The culmination of four decades of work by J. Thomas Shaw, this fully searchable e-book carefully analyzes, both chronologically and by genre, Alexander Pushkin’s use of rhyme to show how meaning shifts in tandem with formal changes. Comparing Pushkin’s poetry with that of Konstantin Nikolaevich Batiushkov (1787–1855) and Evgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (1800–1844), Shaw considers, among other topics, what is exact and inexact in “exact” rhyme, how the grammatical characteristics of rhymewords affect the reader’s percepetion of the poem and its rhyme, and how the repetition of a rhyming word can also change meaning.
    Each of the five chapters analyzes in detail a distinct aspect of rhyme and provides rich resources for future scholars in the accompanying tables of data. The extensive back matter in the book includes a glossary, abbreviations list, bibliography, and indexes of poems cited, names, and rhyme types and analyses.

J. Thomas Shaw is professor emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of several books, including Pushkin’s Rhymes: A Dictionary, Baratynskii: A Dictionary of the Rhymes and a Concordance to the Poetry, and Pushkin’s Poetics of the Unexpected: The Nonrhymed Lines in the Rhymed Poetry and the Rhymed Lines in the Nonrhymed Poetry.