После бала — After the Ball
A ball, a mazurka, and what the same man was doing at dawn.
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 «После бала» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 3075 running words · 191 sentences · about 12 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 34 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 | 966 dictionary words, averaging 16.1 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 623 of them — 64%. 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 2 of 3 on this shelf · 10 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 После бала itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 65.1% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 73.6% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 79.3% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 87.8% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 95.3% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 813 of this story's own 966 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 351 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
Спать хочется — 1570 wordsМальчики — 1791 words Дама с собачкой — 5109 wordsНос — 7645 words
How it begins
— Вот вы говорите, что человек не может сам по себе понять, что хорошо, что дурно, что все дело в среде, что среда заедает.
— So you say that a man cannot by himself understand what is good and what is bad, that it is all a matter of environment, that the environment devours a man.
That first sentence is the free sample, and honestly the only one: «После бала» 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.