Студент — The Student
A cold evening, a fire, a story about the apostle Peter — and suddenly everything connects. Chekhov's own favourite.
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 «Студент» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 1124 running words · 68 sentences · about 4 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 12 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 | 498 dictionary words, averaging 16.5 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 348 of them — 70%. 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 · 6 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 Студент itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 59.5% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 71.8% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 78.5% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 85.1% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 93.9% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 442 of this story's own 498 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 274 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
Лошадиная фамилия — 904 words, freeЗлоумышленник — 1063 words, free Ванька — 1153 words, freeСпать хочется — 1570 words
How it begins — Russian with English, sentence by sentence
Погода вначале была хорошая, тихая.
At first the weather was fine and still.
Кричали дрозды, и по соседству в болотах что-то живое жалобно гудело, точно дуло в пустую бутылку.
Thrushes were calling, and close by in the marshes something alive was humming plaintively, as though blowing into an empty bottle.
Протянул один вальдшнеп, и выстрел по нем прозвучал в весеннем воздухе раскатисто и весело.
A solitary woodcock came flighting over, and the shot fired at it rang out in the spring air, rolling and gay.
Но когда стемнело в лесу, некстати подул с востока холодный пронизывающий ветер, всё смолкло.
But when it grew dark in the forest, a cold, piercing wind blew up out of the east, quite out of season, and everything fell silent.
По лужам протянулись ледяные иглы, и стало в лесу неуютно, глухо и нелюдимо.
Needles of ice stretched across the puddles, and the forest turned cheerless, muffled and unfriendly.
Запахло зимой.
It began to smell of winter.
Иван Великопольский, студент духовной академии, сын дьячка, возвращаясь с тяги домой, шел всё время заливным лугом по тропинке.
Ivan Velikopolsky, a student of the theological academy and the son of a sexton, walking home from the evening woodcock flight, kept the whole way along a footpath across the water-meadow.
У него закоченели пальцы, и разгорелось от ветра лицо.
His fingers were numb with cold, and his face burned in the wind.
Ему казалось, что этот внезапно наступивший холод нарушил во всем порядок и согласие, что самой природе жутко, и оттого вечерние потемки сгустились быстрей, чем надо.
It seemed to him that this cold, arriving so suddenly, had broken the order and harmony of everything, that nature herself was frightened, and that for this reason the evening darkness had thickened faster than it should.
Кругом было пустынно и как-то особенно мрачно.
All around it was deserted and somehow peculiarly gloomy.
Только на вдовьих огородах около реки светился огонь; далеко же кругом и там, где была деревня, версты за четыре, всё сплошь утопало в холодной вечерней мгле.
Only in the widows' kitchen gardens near the river was a fire shining; far around, and over where the village lay, some four versts off, everything was utterly drowned in the cold evening mist.
Студент вспомнил, что, когда он уходил из дому, его мать, сидя в сенях на полу, босая, чистила самовар, а отец лежал на печи и кашлял; по случаю страстной пятницы дома ничего не варили, и мучительно хотелось есть.
The student remembered that when he left the house his mother had been sitting barefoot on the floor of the passage, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove, coughing; because it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked at home, and he was tormented with hunger.
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?
At 1124 words this is a step up from the very shortest Chekhov — a comfortable B1 read with the glosses at your elbow, and honest work slightly below that. 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.