Language through Literature
Шинель — The Overcoat
A small man and his great overcoat. The founding story of Petersburg clerkdom, and of Russian prose after it.
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 «Шинель» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 10007 running words · 410 sentences · about 40 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 111 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 | 2313 dictionary words, averaging 24.4 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 1400 of them — 61%. 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 · 21 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 78.4% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 4 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 Шинель itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 63.4% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 73.3% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 82.0% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 84.4% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 91.7% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 1813 of this story's own 2313 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 613 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
Дом с мезонином — 5600 wordsНос — 7645 words Первая любовь — 15781 wordsПалата № 6 — 16043 words
How it begins
В департаменте… но лучше не называть, в каком департаменте.
In the department of... but better not to say in which department.
This page prints only that first sentence. In the room the first instalment of «Шинель» 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: 100 words no longer in use, and 94 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.