II. Розділ 2
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A village feud in the spelling of 1879
Kaidash’s Family Кайдашева сім’я
Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky, 1879
Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky’s complete comic novella in Ukrainian, not an adaptation, printed as in its first separate edition (Lviv, 1879), old spelling included. It is for C1 learners who want the best-known family comedy of Ukrainian literature in its first version, with the village speech of the Ros valley and an orthography older than modern Ukrainian. About 52,500 words in ten chapters, 12 words per sentence on average: one of the longest books in the Ukrainian catalogue.
- C1
- 52 467 words
- 9-15 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 the sentences are manageable, but forms like и, іх, ёго and міні stop you on every line; start with the B1 adaptation of Kaidash’s Family in the catalogue, then come back to the original.
B2C1
This text
At C1 you can read it: once your eye turns и into і and ёго into його, what remains is lively village dialogue and concrete words of the house, the yard and the field.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 it reads freely; only the words of nineteenth-century farm life (возовиця, запаска, клуня) still need a tap.
Start readingBy sentence length and long words alone this would be B2: 12 words per sentence and 7.8% of words with 9 letters or more (about one in 13), close to the same author’s Mykola Dzheria (15 words, 8.0%), which is B2. What makes it C1 is the 1879 spelling, which changes the commonest words of the language. The conjunction і never appears: it is и, 1,317 times, the second most frequent word after на. Before voiceless consonants з becomes с (430 times: с квіток, с червоними), ї is written і (іі for її 208 times, іх for їх 119, своі, Киів), йо and ьо are ё (ёго 257 times, ёму, слёзи), and мені is always міні (99 times); од stands for від throughout (210 times). Together that is about 3,350 words, roughly one in 16, so nearly every sentence holds a form you must convert in your head before a dictionary helps. As with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, C1 at 7.4% long words because of its Hutsul dialect, the difficulty lies in the forms, not in sentence length. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 52 467
- words
- 12
- words in an average sentence
- 9-15
- hours of reading
- 1879
- Друкарня Товариства імени Шевченка
Друкарня Товариства імени Шевченка, 1879. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Semyhory, a village among the steep hills on the Ros river, south of Kyiv, in the years after serfdom. Omelko Kaidash makes carts and wheels, keeps every fast and drinks hard at the tavern; his wife, who once served at the manor, greets everyone with honeyed words and rules the house with a sharp tongue. Their elder son Karpo, silent and stubborn, marries Motria, the proud daughter of a rich neighbour, Dovbysh, and from the first morning mother-in-law and daughter-in-law fight over the oven, the bread and every chore. The younger son Lavrin, a cheerful joker, meets gentle Melashka from the poorer village of Biievtsi on his way to the mill, and she too learns what life under her mother-in-law means, and how much she misses her own mother. Old Kaidash, meanwhile, wrestles with his drinking and his conscience, and two families now share one small yard. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Reading the 1879 spelling
This passage shows most of the edition’s habits at once: и is the conjunction і, с is з before a voiceless consonant (с квіток, с червоними), іі is її (Вся іі голова, “her whole head”), and there is no apostrophe, so піря is пір’я. Read these as one sound pattern, not as new words, and the description of Motria’s festive dress becomes plain.
Honey first, then wormwood
The paragraph is built on one image: Kaidashykha greets her first daughter-in-law with медовими словами (“honeyed words”) and only later lets her taste полинь, wormwood, the bitter herb of Ukrainian folk speech. With Melashka she starts with the wormwood at once. Note also ій for їй and инакше for інакше: the same і for ї habit as everywhere in this edition.
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 a mother’s boast turns into an idiom: такий слухняний, такий тихий, хоч у вухо бгай, “so obedient, so quiet, you could tuck him in your ear”, says Kaidashykha of her son Karpo.
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not an adaptation: Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky’s complete novella in ten chapters. It was first published in 1879 in the Lviv journal Pravda and the same year as a separate book by the press of the Shevchenko Society in Lviv; the title page signs it with the author’s real surname, Ivan Levytsky. The text comes from Wikisource, which reproduces that 1879 edition, and keeps its spelling: the title reads Кайдашева сімя̀, the conjunction і is и, з is с before voiceless consonants, ї is і, йо is ё, and there is no apostrophe (сімя, пятниця). This is the first version: for the 1887 edition the author rewrote the opening and the ending and dropped old Kaidash’s vision of Saint Paraskeva in the forest, which you will find here. As in other books of its time, the characters use period words for Jews and Roma that are offensive today.
Is there an audiobook?
Kaidash’s Family 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 farm words such as возовиця (“carting the sheaves home from the field”) and колотнеча (“a squabble, a row”, the word for most of the book). Old spellings such as ёго or іх are easier to look up once you read them as його and їх.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most with sayings that make no sense word by word, such as Kaidashykha’s jibe at her daughter-in-law’s baking: Але й хліб спекла, хоч коника ліпи! (“And what bread she’s baked: you could mould a little horse out of it!”, that is, it is raw dough). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
About 9-15 hours at the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker. The ten chapters differ in size: the shortest, VI, has about 3,900 words, the longest, VII, about 7,900; most have 4,400-6,700, so a chapter takes one or two evenings.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even. Chapter averages run from 10.8 words per sentence (V) to 13.5 (I). Chapter I is the slowest start: it opens with long descriptions of the hills of the Kaniv region and of the Kaidash farm before the first dialogue. The old spelling is the same on every page, so it gets easier as your eye learns to read и as і and ёго as його.
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 ten chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for example V. Розділ 5, where Lavrin sets off for the mill and meets Melashka on the road.