The Russian reading room
Душечка — The Darling
Olenka can only think her husband’s thoughts. Chekhov’s gentlest and most unsettling story, and Tolstoy’s favourite.
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.
Club Chekhov — All Subtext, No Action — the podcast reading through Chekhov's works with Lev Lesokhin and Prof. Alexander Burry — took this story on air: the reading · the discussion. Every episode against the shelf: the map.
How long «Душечка» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 3,850 running words · 279 sentences · about 15 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 43 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 | 1,201 dictionary words, averaging 13.8 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 751 of them — 63%. 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 · 15 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 84.0% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 10 of 24 on this shelf, most forgiving first (why the short story is not the easy one) |
How much of it you would already understand
Each row is the most common words in these 24 books, in order of how much Russian they open, measured against Душечка itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 67.1% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 75.3% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 84.1% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 86.9% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 93.7% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 1009 of this story's own 1,201 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 441 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
Крыжовник — 3,241 wordsМедведь — 3,647 words Анна на шее — 3,935 wordsЧеловек в футляре — 4,005 words
How it begins
Оленька, дочь отставного коллежского асессора Племянникова, сидела у себя во дворе на крылечке, задумавшись.
Olenka, the daughter of Plemyannikov, a retired collegiate assessor, was sitting on the little porch in her own yard, lost in thought.
This page prints only that first sentence. In the room the first instalment of «Душечка» is free to anyone, with no account; the rest is part of the full library — every text on the shelf, 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, and their complete texts are on these pages with no account at all, if you would rather taste the room first.
Before a class reads this
Modern Russian has lost some of what is on this page. Counted from the glosses themselves: 2 words no longer in use, and 31 older endings on words that survive.
The words themselves are in the book. This one is part of the library rather than the free room, so the count stands here and the glosses do not — the same rule that keeps its sentences off this page.
More like this: all 24 stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.