There are two main methods of learning a language—Russian, in the present case: pick-up and dig-up. For the first, the requirements are a good ear and Russian surroundings. After a year or two of this a person may be able to speak the idiom with perfect although illusory fluency (the illusion being produced by a subtle blend of clichés and solecisms), but will not be able to read or write it.
The second method has less brilliancy and abandon, but is incomparably safer. Based as it is on a diligent study of the anatomy of the language, i.e., on grammar, it gradually gets into your system if your system can stand it, which, normally, it should. In fact, my pet theory is that English-speaking people are born linguists, most of whom, unfortunately, do not use their gift, while, on the other hand, Russians have no real aptitude for languages but brazenly pick them up under the false impression that all foreign tongues are simpler than Russian.
Before helping the born linguist to work his stumbling way through the intricacies of Russian grammar, I usually point out that what is going to bother him most, are the following two facts: First, that Russian vowels are pronounced in a way totally different from English ones, but in several cases are not dissimilar from, say, French vowels (at this point, I try to find out who among my students knows French but this does not help much since the French learned at school is comfortably pronounced the English way). A Russian vowel is an orange, an English vowel is a lemon. When you speak Russian your mouth ought to distend laterally at the corners, vowels being expressed by a horizontal line from cheek to cheek, rather than by a vertical one from chin to nose as in English. You can, and should, speak Russian with a permanent broad smile, which is a very difficult feat in English, where the mouth forms a proximo-distad directed oval to say O. Compress its poles, inflate its sides and you get the Russian equivalent. I strictly avoid the humorous touch when dealing with my classes, but suchlike explanations, which are merely meant to stress the anatomical differences between the two languages, oddly enough provoke a ripple of laughter, when all I ask for is a bland smile of the Cheshire cat type.
The other fact I immediately stress is that Russian is an inflectional language, which means that words undergo grammatical change of endings according to person, number, tense and case. “Ahfrika”1 (the Russian for Africa) becomes for instance “v (in) Ahfrike” in the locative case: ya zhivu v Ahfrike meaning “I live in Africa.”
These transformations (which may be compared to replacing the last coach of a train by a diner or a caboose, or eliminating it altogether, or adding another car, or to be frank, losing the better part of the train in a dark tunnel of uncertain location) are simple in themselves, but being numerous, must be learned with great perseverance so as to avoid constant accidents all along the line. The first course of Russian is really the study of these inflections and of prefixes (changeable locomotives), and however exasperating the unpredictable quality of Russian grammar may seem, the thing must be seen through. The conjuror’s patter of the Berlitz School is not, in my opinion, a good introduction to the Russian language, and generally speaking I must admit to feeling a great deal of disgust for any leveling or oversimplification. Brains must work the hard way or else lose their calling and rank. The loaves of knowledge do not come nicely sliced. All you get is a stone-strewn field to plow on an exhilarating morning. Incidentally and apart from totalitarian regimes, the most despicable invention of our times is Basic English.
The investigation of grammatical phenomena should be accompanied from the very start by attempts to turn English sentences of “my aunt has a hat” type into Russian. The images evoked by such sentences are unlovely but they must be endured for the sake of the grammatical point they loyally raise. I prefer to wait a little before having my students memorize lists of useful words, although I expect them to remember those they handle in their exercises. Anatomy must precede systematics, and the importance of studying the behavior of a word is greater than that of learning to say in Russian “goodbye” or “good morning.” I should like the student to enjoy the twists and turns of my Russian eels, to enter into the spirit of the game and watch words at play with a true naturalist’s detachment rather than with a collector’s greed.
The highest peak of Russian grammar is reached when the student gets used to the transformations in sense which verbs undergo owing to a change in the prefix. Most verbs moreover have reciprocal and reflexive forms ending in “sa” and there again the addition of this “sa” may give a perfectly new twist to the meaning of a verb already changed by the prefix. Govoritz2 for instance means to speak, pogovoritz to have a talk, dogovoritz to say all one has to say, ugovoritz to persuade, podgovoritz to instigate, prigovoritz to condemn, peregovoritz to talk something over, rasgovoritz to draw somebody out, sgovoritz to bring people together and vozgovoritz to launch upon an oration; but with other prefixes the verb may have at least two meanings in each case, so that vygovoritz means to pronounce, but also to stipulate, progovoritz to utter or to speak away for a given amount of time, zagovoritz to start speaking or to overwhelm one’s interlocutor with words, nagovoritz to accumulate a number of (nice, nasty) remarks, or to make a gramophone record, ogovoritz to denounce, or to make some reservation when settling some matter, and finally otgovoritz is either to dissuade or to rattle off a speech. Of these fifteen prefix-modified forms of govoritz (producing as we have seen twenty-one different shades of meaning) ten have moreover reciprocal or reflexive forms, which not only may deviate in an unexpected direction from the meaning produced by the same prefix, but may also have more meanings than one. Thus the reciprocal dogovoritza means to reach an agreement, ugovoritza to decide upon some course of action, sgovoritza simply to make an agreement, razgovoritza to enter into a conversation, nagozvoritza to talk one’s fill and zagovoritza to prolong the conversation unduly (in all these cases of course the action is shared with somebody else, hence the term “reciprocal”). On the other hand the reflexive dogovoritza means to speak (“by one’s self” in this and in the rest of the following forms) until one has reached a certain, often nonsensical, point, zagovoritza to lose one’s self utterly in the maze of one’s speech, podgovoritza to ingratiate oneself, razgovoritza to become talkative if not actually garrulous, progovoritza to blurt out something that one would not have liked to tell, otgovoritza to find an excuse, ogovoritza either to make certain, purely verbal, reservations or to make a slip in speaking, and finally vozgovoritza does not mean anything at all.
This kaleidoscopic performance on the part of verbs is, I repeat, the most bothersome aspect of Russian grammar, and only when the student ceases to be flustered by it, then, and only then, he is safe. The difficulty for people who would have liked to have automatic mnemonic rules is obvious, but the good student will treat the most annoying Russian word with sympathy and help it to uncoil itself when it overdoes its playful contortions.
The first course in Russian takes us from the uncle’s house to that circus of verbs. Exercises in grammar are accompanied by a good deal of reading of simple digestible stuff correlated with previously acquired rules and especially composed to illustrate them. I have found the story of an English couple, Peter and Mary, written by Elisaveta Fen for students of Russian, eminently suitable. A general though necessarily halting and bashful conversation in Russian should gradually become part of the lesson, while the second course will see Pushkin and Chekhov (plays, short stories) replace Miss Fen.
* “On Learning Russian,” The Wellesley Magazine, April 1945, 191–92. A note heads the article: “The College offers this year, for the first time, a six hour course in elementary Russian, open to all undergraduates. An intermediate course is planned for next year, open by permission of the instructor. Mr. Nabokov, who teaches this course, came to Wellesley in 1941–42 as visiting lecturer in Comparative Literature.” The byline of the main article reads “Vladimir Nabokov, Lecturer in Russian.” He had been teaching elementary Russian since 1942 on a year-by-year basis, but only now had it become an established part of the college schedule.