The academician B.Ya. Vladimirtsov and the issues of the Mongolian versification

The article deals with the problem of Mongolian versification in connection with the issues of the historical phonetics of the Mongolian language. The authors focus on separate forms of the Mongolian verse analyzed by academician B.Ya. Vladimirtsov in the context of the formation of the Mongolian versification and the influence of the Tibetan poetic form on that of the Mongolian verse. While considering the issues of the historical phonetics of the Mongolian language, starting from the period reflected in the classical (old-written) Mongolian language up to the beginning of the 20th century when B.Ya. Vladimirtsov was recording the living Mongolian speech and verse forms of folklore himself, he concentrated on the analysis of the Mongolian verse forms, dimensions and formal stanza organization of poetic texts. The descriptions of the Mongolian verse form analyzed by B. Vladimirtsov coincide with the poetic forms adopted in the Tibetan poetic literature. Both the Mongolian and the Tibetan verses have a syllabic versification system with an odd number of syllables in a line (from 7-9 to 21-23), the line is divided by caesura into two hemistichs. Similar results were obtained by the authors on the basis of the analysis of poems recorded by N.N. Poppe in the early 1930s. Apparently, the isochrony of the lines in modern Mongolian poetry, noted by L.K. Gerasimovich, is also a legacy of the classical Mongolian versification adopted by the Tibetans. One of the results of this particular study is the fact that B.Ya. Vladimirtsov's search in the field of the Mongolian versification in the 1920s corresponded to the content of theoretical research in the field of general theory of verse and Russian versification.