The Russian reading room
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 | 3,647 running words · 576 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 | 1,025 dictionary words, averaging 6.3 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 610 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 | 82.2% 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 24 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 | 71.3% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 79.4% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 87.4% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 90.3% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 94.8% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 843 of this story's own 1,025 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 356 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 — 3,075 wordsКрыжовник — 3,241 words Душечка — 3,850 wordsАнна на шее — 3,935 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.
This page prints only that first sentence, but the room opens «Медведь» whole to anyone — every word glossed, sentence-by-sentence English and audio — free, with no account. Read it whole in the room
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 26 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.