Last week, I participated in an international academic conference devoted to verse studies. Not "poetry," mind you, but verse -- the stuff poetry is made of. Russians have a rich tradition of analyzing creativity as if it were a science, breaking down poems word-by-word into statistics and charts. Dubbed "the Russian method" by American scholars, this approach has yielded some very interesting results.

It's a heartwarming reminder of cultural continuity when topics such as whether Dante's verse is syllabic or syllabotonic -- whatever that means -- rile up participants within minutes to the point of calling each other names. To argue is human, and the satisfaction of this primal need is one of the main driving forces at any conference.

The topic that I was dealing with -- the prominence of traditional verse forms in modern poetry -- was well cut out for the Russian analytical method. Using figures and diagrams, I showed that even in avant-garde poetic circles such as the Vavilon literary community, Western-style free verse is still very much a novelty, accounting for less than a third of all texts. In mass poetry, which has its own outlets and unions on the Internet, the prominence of free verse falls below 10 percent. Although there are some signs that Western interest in conventional verse is sparking again (as is the case with the New Formalists movement in the United States, for example), Russian poetry keeps in touch with its heritage like no other literary tradition.

Each evening, after the day's events were over, Moscow State University professor Sergei Kormilov took conference participants on long, involved tours of Moscow and its environs. The first of these tours was devoted to the neighborhood of Ostozhenka, Volkhonka and the Church of Christ the Savior, since the conference was taking place right nearby, at the Institute of Russian Language.

This year, as several times before, the organizing committee was chaired by academician Mikhail Gasparov, one of the best modern scholars in the field of humanities. He is a captivating presence, and professor Ian Lilly from Auckland University introduced him at the opening dinner as "the Zeus of verse studies."

"Wow, Zeus," Gasparov murmured thoughtfully.