A.Ch. Vostokov - poet, stichoved, lingvist (A.Kh. Vostokov – poet, versification scholar, linguist)

A.Kh. Vostokov – poet, versification scholar, linguist. The article examines the work of A.Kh. Vostokov “Essay on Russian Versification” (1812, 1817). This represents the final stage of his research in the field of Russian folk literature and is connected both with his first studies in the philological and linguistic fields and with his own poetic output, which finished at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century. In his essay, after analysing the quantitative, syllabic and syllabotonic systems of versification, Vostokov interprets Russian folk verse as a tonic verse, in which the concept of “prosodic period” is fundamental. With this terminology Vostokov foreshadows the concept of “taktovik”. Vostokov also experimented with this meter in original compositions and translations of Schiller and of Serbian folk songs. The choice of Serbian folk songs reveals his philological intuition, since the verse of these songs is closest to the common-Slavic narrative verse. Pushkin praised Vostokov's experiment highly and wrote that the Russian “narrative verse” could become an innovative tool for the Russian epic poet of the future.