Rhythmic and poetic organization of prose works by Boris Beta (B.V. Butkevich)

The article analyzes the features of the rhythmic and poetic organization of prose works by Boris Beta (B.V. Butkevich), a prominent representative of Russian emigrant literature in the Far East. The author actively uses the method of syntactic inversion, due to which the natural, expected course of prosaic speech is disrupted and the reader’s attention is drawn to the details emphasized in this way. At the same time, permutations of words are accompanied by a change in the intonation pattern of speech, which becomes special, artificial and performs the function of semantic stress. The rhythmic and poetic technique of lexical repetition is also presented in the texts of the works by Boris Beta. Beta’s repetitions do not look artificial, because they are not synonymous, but metonymic, the meanings of words border each other and contribute not to a doubling, but to a continuous flow of the meaning of an artistic utterance. Beta’s prose is also characterized by a tonic (accent) organization. Many fragments of Beta’s prose works form tonic periods and thus potentially contain tonic verses. Thus, in his prose of the Far Eastern and even more Parisian periods, Boris Beta transposed the rhythmic and poetic properties of the lyric poem into a prosaic structure.