Медведь — The Bear
A widow in mourning, the creditor who will not leave, and a duel proposed in the name of equal rights. Chekhov’s one-act farce, played everywhere since 1888.
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 «Медведь» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 3659 running words · 581 sentences · about 15 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 41 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 | 1030 dictionary words, averaging 6.3 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 613 of them — 60%. 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 · 14 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 82.3% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 8 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 Медведь itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 70.9% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 79.0% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 87.2% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 90.0% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 94.6% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 848 of this story's own 1030 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 358 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
После бала — 3075 wordsКрыжовник — 3241 words Душечка — 3850 wordsАнна на шее — 3935 words
How it begins
Елена Ивановна Попова, вдовушка с ямочками на щеках, помещица.
Yelena Ivanovna Popova, a little widow with dimples in her cheeks, a landowner.
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Медведь» 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: 13 words no longer in use, and 27 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.