Chapter 6. Stylistic Errors

And sometimes this happens: a poet writes a wonderful poem, technically flawless, recites it with great expression—and everyone around bursts into laughter. The reason is that one may quite unconsciously commit articulatory errors. Articulation is, essentially, pronunciation. What relation can it possibly have to writing? Sometimes a poet writes in such a way that, no matter how the lines are read aloud, the result sounds either vulgar or absurd. On the page, however, everything appears perfectly beautiful. The canonical example is considered to be a line by the famous Soviet poet Vera Inber, who in a poem about Stepan Razin wrote the following: “Отруби лихую голову…” I trust it is clear what unintended phrase emerges when this is pronounced aloud. In response, someone (it is said to have been Samuil Marshak, though that is most likely an urban legend, so one cannot say for certain) answered with an epigram:

Let me give several more examples of such mistakes, which are worth avoiding. The wonderful bard Alexander Karpov once рассказывал that, while serving on the jury at a singer-songwriter festival, he listened to a young woman who expressed the problem of female loneliness with the line “И цел к утру мой чёрный хлеб…” Everyone else was bewildered as to why Karpov was doubled over with laughter.

The bard Alexey Nezhevets once performed Viktor Tretyakov’s song “Tube” from the stage. The song contains the line: “Люблю — и баста!” It is not difficult to guess how this line came out in Nezhevets’s performance, and after the concert the Gomel performer Igor Silchenko approached him and teased him about the moment. The following day, at the closing concert, Silchenko himself sang a song containing the line “Когда любови с нами нет…” In Silchenko’s performance it turned into “Когда любовь, весна, минет…”, after which Nezhevets, in turn, gleefully confronted him with it. I should note that the fault here lies not only with the performer (though primarily with him), but also with the author, who writes lines in which such slips of the tongue are possible.

Once someone told me about a marvelous phrase encountered in the song of a young woman at yet another festival: “Искала, выбирала я тебя…” Chose you out of what, exactly?

At a festival in Orsha, a certain young man, singing in a rather high voice, performed the line: “Он с оргазмом смотрел на меня…” Everyone standing behind him collapsed with laughter, while the jury remained bewildered as to why everyone was laughing. Later we asked him about it. It turned out that the actual line was: “Он с сарказмом смотрел на меня”, but the acoustics of the hall distorted the sound, producing something quite different.

Sometimes it happens differently. At times the result is not vulgarity but simply some amusing accidental word that provokes laughter. For example, in the song “Little Gudgeons” by Aleksei Ivashchenko and Georgy Vasilyev there is the line: “плывут у бережка реки…” But in performance, “бережка” and “реки” merge together, and the authors themselves admitted that after concerts people often approached them asking who the “бережкарики” were. They even received notes saying: “Please sing the song about the berezhkarikis.”

Another example may be found in the pop song “Veins-Rivers” performed by Anastasia Stotskaya. In pop music one rarely listens closely to the lyrics—they are not terribly important. But still… Stotskaya blends the words together so strongly in the line “Реки любовь от меня прочь умчали” that it produces the strange verb “прочумчать.” What does “прочумчать” even mean?

In short, if you do not want your own poems to be filled with “бережкарики” and “прочумчать,” you should read them aloud several times with proper expression after writing them. Or read them to someone else. That way you will understand how they sound to the ear. And one general recommendation: the opinions of your relatives and friends about your poetry are biased and entirely worthless. Only a barely acquainted person will tell you the truth.

Now, about stylistic mistakes. One of the most common in poetry is the so-called amphiboly—ambiguity; a phrase or sentence which, due to incorrect construction, may be misunderstood or interpreted in two ways. “Как только с трибуны сошла доярка, на неё тут же залез председатель”; “Дубровский убил медведя, и Троекуров приказал снять с него шкуру”. Try to avoid such turns of phrase for obvious reasons. The following may serve as a poetic example of amphiboly:

An involuntary question arises: who saw whom?

Young poets quite often commit a cruder stylistic error—anacoluthon. This is a syntactic inconsistency between parts of a sentence, introduced either carelessly by the author or intentionally as a stylistic (often comic) device. “Мне совестно, как честный офицер” (Alexander Griboedov). Only a highly literate person may permit themselves to use anacoluthon deliberately as a means of imitating illiteracy. Pay attention to grammatical cases and genders in your poetry. Excuses that the poem was written “from the heart” and therefore could not be otherwise are utter nonsense. One must write and speak correctly above all.

Poets also frequently make unjustified use of solecisms—incorrect turns of phrase that nevertheless do not destroy the meaning of the utterance (for example, “Сколько время?” is grammatically incorrect, though people say it all the time). Solecisms are permissible in poetry only when they create some specific stylistic effect, perhaps that of colloquial speech.

Another widespread stylistic mistake is cacology. Cacology is the incorrect combination of words within a sentence (“одержать успех” instead of “одержать победу,” and so forth). One also often hears people say “поднять тост" (to raise a toast). Please remember: one may raise a glass, but a toast may only be proposed!

Poets often overload their verse with every imaginable cliché. For example, “golden autumn” or “mother is the dearest person of all.” All of this is, of course, true, but it has become so worn-out as to be mind-numbing. Rhymes such as любовь–кровь belong essentially to the same category. I urge you: seek out new images, images unused before you, new themes, new variations on old themes. For the world is, in essence, infinite—and so too is the number of possible images. As an example, here are some beautiful lines about a woman:

What do you think of that, eh? When we hear the banal phrase “God exists,” we imagine something entirely different. But here, seemingly offered merely as a casual example: “you, for instance, are God.”

Incidentally, speaking of God. I sincerely ask you: it is better not to write on this subject at all, especially if you are not confident in your abilities. More dreadful poems have been written about God than even about love. Every scribbler considers it their duty to write about God. And their poems contain much that is new and beautiful—except that the new is not beautiful, and the beautiful is not new. As a counterexample, one may cite Dmitry Rastaev’s brilliant and extraordinarily powerful poem about God—perhaps the strongest such poem I have ever encountered—“Let Us Invent a New God.”

In Rastaev’s poem there is no banal retelling of the Bible or of his personal attitude toward religion. What we find here is a view from the outside—the perspective of a random passerby. And for that reason it is extraordinarily frightening and true. A more detailed discussion of poetry with a religious orientation and its peculiarities may be found elsewhere in this textbook, in the article “Poetry with a Religious Orientation”.

Finally, one of the most widespread mistakes is authorial deafness—obvious stylistic and semantic errors in a literary work that remain unnoticed by the author. The reasons for such mistakes are explained in various ways: the author’s carelessness, limited erudition, or a simple accidental slip. Sometimes episodes of “deafness” arise involuntarily, when concentration on the principal task pushes individual details out of the field of attention. Here are several examples:

In Lermontov:

A mane grows only on a lion, and not along its spine but on its neck.

У Фета:

It is the snowdrop that emerges from beneath the snow, not the lily of the valley, which appears only in the height of spring.

У Уткина:

During the Russian Civil War, the Soviet troops did not “defend” Perekop; they stormed it.

In other words, if you are writing about something, try to understand the object of your poetic investigation as thoroughly as possible, and avoid such blunders.