The Russian reading room
Дом с мезонином — The House with the Mezzanine
An idle painter, two sisters, and an argument about whether small good deeds help at all. It ends on three words everybody in Russia knows.
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 «Дом с мезонином» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 5,600 running words · 364 sentences · about 22 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 62 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 | 1,542 dictionary words, averaging 15.4 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 934 of them — 61%. 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 3 of 3 on this shelf · 19 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 81.8% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 6 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 Дом с мезонином itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 65.8% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 74.2% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 82.9% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 85.4% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 93.7% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 1262 of this story's own 1,542 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 515 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
Человек в футляре — 4,005 wordsДама с собачкой — 5,109 words Нос — 7,644 wordsШинель — 10,007 words
How it begins
Это было 6—7 лет тому назад, когда я жил в одном из уездов Т-ой губернии, в имении помещика Белокурова, молодого человека, который вставал очень рано, ходил в поддёвке, по вечерам пил пиво и всё жаловался мне, что он нигде и ни в ком не встречает сочувствия.
This was six or seven years ago, when I was living in one of the districts of the province of T., on the estate of a landowner named Belokurov, a young man who got up very early, went about in a peasant coat, drank beer in the evenings, and was for ever complaining to me that he met with sympathy nowhere and from nobody.
This page prints only that first sentence. In the room the first instalment of «Дом с мезонином» 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: 4 words no longer in use, and 34 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.