See Raskol'nikov

April 9, 2010

Dear Students,

The ordinary-seeming verb видеть, вижу, видишь ‘to see’ in Russian is one of the first second-conjugation prototypes we learn, along with (по)смотреть ‘look at’; a verb of psychological visual perception and of conscious attention, cf. слушать, слушаю ‘listen to’, слышать, слышу ‘hear’. For some reason ‘hear’ is learned later — it’s trickier to conjugate and its easily confused with its counterpart. But видеть has always struck me as peculiar, as its infinitive theme in -e- (the old jat’ here) is never stressed, so that we don’t have any proof that the theme vowel isn’ t и. Я вас видил на улице would be the same as я вас видел. And yet I never encounter this spelling mistake. Strange.

This verb in Old Russian has the athematic present passive partiple невидомъ ‘being seen; having sight’, which should be невидим, as it is in modern Russian. Czech also has nevidomý ‘unsighted, blind’, hinting that this verb goes back to earlier Slavic. The imperative in Old Russian is вижь, ОCS виждь, ‘see!’ This is also irregularly athematic. As in “see the ball, see Jane run!” We don’t ordinarily speak that way. I think of Pushkin’s Slavonic poem “The Prophet”, with its line восстань, пророк, и виждь, и внемли....глаголом жги сердца людей! ‘Rise up, prophet, and see, and hear....sear the hearts of people with the Word’. I think of Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet’s ghost, ‘List, list, o list!’ as, literally Слышь, слышь, о слышь! (For some reason this sounds funny in Russian to me.) The imperative вижь is another signal that this is an old athematic verb.

And, indeed, it turns out to be related to the old verb ‘to know’ in Slavic, вэдэти, вэмь, in Roman letters věděti, věm. Indeed, the OCS form vědě ‘I know’ is the perfect tense of an older form of the word ‘to see’, so that ‘knowing’ is ‘having seen’. Veni, vidi, vici, I came, I saw, therefore I know; I conquered. Though we have lost the old verb вэдэти in Russian, we have a lot of cognates in the language: весть ‘news’, пропал без вести ‘disappeared without a trace’, известия ‘news’, известный ‘known, familiar’, неизвестный ‘unknown’.

It is interesting that the psychological perception verb слышать is used in Russian, and in many Slavic languages, in the sense ‘to feel, have the sensation’. When Raskol’nikov is about to murder the old woman, ему самому слышалось, как они с каждым мгновением (руки) немели и деревенели ‘he could feel how with each moment his arms were getting numb and wooden-feeling’ (page 140 in my edition). In this fashion auditory and generally psychological perception are intertwined in the mind of the murderer. who is on the verge of hallucination at the very moment when, his theory predicts, he should be totally clear-minded and emotionless.

gmc