"Establish whether or not I had it in me to be..."

It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962.

I guess if you’re into cinematography then Tarkovsky’s films tickle your fancy. Recently I came across such an excerpt given in this article. Read it out loud.

В „Ивановом детстве“ я не пытался анализировать сам процесс, а скорее состояние человека, на которого воздействует война. Если человек разрушается, то происходит нарушение логического развития, особенно когда это касается психики ребёнка.

Are there nouns and verbs you know already? What about infinitive form of those verbs? Today I’d like to scrutinize each sentence with you.

1. There are just 2 sentenses. Let’s find out subjects and predicates in both.
   - 1) If there is a first-person pronoun, have enough courage to highlight it as a subject! What is the predicate? Usually it goes right after the subject, so here it does too.
   - 2) Guess and then only see in KEYS.

2. - The main predicate in the 1 sentence is пытался. In Russian, after the verbs: стараться, пытаться, пробовать (they all have the same meaning in general) should be followed by infinitive verb.
   - The next snipped is анализировать процесс. Determine the case of процесс (see in KEYS).
   - In the next part of the sentence, you see an adverb “скорее” followed by another noun in the same case состояние. Any guess what declension is it? (see in KEYS)
   - However, what means “а скорее”? (see in KEYS)
   - состояние человека - a man here has a particular case, any guess what? (see in KEYS)
   - The preposition “на” usually follows after the verb “воздействовать”. However here, we see in a different order — all 3 words create a drama effect, because we want to point out the process of influence. How the war influences on the man.
   Now could you translate into English down in the comment box?

3. Let’s move on to the 2 sentence. You might have noticed the 2 sentence looks like the first conditional. Both parts are in the present tense. The first is easy-peasy, there are only the subject and the predicate. Second may take a bit more time to

   - find what belongs to what. Find the noun in the Nominative case (see in KEYS).
   It does что? Оно “происходит”. Do not be afraid of using this web-site for confirmation your choice in verb conjugation is correct. We see the subject has a neuter gender and singular, we assume it “происходит” (at least we may remember that all conjugation in infinitive form have -т- in the endings).

   - … логического мышления … this part refers to the predicate because we have to know what “нарушение” is it. What do you say in English?

   - это касается - how can we know whether the verb is in the right form? Let’s find its infinitive first: касаться —> кас (root) + ать (suffix) + ся (reflexive particle). What you see is the suffix (ать) belongs to the First conjugation. Then, we see the subject is in neuter gender (это) means the third-person pronoun\neuter (like in English, he\she\it), so it means we have to change the suffix into -ет-. Voilà!
   - … психики ребёнка … - literally speaking, when something “касается” something, it goes along the Genitive case (which means B comes from A action).
   касается (кого?) ребёнка".
   “Ребёнок” in this case has the ending -а- because it has neuter gender.
   However here we see that it is about a particular side of a child, his\her mentality. Because it belongs to a child, it also changed into the Genitive case.
   Психика initially has a female gender and it is singular, so it changed the ending into -и-.
   

   So, we analized each word step by step. Could you get back to the beginning and read once again? How does it feel? Has anyting changed in your understading of the sentence building? Let me know.

I hope you enjoyed the reading some bits of grammar. And…

If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend you to do it. Here it is available in Russian with English subtitles. Enjoy the masterpiece.

Спасибо, что дочитал(а) до конца. :)

KEY

1. 2) - Я не пытался

2. - анализировать (виню за это что?) процесс (a noun in Acc. case, 3-person pronoun, that’s why the noun is without any change, no ending is there).
   - 2-person pronoun, because it has a neuter gender initially.
   - rather
   - Genitive case, because this condition belongs to him.

3. - нарушение
   - logical thinking