Lermontov's fragment “It happened in the last years of powerful Rome...”: the problem of sources and forms

The article deals with the problem of original sources and metric-intonational arrangement of Lermontov’s fragment “It happened in the last years of powerful Rome.”, one of the few poet ‘s references to hexameter and Roman material. We analyze relationship between dactylic foot and trochaic foot, characteristic features of censorship performance, and syntactic transfer. Lermontov’s experiments in hexameter proper functioning of this size correspond with the functioning of the Russian poetry of the first third of the 19th century. Lermontov was obviously influenced by the narrative style of Zhukovsky in the choice of the meter, albeit that he advanced his intonation fragment to the heroic hexameter. As far as the sources of the text are concerned, a marked similarity between the heroine from Lermonotv’s fragment and the image of Tamara from the poem “The Demon” is observed. The studied fragment and the fourth edition of the poem were created in one year. Lermontov attempted to employ this romantic type in another historical and cultural material, but he left his project unfinished. Instead, he focused his attention on the writing of the poem.