Vy Chitali Annu Kareninu?

[Benjamin Sher]

Dear Seelangers:

[This letter is based in part on a letter I wrote to Joachim Faust, a
brilliant doctoral student at the University of South Alabama, who is
writing a dissertation examining the aspectual symbolism of Blok's
three stages of poetry. With his permission, I would like to quote
a few excerpts from it]

I can only tell you that I abandoned the continuum theories on the
aspects many years ago, but not for any arbitrary reason. On the
contrary, I wanted to believe in them. I clung to them until I fi-
nally came to see that maybe they were valid up to a point, like Euc-
ledian geometry, but that they were hopelessly incapable of eluci-
dating any of the critical and sometimes even the most basis sentences:

Let's look at a pure factual statement like: "on delal" (single oc-
currence, though it is no different essentially from the frequen-
tative. -- In my opinion, number has NOTHING to do with aspect!).

I talked about this in my essay. You mention a variation of this very
sentence ("ty chital Annu Kareninu") as still not being explained.
Never mind, in my opinion, the interrogative mode. It has no bearing
on the essential issue involved. No more so than number.

It is precisely this and other such inconvenient, disturbing, tormen-
ting exceptions that made me finally realize that this whole conti-
nuum business will drive me straight to an insane asylum. The dif-
ference between "on delal" (IMP single occurrence) and "on sdelal"
(P single occurrence) is a fundamental, conceptual distinction, the
difference between 'nothing' and "an empirical object" (yes, an
object-verb -- and an object-adjective, too, i.e. the attributive
form, see my essay) as an "object" delimited at both ends). That's
the whole point.

This is the single most difficult aspectual decision for a foreign
student of Russian to make, this simple sentence, and it will drive
you crazy the rest of your life until you realize that, again, in my
humble opinion, it reveals a fundamental distinction based on incom-
patible modes of being and knowing, on a logical-metaphysical binary
model that must be intuited, yes, through experience, in context
(only a fool would waste his time spinning endless theories that are
not grounded in the evidence of sense-experience) yet nonetheless it
must be intuited, not merely experienced.

"On delal" and "on sdelal" are those planets I was referrring to in
my essay. They travel along fundamentally different orbits, even if
they seem only miles apart. That's the whole point. That's why every-
body, or almost everybody gets this wrong. They try to fit it into
their procrustean bed, to compare apples with oranges, to look every-
where for an explanation for the aspects, in tenses, in moods, in
grammatical modes, in adverbs and adverbial phrases, in particles, in
what have you, when the answer is right under their nose, in the int-
rinsic, binary logic of the (mutually exclusive) aspects themselves.
That's why they are so difficult for a foreigner to learn. If the as-
pects were something FAMILIAR, any intelligent sophomore good get a
handle on it in no time. No, it is essentially ALIEN to us, and be-
cause it is all-pervasive, because it is the keystone of Russian
grammatical usage and, paradoxically, because it is intimately rela-
tional in its intricately structured morphology, it demands the
greatest concentration and dedication, just as mastering the piano
does. There is no short cut. Intuiting aspectual choice may sud
ently hit you like lightning (or it may take years), but IMPLEMEN-
TING the model, even after you have finally grasped it, still takes
years of meticulous, laborious work.

By the way, I want to thank you for raising a number of issues that
still need to be discussed. I will try to deal with at a later date.

Respectfully,


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