Language through Literature
Which one to read first
Almost every reading list for Russian learners is either graded readers — which nobody wants to have read — or "the classics", undifferentiated, as though Chekhov's four-page sketch and Notes from Underground asked the same thing of you. Here is the honest order, measured on the texts themselves.
Start here — free, and no account
Seven Chekhov stories, easiest first. Every one is complete and unabridged, and every one has its own page here — the whole text, with the English under each sentence, and no account. In the interactive reader, four of them read whole for anyone; a free account opens all seven.
Смерть чиновника — The Death of a Clerk
A clerk sneezes on a general, and cannot survive having done it.
Толстый и тонкий — Fat and Thin
Two childhood friends meet at a station — until they establish which of them holds the higher rank.
Хамелеон — Chameleon
A police inspector changes his mind about a dog — depending on whose dog it turns out to be. The classic on rank-worship.
Лошадиная фамилия — A Horsey Name
The general has toothache, and the name of the man who can cure it is “something to do with horses”… The most famous joke in Russian.
Злоумышленник — The Malefactor
A peasant has been unscrewing nuts from the railway line — “for fishing weights”. An interrogation that is funny and then frightening.
Студент — The Student
A cold evening, a fire, a story about the apostle Peter — and suddenly everything connects. Chekhov's own favourite.
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.
Then the longer ones
Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, plus the Chekhov that runs longer. These are part of the library.
Мальчики — The Boys
Volodya comes home for the holidays with a mysterious friend. The escape to America is set for tomorrow.
Спать хочется — Sleepy
A thirteen-year-old nursemaid rocks somebody else's baby, night after sleepless night. One of the most frightening things Chekhov wrote.
Медведь — The Bear
A widow in mourning, the creditor who will not leave, and a duel proposed in the name of equal rights. Chekhov’s one-act farce, played everywhere since 1888.
Скрипка Ротшильда — Rothschild's Violin
A coffin-maker counts his life in losses — until a willow by the river shows him what it cost.
Анна на шее — Anna on the Neck
A girl barely out of school is married to a frightened official three times her age, discovers at one ball what her beauty is worth, and never looks back.
Человек в футляре — The Man in a Case
A schoolmaster who keeps his umbrella, his watch and his face in cases, and holds a whole town in fear for fifteen years.
Крыжовник — Gooseberries
A man spends his life saving for a country place with gooseberries in it, and gets one. His brother cannot forgive him for being happy.
О любви — About Love
A man and a married woman spend years not saying what they both know, and understand it only when the third bell rings.
Дама с собачкой — The Lady with the Dog
A holiday affair in Yalta that turns out, against everyone's intention, to be the central event of two lives.
Душечка — The Darling
Olenka can only think her husband’s thoughts. Chekhov’s gentlest and most unsettling story, and Tolstoy’s favourite.
После бала — After the Ball
A ball, a mazurka, and what the same man was doing at dawn.
Нос — The Nose
Major Kovalyov's nose leaves his face and is seen about Petersburg in the uniform of a State Councillor.
Шинель — The Overcoat
A small man and his great overcoat. The founding story of Petersburg clerkdom, and of Russian prose after it.
Белые ночи — White Nights
Four white nights and a morning. A dreamer meets Nastenka on the embankment and speaks to another person for the first time in his life.
Первая любовь — First Love
Sixteen years old, a dacha outside Moscow, a princess next door — and the discovery of who she really loves.
Палата № 6 — Ward No. 6
A doctor who has decided that suffering does not matter is put in his own asylum ward. Chekhov’s longest and hardest reckoning.
Дом с мезонином — The House with the Mezzanine
An idle painter, two sisters, and an argument about whether small good deeds help at all. It ends on three words everybody in Russia knows.
How to know if you are ready
You do not need to be. The point of a glossed reader is that the vocabulary arrives while you read rather than before. But if you want the numbers — how many words buy how much of the page — they are in how much Russian you need to read Chekhov, and the word lists are ordered accordingly.