention to both the development of verse theory (see his works on the typology of metrical systems, 1 the theory and the typology of vers libre, 2 methodological problems in the description of poetic rhythm, 3 rhyme and stanzaic structures 4 ) and the description of empirical material used in case studies such as his research on the metric repertoires of Jaan Kärner and Lydia Koidula,
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