Максим Ильич Шапир: In memoriam

This article presents an overview of the achievements of Maksim Shapir, a leading Russian scholar who died prematurely in 2006. He is the author of some 200 works covering a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, including the history and theory of Russian verse, the theory of poetic language, linguistic poetics, textology, the history of literature, semiotics, the logic and methodology of science, and the history of Russian philology.Among Shapir's principal accomplishments is his original general theory of verse. His main intellectual thrust was the isomorphism and homology of form and content. Shapir expanded the idea of the potential meaningfulness of form and applied it to all levels and aspects of poetic language, including orthography and punctuation; it is on this thesis that Shapir's conception of textual criticism is based. In addition, he posed the question of historical grammar of Russian verse and developed a new model of macro-evolution of Russian poetic styles.