Presidium Podium

For quite some time now, I have hypothesised that the comparatively high prevalence of passive voice-reliant formulation in common Russian observational language is an indication of underlying cultural differences in worldview and cultural outlook.

Years after first synthesising this observation, I stick by it, despite little empirical or scientifically admissible data to mine or research — and even less time to comb the landscape for credible supporting evidence.

This may mean that my idea is baseless, especially if one is to proceed from my mom’s dictum regarding my attempts to help teach Lisa Russian — that I, a person of no formal Russian education or pedagogical training, ought to write a book, “Novel approaches to the Russian language.”

I have always had problems — or rather, problems were always encountered by me — with what appeared to my English teachers as an excessive fondness for passive voice constructions. Passive voice, as you probably know, is a configuration of sentence in which the grammatical subject is the receiver of the action of the verb, as opposed to an explicitly identified agent that performs an action — a transitive verb — unto a subject.

For instance:

• Active voice: The flying ball hit Billy squarely in the face.
• Passive voice: Billy was hit by the flying ball squarely in the face.

In the sort of writing technique generally disseminated in American public education and introductory university composition courses, passive voice is discouraged in rather ebullient terms as a stylistic device. Nobody ever bothered to give me satisfyingly explicit reasons for this; in fact, now that I think about it, there really aren’t any memorable answers at all. Something about obscuring and/or confounding the actor in a sentence, and so on and so forth.

One day, having thought about it, it hit me that my motivation in using it in many of the situations under my active consideration was a very deliberate one, rather than a fact of syntactical or grammatical happenstance or some form of aesthetic willy-nilly. It conveyed precisely that which I intended to convey about an action — usually a complex action with a multitude of causal links and conceptual dependencies — that resulted in a certain state of affairs by transpiring in a self-contained way, participating unto itself, in and of itself.

Notwithstanding any role that the highly bureaucratic, intensely ideological and rather technocratic Soviet regime may play in contributing to this effect through its presentation of press releases, newspaper articles and communiques to the polity, there is something about the prominence of passive voice in Russian that I think indicates differences in how the incumbent culture of its native speakers sees the world.

Those differences strike me as being almost ontological in scope and significance.

Orthodox and mainstream Anglo-American formulation of thoughts tends to grant very generous emphasis to the agency and, where applicable, individuality associated with the carrying-out of actions. I am fairly certain some of the foundation for this ideological; the mythos of English liberal values, of socio-economic orders that in their official exhortation give prominence to free agency and private enterprise, and other things making frequent appearance in the common intellectual inheritance of American and English thinking seem to demand that the agent be underscored.

This orientation engenders a clearer and more distinct sense of individual responsibility and accountability for actions, as well as giving credit where credit is due to individual initiative or assigning blame in case of error. That is the optimistic appraisal, anyway; all of these dominant features of the language we use to describe our world have representational connection to the underlying power structure, and the interests of empowered constituencies in telling a certain story about the world’s structure, organisation, operation, and justifying the roles that some people play in it and others don’t.

The Eastern European mind has always had a more collective psychology, even prior to the advent of socialist revolution. For the majority of the population, conditions created a greater atmosphere of community - more specifically, communality - as it related to the appropriation of the social product. Individual accomplishment was not as significant; individual contributions were often seen more as parts of a distributed endeavour than unique and distinctive, and often anonymised or played down in popular culture.

Furthermore, Russians do not really have a democratic tradition in their history, either in some degree of fact or the illusion of such. For as long as Russia has existed hitherto, it has essentially been autocratically ruled to one degree or another. This leads to a different perception of personal and popular empowerment, and the displacement of individual actions upon macroscopic events.

In much the same way as people chalk up anonymous and unpredictable natural disasters to the whims of “Mother Nature,” in a tone of resignation at their powerlessness before it, I feel that Eastern Europeans are more inclined to view political and macro-historical events in a similar vein. Not merely the account of history, but indeed its content, has a more contrived, “manufactured” and “official” character to it, executed (if not necessarily, but possibly dictated) by a strong and ever-present bureaucratic outfit — an apparatus, a nomenklatura.

It is not an unparsimonious leap to suggest that the perception of day-to-day events can be shaped by this paradigmatic idiosyncrasy. It is more often the case, it seems to me, that it would seem gratuitous, unbecoming, or simplistic to dwell on the importance of the assignment of an actor to events. It may even seem like a gratuitous semantic fetish. Situations often simply “arise,” facts “come into being,” considerations “obtain” and events “take place” to engender a certain outcome.

A week or two ago, I read Chekhov’s Grisha to Lisa in her kitchen while she cooked¹, at her encouragement. It surely has to be the shortest of Chekhov’s short stories, as its textual footprint did not exceed three pages.

It is a very pleasant and endearing story, but that notwithstanding, I made the observation at the time that the narrative, whether as a direct correlate of Chekhov’s intent or a byproduct of the English translation’s flavour, struck me as a having an unusually matter-of-fact and inertly concrete phraseology (and tone) as compared to my general expectations of a story.

Personally, I am inclined to chalk it up to a loss of authorial precision in translation, although it might behoove me to read the Russian original to gain more perspective. The effect I refer to above is not intensely perceptible, nor even especially verifiable exegetically. It’s really just a hopelessly vague intuition of mine as to the narrator’s / translator’s “mood.”

Russian has markedly different literary tendencies in narrative voice. There is a tendency to expose sequences of events with a greater investigative stoicism, as well as an eminently more liberal employment of passive voice in general speech and thought in order to emphasise the quality of events participating more “objectively” and “in and of themselves,” which seems to me to tap into a core fibre of a characteristically Russian poetic outlook.

The difference is that in Russian, it sounds “normal” to me; but if these features are grafted in an unembellished manner into English, they tend to sound rather awkward, rigid and stiltified — dare I say “bureaucratised?” — to the extent that they are not favoured devices in varieties of English-language storytelling generally thought artful.

I’ve found this to be absolutely true of my own translations, especially the hasty, real-time ones where there is no time to devote thought to the cultural and idiomatic idiosyncrasies that might be brought to bear. I recall this feeling numerous times when translating complete Russian phrases or lyrics for Lisa, spurred on by her keen and indefatigable curiosity.

At any rate, it got me thinking; aside from allusory, shadowy reproductions of Russian narrative and mythos, what is it about this descriptive account that seems so familiar? It dawned on me that it reminded me of my own attempts at writing stories, mostly for various high school class exercises requiring such and “creative writing” contributions to the newspaper of my elementary school, the illustrious Paw Street Journal of Madison Elementary.

Don’t misunderstand me; I would never purport to arrogate upon myself those qualities which deem one analogous or comparable to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in his principal area of competency, nor even entertain claims of my being an effective writer of stories or situational descriptive accounts in any way, shape, or form.

Actually, that’s the problem — I’m not. I couldn’t write a good story to save my life. It just doesn’t sound like a story.

Part of that is probably accounted for by my reading habits growing up and into hoy en dia². The overwhelming preponderance of my voluntary reading has consisted of non-fictional expository text, typically concerned with the subject matter of history, politics, social sciences, psychology, or technology. I have read preciously little literature. Some people seem to harbour the illusion that I am well-read, and contrary to your claims, the lot of you, I am abysmally, apocalyptically, catastrophically bereft of literary pedigree. I have read very, very few classics issuing from any canonical lineage of literature. If you can name it, I haven’t read it. In fact, I have dealt relatively little with text produced outside the confines of the 20th century.

Needless to say, not a day passes that I don’t feel enourmous guilt, shame and regret for having gotten to be such a Philistine. And the insult to injury is that it’s not even that I don’t enjoy fiction or have some principled aversion to it, although I allow for the effects of a slight preferential bias. But mainly, I just didn’t get around to it somehow.

The value judgment aside for a moment, it seems fairly uncontroversial that my schooling has been in plainly expository text and prose, not in accounts of things — the sorts of things that fall into the province of tales, adventures, myths, fables, epics, legends, sagas, plays, anecdotes, etc.

But still, I’ve read enough of those. Come on, I went to public high school; that’s the trenches, and Charlie’s still going to lob certain quantities of literature at you from his artillery cannons. Helmets don’t help.

But I can’t write them.

From a front-row seat in the constellation of storylike vantage points, my stories sound the way that my drawings of most phenomena significant to humans in the natural world appear. I can’t draw people, animals, foliage - anything involving complicated gradients, transitions, contours.

Oh, contours, how estranged we are! Can’t do those at all. No internalisation of natural contours that allow for their original reproduction in drawing seems to have occured. Either that, or some sort of cognitive impairment. Hmm. Can I get on disability benefits with that?

But give me simple, rigid geometric figures consisting of straight lines or simple, uniform arcs, and I can probably sketch something passable in an art class. An introductory one. At a night school. For ex-convicts trying to rebuild their life.

I can do even 3D prisms!

If stories — elegant narratives with rich, inviting and engaging descriptions, graceful transitions, delicate nuances and intricately vivid reproductions of colloquial interaction among human actors — are pictures of people, and expository essays — rhetorical exercises, argumentation and prosaic, stolid descriptive accounts at best — are Soviet apartment blocks, then I fall in that continuum much as I do with visual reproduction.

To the extent that I can write anything at all, it is unfailingly of the latter variety.

I wonder if there is something about the psychological profile and attendant cognitive focus of the sort of people that elect for themselves a reading background through acknowledged preference — however slight — toward argumentative essays and scientific craft similar to my own… that impairs their faculty of troubadourship?

Or is it that there is no dichotomy here, and I just haven’t had much experience writing stories?

^{1 Quite deliciously, I might add. Praise of her culinary talents is something that easily warrants a wholly separate blog devoted solely to this purpose. For the sake of brevity, it will have to suffice to say that they are nothing short of extraordinary.}

^{2 Although the good Lord knows I cannot remember the last time I had time or energy to read recreationally.}