Stylistic figures, that is, unusual constructions of speech, from the point of view of syntax, are a frequent phenomenon in Russian. These include the rhetorical question, several types of parallelisms, the ending, the silence, the unanimity and others.
Inversion is a figure in the style that, along with the ones listed above, is most often found in poetic works. This turn consists in such an arrangement of words in a sentence that violates the traditional order when the subject follows the predicate, and the definition after the word that it defines. It also breaks away from the defined epithet, and other speech phenomena occur.
Inversion in the Russian language as an example of a certain archaic norm is more common in fiction. Many writers eagerly resort to this technique in order to enhance the expressiveness of their words.
When inversion is used in some part of the text, this accentuates the reader’s attention in this section, the rearranged words seem to be underlined, involuntarily stand out, speech becomes more expressive, peculiar. Thus, the author has the opportunity to show what is important for him in the content, what matters.
It is generally believed that the word order in the Russian language is not strictly fixed, but rather free. This means that the members of the proposal do not have a clearly assigned place. Although, if you look closely, you may find that the permutation options are not infinite, some restrictions still exist. They are due to the semantics of the proposal and the connectedness of its components in structure. No matter how the word order is changed in order to focus on something, change something, or for other reasons, a sentence as a syntactic unit should preserve its structural properties.
In the narrow sense of the word, inversion is a permutation that violates the usual word order. It occurs in the following cases:
1) When a rema is put before a topic in a sentence (the concepts of subject and rema correspond to the concepts of subject and predicate, subject and predicate). This occurs when the order of the parts is violated during its actual division. Usually, the bump follows the theme. Syntactic division involves the allocation in the sentence of the predicate and subject, and then expanding their secondary members. But the actual division, depending on the tasks of communication and the specific situation, adapts the grammatical structure of the sentence. In this case, the subject and predicate do not coincide with the grammatical predicate and subject, that is, the sentence can end with the subject, and the predicate can begin. The main tool in this division is the logical stress. With full preservation of parts of the sentence, it is enough to change the intonation of one word so that the semantic shade of the whole sentence changes. Also, particles (but not, after all, then) serve to highlight a theme or a bump.
A similar inversion in poetry makes it possible to single out a definition, an epithet, to make it brighter. Such a construction of the sentence, namely the location of the definition expressed in the genitive case after the definable, is typical for 18th century literature. That is, it can be said that inversions in poetry are of historical origin.
2) When the rearrangement of parts of the phrase leads to the fact that the sentence is stylistically colored. Here the violation of the integrity of the phrase occurs by inserting between its parts a verb. As if by itself a pause forms, which separates this word from others, it takes on a special meaning.
In any case, inversion is a word order that somewhat violates the norms of the modern literary language.