The genitive: possession and absence

The Russian genitive case is the one you will reach for most often once you get past this is a book. It marks the owner, it marks what is missing, it counts things, and it follows about twenty prepositions. English does all of that with the single word of and a stray apostrophe. Russian does it with one set of endings, and once you have them, a startling amount of ordinary speech opens up.

If you have not met the six cases as a system yet, the Russian cases overview is the place to start. This page is the second pass on the genitive: every job it does, the full set of endings, and the plural that every textbook quietly apologises for.

The singular endings

The genitive singular is short and regular. Two endings for masculine and neuter nouns, two for feminine, and the choice between each pair is the hard-soft distinction you already use elsewhere.

Three things to notice. First, день becomes дня, not деня: the е in the middle is a fleeting vowel that drops out as soon as an ending arrives. It does the same in оте́ц, which becomes отца́. Second, the -ы/-и choice in feminine nouns is a spelling rule, not a grammar one. Russian never writes ы after г, к, х, ж, ш, ч or щ, so кни́га has to become кни́ги and де́вушка has to become де́вушки. Third, the ending follows the shape of the word, not its meaning: па́па and мужчи́на are masculine, but they end in -а, so they take the feminine ending and become па́пы and мужчи́ны.

A small set of nouns do their own thing and simply have to be learned: и́мя and вре́мя become и́мени and вре́мени, and мать and дочь insert an -ер- to become ма́тери and до́чери.

Possession: the owner comes second

Russian has no apostrophe-s. To say whose something is, you put the thing first and the owner second, in the genitive:

кни́га бра́та (kniga brata) - the brother's book, literally the book of the brother

маши́на ма́мы (mashina mamy) - Mum's car

коне́ц неде́ли (konets nedeli) - the end of the week

Word order here is fixed in a way it is not elsewhere in Russian. The owner follows the thing it owns. English speakers put the owner first on instinct, because that is where the apostrophe-s puts it, and бра́та кни́га reads to a Russian ear like a line of poetry or a mistake, usually the second.

Absence: у меня нет and everything built on it

This is the construction worth drilling until it is automatic. Russian does not normally say I have with a verb. It says at me there is:

У меня́ есть сестра́. (U menya yest sestra.) - I have a sister.

Here сестра́ is the subject, in the nominative. Now negate it:

У меня́ нет бра́та. (U menya net brata.) - I do not have a brother.

Нет replaces есть, and the thing that is missing drops into the genitive. It is no longer the subject of anything, because there is nothing there to be a subject. That is the logic of the whole construction: absence is expressed through the genitive case, and you cannot say I don't have a book in Russian without it.

The same pattern covers anything that is not somewhere:

Зде́сь нет воды́. (Zdes net vody.) - There is no water here.

Бра́та нет до́ма. (Brata net doma.) - My brother is not at home.

Compare that last one with Брат до́ма, my brother is at home. The moment he is absent, he stops being брат and becomes бра́та.

In the past and the future, нет becomes не бы́ло and не бу́дет, and the verb never changes, whatever the gender or number of the missing thing: always neuter бы́ло in the past, always бу́дет in the future. There is no subject for it to agree with.

Вчера́ не бы́ло воды́. (Vchera ne bylo vody.) - Yesterday there was no water.

За́втра не бу́дет вре́мени. (Zavtra ne budet vremeni.) - There will be no time tomorrow.

With a pronoun, the owner in the у construction is itself in the genitive, because у takes the genitive. The genitive pronouns are меня́, тебя́, его́, её, нас, вас and их, and after a preposition the third-person ones gain an н-: у него́, у неё, у них.

У него́ мно́го де́нег. (U nego mnogo deneg.) - He has a lot of money.