Дама с собачкой — The Lady with the Dog
A holiday affair in Yalta that turns out, against everyone's intention, to be the central event of two lives.
Source trail: compare the public-domain Russian text in Russian Wikisource. The reader's text has been proofread and divided into learnable sentences; it is not simplified.
How long «Дама с собачкой» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 5109 running words · 343 sentences · about 20 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 57 minutes at a learner's pace with the glosses to hand — not a native's pace, which would be a third of that |
| Different words | 1405 dictionary words, averaging 14.9 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 867 of them — 62%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text, which is why length alone does not say how hard a story is (the arithmetic) |
| Difficulty | level 2 of 3 on this shelf · 11 of 15 by length |
How much of it you would already understand
Each row is the most common words in these fifteen books, in order of how much Russian they open, measured against Дама с собачкой itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 67.7% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 76.8% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 81.9% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 89.6% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 95.9% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 1150 of this story's own 1405 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 461 carry 80%. Ninety-five per cent is the coverage at which reading stops being decoding, though the threshold is softer than it is usually quoted: how that number is arrived at.
Shorter and longer on the same shelf
Мальчики — 1791 wordsПосле бала — 3075 words Нос — 7645 wordsШинель — 10007 words
How it begins
Говорили, что на набережной появилось новое лицо: дама с собачкой.
People were saying that a new face had appeared on the esplanade: a lady with a little dog.
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Дама с собачкой» is part of the full library — all fifteen texts, every word glossed, sentence-by-sentence English and audio — for €5 a month, cancel whenever you like. What the library costs. Seven complete Chekhov stories are free in the reader, no account, if you would rather taste the room first.
More like this: all fifteen stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.