Language through Literature
Толстый и тонкий — Fat and Thin
Two childhood friends meet at a station — until they establish which of them holds the higher rank.
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 «Толстый и тонкий» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 511 running words · 88 sentences · about 2 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 6 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 | 268 dictionary words, averaging 5.8 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 189 of them — 71%. 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 · 1 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 90.7% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 24 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 Толстый и тонкий itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 58.7% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 73.4% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 80.2% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 85.1% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 91.2% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 243 of this story's own 268 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 166 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
Смерть чиновника — 677 words, freeХамелеон — 901 words, free
How it begins — Russian with English, sentence by sentence
На вокзале Николаевской железной дороги встретились два приятеля: один толстый, другой тонкий.
At the station of the Nikolaevsky railway two friends met: the one fat, the other thin.
Толстый только что пообедал на вокзале, и губы его, подёрнутые маслом, лоснились, как спелые вишни.
The fat one had just dined at the station, and his lips, glazed with butter, glistened like ripe cherries.
Пахло от него хересом и флёр-д’оранжем.
He smelt of sherry and fleur d'orange.
Тонкий же только что вышел из вагона и был навьючен чемоданами, узлами и картонками.
The thin one, for his part, had just stepped down from the carriage and was loaded with suitcases, bundles, and hatboxes.
Пахло от него ветчиной и кофейной гущей.
He smelt of ham and coffee grounds.
Из-за его спины выглядывала худенькая женщина с длинным подбородком — его жена, и высокий гимназист с прищуренным глазом — его сын.
From behind his back there peeped a scrawny little woman with a long chin — his wife, and a tall high-school boy with a narrowed eye — his son.
— Порфирий!
— Porfiry!
— воскликнул толстый, увидев тонкого.
exclaimed the fat one, catching sight of the thin one.
— Ты ли это?
— Is it really you?
Голубчик мой!
My dear fellow!
Сколько зим, сколько лет!
So many winters, so many years!
— Батюшки!
— Good gracious!
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 — 511 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.
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 0 older endings on words that survive.
Words modern Russian no longer has
| Word | In this text | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| лобыза́ния | 1 | kisses, kissing (gen sg or nom/acc pl) (arch.) |
| ста́тский | 1 | civil (of civil-service rank) |
| столонача́льником | 1 | head clerk (instr sg) |
| фрунт | 1 | front (military stance/attention, arch.) |
More like this: all 24 stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.