There Is No “Why” in the World#7
Russian Impersonal Constructions and the Dative Case
“Мне грустно.”
How should we translate this Russian sentence into English?
I feel sad, you might say.
But that could be a rather strange translation.
Because the sentence does not literally mean “I am sad.”
A more literal rendering would be something like this:
Sadness is present in me.
Sadness is not something I actively produce.
It is a state that happens to me.
The Polish-born linguist Anna Wierzbicka once described the Russian mentality in the following way:
The Russian soul is a “bound soul,”
a soul whose blood has been tainted by Mongolian fatalism.
According to her, this worldview is deeply embedded in the very structure of the Russian language.
Russian contains constructions that shift attention away from the acting subject, such as impersonal and dative constructions.
In English, emotions and actions are typically expressed with a clear subject:
I feel sad.
I want something.
I envy him.
The subject appears to control the experience.
But Russian often frames the same experience differently.
Instead of presenting a person as the agent of a feeling, the language may describe the feeling as a state that occurs to the person.
Consider the following two sentences.
Он завидовал.
Ему было завидно.
Both can refer to the same situation.
But the first sentence says:
He envied someone.
Here the subject’s agency is emphasized.
The second sentence says something closer to:
There was envy in him.
Here envy is not presented as his deliberate choice, but as a state that settled upon him.
It is as if he is experiencing a feeling imposed by some force beyond his control.
Consider another example.
Мне ужасно хочется.
A literal translation would be:
It terribly wants itself in me.
In natural English we would say:
I want it very much.
But Russian frames the situation differently.
Desire itself is not expressed as
“I want.”
Instead it becomes
“A desire occurs in me.”
In these sentences, the subject of the action is not the human being.
The subject is something indefinite and unnamed.
A similar pattern appears with reflexive constructions.
In Russian, actions are often described as if they are determined not by the agent, but by some impersonal force.
Consider the following pair of sentences.
Его переехал трамвай.
Его переехало трамваем.
Both can mean:
He was run over by a tram.
But the second sentence frames the event as if it simply happened, almost like a natural occurrence.
Not something someone did
but something that took place.
Wierzbicka also points to another characteristic of Russian culture:
irrationality, and distrust of rationalism.
In Western culture, the emphasis on reason is often closely connected with the idea of individual free will.
But in Russian culture, skepticism toward rational control can be linked to a worldview that stresses the limits of human will and power — a kind of fatalism.
In many languages we naturally ask a question like this:
Why did he do that?
But in some languages, expressions exist in which there is no clear subject to ask about.
There is only a sentence like this:
It just happened.