Prince Myshkin's "Tak nel'zia postupat'"

[Benjamin Sher]

Dear Seelangers:


Can we even conceive of navigating through the labyrinth of the Rus-
sian language without a firm, unambiguous yet SIMPLE model or chart
of Russian aspectual usage?

If we drown ourselves in the infinite variety of DERIVATIVE aspectual
choices (temporal, moral, social, psychological, emotional) without a
central aspectual model that this variety presupposes and on which it
rests, what have we gained except a chaos of details that cause us to
flounder and grope in the dark?

Who can forget Prince Myshkin's unforgettable "Tak nel'zia postupat'"
("No human being ought to act like that" -- I tried in vain for hours
late into the night to find the quote. I know it's there some place)
What a magnificently simple indictment of the evil that lurks in us
all. Yet why "postupat'" (imperfective, i.e. transcendental) and not
 "postupit'"? What's the reason for Dostoevsky's aspectual choice? We
know that "Tak nel'zia postupit'" is impossible here, but why?

Does the answer lie in a distinction between a "moral IMP" vs. an
"amoral P"? Or in a "process IMP" vs. a "result P"? Or in an "un-
limited IMP" vs. a "(de)limited P"? Or a "habitual/frequentative IMP"
vs. a "single occurrence P"? Or an "unstable IMP" vs. a "stable P"?

In my personal opinion, all of the above explanations lead nowhere
but to the mental asylum: Not only are they wrong in themselves. They
fail to grasp the fundamental philosophical, logical and intuitive
distinction involved and why Dostoevsky must use the imperfective in
this case.

My answer is that Prince Myshkin (i.e. any Russian speaker) is faced
between two aspectual options: an empirical moral aspect ( "postu-
pit'") and a transcendental moral aspect ("postupat'"). BOTH ASPECTS
INVOLVE MORALITY. Metaphorically speaking, we may say that the P "tak
nel'zia postupit'" is a circumstantial statement that transforms the
verb into a 3-D object-verb embedded in perceived reality, while the
IMP "tak nel'zia postupat'" expresses a kind of 2-D pure moral sensi-
bility that is by definition beyond all perception.

I think many will say: "So what else is new, Benjamin? I have known
that for twenty years. Why all the fuss?"

The heart of this distinction lies in the fact that the moral dif-
ference (pure moral quality vs. empirical moral quality relating to
some circumstance) reflects, expresses and flows directly from two
incompatible world views that are related ONLY morphologically. Deep
down, the Russian user intuitively makes a binary decision that auto-
matically DEMANDS one aspect OR the other (depending on the context,
of course) but NOT BOTH.

That's the crucial point: The aspectual decision is NOT arbitrary, it
is NOT on a CONTINUUM. For this reason, in my opinion the very terms
"imperfective/perfective", implying just such a continuum, are a dead
end because they create the false impression in the mind of the FO-
REIGN STUDENT that a Russian is agonizing over an aspectual choice
between two points. This is no doubt similar to the illusion of a
foreigner that a native speaker of English "agonizes" over the choice
of an article (three options: "AN American dream"; "THE American
revolution"; "American history is rich in incidents" -- no article).

Well, this is the way I see it. I welcome a dialogue on this subject.


Benjamin Sher
Russian Literary Translator
(SOVIET POLITICS AND REPRESSION IN THE 1930'S
Yale University Press, forthcoming 1997)
sher07 at bellsouth.net