I. Глава перша
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Cossack Ukraine in 1663, unabridged
The Black Council Чорна рада
Panteleimon Kulish, 1943
Panteleimon Kulish’s complete historical novel in Ukrainian, not an adaptation: the text of the 1943 Kraków-Lviv edition of a book first published in 1857 and counted as the first Ukrainian historical novel. It is for C1 learners who want the Cossack Ukraine of the 17th century told by a 19th-century writer who imitated the language of the old chronicles. About 53,800 words in 18 chapters, with 13 words per sentence on average: one of the longer books in the Ukrainian catalogue.
- C1
- 53 787 words
- 9-15 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 you will follow the sentences but stumble over Kulish’s old forms on most lines. The catalogue’s B1 retelling of The Black Council tells the same story in simple modern Ukrainian, and after it the original becomes much easier to follow.
B2C1
This text
At C1 you can read it: once од, -всь and -ії stop looking strange, the dialogue at Cherevan’s table and at the hetman’s feast moves fast, and only the long descriptions of old Kyiv slow you down.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 it reads freely; only the words of Cossack ranks, dress and arms (бунчук, тороки, кобеняк) and the priest’s Church Slavonic still call for a tap.
Start readingSentence length and long words alone would make this B2: 13 words per sentence and 7.8% of words with 9 letters or more, the same share as Kaidash’s Family and close to Mykola Dzheria (15 words, 8.0%), which is B2. What lifts it to C1 is Kulish’s deliberately old-fashioned language. Од stands for від 196 times, while від itself appears once; reflexive past-tense verbs end in -всь instead of -вся 276 times (оставсь, засміявсь, піднявсь); 122 adjectives keep the long ending -ії (козацькії, великії, окаяннії); 73 words take the old prefix із- (ізнов, ізроду, ізближались); єсть and єси (“is”, “you are”) occur 24 times and послі (“after”) 18 times, and the priest Shram slips into Church Slavonic: рече, глаголати, благословеніє. On top of that comes the vocabulary of Cossack politics: forms of гетьман occur 235 times and of запорожець 213, alongside булава, бунчук, старшина and посполитий. Like Kaidash’s Family, rated C1 at the same 7.8%, the difficulty lies in the forms, not in the length of the sentences. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 53 787
- words
- 13
- words in an average sentence
- 9-15
- hours of reading
- 1943
- Українське видавництво
Українське видавництво, 1943. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Spring 1663. Ukraine has been split along the Dnieper since the death of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and two riders are heading for Kyiv: old Shram, a colonel from Pavoloch who became a priest but still carries pistols under his cassock, and his son Petro. They spend the night at Khmaryshche, the walled farm of Shram’s old comrade Cherevan, a jolly Cossack who grew rich in the war. There they find a blind kobzar who buys captives out of slavery with his songs, and Vasyl Nevolnyk, freed by him from a Turkish galley. Petro and Cherevan’s daughter Lesia take to each other at once, but her mother has higher plans. In Kyiv the party meets the left-bank hetman Yakym Somko and a huge, mocking Zaporozhian, Kyrylo Tur, while the talk in the streets and taverns turns to Ivan Briukhovetsky, the Zaporozhians’ humble-looking candidate, and to a council where the common people, not the officers, would choose the hetman. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Чорна рада
X. Глава десята
́ : ́ , ́; , . ́ , . . ́ , ́ , , , . , ; ́ , ; ́ , .
Choose an underlined word.
Strip the long ending
Kulish often writes the long adjective ending -ії where modern Ukrainian has -і: державськії is державські. The novel has over a hundred such forms (козацькії, великії, тії), so drop the extra ї and the word looks familiar again.
Accents are a free guide
The acute accents in зна́чного, п’я́тра or рі́вня are stress marks added by the 1943 editors, not letters. Read the word without them and use them as a pronunciation hint: the novel has about 2,250 of them.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
€1 a month
With the Reader plan, the whole sentence is translated where an old grumble turns into an image: усяке сиділо по Вкраїні тихо та смирно, наче бджола в зимовнику, “everyone sat quiet and meek across Ukraine, like a bee in its winter hive”, says Vasyl Nevolnyk of the years before the war.
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not an adaptation: Panteleimon Kulish’s complete novel in 18 chapters, subtitled роман-хроніка (a novel-chronicle). Parts appeared in journals in 1845-1846, and the full book was first published in 1857 as Чорна рада. Хроніка 1663 року; it is counted as the first Ukrainian historical novel. Our text follows the 1943 Kraków-Lviv edition of Українське видавництво as reproduced on Wikisource, without that edition’s foreword and glossary. Its spelling is close to modern Ukrainian, with a few conventions of the 1920s such as ґ in borrowed words and genitives like смерти and зверхности, and about 2,250 stress marks on less familiar words. As in other books of its time, the characters use period words for Jews and Poles that are offensive today.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no audio version of The Black Council on MovaReader; you read on screen and tap a word to see its translation. You will tap often in the first paragraph alone: козарлюга (“a seasoned old Cossack”) and тороки (“straps behind the saddle for tying on baggage”) are typical of what follows.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. It helps most where old forms and an idiom meet, as in Погано було за ляхів, та вже ж і наші гуляють не в свою голову, “Life was bad under the Poles, but now our own people run wild as they please”. Without the plan you can still tap single words up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
About 9-15 hours at a learner’s pace with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker. The 18 chapters run from about 1,700 words (XVIII) to about 5,200 (XII); most have 2,000-4,000, so a chapter takes one or two sittings.
Where does the text get easier?
After the opening the difficulty is even: most chapters average 11-14.6 words per sentence. Chapter I is the hardest, at 16.6 words per sentence and 10.7% long words, because it sets out the history of the Khmelnytsky years; chapters IV-VI also open with long descriptions of old Kyiv. The lightest are XV (9.8 words per sentence) and XVII (10.9), where dialogue carries the story.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. After you sign in, the reader remembers your place and the words you opened. The contents on this page open any of the 18 chapters directly, for example X. Глава десята, where the travellers reach the rich farm of Hvyntovka near Nizhyn.