I. Розділ 1
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Galicia’s oil rush, complete, for C1
Boa constrictor Boa constrictor
Ivan Franko, 1957
The complete original in Ukrainian of Ivan Franko’s novella, in his revised version of 1907, not an adaptation. It is for C1 readers who want a gripping story of money and fear set in the oil fields of 1870s Galicia. About 35,200 words in five chapters, 15 words per sentence on average.
- C1
- 35 186 words
- 6-10 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 chapter I is the wall: sentences of about 20 words, oil-field words like кип’ячка and віск, and Galician forms like відки for звідки. Chapter II, with its dialogues, reads more easily.
B2C1
This text
At C1 you can read it with single-word taps: the dialogues of chapters II-IV move fast, and the long descriptive sentences of chapters I and V are worth taking slowly.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 the story reads freely; only the trade jargon of the oil fields and the odd German or Yiddish phrase (wie geht’s, Glück auf) slow you down.
Start readingThe average sentence has 15 words, and one word in ten (10.0%) has 9 letters or more: the same density as Franko’s Zakhar Berkut (15.1 words, 10.4%) and well above Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s “Дорогою ціною” (11.7 words, 8.8%), a B2 in this catalogue. The vocabulary is that of the Boryslav oil fields: кип’ячка (crude oil) appears 26 times, віск (ozokerite wax) 44, ґешефт (deal) 29, баришівник (cattle dealer) 33, штольня (gallery) 19. Galician forms add work, such as the locative в дерев’янім домику and відки for звідки. The difficulty is uneven: chapter I averages about 20 words per sentence and chapter V about 18, while chapters II-IV run at 12-14 with long dialogues. Hence C1. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 35 186
- words
- 15
- words in an average sentence
- 6-10
- hours of reading
- 1957
- Книгоспілка
Книгоспілка, 1957. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Herman Goldkremer, a Jewish oil and wax magnate whose fortune nears a million, spends his weekly Friday in Boryslav, the muddy oil town where diggers work his pits. In his office hangs a painting he cannot stop looking at: a boa constrictor crushing its prey. Over his account books he remembers how he got here: a childhood of poverty in Drohobych, his mother’s death in the cholera of 1831, happy years on the road with the kind rag trader Itsyk, skimming crude oil from Boryslav puddles, a dangerous partnership with the cattle dealer Wolf, a marriage, and the first refinery that showed him where the money lay. Back in the present, his son Duvidko troubles him, the wax boom is on, and a bitter rival, Itsko, is digging right next to his richest seam. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
The words of an oil town
Franko describes 1870s Boryslav in its own vocabulary. кип’ячка is the local name for crude oil (standard нафта or ропа), віск here is ozokerite, the mineral wax dug out of the pits, and сопух is the stench they give off. Note the Galician locative в дерев’янім домику, where today’s standard says в дерев’яному: phrases of the type в якім, у тім come back over a hundred times in the book.
Find the verbs first
The last sentence runs to nearly 50 words. Read it through its verbs: пішли, не минуло, покрилися, робилися, обгороджувалися, давали. Then the trade words fall into place: закоп is a hand-dug pit, сажень an old measure of about two metres, жила a seam, and цямрина the timber lining that these early pits did without. сторгував comes from торгуватися, “to haggle”; the prefix с- marks the deal as closed.
Where the text gets harder
Idense opening
II-IVshorter sentences, more dialogue
Vdense again
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
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In chapter I the air of Boryslav is “задушливе, загусле від нафтового сопуху” (“stifling, thick with the stench of oil”): translating the whole sentence in Reader untangles the inverted word order and the rare word сопух at once.
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
Yes, it is the complete original, not an abridgement: all five chapters of Ivan Franko’s novella. It first appeared in 1878 and as a book in 1884; Franko revised it in 1907, and this is that revised version, as printed in volume X of his Works in 20 volumes (Knyhospilka, New York, 1957), taken from Wikisource. The spelling is that edition’s, with Galician forms such as відки and в якім left as Franko wrote them.
Is there an audiobook?
Boa constrictor has no audiobook on MovaReader: here the novella is read on screen. Tap a word to see its translation; you will need it most for oil-field words such as кип’ячка (crude oil) and цямрина (the timber lining of a pit).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most in chapters I and V, where sentences average about 20 and 18 words, and with lines like “Він не тужив до нього, не бажав, щоб воно вернулося” (“He did not long for it, did not wish it to come back”). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole novella takes about 6-10 hours at the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker. The chapters are uneven: chapter IV has about 3,000 words, chapter II about 14,500, so chapter II is best spread over several evenings.
Where does the text get easier?
Yes, after chapter I. Chapter I averages about 20 words per sentence with 11.6% long words; chapters II and III drop to about 14 words, with long dialogues, and chapter IV to about 12. Chapter V gets denser again, at about 18 words per sentence.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can come back to the novella where you left off. Any of the five chapters opens from the contents on this page, for example II. Розділ 2, where young Herman goes to Boryslav to skim crude oil.