I. Розділ 1
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Runaway serfs head for the Danube (B2)
Dorohoiu tsinoiu Дорогою ціною
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, 1955
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s complete novella in Ukrainian, first published in 1902, not an adaptation; the title means “At a High Price”. It is for B2 learners who want an adventure story about the dream of freedom under serfdom. About 18,000 words in five chapters, 12 words per sentence on average.
- B2
- 18 014 words
- 3-5 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the long descriptive sentences of chapters I and IV will be slow going, and old forms like од for від or смерти for смерті take getting used to.
B1B2
This text
At B2 you can read it: about a third of the paragraphs are dialogue lines, and the descriptions of the marshes and the steppe give way to word-by-word translation.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the novella reads freely; only the village and marsh vocabulary and the old spellings make you stop.
Start readingThe average sentence has 12 words, and 8.8% of words have 9 letters or more, about one in eleven. That puts the novella between Kotsiubynsky’s Intermezzo (9.8 words, 6.3%) and the C1 books of this catalogue such as Ivan Franko’s Boa constrictor (14.9 words, 10.0%). The language is standard Central Ukrainian, with no dialect as dense as the Hutsul speech of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, but the 1955 edition keeps older forms: од appears 65 times against 16 for від, and you will meet смерти, крови, сливе (“almost”) and short verb endings like стукнувсь (41 of them). Dialogue lines make up about a third of the paragraphs (209 of 566). Chapter IV is the densest, at 14.5 words per sentence. Hence B2. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 18 014
- words
- 12
- words in an average sentence
- 3-5
- hours of reading
- 1955
- Книгоспілка
Книгоспілка, 1955. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
The 1830s, Ukraine under serfdom. Ostap, a young serf, has been stirring up the villagers, and the master threatens to flay him or hand him over to the army. He runs for the Danube, where people say there are no masters. Solomiia, a strong young woman married to a man she cannot bear, catches up with him on the road dressed as a lad and cuts off her braids to pass for one. With a group of runaways they wait in a ravine for boatmen from the far bank; the crossing goes wrong, and the two must find their own way over the river through the reed marshes, watched by Cossack patrols. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Дорогою ціною
III. Розділ 3
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Choose an underlined word.
Find the verb first
The paragraph opens with two adverbial participles, Плутаючись (“stumbling through”) and пролазячи (“crawling under”), and only then reaches the subject вони and the verb долізли (“they made their way”). Look for the verb before you translate. Тут було парно and звідти пашіло are impersonal: no subject, and the neuter past tense says “it was close”, “heat poured from there”. Згук is an old form of звук, “sound”.
Він is the darkness
Морок (“darkness, gloom”) is masculine, so every він in this paragraph is the darkness, not Ostap: Він оточав її..., Він жив, той морок. Pronoun first, noun after it (Він жив, той морок, “It lived, that darkness”) is an emphatic order common in Ukrainian prose. Одрізнити is this edition’s form of відрізнити: the text uses од for від 65 times, so read од- as від-.
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
In the long descriptions, translating the whole sentence in Reader keeps the picture together, as in По скляному поверху ставка, з глибини якого визирало темне зоряне небо, тихо плив білою хмарою туман (“Over the glassy surface of the pond, from whose depths the dark starry sky looked out, the mist drifted quietly like a white cloud”).
ReaderIf this book is not the one
All books at this levelBefore you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not an adaptation: Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s complete novella, five chapters with the author’s opening pages on the 1830s. It first appeared in 1902 in the Kyiv journal Kievskaya Starina. The text comes from Wikisource, which reproduces volume I of Kotsiubynsky’s Works (Твори) published by Knyhospilka in New York in 1955, and it keeps that edition’s spelling: од for від, смерти and крови for смерті and крові.
Is there an audiobook?
Dorohoiu tsinoiu has no audiobook on MovaReader: the novella is read on screen, and a tap on a word shows its translation. You will need it for words like пашіло (“heat poured out”) and перестрашена (“frightened”), and for the marsh vocabulary of the Danube: комиш (“reeds”) and плавні (“reed marshes”).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most in the long descriptions, such as Нічна задуха насичена була сильними пахощами татарського зілля, кушіру, зогрітої води (“The close night air was heavy with the strong smells of sweet flag, hornwort and warm water”). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
About 3-5 hours, at the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker. The five chapters are similar in size, about 3,000 to 3,900 words each, so one chapter makes an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is fairly even. Chapter I, with the author’s introduction, averages 12 words per sentence; chapters II, III and V run on dialogue and action at about 11, and III and V have the fewest long words (under 8%). Chapter IV is the densest: 14.5 words per sentence and one long word in ten.
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 where you left off. Any of the five chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for example II. Розділ 2, where the runaways wait for the boatmen on the Danube.