Do the Oxen Low When the Manger Is Full? Хіба ревуть воли, як ясла повні?

An adaptation, not the original text. It is MovaReader’s own retelling in simple modern Ukrainian of Хіба ревуть воли, як ясла повні?, the novel Panas Myrnyi wrote together with his brother Ivan Bilyk (Ivan Rudchenko). It was first published in 1880 in Geneva, because printing books in Ukrainian was banned in the Russian Empire at the time; the plot here follows that 1880 Geneva edition as it appears on Wikisource, which keeps the edition’s own Drahomanov spelling with the letter ј. The language has changed completely: the novel’s 30 chapters, well over 100,000 words, become 12 short chapters of about 5,900 words, so roughly a twentieth of the original. The long landscape passages are gone, the history of the village and of Maksym Hudz shrinks to one chapter, the court and zemstvo scenes are condensed, and the period’s ethnic slurs in the tavern scenes are left out. The main line and its order stay: Motria and the stranger from the Don, Chipka’s childhood, old Ulas, Hrytsko and Khrystia, the lost field, the gang, Halia and the years after the abolition of serfdom. The complete novel is not in the catalogue.

No, there is no audio version of this book on MovaReader; the text is read on screen. Tap an unfamiliar word and its translation appears: here that will mostly be words of the serf era, such as волость (the rural district office where the village authorities sat) or рекрути (army recruits, as in віддати в рекрути, to send a man into the army).

Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. Most sentences are short enough to read word by word, so you will need it mainly where simple words carry a double meaning, as in the old shepherd’s Кому воля, а кому неволя, “freedom for some, bondage for others”, or the book’s title, a proverb meaning that people do not protest when they are well fed. Without the plan you can translate single words until the daily limit runs out.

One to two hours for the whole book, at a learner’s pace with translation of new words, not a native speaker’s. The 12 chapters run from about 400 words (chapter VI, the history of the village) to about 620 (chapter XII), so each one fits into a short sitting.

The difficulty is even from start to finish: every chapter averages between 10.4 and 11.4 words per sentence. Chapter V, “Кому воля, а кому неволя”, about the coming end of serfdom, is the densest at 11.4; chapter XII, with more short replies, is the lightest at 10.4. Chapter VI, the history of Pisky, has the most long words, because it is full of terms like кріпаками and панщину.

Yes. After you sign in, the reader remembers where you stopped and which words you opened. The contents on this page also open any of the 12 chapters directly, for example chapter IV, “Дід Улас” (Old Ulas).