The meaning of the word prose. Prose works

PROSE is the antonym of verse and poetry, formally - ordinary speech, not divided into singled out commensurate segments - poems, in terms of emotional and semantic - something mundane, ordinary, ordinary. In fact, the dominant form in the literature of two, and in Western Europe- the last three centuries.

Back in the 19th century all fiction, including prose, was called poetry. Now poetry is called only poetic literature.

The ancient Greeks believed that poetry uses a special speech, decorated according to the rules set out by its theory - poetics. The verse was one of the elements of this decoration, the difference between the speech of poetry and everyday speech. Decorated speech, but according to other rules - not poetics, but rhetoric - oratory was also distinguished ( Russian word“eloquence” literally conveys this feature of him), as well as historiography, geographical descriptions and philosophical writings. The ancient novel as the least “correct” was the lowest in this hierarchy, was not taken seriously and was not recognized as a special layer of literature - prose. In the Middle Ages, religious literature was too separated from secular, strictly artistic, for prose in both to be recognized as something unified. Medieval entertaining and even instructive works in prose were considered incomparable with poetry as such, still poetic. The Greatest Romance of the Renaissance - “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) - belonged rather to grassroots literature associated with folk comic culture than to the official literature. M. Cervantes created his "Don Quixote" (1605, 1615) as a parody novel, but the implementation of the plan turned out to be much more serious and significant. In fact, this is the first prose novel (parodied in it chivalric romances were mostly poetic), which was recognized as a work of high literature and influenced the flowering of the Western European novel more than a century later - in the 18th century.

In Russia, non-translated novels appeared late, from 1763. They did not belong to high literature, a serious person had to read odes. In the Pushkin era, foreign novels of the 18th century. young provincial noblewomen like Tatyana Larina were fond of, and even more undemanding public were fond of domestic ones. Ho sentimentalist N.M. Karamzin in the 1790s already introduced prose into high literature- in the neutral and non-regulated genre of the story, which, like the novel, was not included in the system of recognized classicist genres, but also not burdened, like it, with unprofitable associations. Karamzin's stories became poetry in prose. A.S. Pushkin even in 1822 wrote in a note on prose: “The question is, whose prose is the best in our literature? - Answer: Karamzin. Ho added: “This is still not a big praise ...” On September 1 of the same year, in a letter, he advised Prince P.A. Vyazemsky to seriously engage in prose. “Summers tend to prose ...” - Pushkin remarked, anticipating his poems in the sixth chapter of “Eugene Onegin”: “Summers tend to harsh prose, / Summers drive naughty rhyme ...” romantic stories A.A. Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) in letters of 1825, he twice calls to take up the novel, as later N.V. Gogol - go from stories to great work. And although he himself made his printed debut in prose only in 1831, simultaneously with Gogol (“Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”) and, like him, anonymously - “The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin”, thanks primarily to the two of them in the 1830s gg. in Russian literature, an epochal change occurred, which has already occurred in the West: from predominantly poetic, it becomes predominantly prosaic. This process was completed in the early 1840s, when Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” (1840) (who bore extensive ideas in prose) and “ Dead Souls” (1842) Gogol. Nekrasov then “prosaises” the style of poetic poetry.

For a relatively long period, poems regained their leadership only for turn of XIX-XX centuries (“Silver Age” - in contrast to the “golden” age of Pushkin), and then only in modernism. Modernists were opposed by strong realist prose writers: M. Gorky, I.A. Bunin,

A.I. Kuprin, I.S. Shmelev, A.N. Tolstoy and others; for their part, the symbolists D.S. Merezhkovsky, Fedor Sologub, V.Ya. Bryusov, Andrei Bely, in addition to poetry, created in principle new prose. True, and in silver age(N.S. Gumilyov), and much later (I.A. Brodsky), some poets put poetry much higher than prose. However, in the classics of the 19th-20th centuries, both Russian and Western, there are more prose writers than poets. Poems are almost completely ousted from the drama and epic, even from the lyric epic: in the second half of the 20th century. the only Russian poem of the classical level is Akhmatov's "Poem Without a Hero", predominantly lyrical and begun by the author as early as 1940. Poems remained mainly for lyrics, and modern lyrics by the end of the century, as in the West, lost their mass, even general reader, remained for a few lovers. Instead of a theoretically clear division of the genres of literature - epic, lyric, drama - a fuzzy but familiar one was fixed in the language: prose, poetry, dramaturgy (although lyrical miniatures in prose, strained poems and completely ridiculous dramas in verse are still being created).

The triumphal victory of prose is natural. Poetic speech is frankly conditional. Already L.N. Tolstoy considered it completely artificial, although he admired the lyrics of Tyutchev and Fet. In a small space intense in thought and feeling lyrical work verses look more natural than in lengthy texts. The verse has a lot of additional means of expression compared to prose, but these "props" are archaic in origin. In many countries of the West and East modern poetry uses almost exclusively vers libre (free verse), which does not have a size and rhymes.

Prose has its structural advantages. Much less capable than verse to influence the reader “musically”, it is more free in the choice of semantic nuances, shades of speech, in the transmission of “voices” different people. “Controversy”, according to M.M. Bakhtin, prose is inherent to a greater extent than poetry (see: Artistic Speech). The form of prose is similar to other properties of both the content and the form of modern literature. “In prose, unity crystallizes from diversity. In poetry, on the other hand, diversity develops from a clearly proclaimed and directly expressed unity. Ho for modern man unequivocal clarity, statements "on the forehead" in art is akin to banality. Literature XIX and even more than the 20th century. prefers as a basic principle a complex and dynamic unity, a unity of dynamic diversity. This also applies to poetry. By and large, one pattern determines the unity of femininity and masculinity in A.A. Akhmatova, tragedy and mockery in the prose of A.P. Platonov, it would seem, completely incompatible plot-content layers - satirical, demonic, “gospel” and love connecting them - in “The Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov, novel and epic in " Quiet Don” M.A. Sholokhov, the absurdity and touchingness of the hero of the story V.M. Shukshin "Crank", etc. With this complexity of literature, prose reveals its own complexity in comparison with poetry. That is why Yu.M. Lotman built the following sequence from simple to complex: “ Speaking- song (text + motive) - “classical poetry” - fiction". With a developed culture of speech, “similarity” of the language of literature to everyday language is more difficult than a clear, straightforward “dissimilarity”, which was originally poetic speech. So it is more difficult for a student to draw to draw a nature similar than unlike. So realism demanded more experience from humanity than pre-realist trends in art.

One should not think that only verse has rhythm. Conversational speech is quite rhythmic, as are normal human movements - it is regulated by the rhythm of breathing. Rhythm is the regularity of some repetitions in time. Of course, the rhythm of ordinary prose is not as ordered as that of poetry, it is unstable and unpredictable. There is more rhythmic (in Turgenev) and less rhythmic (in Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy) prose, but it is never completely unordered. Syntactically distinguished short segments of the text do not differ extremely in length, often they begin or end rhythmically the same way two or more times in a row. Noticeably rhythmic is the phrase about the girls at the beginning of Gorky's "Old Woman Izergil": "Their hair, / silk and black, / were loose, / the wind, warm and light, / playing with them, / tinkled with coins / woven into them." The syntagmas here are short, commensurate. Of the seven syntagmas, the first four and the sixth begin with stressed syllables, the first three and the sixth end with two unstressed (“dactylic” endings), inside the phrase two adjacent syntagmas end in the same way - with one unstressed syllable: “wind, warm and light” (all three words are rhythmically the same, consist of two syllables and are stressed on the first) and “playing with them” (both words end in one unstressed syllable). The only, last syntagma ends with an accent, which energetically ends the whole phrase.

The writer can also play on rhythmic contrasts. In Bunin's story "The Gentleman from San Francisco," the fourth paragraph ("It was the end of November...") contains three phrases. The first is small, it consists of the words “but they sailed quite safely”. The next one is huge, half a page long, describing the pastime on the famous “Atlantis”. In fact, it consists of many phrases, separated, however, not by a period, but mainly by a semicolon. They, like the waves of the sea, overwhelm one another continuously. Thus, everything that is said is practically equalized: the structure of the ship, the daily routine, the occupations of passengers - everything, living and inanimate. The final part of the gigantic phrase - “at seven they announced with trumpet signals about what was main goal of all this existence, the crown of it...” Only here the writer pauses, expressed by a punctuation. And finally, the last, final phrase, short, but as if equated to the previous one, so rich in information: “And then the gentleman from San Francisco hurried to his rich cabin to get dressed.” Such an “equating” strengthens the subtle irony about the “crown” of this entire existence, i.e., of course, dinner, although it is not consciously named, but only implied. It is no coincidence that later Bunin will describe in such detail the preparation of his hero for dinner and his dressing in a hotel on Capri: “And then he again began to prepare, as if for a crown ...” Even the word “crown” is repeated. After the gong (analogous to the “trumpet signals” on “Atlantis”), the gentleman goes to the reading room to wait for his wife and daughter, who are not yet quite ready. There, a blow happens to him, from which he dies. Instead of the "crown" of existence - non-existence. In the same way, rhythm, disruptions of rhythm, and similar rhythmic semantic “roll calls” (with some reservations, we can also talk about the rhythm of imagery) contribute to the fusion of all elements of the text into a harmonious artistic whole.

Sometimes, since late XVIII century, and most of all in the first third of the 20th century, writers even meticulously prose: they introduce the same sequence of stresses into syntagmas as in syllabo-tonic verses, but do not divide the text into poetic lines, the boundaries between syntagmas remain unpredictable. Andrei Bely tried to make metrized prose almost a universal form, he used it not only in novels, but also in articles and memoirs, which greatly annoyed many readers. AT contemporary literature metrized prose is used in some lyrical miniatures and as separate inserts in larger works. When, in a continuous text, rhythmic pauses are constant and the metrized segments are equal in length, in sound such a text is indistinguishable from a poetic one, like Gorky's "Songs" about the Falcon and the Petrel.

Prose(lat. prōsa) is speech without division into commensurable segments, the rhythm of which is based on the approximate correlation of syntactic constructions. She is non-poetic literature.

Unlike poetry, prose does not have significant restrictions on rhythm and rhyme. It provides the authors, as M. M. Bakhtin noted, with wider “opportunities for linguistic diversity, combining in the same text different ways of thinking and speaking: in prose artistry (most fully manifested in the novel).” Prose, in particular, many times surpasses poetry in genre diversity.

A copywriter needs to be able to create both prose and poetry. Knowledge of poetry enriches the language of the prose writer. As K. Paustovsky noted:

“Poetry has one amazing property. She returns the word to its original virgin freshness.

Genera and genres of literature

All verbal and artistic works can be grouped into three large groups, called literary genera and including both poetic and prose texts:

- epic,

- drama,

- lyrics.

As well as separate genus distinguish lyroepic and distinguish between some intergeneric and extrageneric forms.

Although there is a division into genders, in literary works there may be a "generic intersection". So maybe epic poem, lyrical story, dramatic story, etc.

In each of literary genera includes works of a certain genre.

Literary genres- these are groups of works collected according to formal and substantive features. It can also be said that a genre is a historically emerging and developing type of artwork, which has a certain set of stable properties (size, speech constructions, construction principles, etc.). Genres provide continuity and stability in literary development.

Over time, some genres die off, they are replaced by others. Also, "survivors" genres can become both more and less popular - both with authors and readers. To form or change literary genres affected by historical reality. So, for example, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the detective, police novel, science fiction and ladies' ("pink") novel developed powerfully.

The classification of genres is not an easy task, because different genres may have the same properties.

Historically, genres were divided into two groups: "high" and "low". Yes, in the early literary times the lives of the saints were classified as "high", and entertaining works - as "low". During the period of classicism, a strict hierarchy of genres was established: high genres are ode, tragedy, epic, low genres are comedy, satire, fable. Later, a fairy tale, a novel began to be attributed to the “high” ones.

Today they talk about high literature (strict, truly artistic, "literary top"), and mass literature ("trivial", "popular", "consumer", "paraliterature", "conjunctural literature", "literary bottom"). The first is intended for people who are reflective, educated, versed in art. The second - for the undemanding majority of readers, for a person "not attached (or little attached) to artistic culture who does not have a developed taste, who does not want or is not able to think independently and appreciate works, who is looking for entertainment in printed materials. Mass literature is distinguished by schematism, the use of stereotypes, clichés, "authorlessness". But popular literature compensates for its shortcomings with a dynamically developing action, an abundance of incredible incidents.

There are also classical literature and fiction. Classic literature- these are works that are the pinnacles of creativity and which modern authors should be equal to.

As they say, a classic is what is written with the expectation of the tastes of future generations.

Fiction (from French belles lettres - belles-lettres) usually refers to non-classical narrative prose that belongs to mass literature, but is not at the very "bottom". In other words, fiction is the middle mass literature, located between the classics and pulp fiction.

The copywriter must have a good idea of ​​the specifics of the genera and genres literary works. For example, mixing or substituting genres can easily “kill” a text for a reader who expects one thing and gets another (instead of “comedy” - “drama”, instead of “action movie” - “melodrama”, etc.). However, a well-thought-out mixing of genres can also work effectively for a specific text. The final result will depend on the literacy and skill of the copywriter. He must know the "laws of the genre."

More detailed information on this topic can be found in the books of A. Nazaikin

Prose is around us. It is in life and in books. Prose is our everyday language.

Artistic prose is a non-rhyming narrative that does not have a size (a special form of organization of sounding speech).

A prose work is a work written without rhyme, which is its main difference from poetry. Prose works are both artistic and non-fiction, sometimes they are intertwined, as, for example, in biographies or memoirs.

How did the prose, or epic, work come about?

Prose entered the world of literature from Ancient Greece. It was there that poetry first appeared, and then prose as a term. The first prose works were myths, traditions, legends, fairy tales. These genres were defined by the Greeks as non-artistic, mundane. These were religious, domestic or historical narratives, which received the definition of "prosaic".

In the first place was highly artistic poetry, prose was in second place, as a kind of opposition. The situation began to change only in the second half. Prose genres began to develop and expand. Novels, short stories and short stories appeared.

In the 19th century, the prose writer pushed the poet into the background. The novel, short story became the main art forms in literature. Finally, prose work took its rightful place.

Prose is classified by size: small and large. Consider the main artistic genres.

A work in prose of a large volume: types

A novel is a prose work that is distinguished by the length of the narrative and complex plot, fully developed in the work, and the novel may also have side storylines, in addition to the main one.

The novelists were Honoré de Balzac, Daniel Defoe, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Erich Maria Remarque and many others.

Examples of prose works by Russian novelists can make up a separate book-list. These are works that have become classics. For example, such as "Crime and Punishment" and "The Idiot" by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, "The Gift" and "Lolita" by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, "Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, "A Hero of Our Time" Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov and so on.

An epic is larger in volume than a novel, and describes major historical events or responds to popular issues, more often both.

The most significant and famous epics in Russian literature are "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, "Quiet Don" by Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov and "Peter the Great" by Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy.

Prose work of a small volume: types

Novella - short work, comparable to the story, but having a greater saturation of events. The story of the novel begins in oral folklore in parables and tales.

The novelists were Edgar Poe, H. G. Wells; Guy de Maupassant and Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin also wrote short stories.

A story is a short prose work, characterized by a small number of actors, one storyline and detailed description details.

Bunin and Paustovsky are rich in stories.

An essay is a prose work that is easily confused with a story. But still there are significant differences: the description is only real events, lack of fiction, a combination of fiction and non-fiction, as a rule, affecting social problems and the presence of more descriptiveness than in the story.

Essays are portrait and historical, problematic and travel. They can also mix with each other. For example, a historical essay may also contain a portrait or problematic one.

An essay is some impression or reasoning of the author in connection with specific topic. It has free composition. This type of prose combines the functions literary essay and publicistic article. It may also have something in common with a philosophical treatise.

Medium prose genre - short story

The story is on the border between the short story and the novel. In terms of volume, it cannot be attributed to either small or large prose works.

AT Western literature the story is called short novel". Unlike the novel, in the story there is always one story line, but it also develops fully and fully, so it cannot be attributed to the genre of the story.

There are many examples of short stories in Russian literature. Here are just a few: Poor Lisa» Karamzin, Chekhov’s Steppe, Dostoyevsky’s Netochka Nezvanov, Zamyatin’s Uyezdnoe, Bunin’s Life of Arseniev, Stationmaster» Pushkin.

AT foreign literature one can name, for example, Chateaubriand's René, Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Suskind's The Tale of Monsieur Sommer.

PROSE is the antonym of verse and poetry, formally - ordinary speech, not divided into singled out commensurate segments - poems, in terms of emotional and semantic - something mundane, ordinary, ordinary. In fact, the dominant form in the literature of the two, and in Western Europe - the last three centuries.

Back in the 19th century all fiction, including prose, was called poetry. Now poetry is called only poetic literature.

The ancient Greeks believed that poetry uses a special speech, decorated according to the rules set out by its theory - poetics. The verse was one of the elements of this decoration, the difference between the speech of poetry and everyday speech. Decorated speech, but according to other rules - not poetics, but rhetoric - was also distinguished by oratory (the Russian word “eloquence” literally conveys this feature of it), as well as historiography, geographical descriptions and philosophical writings. The ancient novel as the least “correct” was the lowest in this hierarchy, was not taken seriously and was not recognized as a special layer of literature - prose. In the Middle Ages, religious literature was too separated from secular, strictly artistic, for prose in both to be recognized as something unified. Medieval entertaining and even instructive works in prose were considered incomparable with poetry as such, still poetic. The greatest novel of the Renaissance - “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) - belonged more to the grassroots literature associated with folk laughter culture than to official literature. M. Cervantes created his "Don Quixote" (1605, 1615) as a parody novel, but the implementation of the plan turned out to be much more serious and significant. In fact, this is the first prose novel (the chivalric novels parodied in it were mostly poetic), which was recognized as a work of high literature and influenced the flowering of the Western European novel more than a century later - in the 18th century.

In Russia, non-translated novels appeared late, from 1763. They did not belong to high literature, a serious person had to read odes. In the Pushkin era, foreign novels of the 18th century. young provincial noblewomen like Tatyana Larina were fond of, and even more undemanding public were fond of domestic ones. Ho sentimentalist N.M. Karamzin in the 1790s already introduced prose into high literature - in the neutral and unregulated genre of the story, which, like the novel, was not included in the system of recognized classicist genres, but was not burdened, like him, with unprofitable associations. Karamzin's stories became poetry in prose. A.S. Pushkin even in 1822 wrote in a note on prose: “The question is, whose prose is the best in our literature? - Answer: Karamzin. Ho added: “This is still not a big praise ...” On September 1 of the same year, in a letter, he advised Prince P.A. Vyazemsky to seriously engage in prose. “Summers tend to prose ...” - Pushkin remarked, anticipating his poems in the sixth chapter of “Eugene Onegin”: “Summers tend to harsh prose, / Summers drive naughty rhyme ...” The author of romantic stories A.A. Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) in letters of 1825, he twice calls to take up the novel, as later N.V. Gogol - to move from stories to a great work. And although he himself made his printed debut in prose only in 1831, simultaneously with Gogol (“Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”) and, like him, anonymously - “The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin”, thanks primarily to the two of them in the 1830s gg. in Russian literature, an epochal change occurred, which has already occurred in the West: from predominantly poetic, it becomes predominantly prosaic. This process was completed in the early 1840s, when Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) (who bore extensive ideas in prose) and Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) appeared. Nekrasov then “prosaises” the style of poetic poetry.

Poems regained their leadership for a relatively long period only at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. (“Silver Age” - in contrast to the “golden” age of Pushkin), and then only in modernism. Modernists were opposed by strong realist prose writers: M. Gorky, I.A. Bunin,

A.I. Kuprin, I.S. Shmelev, A.N. Tolstoy and others; for their part, the symbolists D.S. Merezhkovsky, Fedor Sologub, V.Ya. Bryusov, Andrei Bely, in addition to poetry, created a fundamentally new prose. True, both in the Silver Age (N.S. Gumilyov), and much later (I.A. Brodsky), some poets put poetry much higher than prose. However, in the classics of the 19th-20th centuries, both Russian and Western, there are more prose writers than poets. Poems are almost completely ousted from the drama and epic, even from the lyric epic: in the second half of the 20th century. the only Russian poem of the classical level is Akhmatov's "Poem Without a Hero", predominantly lyrical and begun by the author as early as 1940. Poems remained mainly for lyrics, and modern lyrics by the end of the century, as in the West, had lost a mass, even a wide readership, left for a few fans. Instead of a theoretically clear division of the genres of literature - epic, lyric, drama - a fuzzy but familiar one was fixed in the language: prose, poetry, dramaturgy (although lyrical miniatures in prose, strained poems and completely ridiculous dramas in verse are still being created).

The triumphal victory of prose is natural. Poetic speech is frankly conditional. Already L.N. Tolstoy considered it completely artificial, although he admired the lyrics of Tyutchev and Fet. In a small space of a lyrical work intense in thought and feeling, verses look more natural than in lengthy texts. Verse has a lot of additional expressive means in comparison with prose, but these “props” are archaic in origin. In many countries of the West and East, modern poetry uses almost exclusively vers libre (free verse), which has no meter or rhyme.

Prose has its structural advantages. Much less capable than verse to influence the reader “musically”, it is more free in the choice of semantic nuances, shades of speech, in the transfer of the “voices” of different people. “Controversy”, according to M.M. Bakhtin, prose is inherent to a greater extent than poetry (see: Artistic Speech). The form of prose is similar to other properties of both the content and the form of modern literature. “In prose, unity crystallizes from diversity. In poetry, on the other hand, diversity develops from a clearly proclaimed and directly expressed unity. But for a modern person, unequivocal clarity, statements "on the forehead" in art are akin to banality. Literature of the 19th and even more of the 20th century. prefers as a basic principle a complex and dynamic unity, a unity of dynamic diversity. This also applies to poetry. By and large, one pattern determines the unity of femininity and masculinity in A.A. Akhmatova, tragedy and mockery in the prose of A.P. Platonov, it would seem, completely incompatible plot-content layers - satirical, demonic, “gospel” and love connecting them - in “The Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov, novel and epic in “The Quiet Don” by M.A. Sholokhov, the absurdity and touchingness of the hero of the story V.M. Shukshin "Crank", etc. With this complexity of literature, prose reveals its own complexity in comparison with poetry. That is why Yu.M. Lotman built the following sequence from simple to complex: “colloquial speech - song (text + motive) - “classical poetry” - artistic prose”. With a developed culture of speech, “similarity” of the language of literature to everyday language is more difficult than a clear, straightforward “dissimilarity”, which was originally poetic speech. So it is more difficult for a student to draw to draw a nature similar than unlike. So realism demanded more experience from humanity than pre-realist trends in art.

One should not think that only verse has rhythm. Conversational speech is quite rhythmic, as are normal human movements - it is regulated by the rhythm of breathing. Rhythm is the regularity of some repetitions in time. Of course, the rhythm of ordinary prose is not as ordered as that of poetry, it is unstable and unpredictable. There is more rhythmic (in Turgenev) and less rhythmic (in Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy) prose, but it is never completely unordered. Syntactically distinguished short segments of the text do not differ extremely in length, often they begin or end rhythmically the same way two or more times in a row. Noticeably rhythmic is the phrase about the girls at the beginning of Gorky's "Old Woman Izergil": "Their hair, / silk and black, / were loose, / the wind, warm and light, / playing with them, / tinkled with coins / woven into them." The syntagmas here are short, commensurate. Of the seven syntagmas, the first four and the sixth begin with stressed syllables, the first three and the sixth end with two unstressed (“dactylic” endings), inside the phrase two adjacent syntagmas end in the same way - with one unstressed syllable: “wind, warm and light” (all three words are rhythmically the same, consist of two syllables and are stressed on the first) and “playing with them” (both words end in one unstressed syllable). The only, last syntagma ends with an accent, which energetically ends the whole phrase.

The writer can also play on rhythmic contrasts. In Bunin's story "The Gentleman from San Francisco," the fourth paragraph ("It was the end of November...") contains three phrases. The first is small, it consists of the words “but they sailed quite safely”. The next one is huge, half a page long, describing the pastime on the famous “Atlantis”. In fact, it consists of many phrases, separated, however, not by a period, but mainly by a semicolon. They, like the waves of the sea, overwhelm one another continuously. Thus, everything that is said is practically equalized: the structure of the ship, the daily routine, the occupations of passengers - everything, living and inanimate. The final part of the gigantic phrase - “at seven they announced with trumpet signals about what constituted the main goal of this entire existence, its crown ...” Only here the writer makes a pause, expressed by a dot. And finally, the last, final phrase, short, but as if equated to the previous one, so rich in information: “And then the gentleman from San Francisco hurried to his rich cabin to get dressed.” Such an “equating” strengthens the subtle irony about the “crown” of this entire existence, i.e., of course, dinner, although it is not consciously named, but only implied. It is no coincidence that later Bunin will describe in such detail the preparation of his hero for dinner and his dressing in a hotel on Capri: “And then he again began to prepare, as if for a crown ...” Even the word “crown” is repeated. After the gong (analogous to the “trumpet signals” on “Atlantis”), the gentleman goes to the reading room to wait for his wife and daughter, who are not yet quite ready. There, a blow happens to him, from which he dies. Instead of the "crown" of existence - non-existence. In the same way, rhythm, disruptions of rhythm, and similar rhythmic semantic “roll calls” (with some reservations, we can also talk about the rhythm of imagery) contribute to the fusion of all elements of the text into a harmonious artistic whole.

Sometimes, since the end of the 18th century, and most of all in the first third of the 20th century, writers even meticulously prose: they introduce the same sequence of stresses into syntagmas as in syllabo-tonic verses, but do not divide the text into poetic lines, the boundaries between syntagmas remain unpredictable. Andrei Bely tried to make metrized prose almost a universal form, he used it not only in novels, but also in articles and memoirs, which greatly annoyed many readers. In modern literature, metrized prose is used in some lyrical miniatures and as separate inserts in larger works. When, in a continuous text, rhythmic pauses are constant and the metrized segments are equal in length, in sound such a text is indistinguishable from a poetic one, like Gorky's "Songs" about the Falcon and the Petrel.