Нос — The Nose
Major Kovalyov's nose leaves his face and is seen about Petersburg in the uniform of a State Councillor.
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 «Нос» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 7645 running words · 545 sentences · about 31 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 85 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 | 1893 dictionary words, averaging 14.0 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 1139 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 3 of 3 on this shelf · 12 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 Нос itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 64.5% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 74.5% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 81.0% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 88.9% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 95.5% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 1511 of this story's own 1893 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 559 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 wordsДама с собачкой — 5109 words Шинель — 10007 wordsПервая любовь — 15781 words
How it begins
Марта 25 числа случилось в Петербурге необыкновенно странное происшествие.
On the 25th of March there occurred in Petersburg an extraordinarily strange incident.
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «Нос» 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.