Notes on Prosody

Nabokov also proposes an approach for scanning patterns of accent which interact with syllabic stress in iambic verse.

Originally Appendix 2 to his Commentary accompanying his translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Notes on Prosody was released separately in book form.

[1] Notes on Prosody and Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin sparked considerable academic debate.

Nabokov in large part follows the system described by Andrei Bely in his paper "Description of the Russian iambic tetrameter" ("Опыт характеристики русского четырехстопного ямба") published in the collection of essays Symbolism (Символизм) (Moscow, 1910).

He describes a number of types of scuds (page 18): The primary source of the differences between Russian and English verse is that English has many one syllable nouns, verbs, and adjectives, where Russian words typically have many syllables, and carry only a single invariable stress.