I. Розділ 1
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A runaway serf seeks freedom by the sea (B2)
Mykola Dzheria Микола Джеря
Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky, 1926
Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky’s complete novella in Ukrainian, first published in 1878, not an adaptation; the title is the name of its hero, a serf who runs away from his master. It is for B2 learners who want a classic of Ukrainian village life and of the hunger for freedom under serfdom, told at a slow, pictorial pace. About 36,600 words in eight chapters, 15 words per sentence on average.
- B2
- 36 553 words
- 6-10 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the sentences of 15 words on average, longest in the landscape pages of chapters I and VI, will be slow going, and forms like од for від, прокинувсь for прокинувся or читать for читати take getting used to.
B1B2
This text
At B2 you can read it: almost half of the paragraphs are dialogue lines, the vocabulary is the concrete language of the village and of work, and the long descriptions give way to word-by-word translation.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the novella reads freely; only the words of serf labour and of the fisheries (панщина, осавула, забродська ватага) and the 1920s spellings make you stop.
Start readingThe average sentence has 15 words, as long as in Ivan Franko’s Boa constrictor (14.9) and Zakhar Berkut (15.1), among the longest sentences in the Ukrainian catalogue. But only 8.0% of words have 9 letters or more, about one in twelve, against 10.0% and 10.4% in those two C1 books; that is close to Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s B2 novella Dorohoiu tsinoiu (8.8%). The length comes from unhurried descriptions of the village, the fields and the estuary, plain words strung together with та, й and а, not from abstract vocabulary, and there is no dense dialect. The 1926 Knyhospilka edition keeps the author’s older forms: од appears 135 times against 2 for від, there are 81 short verb forms like прокинувсь (for прокинувся), and particles are hyphenated, as in вже-ж or Що-ж (106 times). Dialogue lines in „…“ quotation marks make up 445 of 965 paragraphs. Hence B2. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 36 553
- words
- 15
- words in an average sentence
- 6-10
- hours of reading
- 1926
- Книгоспілка
Книгоспілка, 1926. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Verbivka, a village on the Rastavytsia river in the Vasylkiv district south of Kyiv, in the last decades of serfdom. Mykola Dzheria, a handsome young serf who can read and sings in church, falls for Nymydora, a poor orphan working as a hired girl, although his mother has a richer bride in mind. They marry, but the landlord Bzhozovsky squeezes the village with ever more days of unpaid labour, and his overseer drives the people like cattle. Mykola answers back, the master threatens to send him to the army, and one night Mykola leaves his wife and little daughter and runs away with a group of men. As бурлаки, drifting workers without papers, they toil at sugar refineries, live through an epidemic in the barracks and reach the Dniester estuary in Bessarabia, where an official, for a bribe, registers them under the names of men long dead. Mykola joins a fishing gang on the estuary, but his thoughts keep going back home. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Микола Джеря
V. Розділ 5
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Choose an underlined word.
Present tense for a landscape
The novella opens in the present tense: тече, зеленіють, блищить, виринають. Nechuy-Levytsky paints Verbivka as if you stood in front of it, and switches to the past once the story starts. Note the verbs of colour: зеленіють (“show green”) and чорніють (“show black”) are made from colour adjectives, a pattern you will meet on almost every page.
Old forms: год, од, пашпорт
Сто год means сто років (“a hundred years”): год is an old, colloquial genitive plural of рік. Од is the old form of від (“from, than”), so старший од Миколи is “older than Mykola”; the novella has од 135 times and від only twice. Пашпорти is the old form of паспорти (“passports”).
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
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In the dialogue, translating the whole sentence in Reader catches the idiom, as in то хоч давай драла назад у Вербівку робить панщину (“then we might as well run back to Verbivka and do serf labour”).
ReaderIf this book is not the one
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not an adaptation: Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky’s complete novella in eight chapters, ending with the author’s date line, 1. I. 1876. It first appeared in 1878 in the Lviv journal Pravda, because the censorship in the Russian Empire would not let it be printed there. The text comes from Wikisource, which reproduces the 1926 Knyhospilka edition (Kyiv, edited by Andriy Nikovsky), and it keeps that edition’s spelling: dialogue in „…“ quotation marks, hyphenated particles such as вже-ж and чом-же, ночи for ночі, and the author’s од for від.
Is there an audiobook?
Mykola Dzheria 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 the words of serf life, such as панщина (“unpaid labour owed to the landlord”) and осавула (“the landlord’s overseer”), and later for the fisheries: забродська ватага (“a fishing gang”) and неводи (“seine nets”).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most with turns of speech that make no sense word by word, such as Не здобра стали бурлакувать (“It was not a good life that made us drifters”). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
About 6-10 hours, at the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker. The eight chapters differ in size: the shortest, III and VII, have about 2,800 words each, the longest, I, about 6,200, so a long chapter takes two evenings.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even, with no easy or hard stretch. Chapter averages run from 13.7 words per sentence (VII) to 16.3 (VI). Chapter II, with much village dialogue, has the fewest long words (6.4%); chapter V, the arrival in Bessarabia and the fisheries, has the most (9.2%). The first pages of chapter I are long landscape descriptions, so the start feels slower than the story that follows.
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 eight chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for example V. Розділ 5, where the runaways cross the Dniester estuary into Bessarabia.