The Russian reading room
Скрипка Ротшильда — Rothschild's Violin
A coffin-maker counts his life in losses — until a willow by the river shows him what it cost.
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.
Prof. Alexander Burry named this story for Club Chekhov — All Subtext, No Action, the podcast reading through Chekhov's works with Lev Lesokhin — and the shelf got there first. Its episode will stand on the map when it airs.
How long «Скрипка Ротшильда» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 3,017 running words · 228 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 | 1,014 dictionary words, averaging 13.2 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 633 of them — 62%. 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 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 85.2% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 14 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 Скрипка Ротшильда itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 65.0% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 73.5% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 83.9% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 87.5% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 94.5% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 864 of this story's own 1,014 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 411 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 — 1,570 wordsМальчики — 1,791 words О любви — 3,056 wordsПосле бала — 3,075 words
How it begins
Городок был маленький, хуже деревни, и жили в нем почти одни только старики, которые умирали так редко, что даже досадно.
The little town was small, worse than a village, and it was inhabited almost entirely by old people, who died so rarely that it was actually annoying.
This page prints only that first sentence. In the room the first instalment of «Скрипка Ротшильда» 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: 4 words no longer in use, and 33 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.