Language through Literature
Лошадиная фамилия — A Horsey Name
The general has toothache, and the name of the man who can cure it is “something to do with horses”… The most famous joke in Russian.
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 «Лошадиная фамилия» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 904 running words · 178 sentences · about 4 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 10 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 | 380 dictionary words, averaging 5.1 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 264 of them — 69%. 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 1 of 3 on this shelf · 4 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 88.2% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 19 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 Лошадиная фамилия itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 71.0% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 79.1% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 88.4% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 92.1% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 95.1% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 335 of this story's own 380 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 200 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
Смерть чиновника — 677 words, freeХамелеон — 901 words, free Злоумышленник — 1063 words, freeСтудент — 1124 words, free
How it begins — Russian with English, sentence by sentence
У отставного генерал-майора Булдеева разболелись зубы.
Retired Major General Buldeyev was suffering from toothache.
Он полоскал рот водкой, коньяком, прикладывал к больному зубу табачную копоть, опий, скипидар, керосин, мазал щёку йодом, в ушах у него была вата, смоченная в спирту, но всё это или не помогало, или вызывало тошноту.
He rinsed his mouth with vodka and with brandy, applied tobacco soot, opium, turpentine and kerosene to the aching tooth, painted his cheek with iodine, and kept cotton wool soaked in spirits in his ears, but all of it either did no good or brought on nausea.
Приезжал доктор.
The doctor came.
Он поковырял в зубе, прописал хину, но и это не помогло.
He poked about in the tooth, prescribed quinine, but that did not help either.
На предложение вырвать больной зуб генерал ответил отказом.
To the suggestion that the bad tooth be pulled out the general answered with a refusal.
Все домашние — жена, дети, прислуга, даже поварёнок Петька предлагали каждый своё средство.
The whole household — his wife, the children, the servants, even Petka the kitchen boy — each proposed a remedy of his own.
Между прочим и приказчик Булдеева Иван Евсеич пришёл к нему и посоветовал полечиться заговором.
Among others, Buldeyev's steward Ivan Yevseich also came to him and advised him to try a cure by charm.
— Тут, в нашем уезде, ваше превосходительство, — сказал он, — лет десять назад служил акцизный Яков Васильич.
“Here in our district, Your Excellency,” he said, “there served, some ten years back, an excise officer, Yakov Vasilyich.
Заговаривал зубы — первый сорт.
He charmed away toothaches — first rate.
Бывало, отвернётся к окошку, пошепчет, поплюёт — и как рукой!
He’d turn to the window, mutter a bit, spit — and it was gone as if by magic!
Сила ему такая дадена…
Such a power was given him…”
— Где же он теперь?
“And where is he now?”
Read it free, in the room. The first instalment needs no account; a free account opens the whole story. Every word is glossed where it stands, the English is a tap away and never in your eyeline until you ask, and the audio reads the lines to you. The complete text, with the English under every sentence, is on its own page with no account at all.
Is it at your level?
This is one of the easiest complete works of Russian literature there is — 904 words, short sentences, everyday vocabulary. A strong A2 learner can walk through it with the glosses; at B1 it starts to feel like reading. The reader marks every word by whether you have met it before, so you can see the cost of a story before you commit an evening to it.
Before a class reads this
Modern Russian has lost some of what is on this page. Counted from the glosses themselves: 4 words no longer in use, and 0 older endings on words that survive.
Words modern Russian no longer has
| Word | In this text | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| е́жели | 3 | if (archaic/colloquial for если) |
| вы́пользовать | 1 | to cure, treat (inf, arch.) |
| изво́льте | 1 | if you please, kindly (polite imper) (archaic) |
| ма́тушки | 1 | mother dear (gen sg); good gracious! |
More like this: all 24 stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.