Breakdown of Ночью он выключается, и в углу появляется мягкая тень от лампы.
Questions & Answers about Ночью он выключается, и в углу появляется мягкая тень от лампы.
Ночью is the instrumental singular of ночь, used adverbially to mean “at night.”
Russian often uses the instrumental (or sometimes genitive) with no preposition to express time when something happens, especially with:
- parts of the day: утром (in the morning), днём (in the daytime), вечером (in the evening), ночью (at night)
- seasons: зимой, летом etc.
So Ночью он выключается literally is like saying “By night / During the night he turns off”, but the natural English is “At night he turns off.”
You can say:
- в ночь – but this is more like “into the night” (direction, often poetic or dramatic), not the neutral “at night”.
- по ночам – “at night(s), at night-time (in general, on many nights).”
For a simple, everyday “at night”, ночью is the normal form.
Он выключается here describes a regular / habitual action:
- Ночью он выключается.
= “At night it (always / usually) turns off.”
The present tense of an imperfective verb (выключаться) is used in Russian to talk about:
- actions happening now (Он сейчас выключается – “It’s turning off now”), and
- repeated or habitual actions (Ночью он выключается – “At night it (as a rule) turns off.”).
For a single, one-time future event, Russian would normally use the perfective future:
- Ночью он выключится.
= “Tonight it will turn off (once).”
So in your sentence, it’s understood as a regular pattern, not a single scheduled event.
Выключается can have a few related shades of meaning, depending on context:
Middle / automatic sense – “turns off (by itself / automatically)”
- This is the most natural reading in your sentence:
Ночью он выключается.
= “At night it turns off (automatically).”
- This is the most natural reading in your sentence:
General passive‑like sense – “gets turned off / is turned off (by someone/people)”
- Often the agent is not specified because it’s not important:
- Ночью свет выключается.
“At night the light is turned off.”
- Ночью свет выключается.
- Often the agent is not specified because it’s not important:
The ‑ся ending here doesn’t force a strict “himself/itself” meaning the way English self often does. It often just removes the explicit agent and describes the process from the point of view of the object (the thing that ends up being off).
If you really wanted to stress “by itself”, you could add сам:
- Ночью он сам выключается. – “At night it turns itself off (on its own).”
If you wanted to be explicit that someone turns it off, you’d use an active verb with a subject:
- Ночью его выключают. – “At night they turn it off.”
Both выключается and появляется end in ‑ется, which historically contains ‑ся, the reflexive/“self” clitic. But in modern Russian they behave a bit differently in how learners normally think about them:
выключаться → выключается
- Base verb: выключать – “to turn off (something).”
- With ‑ся: выключаться – “to turn off / be turned off / turn itself off (no explicit object).”
- Here ‑ся:
- removes a direct object (выключать свет → свет выключается),
- and often gives a middle / passive‑like meaning.
появляться → появляется
- There is no common non‑‑ся form появлять with the same meaning.
- Появляться is simply “to appear, to show up”; it is always used with ‑ся.
- You can treat появляться as an ordinary intransitive verb: it doesn’t take a direct object; something just appears.
So grammatically, both have ‑ся, but:
- выключаться clearly contrasts with выключать, so learners feel the reflexive effect.
- появляться is basically just “the verb for ‘to appear’” – you don’t usually think of it as “turning a non‑reflexive verb into a reflexive one.”
The choice depends on meaning and case:
в углу – “in the corner” (location, static)
- в
- prepositional case of угол → в углу.
- Used when something is located in the corner:
- Тень в углу. – “The shadow is in the corner.”
- в
в угол – “into the corner” (direction, motion towards)
- в
- accusative case.
- Used when something moves into the corner:
- Он зашёл в угол. – “He went into the corner.”
- в
на углу – “on the corner, at the corner” (often of a street/building)
- на углу дома – “on the corner of the house / at the corner of the street.”
- This is about a corner as a point on a boundary, not the inside of a room.
In your sentence, the shadow appears and stays in a certain place, not “moves into” it, and it’s inside a space (like a room), so в углу (static location) is correct.
Both orders are grammatically correct, but they have slightly different information structure (what is “old” vs “new” information and what is emphasized).
В углу появляется мягкая тень.
- Focus is more on what appears.
- The place в углу is given first, as a kind of scene setting:
- “In the corner, there appears a soft shadow.”
- This sounds a bit more descriptive, atmospheric, or literary.
Мягкая тень появляется в углу.
- Focus is more on where the soft shadow appears (we first introduce the shadow, then say where).
- Feels somewhat more neutral in everyday speech.
Russian word order is flexible; speakers often put what they want to emphasize towards the end. Here, by ending on мягкая тень, the sentence slightly highlights the soft shadow itself as the key new element.
От is the normal preposition for expressing a shadow cast by something:
- тень от лампы – “a shadow from the lamp (cast by the lamp).”
- тень от дерева, тень от дома – “shadow of a tree/house” (in the physical, light-and-shadow sense).
Nuances:
- от here means “from, produced by, coming from as a source.”
- It is standard in collocations like:
- звук от колонок – sound from the speakers,
- свет от окна – light from the window.
Из-за focuses more on cause or obstruction:
- Из-за лампы видно плохо. – “Because of the lamp, it’s hard to see.”
- Тень из-за лампы sounds like the lamp is the reason for some problematic shadow, less like the neutral physical description.
Using just a genitive without a preposition (like тень лампы) is not idiomatic for a literal light‑shadow. It would more likely be read metaphorically (“the shadow of the lamp” in some figurative sense) or just as unnatural.
So for a literal visual shadow cast by something, тень от X is the standard pattern.
Yes, мягкая тень is a perfectly natural and common phrase in Russian.
- мягкий свет – “soft light”
- мягкая тень – “soft/gentle shadow”
Here мягкая describes a shadow whose edges and contrast are not harsh – it’s diffuse, gentle, not sharp or scary. Think of the kind of shadow a shaded lamp would give, not a hard spotlight.
Other common collocations:
- глухая тень – deep shadow
- резкая тень – sharp, hard shadow
So мягкая тень от лампы sounds very idiomatic and creates a calm, cozy image in Russian.
In Russian, you normally put a comma before “и” when it connects two separate clauses with their own subjects and verbs.
Here we have:
- Ночью он выключается – subject: он, verb: выключается
- в углу появляется мягкая тень от лампы – subject: мягкая тень, verb: появляется
Since each part could stand alone as a full sentence, they are two independent clauses, and the standard rule is to separate them with a comma:
- Ночью он выключается, и в углу появляется мягкая тень от лампы.
In English, the comma before “and” joining two independent clauses is optional in informal writing, but in Russian it is obligatory in this kind of structure.
Он must refer to some masculine noun mentioned earlier in the text or obvious from context. For example:
- телевизор (TV) – masculine
- компьютер (computer) – masculine
- ночник (night‑light) – masculine
Russian pronouns он / она / оно / они always agree with the grammatical gender and number of the noun they stand for, not with any real-world gender of the object.
- For a masculine noun: он выключается – “it/he turns off.”
- For a neuter noun: оно выключается – “it turns off.”
- For a feminine noun: она выключается.
You could also use оно only if the original noun is neuter (e.g. радио, окно).
Это can be used instead of a personal pronoun in some contexts, but это выключается would sound odd here if a specific masculine noun was introduced before; он is the normal choice to refer back to a known masculine subject.