Language through Literature
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 | 16845 running words · 1207 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 | 2513 dictionary words, averaging 14.0 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 1383 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 · 24 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 66.5% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 1 of 24 on this shelf, most forgiving first: the text that asks the smallest share of its own words (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 Белые ночи itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 75.7% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 83.1% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 89.5% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 91.7% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 95.7% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 1671 of this story's own 2513 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 405 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
Первая любовь — 15781 wordsПалата № 6 — 16043 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?..
This page prints only that first sentence. In the room the first instalment of «Белые ночи» 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: 15 words no longer in use, and 47 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.