Russian Language Blog

I’m not much of an opera fan — because most of them, in my opinion, have maybe 5 or 10 minutes of musically entertaining sections heavily padded with hours and hours of shouting and warbling. The typical opera is like one of those pop-music albums that contains exactly ONE hit anyone wants to hear again, plus 10 instantly forgettable “B-side” numbers, plus 3 or 4 dance remixes of the one song for which you bought the album. Perhaps only футбол can rival opera in the sheer quantity of “Nothing Interesting Is Happening Right Now” that it offers to spectators.

A шкатулка (“ornamental box”) depicting an episode from the life of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich

And yet — a few operas do have their moments, and for me one of the most spectacular examples is the Половецкие пляски (“Polovtsian Dances”) section from 1890′s «Князь Игорь» (“Prince Igor”) by Александр Бородин (“Aleksandr Borodin”). It only runs about семь минут, but they are an AWESOME seven minutes.

In this YouTube video, it’s performed by a massive theatre company with everyone приодетые в блестящих средневековых тряпках (“dolled up in glittery medieval ‘threads’”), and it’s quite a spectacle!

Admittedly, I really had trouble understanding what they’re singing, at first — all those operatic voices sort of blend together into a indistinct tra-la-hah-lah that’s difficult to decipher, especially in a language that isn’t my native one. (Soprano voices, in particular.) But after just a bit of Googling, I found the written lyrics for this section. And it’s wierd how the sounds that had been meaningless траляля, труляля start to magically crystallize into intelligible Russian words once you’re able to read along while you listen! But before we get to the sing-a-long lyrics…

A Bit of Backstory from Medieval Rus’

Borodin based the opera’s libretto on a 13th-century East Slavonic epic poem known as «Слово о плъку Игоревѣ», which is typically translated as “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” The poem describes a rather disastrous military raid led by the Slavic prince Igor Svyatoslavich in 1185 against the Polovtsian army of Khan Konchák — which ended in the slaughter of all but a dozen Russian warriors, and the capture of Prince Igor.

Even though Igor’s military campaign was a flop, the epic that recounts it is revered for at least two reasons: First, from a linguistic standpoint, it’s a rare and valuable record of what ancient East Slavonic looked like before it began to be influenced by Old Church Slavonic (which belongs to the South Slavic group). Second, from the standpoint of Slavic nationalism, the poem urges the princes of Kievan Rus’ to cease their constant in-fighting and unify against the incessant attacks by various Turkic peoples. Little did the anonymous author know that the fearsome татары (“Tatars” or “Mongols”) would come riding into town just a few decades after Prince Igor’s death and kick the butts of everybody in the region, both Slavic and Turkic!

Who were these Polovtsians? Половцы is simply the Slavic name for a bunch of nomadic Central Asians who called themselves “Kumans” or “Cumans.” Their periodic raiding and pillaging of Kievan Rus’ started around 1060 and continued for almost 200 years (until the Tatars showed up uninvited). Our knowledge of Kuman/Polovtsian culture is a bit scanty, but we know that their language belonged to the Turkic group; they were evidently rather light-haired (at least compared to other Central Asians); and in Igor’s time they were still pagan, although in later centuries, some assimilated to Islam and others to Christianity.

As for the хан (“khan” or “king”) named Кончак, don’t make the mistake of thinking he was a total bad guy. Despite the constant hostility between the Russians and the Polovtsians, they would occasionally form ad hoc military or political alliances. In fact, Konchak and Igor were сваты, or “co-fathers-in-law” — the pagan khan’s daughter was in an arranged marriage with the Christian prince’s son!

So, the Половецкие пляски segment that you see in the video clip is from end of Act 2 in the opera — the wounded Igor is technically a POW in the Polovtsian camp, but Konchak has intervened on behalf of his son-in-law’s dad, and is playing the part of a gracious host in hopes that the Kievans will agree to some sort of truce.

The lyrics (and their translation)

In the first section, entitled Пляска девушек (“Dance of the girls”), we hear a chorus of невольницы (“slave maidens”), who address their song as «ты» and urge it to “fly away on the wings of the wind,” back to their long-lost homeland on the far side of the Caspian Sea. (Hmmm, can you think of another classic Russian tune where the singer addresses her own song in the imperative, and tells it to fly to some distant place?)

Anyway, practically everyone will recognize the melody, which was ripped off (via the Broadway show Kismet) and turned into the 1950s pop standard “Stranger in Paradise”. Here it is with a line-by-line translation — click and drag on the pink lines to see the English:

♪♫ Улетай на крыльях ветра
Fly away, on the wings of the wind,
Ты в край родной, родная песня наша,
You [fly away], our native song, to the region of our birth.
Туда, где мы тебя свободно пели,
To where we sang you in liberty,
Где было так привольно нам с тобою.
Where you and we were so free.
Там, под знойным небом,
There, under the sultry sky,
Негой воздух полон,
The air is full of bliss,
Там под говор моря
There, under the murmuring of the sea,
Дремлют горы в облаках. ♪♫
The mountains half-slumber in the clouds.

Incidentally, I’m really not sure why the next-to-last line has под говор (accusative) instead of под говором (instrumental) — since it’s hard to see how the verb дремать (“to be drowsy”) conveys motion, even in a figurative sense. Perhaps one of our native speakers can shed light?

Anyway, some very athletic dancing by the male slaves follows, and all the frenetic leaping and banging of kettle drums leads us into a bombastic, Carmina Burana-ish chorus that begins at around 03:40 in the video clip. In the opera’s score, this part is rather unimaginatively titled Общая Пляска (“General/Collective Dance”), but “Khan Konchak, Superstar!” might be a better title. The key verb in this section is definitely славить — “to glorify, to sing the praises of”. If you close your eyes, you can almost imagine Ricardo Montalban’s minions singing this to William Shatner:

♪♫ Пойте песни славы хану! Пой!
Sing songs of glory to Khan! Sing!
Славьте силу, дочесть хана! Славь!
Glorify the might, the honor, of Khan! Praise him!
Славен хан! Хан!
Glorious is Khan! Khan!
Славен он, хан наш!
Glorious is he, our Khan!
Блеском славы
In the gleaming of his glory
Солнцу равен хан!
Khan is like unto the Sun!
Нету равных славой хану! Нет!
There are none equal in glory to Khan! None!
Чаги хана славят хана…♪♫
Khan’s slaves praise Khan!

And as the Polovtsians are singing their lungs out in praise of Mr. Fabulous, Konchak offers Igor a beautiful slave-girl as a party favor from one сват to another — though with a string attached, of course! It starts around 04:40 in the video, and basically turns into a duet by “Konchak and the Khan-ettes”, as the невольницы sing back-up:

♪♫ Видишь ли пленниц ты –
Do you see the captive-girls
С моря дальнего?
From a distant sea?
Видишь красавиц моих
Do you see my beauties
Из-за Каспия?
From beyond the Caspian?
О, скажи, друг,
Oh, say it, friend –
Скажи только слово мне!
Say only a word to me!
Хочешь, любую из них я тебе подарю! ♪♫
If you want, I’ll make you a gift of any one of them!

If you’re wondering what happens next — well, Igor eventually makes a heroic escape by digging a mile-long tunnel with a teaspoon and swimming through the rat-infested sewers crawling under a loose tent-flap and jogging away. (Konchak isn’t exactly holding the prince in maximum-security conditions — after all, they’re both blue-blooded noblemen, and in-laws on top of that!) After arranging for the ransom of other Russian chiefs still in Polovtsian hands, Igor goes back to his job running the princedom of Novgorod-Sverensk, arranges more political marriages for his kids, and eventually dies around 1201. It’s unclear what happens to Konchak, but as we know, the fortunes of the Kievans and the Kumans alike went into decline after the Tatars showed up!

1985 USSR stamp commemorating the 1185 battle

As we all know, shortly after the inquisitive Alice falls вниз по кроличьей норе, she discovers a little glass table with a tiny golden key on top of it, along with an enticing bottle of something that turns out to be
shrinking potion:

Of course, you can’t say “Drink me!” (or “Eat me!” or “Off with his head!”) in Russian without knowing how to form imperative commands. After many years of Russian study, I’m pretty good at the formation part, but I still get confused sometimes about the correct usage of imperatives. So, with a little help from Alice and friends, let’s finish off the week with a look at the…

Повелительное наклонение глаголов
Imperative mood of verbs

Even if you’re fairly new to Russian, you may already have figured out (to your sorrow!) that Russian verbs are often characterized by weird spelling changes as well as shifting syllable stress. So, in order to determine what the correct imperative is, there are two key verb forms that you absolutely must know: the third-person plural («они») and the first-person singular («я») of the imperfective present or the perfective future.

With pretty much 99% of verbs (we’ll get to the exceptions later), knowing these two forms allows you to figure out the imperative every single time. Keeping that general point in mind, let’s go step-by-step through:

Formation of singular imperatives

We’re only going to look at the singular imperative, because once you’ve figured out what it is, creating the plural form is no sweat: you just slap on a -те and you’re done.

First, take the 3rd plural form and “отрубить” (chop off) the last two letters — here, it’s not “off with its head,” but “off with its tail!” Depending on the verb’s conjugation, these last two letters will be either -ут/-ют or -ат/-ят. (With reflexive verbs, of course, it’d be the last FOUR letters, such as -утся or -ятся).

What you’re left with is called the “stem,” which can end either with a vowel, or with a single consonant, or with more than one consonant…

If this stem (i.e., the “chopped” form) ends in a vowel:

Just add -й, and you’ve got the singular imperative! (In these cases, you don’t even need to worry about what the 1st-singular form is.) Like so:

прочитать (“to read”) → они прочита|ют → прочита- → прочитай! “Read!”

открыть (“to open”) → они откро|ют → откро- → открой! “Open!”

плевать (“to spit”) → они плю|ют → плю- → плюй! “Spit!”

пробовать (“to try [food]“) → они пробу|ют → пробу- → пробуй! “Have a taste!”

бояться (“to fear”) → они бо|ятся → бо-(ся) → не бойся! “Don’t be afraid!”

стоять (“to be standing”) → они сто|ят → сто- → стой! “Halt! Freeze!”

If the stem ends in MORE THAN ONE consonant:

Again, it’s simple. Just add an -и to the stem, no matter where the stress is:

наполнить (“to fill”) → они наполн|ят → наполн- → наполни! “Fill!”

почистить (“to clean”) → они почист|ят → почист- → почисти! “Clean!”

If the stem ends in ONE consonant…

So far, we haven’t bothered looking at the 1st-singular form, but here’s where it comes into play, because it’ll tell you whether the imperative is stressed on the ending or on the stem.

(a) …and the 1st-sing. is end-stressed (on the -у/-ю):

In this case you add a stressed -и to the stem to get the imperative:

поговорить (“to talk a bit”) → они поговор|ят → поговор- → (я поговорю) → поговори! “Talk!”

писать (“to write”) → они пиш|ут → пиш- → (я пишу) → пиши! “Write!”

любить (“to love”) → они люб|ят → люб- → (я люблю) → люби! “Love!”

приносить (“to bring [on foot]“) → они принос|ят → принос- → (я приношу) → приноси! “Bring!”

(b) …and the 1st-sing. is stem-stressed:

If the stress isn’t on the -у/-ю in the «я» form, the imperative will be the stem plus a soft sign (-ь):

встать (“to stand up”) → они встан|ут → встан- → (я встану) → встань! “Stand up!”

отрезать (“to cut off”) → они отреж|ут → отреж- → (я отрежу) → отрежь! “Slice it off!”

оставить (“to leave alone”) → они остав|ят → остав- → (я оставлю) → оставь! “Leave it alone!”

ВНИМАНИЕ! (“Attention!”) — notice the imperative of любить is neither «любли!» (i.e., spelled like я люблю) nor «любь!» (i.e., stressed like они любят) — it’s «люби!», with the spelling of the 3rd-plural but the stress of the 1st-singular. And similarly, one says «приноси!» rather than «приноши!» or «принось!», and «оставь!», not «оставли!» or «оставль!»

Finally, if the verb is reflexive:

Add -ся to singular imperatives after -й or -ь, but -сь after -и, and after the plural ending -те. Thus:

пытаться (“to attempt”) → они пыта|ются → пыта- → пытайся! пытайтесь! “Try! Attempt!”

подняться (“to go up”) → они подним|утся → подним- → (я поднимусь) → поднимись! поднимитесь! “Come up!”

And then there are the exceptions:

Fortunately for us foreigners, in the case of imperatives the number of exceptions to the above rules is fairly small!

Пить (“to drink”), and other verbs with one-syllable infinitives ending in -ить, such as лить (“to pour”), бить (“to beat”) and шить (“to sew”), form their imperatives by removing the -ить from the infinitive and adding -ей. This includes their prefixed derivatives, which are usually perfective — thus, from выпить, we get выпей меня!, “Drink me!” Similarly:

приш|ить (“to sew on”) → пришей!

уб|ить (“to kill”) → убей!

The imperfective давать (“to give”), its prefixed derivatives, and various other imperfectives ending in -авать (e.g., вставать, “to stand up”) lose the -ва- in their present conjugation: они дают, “they give.” However, the -ва- is still there in the imperative — so the rule about looking to the 3rd plural for the imperative’s spelling doesn’t work! Instead, just chop off the -ть from the infinitive, and add -й:

отдава|ть (“to give back”) → отдавай!

And then there are a few totally exceptional verbs whose imperatives you just have to memorize. These include the perfective дать (“to give”) and its prefixed forms, along with есть, “to eat”, and a couple others.

предать (“to betray”) → предай!

есть (“to eat”) → ешь!

ехать (“to go by vehicle”) → поезжай!

And that pretty much covers the subject of how to form imperatives. Now we’ll “go ask Alice” about the usage of…

Imperfective vs. perfective imperatives

This is one of those nuanced areas where native speakers just know which verb aspect to use in a given situation. Even so, there are some rules of thumb for the foreign learner:

• With positive (non-negated) imperatives, the imperfective gives the feeling of an invitation or gentle plea, while the perfective can sound a bit more like an instruction or command. In other words, a Russian hostess speaking to a guest would use the imperfective садиться (“sit down”), whose imperative is «садись!» (“Have a seat!”). But speaking to her 8-year-old child she’d use the perfective сесть, whose imperative is «сядь!» (“SIT!”). Thus, after a hearty chug-a-lug from the ВЫПЕЙ МЕНЯ! bottle causes her to уменьшиться (“become smaller”), Alice soon discovers a…

…пирожок, на котором коринками было красиво написано: «СЪЕШЬ МЕНЯ!»
…small pastry, on which was beautifully spelled out with currants: “EAT ME!”

And, several changes in size later:

«Вернись!» — закричала Гусеница вслед Алисе — «Мне нужно сказать тебе что-то очень важное!»
[...]
«Читай Папа Вильям” — предложила Гусеница.
“Сome back!” — the Caterpillar yelled after Alice — “I have something very important to tell you!”
[...]
“Maybe you should try reciting Father William,” — suggested the Caterpillar.

So, the perfective «вернись!» is more like a command, while the imperfective «читай!» is mild encouragement.

• With negated imperatives, the imperfective can sound more like a general prohibition (“Never do so-and-so”), while the perfective can have the effect of an immediate warning (“Look out — mind that you don’t do so-and-so”). So, in a famous line from «Алиса в зазеркалье», we have this well-known advice from the Red Queen, with two imperfective imperatives — one positive, one negated:

«Когда говоришь, открывай рот немного шире, и не забывай прибавлять “Ваше Величество”!»
“When you speak, open your mouth a little wider, and don’t forget to add ‘Your Majesty’!”

And, finally: if you can’t remember how to form an imperative, you can always fall back on using the infinitive with “imperative force” — typically, you’d use the imperfective infinitive in negated commands, but the perfective for positive commands. Just keep in mind that using the infinitive as a command may sound cookbook-ish, bureaucratic, or rudely abrupt. Thus, the all-purpose catchphrase of the Червонная Королева (“Queen of Hearts”) isn’t «пожалуйста, ОТРУБАЙ ему голову!» (“Please chop off his head”) or even «сию секунду ОТРУБИ ей голову!» (“Chop off her head this instant!”). It’s…

«ОТРУБИТЬ им головы!» (“Off with their heads!”)

In last week’s post, I mistakenly used the verb сваливать/свалить with the meaning “to physically knock down” — which seemed logical to me because, after all, the root verb валить means “to topple” and the noun валежник refers to “fallen tree branches.” Regular reader Fitzmat corrected me that сваливать/свалить, despite its etymology, is not generally used in reference to literal, physical falling, but instead has various figurative senses.

But that got me thinking about the general concepts of “up” and “down”, of “ascending” and “lifting”, of “falling” and “dropping,” and how they’re expressed in Russian. Translating them isn’t always simple because words like “up” and “down” have so many non-literal, idiomatic uses in English — “What’s up, doc?” doesn’t signify “What is elevated?”, for instance. So in this post we’ll be sticking with the more literal senses that relate to physical “highness” and “lowness.”

To begin with, the nouns верх and низ respectively mean “the top” and “the bottom”, with the corresponding adjectives верхний, “upper”, and нижний, “lower”. (But in the context of clothing, these adjectives mean “outer” versus “inner” — so нижняя одежда doesn’t mean “clothing worn on the legs”; it means “clothing worn under other clothes.”)

And various important adverbs derive from the nouns верх and низ, expressing both static position («где?») and motion towards («куда?») or away from («откуда?»):

Here are some examples of how they’re used.

Они живут наверху.
They live upstairs.

If you mean that someone lives exactly one floor above you (not on some unspecified upper floor), you can be more clear by saying, instead:

Борис живёт выше нас этажом.
Boris lives above us by (one) floor.

Similarly, with downstairs neighbors, you can use внизу (“somewhere downstairs”) or ниже этажом (“one floor down”) as appropriate.

And if you decide to make a living as a разбойник (“armed robber, bandit”), here are two must-know expressions:

Руки вверх — жизнь или кошелёк!
Hands in the air — your life or your wallet!

As we’ll discuss ниже в этом блоге (“below, further down in this blog-post”), you can use an actual verb to express “raise one’s hand,” but with the command руки вверх!, the meaning is totally clear without a verb!

Лягушка плыла вниз по реке.
The frog was swimming down the river (i.e., with the current).

In some contexts, the где? adverbs listed in the first row can also be used prepositionally with the genitive case to show location:

Храм находится вверху горы.
The temple is located on top of the mountain.

Also, the adverb вверх can be followed by the instrumental nouns дном (“with the bottom part”) or ногами (“with the legs”) to express the meaning “upside down”, often in the figurative sense of “in total disorder”:

Всё было вверх ногами.
Everything was topsy-turvy.

Going up! Second floor, mens’ wear…

Now that we’ve looked a bit at “up” and “down” in the adverbial sense, how do you express “to go up” or “to climb down” with Russian verb constructions?

As you probably know, Russian “Verbs of Motion” (VOMs) can be modified with a large number of prefixes to indicate the directionality of the motion. And, in fact, there are two specific prefixes that express “upward” and “downward”: с- (or со-) means “down” and вз- (or воз-, вс-, вос-) means “up.”

HOWEVER, in normal colloquial Russian one rarely uses prefixed VOMs with the everyday physical meanings “go up” or “descend” or “carry down”, etc. Even though these prefixed forms exist, they tend to have more specialized or abstract senses. For example, восходить/взойти can be used in etymological context with the translation “to trace back to an ancestral word/language”:

Это слово восходит к латыни.
This verb goes back to (derives from) Latin.

But you wouldn’t normally use взойти to mean, for example, “The girl climbed up the ladder.”

Similarly, съежзать/съехать could theoretically express “to drive down from the mountains,” but in colloquial speech you’re more likely to see it in this sense:

Мы съехали с шоссе (на дорогу).
We turned off the highway (onto a side road).

So, if prefixed VOMs are generally not the best way to translate “go up” and “come down”, what verbs should you use instead for such commonplace, everday situations like this…?

Лифт поднялся на первый этаж (“The elevator has come up to the first floor”). Девушка не спускала трусики (“The young woman did not lower her panties”); Трусики спали сами собой (“the panties fell down by themselves”). Всё это, очевидно, подняло настроение у швейцара (“All this, obviously, has elevated the mood of the doorman/attendant.”), to such a degree that he is somehow able to поднимать коробку телекинезом (“lift the package by telekinesis”)!

For students of Russian, the most important verbs by far are…

Спуститься и подняться

Спускаться/спуститься (“to go down, to climb down, to descend”) and подниматься/подняться (“to go up, to climb up, to rise”) are both must-knows because of their sheer versatility and non-specificness — you can correctly use them even in situations where more nuanced verbs exist. And, very conveniently, you don’t need to fuss about the difference between “on foot” or “by vehicle”, which is a characteristic of VOMs.

So, for example, you can use подниматься/подняться whether you’re talking about a person climbing a ladder, or a rocket ascending into the sky, or yeast-dough rising, or a flag going up a pole, etc. The respective nouns for these verbs are спуск, “a descent; the act of lowering” and подъём, “a rise; a raising; an ascent”.

The imperfectives are pretty easy to conjugate: я спускаюсь, ты спускаешься… and я поднимаюсь, ты поднимаешься…. On the other hand, the perfectives are a little harder because they both feature stress-shifts and spelling-changes in the stem. Here’s here’s how the perfectives conjugate:

Mouse over the yellow text for a little pop-up reminder about forming imperatives. And by the way, notice that подняться, being a «Е»-type verb, has a stem change throughout the future perfect, while спуститься, being an «И»-type verb, has a consonant mutation in the 1st-singular ONLY.

Pick it up, put it down

As we know, verbs with the reflexive -ся ending are always intransitive (i.e., they can’t take an accusative direct object). So, naturally, you might wonder what happens when you take off the -ся. Answer: you get verbs with the same general “up/down” meanings, but in transitive senses.

Thus, спускать/спустить (+ acc.) can be translated “to let down, to lower, to intentionally drop (someone or something)”, while поднимать/поднять (+acc.) is “to pick up, to lift, to raise (someone or something).” Here are some examples of the intransitives (“to go up/down”) and the transitives (“to put up/down”) in use:

Ученик поднял свою руку.
The schoolboy raised his hand.

Бабушка подняла младенца со стула и спустила его на пол.
Grandma picked the infant up from the chair and set him down on the floor.

Коза поднималась на гору, пока мы спускались вниз на лыжах.
The she-goat was climbing up the mountain while we were skiing down.

«Мой кот не хочет спуститься с дерева!»
“My cat doesn’t want to come down from the tree!”

«Щас, я поднимусь по лестнице и достану кота.»
“Hang on, I’ll climb up the ladder and get the cat.”

Мария спускает ведро в колодец.
Maria is lowering the bucket into the well.

Пора подняться с постели, лентяй!
Time to get out of bed, lazybones!

Кажется, ему грустно — давай попытаемся поднять у него дух!
He seems to be sad — let’s try to lift his spirit(s)!

In the last example, поднять is used in a rather abstract way, and the verb has other figurative uses, such as поднять тревогу, “to raise an alarm.” And спустить, too, has various meanings that aren’t translatable as “to put down” — for example, Сегодня спускают корабль, “They are launching a ship today,” or Мальчик спустил воздух из мячика, “The boy let the air out of the ball.”

P.S. If you’re curious about the translation of the “Tubthumping” lyrics in the title of the post, my guess is that it would probably be something closer to Меня собьют с ног, а я снова встаю… (“they knock me off my feet, but I stand again…”)