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Russian basis and essentials reader
165 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1938
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July 31, 2026
A handy little pocket-sized book that basically consists of a vast number of examples intended to drill the schoolboy reader through all the grammatical distinctions of the Russian language.
Some of the constructions and vocabulary seem a little archaic even by the standards of the time (the book is dated 1938, but pre-Revolutionary phrases occur in the sample conversations); it's interesting to see the 'poetic' instrumental endings in -ою and -ею apparently still in full use, while the colloquial English expressions are appealingly 'period' as well. Apparently these texts are based on the "Basic English" project by the same publisher ("a system in which 850 English words do all the work of over 20,000"), though I can't help feeling that there must be more than 850 Russian words here!
The final section of the book consists of a parallel-text version of the opening pages of "Gulliver's Travels", which is an unexpected choice given that it is an archaic English text to start off with - and the idea of translating it *into* Russian for teaching purposes is an odd one. But it held my interest, which was presumably the idea, along with the fact that the reader could be assumed to be familiar with the basic plot, though to be honest I remembered very little of it save for the scene where Gulliver wakes and finds himself pinned to the ground by his hair (in its long eighteenth-century queue). The 'Basic English' approach provides a few puzzling circumlocutions, such as "steel-headed sticks" for "spears", and I was amused to find that in some cases the Russian translation had simply gone back to the original, e.g. бритва for "blade for taking the hair off my face" and платок for "pocket-cloth"!
There is no vocabulary provided at the end of the book, due to the parallel-text approach taken throughout and the fact that this is an accompanying book to a formal Russian course (long since lost), but the Introduction does note that "words have been introduced which may not be found in the vocabulary in the Basis and Essentials. These will be found to be useful supplementaries, and they should be memorized". Having worked through the entire book I'm not sure how much I actually learnt; since I was studying simultaneously in a different coursebook I almost immediately began to encounter elements that I hadn't actually learnt yet, since the 1930s approach to language learning evidently consisted of starting off by memorising all the grammatical tables first, and I didn't really absorb them by diligently reading through page after page of examples out loud. (There are things that occur early on in Part I of this book that I *still* haven't covered yet, like all the oblique cases of numerals, though I have a passive recognition of them due to having encountered them in the wild: the various forms of the title of "The Three Musketeers" are a good example of that! О трёх мушкетёрах, с тремя мушкетёрами, трём мушкетёрам... :-)
But when I did subsequently get to those areas of study it was interesting to see the puzzling bits being clarified, and my immediate instinct, having finished working through the book, is that I now need to go back and read it again with greater knowledge, which is a good sign!
I don't think this book will teach you anything - other than possibly some vocabulary - but that isn't what it was intended to do. The ruling principle is that "grammar is best mastered by observing how it is applied in examples", and this volume is designed to provide those: page after page after page of them! "The student will find that it clarifies the rules of grammar and helps him to commit them to memory.... practice and repetition are bound to be effective in the end" and he should not "hesitate to press ahead if he should feel that he had not completely mastered a page", an exhortation which I duly observed ;-)
But ultimately it "should be read and re-read until... known almost by heart" - and it's true that by far the best way of remembering grammar is having familiar phrases demonstrating its application. (The title of the film Двенадцать стульев, for example, enables me to remember the irregular genitive plural of the word стул, and, by association, its irregular plural стулья...)
And the example phrases given in this book are certainly more interesting than the sort of thing one gets in the average modern tourist guide/beginners' textbook, even if it's only something as simple as "Hast thou in the pocket a handkerchief" (the translations in Part I are consciously literal and non-idiomatic) followed by "Unfortunately I forgot it at home" and "Such things must never be forgotten!" (Никогда не нужно забывать таких вещей! - neatly demonstrating the Russian negative in the form of multiple 'nots' followed by the genitive case ("none *of*") along with the shift from the perfective verb form for the single act of forgetting (я забыла) to the imperfective for the concept of repeated forgetting in general). There are also unexpectedly poetic sample phrases ("Autumn has come and the days have become shorter", "Stars will soon hide themselves behind the clouds"), and my favourite, the wonderfully surreal progression from "My nephew was going in the train from London to the sea" to "Suddenly the boiler burst, the engine broke down, the train stopped, and he was forced to go through the fields on foot", which is almost on a par with the apocryphal postilion struck by lightning...
On the whole I found this book very much to my taste, and it has the advantage of being very portable. The schoolboy scribbles on the back flyleaf also add to its charm: Michael Green, Billy Franklin and Freddie were presumably all past owners, although the telephone numbers (?) puzzle me: the repeated "98-42507" isn't in any format that I recognise.
Some of the constructions and vocabulary seem a little archaic even by the standards of the time (the book is dated 1938, but pre-Revolutionary phrases occur in the sample conversations); it's interesting to see the 'poetic' instrumental endings in -ою and -ею apparently still in full use, while the colloquial English expressions are appealingly 'period' as well. Apparently these texts are based on the "Basic English" project by the same publisher ("a system in which 850 English words do all the work of over 20,000"), though I can't help feeling that there must be more than 850 Russian words here!
The final section of the book consists of a parallel-text version of the opening pages of "Gulliver's Travels", which is an unexpected choice given that it is an archaic English text to start off with - and the idea of translating it *into* Russian for teaching purposes is an odd one. But it held my interest, which was presumably the idea, along with the fact that the reader could be assumed to be familiar with the basic plot, though to be honest I remembered very little of it save for the scene where Gulliver wakes and finds himself pinned to the ground by his hair (in its long eighteenth-century queue). The 'Basic English' approach provides a few puzzling circumlocutions, such as "steel-headed sticks" for "spears", and I was amused to find that in some cases the Russian translation had simply gone back to the original, e.g. бритва for "blade for taking the hair off my face" and платок for "pocket-cloth"!
There is no vocabulary provided at the end of the book, due to the parallel-text approach taken throughout and the fact that this is an accompanying book to a formal Russian course (long since lost), but the Introduction does note that "words have been introduced which may not be found in the vocabulary in the Basis and Essentials. These will be found to be useful supplementaries, and they should be memorized". Having worked through the entire book I'm not sure how much I actually learnt; since I was studying simultaneously in a different coursebook I almost immediately began to encounter elements that I hadn't actually learnt yet, since the 1930s approach to language learning evidently consisted of starting off by memorising all the grammatical tables first, and I didn't really absorb them by diligently reading through page after page of examples out loud. (There are things that occur early on in Part I of this book that I *still* haven't covered yet, like all the oblique cases of numerals, though I have a passive recognition of them due to having encountered them in the wild: the various forms of the title of "The Three Musketeers" are a good example of that! О трёх мушкетёрах, с тремя мушкетёрами, трём мушкетёрам... :-)
But when I did subsequently get to those areas of study it was interesting to see the puzzling bits being clarified, and my immediate instinct, having finished working through the book, is that I now need to go back and read it again with greater knowledge, which is a good sign!
I don't think this book will teach you anything - other than possibly some vocabulary - but that isn't what it was intended to do. The ruling principle is that "grammar is best mastered by observing how it is applied in examples", and this volume is designed to provide those: page after page after page of them! "The student will find that it clarifies the rules of grammar and helps him to commit them to memory.... practice and repetition are bound to be effective in the end" and he should not "hesitate to press ahead if he should feel that he had not completely mastered a page", an exhortation which I duly observed ;-)
But ultimately it "should be read and re-read until... known almost by heart" - and it's true that by far the best way of remembering grammar is having familiar phrases demonstrating its application. (The title of the film Двенадцать стульев, for example, enables me to remember the irregular genitive plural of the word стул, and, by association, its irregular plural стулья...)
And the example phrases given in this book are certainly more interesting than the sort of thing one gets in the average modern tourist guide/beginners' textbook, even if it's only something as simple as "Hast thou in the pocket a handkerchief" (the translations in Part I are consciously literal and non-idiomatic) followed by "Unfortunately I forgot it at home" and "Such things must never be forgotten!" (Никогда не нужно забывать таких вещей! - neatly demonstrating the Russian negative in the form of multiple 'nots' followed by the genitive case ("none *of*") along with the shift from the perfective verb form for the single act of forgetting (я забыла) to the imperfective for the concept of repeated forgetting in general). There are also unexpectedly poetic sample phrases ("Autumn has come and the days have become shorter", "Stars will soon hide themselves behind the clouds"), and my favourite, the wonderfully surreal progression from "My nephew was going in the train from London to the sea" to "Suddenly the boiler burst, the engine broke down, the train stopped, and he was forced to go through the fields on foot", which is almost on a par with the apocryphal postilion struck by lightning...
On the whole I found this book very much to my taste, and it has the advantage of being very portable. The schoolboy scribbles on the back flyleaf also add to its charm: Michael Green, Billy Franklin and Freddie were presumably all past owners, although the telephone numbers (?) puzzle me: the repeated "98-42507" isn't in any format that I recognise.
Displaying 1 of 1 review