III. Хрещатик уночі
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A village boy against 1920s Kyiv, at B1
The City Місто
Valerian Pidmohylny
This is a retelling of Valerian Pidmohylny’s novel in simple modern Ukrainian, not the original: a MovaReader adaptation for readers who handle everyday Ukrainian and want a story of a young man from the village who sets out to conquer the big city. In the catalogue it is B1: about 6,800 words in 14 chapters, with 11 words per sentence on average. The City (Місто, 1928) is often called the first Ukrainian urban novel, a portrait of Kyiv in the years of the New Economic Policy and Ukrainisation; the complete novel is also in the catalogue, at C1.
- B1
- 6 752 words
- 1-2 hours
Will this text hold?
A2
Earlier
At A2 you will tap often: the plot is clear, but most sentences join two clauses, nearly all speech is reported with що or чи, and words of 1920s life (червінець, френч, візник, сільбуд) need a translation.
A2B1
This text
At B1 it reads well if you are at home with the past tense and with reported speech: each chapter is two or three scenes of city life, and Kyiv’s places, Хрещатик, Поділ and the Dnipro, keep coming back.
Check this passageB2
With room to spare
At B2 it is a quick read and a bridge to the complete novel in the catalogue (C1, about 79,600 words), with Pidmohylny’s long ironic sentences, his philosophy of the city and the spelling of the 1929 edition.
Start readingThe average sentence has 11 words, one fewer than the catalogue’s B1 adaptations of Franko’s Boryslav Laughs and Crossed Paths (12 each), and 6.1% of the words have 9 letters or more, close to Boryslav Laughs at B1 (6.0%). The complete City has 13 words per sentence and the old spelling of the 1929 edition (соціяльний, лямпа); here the language is standard modern Ukrainian, and the narrator’s long ironic digressions are cut down to the events. One thing to expect: almost all speech is reported rather than quoted (only about 2% of the words stand in dialogue lines), so you will read many sentences of the type сказав, що… or спитав, чи…, a pattern worth practising at this level. The rest of the vocabulary belongs to 1920s Kyiv: червінець (a banknote of the time), френч (a soldier’s jacket), візник (a cab driver), сільбуд (the village club and reading room), and the places Хрещатик, Поділ and Липки. Sentences stay between about 10 and 13 words in every chapter. Hence B1. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 6 752
- words
- 11
- words in an average sentence
- 1-2
- hours of reading
MovaReader. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
In the 1920s Stepan Radchenko, twenty-five, an orphan, a former insurgent and a village activist, arrives in Kyiv by Dnipro steamer to study economics. On the boat he falls for Nadiika, a quiet girl from his own village who is also going to study. The fishmonger Hnidy lodges him in a shed next to the cows, then gives him the kitchen and his meals in return for work; soon Hnidy’s wife, Tamara Vasylivna, whom Stepan calls «мусінька», becomes his secret lover, and her son Maksym is not blind. Stepan passes his exams with ease, but a literary evening and a proud critic who will not hear him out give him a new goal: to become a writer. He renames himself Stefan, burns his village clothes for a city suit, teaches Ukrainian to office workers, drifts away from Nadiika and meets the capricious Zoska at a charity lottery in the opera house. With the help of the poet Vyhorsky his stories reach the journals, and the city begins to give him money, a name and a place among writers. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Місто
IX. Новий костюм
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Choose an underlined word.
Read the lists as one picture
The passage moves in lists: four verbs in a row (горіли, дзвонили, гули, кричали), then a string of people. You do not need every word; read each list as one picture of the noisy street and tap only what stops you. Note тік людський потік: the verb and the noun share a root, “the human stream streamed past”.
A shopping list in the accusative
After купив (bought) the clothes stand in the accusative, but most of them look like the dictionary form because they are inanimate: сіре кепі, гостроносі черевики, калоші. Крамниця is the word for a shop in the book; магазин is just as common today. Мусінька, the landlady’s pet name, is written with a small letter, as in the novel.
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, MovaReader translates the whole sentence where single words mislead, as in Levko’s rule of life Хто не їсть, той не робить, “Who does not eat does not work”: a joke that turns round the Soviet slogan “He who does not work shall not eat”.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
An adaptation, not the original text. It is MovaReader’s own retelling in simple modern Ukrainian of Valerian Pidmohylny’s novel Місто (The City), first published in 1928 by Knyhospilka. The plot follows the second edition of 1929 on Wikisource, the same text as the complete novel in this catalogue at C1. What changed: about 79,600 words in two parts of 14 chapters each shrink to about 6,800 in 14 chapters; the narrator’s long reflections, the beer-hall talks with the poet Vyhorsky and the literary politics are cut to a few lines; most dialogue is turned into reported speech; and the 1929 spelling is replaced by standard modern Ukrainian. The main characters and events keep their order, to the last chapter. The love scenes are told briefly and without detail, and one scene of sexual violence (chapter VI) is stated in a single sentence.
Is there an audiobook?
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 often be words of 1920s life, such as червінець (a banknote of the time) or сільбуд (the village club and reading room where Stepan kept the library), and city words like візник (a cab driver).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. Most sentences can be read word by word, so you will want it mostly for Stepan’s little maxims, such as Те, чого прагнеш, обманює тебе, а те, чого не чекаєш, приходить саме, “What you strive for deceives you, and what you do not expect comes by itself”, from chapter VII. Without the plan you can still tap single words.
How many hours does it take?
One to two hours for the whole book, at a learner’s pace with translation of new words, not a native speaker’s. The 14 chapters run from about 410 words (chapter VII, «Мусінька») to about 680 (chapter I, «Пароплав»), so each one fits into a short sitting.
Where does the text get easier?
It is fairly even. Sentences stay at about 10-13 words in every chapter, from 10.3 in chapter V to 12.6 in chapter IX. Long words vary more: chapter V, «Бритва», with the literary evening and the critic, has the most (about 8.3% against 6.1% overall), while chapter VIII, «Ляпас», has the fewest (about 4.1%).
Will my place in the book be saved?
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 14 chapters directly, for example chapter X, «Зоська».