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Comment by danielhooper | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, how long did you have to study Russian before you could enjoy Chekhov's stories?

I read a bunch of them (in English) when I was a university student: that's where my first exposure came from.

When I started to study Russian, I read one or two of his stories in this book [1], which was great because it has English and Russian versions on opposite pages. I got to enjoy reading in Russian because I didn't constantly have to look up every tenth word in a dictionary.

Russian is a hard language but there are some still harder. To understand magazine articles and carry on simple conversations on arbitrary topics is a time investment of about 600 hours. To read Chekhov and speak really well on advanced topics is about double that, or 1200 hours. Chekhov's style is close to modern Russian and his style of writing is more straightforward than earlier writers. To read Dostoyevsky... well, hell if I know, I can barely make it through the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary even after all this time investment and living in Russia for a few years! It's like a different language.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Stories-Dual-Language-Book-En...

Chekhov was very popular in Russian schools up until early 90s because of his writing style. You're absolutely spot on that he writes in very plain Russian. Dostoevsky has some mindfuck-inducing way or getting across to the reader. His writing is difficult even for a lot of native Russian speakers. L.N. Tolstoy also has some easy reading ( Детство. Отрочество. Юность / Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth is my favorite)

What happened after the early 90s?

All readers of the site have graduated secondary schools.

Chekhov is still tout in Russian school : https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%8...

I can only comment about the years I spent in school there. I think Soviet era of education pretty much ended with my generation when the old school staff reached retirement years. I have no idea where Russian schools rank nowadays. I heard pretty low.

The Soviet Union fell, among other things.

Presumably, in this context meaning that there was much more literature available for reading?

Probably that people had a much harder time surviving to read as much...

I don't think so. I'm sure reading was encouraged in USSR. Just not reading the wrong books. But overall, people got good education to culture there. It was one of the ideals of the soviet state that actually worked.

Only in the later stages of decline, when economy was tanking and people spent half their time queuing for things, they probably had less time to read...

>Only in the later stages of decline, when economy was tanking and people spent half their time queuing for things, they probably had less time to read...

That's what I meant: in the turmoil of 1991 and beyond, people would have less time to read...

Or you could say that post-1991 they had other things to do (to survive, or to entertain themselves: Western movies etc became available.)

However I was thinking already 1980's: probably the dysfunction of the economy had an impact on people people's reading (like, do you typically read a book while you are at the meat shop queue or shoe shop queue?)

After 1991 they have a lot of other entertainments to spend a time on - pirated videos, more than 3 state-approved TV channels, spread of BBS, FIDO and Internet...

Thanks for sharing, never realised that Dostoyevskiy is so hard, being kind-of-native-speaker.

He's not, it's just that the average reading comprehension level is low.

Out of curiosity, can you read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russian too? Does that feel different than reading them in English?

Do sentences last for 1/3 of a page in English version as well? Such as when you get to the end of the sentence you have already forgotten what was at the beginning? If it is like that then English version is similar to Russian.

Yeah, at least the versions in English that I've read had sentences that last at least a third of the page.

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