The Russian reading room
Палата № 6 — Ward No. 6
A doctor who has decided that suffering does not matter is put in his own asylum ward. Chekhov’s longest and hardest reckoning.
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 «Палата № 6» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 16,043 running words · 1,268 sentences · about 64 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 178 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 | 3,338 dictionary words, averaging 12.7 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 1845 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 · 23 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 76.0% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 3 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 Палата № 6 itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 64.4% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 73.2% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 82.1% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 84.9% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 92.4% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 2536 of this story's own 3,338 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 845 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 — 10,007 wordsПервая любовь — 15,781 words Белые ночи — 16,845 words
How it begins
В больничном дворе стоит небольшой флигель, окруженный целым лесом репейника, крапивы и дикой конопли.
In the hospital yard stands a small lodge surrounded by a whole forest of burdock, nettles and wild hemp.
This page prints only that first sentence. In the room the first instalment of «Палата № 6» 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: 12 words no longer in use, and 51 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.