... that's
Russian
Grammar
Attention
Deficit
Disorder. :)
I'm currently working through some lessons in participles. From what I have experienced (as limited as it is), these are much more common in
written Russian than spoken Russian.
In any case, I ran across the following example sentence:
Не получив ответа на мое письмо, я написал ему опять.
Receiving no reply to my letter, I wrote to him again.
I try to understand
all elements of these sentences.
I understand the adverbial participle (получив), but,
there it is again, that blasted genitive case for a direct object (ответа)! Some of you may recall, we have
discussed this in the past.
This usage seems so random to me and, although many of you tried your best to explain it to me, I still don't see the pattern or understand under what conditions the direct object is placed in the genitive and when it is not. Again, this only seems to be an issue in
negative sentences.
For instance, wouldn't the following sentence be grammatically correct?
Получив ответ на мое письмо, не было нужно ему позвонить.