Meet the writersRussian · Language through Literature
Language through Literature
Five writers, and what each asks of you
Language through Literature
Chekhov & friendsRussianIN THE ORIGINAL
One word. A world opens.
Between the lines
Difficulty in Russian literature is not where people expect it. It is
rarely the grammar and almost always the length of the sentence and the
strangeness of what it is doing. Here is what each of the five actually
demands of somebody reading them in the original.
Chekhov is where a learner should start, and not as a consolation. His sentences are short, his vocabulary is the vocabulary of ordinary life, and a whole story fits in an evening — so the reward for finishing arrives while the effort is still fresh in the hand.
19 in the library · 7 free ·
61197 words of Russian
Nikolai Gogol — Николай Васильевич Гоголь, 1809–1852
Gogol writes longer sentences than Chekhov and stranger ones than anybody. The difficulty is rarely the grammar — it is that the sentence is doing something absurd on purpose, and a reader has to trust that it means to.
2 in the library · 0 free ·
17652 words of Russian
Turgenev is the most evenly written of the four: long, clear, unhurried sentences that repay patience rather than cleverness. Good prose to read once the short forms have stopped surprising you.
1 in the library · 0 free ·
15781 words of Russian
Tolstoy wrote the longest novels in the language and some of its plainest short prose, and «После бала» is the second kind: a ball, a mazurka, and what the same man was doing at dawn. The sentences are ordinary; what they carry is not.
Dostoevsky asks the most of a reader — long paragraphs, voices that argue with themselves, and a habit of piling clause on clause. «Белые ночи» is the gentlest door into him that exists.
1 in the library · 0 free ·
16845 words of Russian
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