Крыжовник — Gooseberries
A man spends his life saving for a country place with gooseberries in it, and gets one. His brother cannot forgive him for being happy.
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 · discussion, part 1 · discussion, part 2. Every episode against the shelf: the map.
How long «Крыжовник» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 3241 running words · 199 sentences · about 13 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 36 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 | 1124 dictionary words, averaging 16.3 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 728 of them — 65%. 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 · 13 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 85.6% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 15 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 fifteen books, in order of how much Russian they open, measured against Крыжовник itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 63.7% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 72.4% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 81.4% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 83.7% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 92.2% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 962 of this story's own 1124 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 476 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
О любви — 3056 wordsПосле бала — 3075 words Медведь — 3659 wordsДушечка — 3850 words
How it begins
Ещё с раннего утра всё небо обложили дождевые тучи; было тихо, не жарко и скучно, как бывает в серые пасмурные дни, когда над полем давно уже нависли тучи, ждёшь дождя, а его нет.
Since early morning the whole sky had been overcast with rain clouds; it was still, not hot, and dull, as it is on grey overcast days when the clouds have hung over the fields for a long time, and you wait for rain and it does not come.
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Крыжовник» 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: 1 word no longer in use, and 33 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 fifteen stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.