Language through Literature
Злоумышленник — The Malefactor
A peasant has been unscrewing nuts from the railway line — “for fishing weights”. An interrogation that is funny and then frightening.
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 «Злоумышленник» is, and how hard
| Length in Russian | 1063 running words · 145 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 | 421 dictionary words, averaging 7.3 words a sentence |
| Words that appear once | 269 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 · 5 of 24 by length |
| By its own vocabulary | 87.4% of its dictionary words carry 95% of the text — 18 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 Злоумышленник itself — not against Russian in general.
| If you know | you can read |
|---|---|
| 500 words | 64.3% of the words on the page |
| 1000 words | 76.1% of the words on the page |
| 2000 words | 84.9% of the words on the page |
| 3000 words | 87.2% of the words on the page |
| 5000 words | 92.5% of the words on the page |
Counted the other way: 368 of this story's own 421 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it — 209 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
Хамелеон — 901 words, freeЛошадиная фамилия — 904 words, free Студент — 1124 words, freeВанька — 1153 words, free
How it begins — Russian with English, sentence by sentence
Перед судебным следователем стоит маленький, чрезвычайно тощий мужичонко в пестрядинной рубахе и латаных портах.
Before the examining magistrate stands a small, exceedingly scrawny little peasant in a shirt of coarse striped homespun and patched trousers.
Его обросшее волосами и изъеденное рябинами лицо и глаза, едва видные из-за густых, нависших бровей, имеют выражение угрюмой суровости.
His face, overgrown with hair and eaten away by pockmarks, and his eyes, barely visible from under thick, overhanging brows, wear an expression of sullen severity.
На голове целая шапка давно уже нечёсанных, путаных волос, что придаёт ему ещё большую, паучью суровость.
On his head is a whole mop of long-uncombed, tangled hair, which lends him a still greater, spiderish severity.
Он бос.
He is barefoot.
— Денис Григорьев!
— Denis Grigoryev!
— начинает следователь.
— the magistrate begins.
— Подойди поближе и отвечай на мои вопросы.
— Step closer and answer my questions.
Седьмого числа сего июля железнодорожный сторож Иван Семёнов Акинфов, проходя утром по линии, на 141-й версте, застал тебя за отвинчиванием гайки, коей рельсы прикрепляются к шпалам.
On the seventh day of this July the railway watchman Ivan Semyonov Akinfov, passing along the line in the morning at the 141st verst, came upon you unscrewing a nut, by which nut the rails are fastened to the sleepers.
Вот она, эта гайка!..
Here it is, this very nut!..
С каковою гайкой он и задержал тебя.
With which said nut he thereupon detained you.
Так ли это было?
Is that how it was?
— Чаво?
— Wha’?
Read it free, in the room. The first instalment needs no account; a free account opens the whole story. 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. The complete text, with the English under every sentence, is on its own page with no account at all.
Is it at your level?
This is one of the easiest complete works of Russian literature there is — 1063 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: 7 words no longer in use, and 0 older endings on words that survive.
Words modern Russian no longer has
| Word | In this text | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| е́жели | 5 | if (archaic/colloquial for если) |
| сего́ | 3 | this, of this (gen m/n of сей) (arch.) |
| изво́лите | 1 | you deign, are pleased to (2pl) (arch.) |
| каково́ю | 1 | of what sort (inst f sg, arch.) |
| ко́ей | 1 | which, whose (f gen/dat/inst sg, arch.) |
| ми́лостивцы | 1 | benefactors, kind sirs (nom pl, arch. deferential) |
| то́кмо | 1 | only, merely (arch.) |
More like this: all 24 stories, or the numbers behind them — how much Russian you need to read Chekhov.