Смерть чиновника — The Death of a Clerk
A clerk sneezes on a general, and cannot survive having done 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 «Смерть чиновника» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 677 running words · 93 sentences · about 3 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 8 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 | 317 dictionary words, averaging 7.3 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 204 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 1 of 3 on this shelf · 2 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 Смерть чиновника itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 69.1% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 79.8% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 86.4% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 93.4% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 100.0% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 284 of this story's own 317 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 182 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
Толстый и тонкий — 511 words, free Хамелеон — 901 words, freeЛошадиная фамилия — 904 words, free
How it begins — Russian with English, sentence by sentence
В один прекрасный вечер не менее прекрасный экзекутор, Иван Дмитрич Червяков, сидел во втором ряду кресел и глядел в бинокль на «Корневильские колокола».
One fine evening the no less fine usher Ivan Dmitrich Chervyakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, gazing through his opera glasses at «The Bells of Corneville».
Он глядел и чувствовал себя на верху блаженства.
He gazed and felt himself at the very height of bliss.
Но вдруг…
But suddenly…
В рассказах часто встречается это «но вдруг».
In stories one often comes across this «but suddenly».
Авторы правы: жизнь так полна внезапностей!
The authors are right: life is so full of the unexpected!
Но вдруг лицо его поморщилось, глаза подкатились, дыхание остановилось… он отвел от глаз бинокль, нагнулся и…. апчхи!!!
But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes rolled, his breathing stopped… he lowered the opera glasses from his eyes, bent down, and…. atchoo!!!
Чихнул, как видите.
He sneezed, as you can see.
Чихать никому и нигде не возбраняется.
Sneezing is forbidden to no one and nowhere.
Чихают и мужики, и полицеймейстеры, и иногда даже и тайные советники.
Peasants sneeze, and police chiefs, and sometimes even privy councillors.
Все чихают.
Everybody sneezes.
Червяков нисколько не сконфузился, утерся платочком и, как вежливый человек, поглядел вокруг себя: не обеспокоил ли он кого-нибудь своим чиханьем?
Chervyakov was not in the least embarrassed; he wiped himself with his handkerchief and, like a polite man, looked around him: had he by chance disturbed anyone with his sneezing?
Но тут уж пришлось сконфузиться.
But now he really did have to feel embarrassed.
Read the whole story free, in the room — no account. Every word is glossed where it stands, the English is a tap away and never in your eyeline until you ask, and the audio reads the lines to you.
Is it at your level?
This is one of the easiest complete works of Russian literature there is — 677 words, short sentences, everyday vocabulary. A strong A2 learner can walk through it with the glosses; at B1 it starts to feel like reading. The reader marks every word by whether you have met it before, so you can see the cost of a story before you commit an evening to it.
More like this: all fifteen stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.