Белые ночи — White Nights
Four white nights and a morning. A dreamer meets Nastenka on the embankment and speaks to another person for the first time in his life.
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 «Белые ночи» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 16861 running words · 1208 sentences · about 67 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 187 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 | 2521 dictionary words, averaging 14.0 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 1390 of them — 55%. 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 · 15 of 15 by length |
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 Белые ночи itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 75.1% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 84.5% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 88.5% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 93.2% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 97.2% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 1678 of this story's own 2521 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 407 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
Шинель — 10007 wordsПервая любовь — 15781 words
How it begins
...Иль был он создан для того, Чтобы побыть хотя мгновенье В соседстве сердца твоего?..
...Or was he created for this, To linger even one brief moment In the neighborhood of your heart?..
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Белые ночи» is part of the full library — all fifteen texts, 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, no account, if you would rather taste the room first.
More like this: all fifteen stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.