What gerunds do#
A gerund pins a secondary action onto the main verb, sharing the same subject: "While reading the newspaper, he drank coffee." The shape of the gerund tells you the time relation between the two actions: simultaneous (imperfective gerund) or prior (perfective gerund). English uses "-ing" plus context; Russian encodes it morphologically.
Two key constraints make gerunds restrictive: (1) the gerund's subject must be the same as the main verb's subject (no equivalent of English "with the door creaking, he walked in") and (2) only certain verb classes form gerunds reliably (state verbs and motion verbs have gaps). Their main home is written Russian: news, prose, legal text, academic writing.
Imperfective: simultaneous action#
Take the third-person plural (они) form of an imperfective verb, drop the ending, and add -я (or -а after a husher):
- читать
- читают
- читая
- говорить
- говорят
- говоря
- идти
- идут
- идя
- сидеть
- сидят
- сидя
- слышать
- слышат
- слыша
- рисовать
- рисуют
- рисуя
- смеяться
- смеются
- смеясь
Reflexive verbs keep -сь after the gerund suffix: смеясь, улыбаясь, купаясь. A few common verbs have no imperfective gerund at all, among them писать (no gerund derived from the mutated stem) and петь. When that happens, speakers fall back on a relative clause.
Читая газету, он пил кофе.
While reading the newspaper, he drank coffee.
Сидя за столом, она думала.
Sitting at the table, she was thinking.
Улыбаясь, он подошёл к нам.
Smiling, he came up to us.
Perfective: prior action#
From a perfective verb, take the past-tense stem (the form before -л) and add -в (or -вши as a fancier variant). The result signals "having done X": the action is completed before the main clause begins. For some -ти / -чь verbs the suffix is -я instead of -в, attached to a special stem ( войти → войдя, принести → принеся).
- прочитать
- прочита-
- прочитав
- написать
- написа-
- написав
- сказать
- сказа-
- сказав
- войти
- (во-)шёл
- войдя
- прийти
- пришёл
- придя
- принести
- (при-)нёс
- принеся
- улыбнуться
- улыбнул-ся
- улыбнувшись
Прочитав книгу, он лёг спать.
Having finished the book, he went to bed.
Войдя в комнату, она улыбнулась.
On entering the room, she smiled.
Сказав это, он замолчал.
Having said this, he fell silent.
The same-subject rule#
A Russian gerund must share its subject with the finite verb of the main clause. This is stricter than English. "Walking down the street, the rain started" is fine English but a textbook ungrammatical Russian sentence; the rain isn't walking. Either rephrase ("As I was walking down the street, the rain started") or use a finite verb in both halves.
Fixed expressions#
Several gerunds have lexicalised into everyday adverbs and conjunctions. They look like gerunds but function as fixed words; you don't think of "having said this" any more than English speakers parse "considering" as a verb. Recognise them and use them whole.
- несмотря на
- despite, in spite of
- благодаря
- thanks to
- не говоря уже о
- not to mention
- судя по
- judging by
- честно говоря
- frankly speaking
- короче говоря
- in short
- между прочим
- by the way
Register and alternatives#
In casual speech, Russians rephrase a gerund with a temporal conjunction (когда, после того как) or with two coordinated finite verbs. Both feel less stiff than a gerund. The gerund stays at home in narrative prose, headlines, and any context where compression is valued.
- Читая газету, он пил кофе.
- Когда он читал газету, он пил кофе.
- Прочитав книгу, он лёг спать.
- После того как он прочитал книгу, он лёг спать.
The four full participles (Participles) and the two gerunds together cover Russian's "verbal adjective / verbal adverb" territory: same machinery, different syntactic slot.