Some of the more attentive readers (or probably just about everyone who reads this) might have noticed that there’s a new feature to this blog – a little something called ‘Community Project’. After writing for this blog for about five months now I couldn’t help but to become aware of the good, sometimes even exceptional, knowledge of Russian language among many of the readers. This sparked an interest to create a dialogue between you here, a place where you could share your knowledge with others as well as getting a share of theirs, and discuss different words and grammatical constructions. I’ve already taken a sneak-peak of the first contributions and I must say that I’m quite impressed with you (someone mentioned the jargon word for money «бабки», which comes from the word «бабка», «баба» [all of the words have the stress on the first vowel], which my dictionary claims to be colloquial words for “woman”, but in my opinion today in Russia these words are not only informal, but even rude). I can’t wait to see what’s you’re going to come up with next – everything is welcome, all kinds of words and constructions and sayings and random fragments of Russian language. And in regard to my last post, my modest paraphrase on Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time”, I might have been mistaken when I assumed that most Russophiles have read the 19th century classic and are familiar with the irony and the sarcasm directed towards society that the author was aimning from when he called the main hero – Печорин – a hero of the 1830’s. Of course Yan Syzo is an anti-hero, just like his prototype Pechorin, but I wanted to say that today’s Russia is just like Lermontov’s present day Russia in the way that often anti-heroes are turned into heroes. Any kind on polemic on this subject is more than welcome. And I’d tought I’d also take a moment to discuss a sentence in the text in my last post, that I made the mistake of not commenting on.

The sentence that I would like to discuss today is as follows (though it’s not the complete sentence as found in the original text, only a part of it): «…ему грозит отчисление по неуспеваемости…» Even for the advanced student of Russian language such a sentence contains some difficulties, especially if the person has not learned Russian at a university, but, for example, at night classes or in some other kind of context, without having the chance to talk to Russian students in their actual ‘habitat’, thus their Alma-Mater in Russian Federation. This sentence is common among students because it speaks of student reality, making it clearly not ‘everybody’s business’ but never mind, let’s try to understand it anyway. Let’s start by breaking down the words it contains one by one:

Грозить (impfv) (pres. я грожу, ты грозишь) – to threaten, with dative + кому? чему?, or instrumental + чем? кем?
«грозить кулаком (кому-нибудь)» – to shake one’s fist at (somone)

Неуспеваемость – poor progress (among students), poor grades; pupil’s failure
Неуспевающий – (of a student) poor, not making satisfactory progress

Отчисление – deduction; (pl.) money deducted, deductions; dismissal
Отчислить (pfv) / отчислять (impfv) – to deduct, to dismiss

One way of translating this sentence could be “…he faces dismissal [from the university] because of poor grades”. In this case the English variant differs greatly from the Russian because he is now active, unlike in the original, when he was inactive as the indirect object, in the dative case, thus not performing an act, but having an act being performed on him. The Russian sentence can be said, in a way, to portray him as not completely responsible for his own poor grades, and thus not for his dismissal either. If you want to stick to the ‘kinder’ treatment of the failing student an alternative translation would be: “…deduction from the university is threatening him due to poor grades”. I don’t know which variant is better. I guess the best thing would be for him to study harder and get his grades up so that he wouldn’t have to be deducted from the university. Because everyone knows that if a male student is dismissed from an institution of higher education in Russia then he’s forced to serve in the army and the Russian army is not a joke. Not at all.