The Imperfective in Sequences of Events. On Nontrivial Aspectual Contexts in Russian in the PastThis article analyses a nontrivial use of the Russian imperfective aspect insequences of events in the past. The use of this so-called "contextually-conditionedimperfective past" (Dickey 2000) is characteristic of West Slavic languages,particularly Czech and Slovak, but in the linguistic literature several cases of its usein Modern Russian have also been identified. Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, this article presents the firstinvestigation of the range of use of this phenomenon in Modern Russian. The article claims that, in spite of the extreme rarity of the imperfective aspect inthe contexts under analysis, evidence for it may be found not only in stylisticallymarked contexts, but in common narrative style as well. Two types of contexts are investigated in detail: a chain of events consistingof more than two verbs, and the coordinative structure, where the second verbis an imperfective one. In the first case, the occurrence of the imperfective verbcan be partly explained by the communicative inappropriateness of the perfectivedelimitative in these contexts, and in the second case the imperfective aspect mayoccur due to the lack of a sharp boundary between the two actions.