Kiril Taranovsky and his Greatest Work

Th e name Kiril Taranovsky (1911–1993) has much less acclaim outside the Slavic world than it deserves. Even his book on Mandelshtam, which was published in English in 1976, mainly attracted the attention of Slavists as the fi rst systematic description of the poetics of an author whose works are so famously diffi cult to understand. But the methods of contextual and subtextual analysis that Taranovsky developed, and his insights on literary theory, are no less signifi cant (see Levinton, Timenchik 1978). Taranovsky’s fi ndings are important for the theory of intertextuality and can serve as a link between literary studies and linguistic pragmatics (Lotman 1984). In one key aspect, Taranovsky’s approach diff ers from that adopted in Western literary criticism: not only the theme of a work (its subject matter, setting, imagery, etc.) but any component of its structure, including the verse structure, can be treated as a subtext. On the one hand, Taranovsky continues the traditions of Russian Formalism; on the other hand, he draws on his own research into the structure and semantics of Russian verse. By the time Taranovsky undertook his research on Mandelshtam’s poetics, he had not only done an enormous amount of work in describing poetic rhythm (Taranovsky 1953, 1955/1956) but he had also outlined a new fi eld in Russian verse theory: the semantics of poetic meter (Taranovsky 1963) and rhythm (Taranovsky 1966). His contribution to Slavic studies was testifi ed by a collection of essays dedicated to him in honor of his 60th birthday, with items from 51 colleagues and former students (see Jakobson, Schooneveld, Worth 1973). Kirill Fedorovich Taranovsky was born in Yuriev, now Tartu in Estonia; his father, a jurist, was a professor of law at the University of Tartu. Th e revolution put an end to this comfortable life, however, and the family emigrated through the Crimea and Turkey to the Balkans. Taranovsky spent his youth in Serbia and was deeply integrated into the culture of the country; in particular, he translated Russian classics into Serbian. He earned a degree in Slavic languages from the University of Belgrade in 1936 and then defended his doctoral thesis