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?»):

Где?	наверху — up, to the top, upstairs вверху — at the top внизу — below, at the bottom, downstairs from
Куда?	наверх — up, to the top, (to) upstairs вверх — upwards, towards the top, upstream вниз — down, downward, downstream, (to) downstairs
Откуда?	сверху — from the top; downwards снизу — from the bottom, upwards

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).

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:

подняться (perf.: “to go up, to climb up, to rise”)
Past	поднялся, поднялася, поднялось, поднялись
	sing.	pl.
1st	поднимусь	поднимемся
2nd	поднимешься	подниметесь
3rd	поднимется	поднимутся
Imperative	поднимись!, поднимитесь!

спуститься (perf.: “to go down, to climb down, descend”)
Past	спустился, спустилась, -лось, -лись
	sing.	pl.
1st	спущусь	спустимся
2nd	спустишься	спуститесь
3rd	спустится	спустяся
Imperative	спустись!, спуститесь!

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…”)