Language through Literature
Ванька — Vanka
Nine-year-old Vanka writes a letter “to grandfather, in the village”. One of the shortest stories on the shelf, and the sharpest — and thick with village words: save it for later, not for first.
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 «Ванька» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 1153 running words · 85 sentences · about 5 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 13 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 | 556 dictionary words, averaging 13.6 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 400 of them — 72%. 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 · 7 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 89.7% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 23 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 Ванька itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 56.0% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 63.3% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 75.1% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 78.3% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 88.2% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 499 of this story's own 556 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 326 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
Злоумышленник — 1063 words, freeСтудент — 1124 words, free Спать хочется — 1570 wordsМальчики — 1791 words
How it begins — Russian with English, sentence by sentence
Ванька Жуков, девятилетний мальчик, отданный три месяца тому назад в ученье к сапожнику Аляхину, в ночь под Рождество не ложился спать.
Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year-old boy who had been apprenticed three months ago to the shoemaker Alyakhin, did not go to bed on Christmas Eve.
Дождавшись, когда хозяева и подмастерья ушли к заутрене, он достал из хозяйского шкапа пузырек с чернилами, ручку с заржавленным пером и, разложив перед собой измятый лист бумаги, стал писать.
Having waited until the master's household and the journeymen had gone off to the midnight service, he took a little bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib out of his master's cupboard and, spreading a crumpled sheet of paper out before him, began to write.
Прежде чем вывести первую букву, он несколько раз пугливо оглянулся на двери и окна, покосился на темный образ, по обе стороны которого тянулись полки с колодками, и прерывисто вздохнул.
Before tracing the first letter, he glanced timorously several times at the doors and windows, cast a sidelong look at the dark icon, on either side of which stretched shelves of shoe-lasts, and drew a broken sigh.
Бумага лежала на скамье, а сам он стоял перед скамьей на коленях.
The paper lay on a bench, and he himself knelt on the floor before the bench.
«Милый дедушка, Константин Макарыч!
“Dear grandfather, Konstantin Makarych!
— писал он.
— he wrote.
— И пишу тебе письмо.
— And I am writing you a letter.
Поздравляю вас с Рождеством и желаю тебе всего от господа бога.
I congratulate you on Christmas and wish you all good things from the Lord God.
Нету у меня ни отца, ни маменьки, только ты у меня один остался».
I have neither father nor mummy, you are the only one I have left.”
Ванька перевел глаза на темное окно, в котором мелькало отражение его свечки, и живо вообразил себе своего деда Константина Макарыча, служащего ночным сторожем у господ Живаревых.
Vanka shifted his eyes to the dark window, in which the reflection of his candle flickered, and vividly pictured to himself his grandfather Konstantin Makarych, who served as night watchman to the Zhivarev family.
Это маленький, тощенький, но необыкновенно юркий и подвижной старикашка лет 65-ти, с вечно смеющимся лицом и пьяными глазами.
He is a small, scrawny, but uncommonly nimble and lively old codger of about sixty-five, with an everlastingly laughing face and drunken eyes.
Днем он спит в людской кухне или балагурит с кухарками, ночью же, окутанный в просторный тулуп, ходит вокруг усадьбы и стучит в свою колотушку.
By day he sleeps in the servants' kitchen or jokes with the cooks; by night, muffled in a roomy sheepskin coat, he walks round the estate and taps his watchman's rattle.
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 full-length nineteenth-century prose — 1153 words, long sentences, the real thing. With every word glossed a B1 reader can climb it; from B2 it opens up. 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: 1 word no longer in use, and 1 older ending on words that survive.
Words modern Russian no longer has
| Word | In this text | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| е́жели | 1 | if (archaic/colloquial for если) |
Old endings on words still in use
The word is current; the ending is not. A student who knows the modern form needs the ending pointed at, not the meaning taught.
| Form | In this text | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| собо́ю | 1 | oneself (instr, archaic ending) |
More like this: all 24 stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.