V. Розділ 5
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Kyiv schoolboys walk to a harvest village
The Tin Ring Олив'яний перстень
Stepan Vasylchenko, 1929
Stepan Vasylchenko’s complete novella for young readers in Ukrainian, first published in 1927, not an adaptation; the title means “The Tin Ring”. It is for B2 learners who want a warm, funny summer story about city schoolboys in a Ukrainian village of the 1920s. About 18,600 words in 16 chapters, 10 words per sentence on average.
- B2
- 18 590 words
- 3-5 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the many short dialogue lines will carry you, but the harvest vocabulary and the 1929 spelling (од for від, як-же, инший) take getting used to.
B1B2
This text
At B2 you can read it: almost half of the paragraphs are dialogue, and the descriptions of the steppe and the harvest give way to word-by-word translation.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the novella reads freely; only the farm words and the Soviet terms of the 1920s make you stop.
Start readingThe average sentence has 10 words, and 9.3% of words have 9 letters or more, about one in eleven. That puts the novella next to Borys Hrinchenko’s The Exam and Other Stories (10 words, 9.1%) and below the C1 books of this catalogue such as Mykola Khvylovy’s A Sentimental Story (11 words, 11.0%). The language is standard Central Ukrainian with Poltava village speech in the dialogue (єй-бо, мо’ for може), and no dialect as dense as the Hutsul speech of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The 1929 Kharkiv edition keeps the spelling of its day: од appears 49 times against a single від, инший 10 times instead of інший, and particles take a hyphen (як-же, було-б: 110 times). Dialogue lines make up almost half of the paragraphs (529 of 1,122), and the densest chapters are the last two, at 10.5 and 12.3 words per sentence. Hence B2. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 18 590
- words
- 10
- words in an average sentence
- 3-5
- hours of reading
- 1929
- Державне видавництво України
Державне видавництво України, 1929. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Kyiv in the 1920s, a hot summer holiday. Three schoolboys decide to walk some two hundred versts to visit their classmates Vasyl and Nastia Bondar in the village of Lypovyi Kut in the Poltava region: Valia Lishchyna, the self-important editor of the school wall newspaper; Vitia Baranovsky, a tram worker’s son who can fix anything; and Kost Yasinsky, a refugee from the Kholm region who writes verse. Kost has his own reason to go: at school he asked Nastia to let him wear her tin ring, and she laughed and told him to earn it. After a night under a windmill and another on the straw of a village school, they find the Bondars in the middle of the harvest, and Nastia’s widowed mother puts the city boys to work tying sheaves. They puzzle over a wooden mortar, help a poor widow bring in her rye together with Sonia, a young pioneer, and hire themselves out to the villagers, while Vitia, after too much drink at a harvest feast, turns out to be Kost’s rival. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Олив'яний перстень
X. Розділ 10
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Choose an underlined word.
Mother in the plural
In Мати будити не звеліли (“Mother said not to wake you”) the verb is plural although мати is one person: in village speech parents are spoken of in the plural out of respect. The note ends with a sentence that has no verb at all, the key in the mortar: Ukrainian drops “is” in the present, and the dash stands in for it. А морока його знає is a mild “goodness knows”.
Read од- as від-
This edition writes од- where modern Ukrainian has від-: одбирає is відбирає (“picks out, sorts”), and the novella has about 65 such words besides 49 separate од. In листу не видно (“you can’t see the leaves”) the thing not seen goes into the genitive, and лист here is the old collective “foliage”, not “a letter”.
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 Дечого багато забудуть мандрівники з тієї мандрівки, та, мабуть, довго не забудуть того хліба, вітром обвіяного, сонцем присмаленого, що хрумав на зубах, як пряник (“The travellers will forget much of that journey, but they will long remember that bread, blown by the wind and browned by the sun, that crunched in their teeth like a honey cake”).
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Ukrainian books B1 Earlier Peasant Arithmetic and Other Stories Мужицька арихметика та інші оповідання Another book by the same author B2
All books at this level
Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not an adaptation: Stepan Vasylchenko’s complete novella for young readers. It first appeared in 1927. The text comes from Wikisource, which reproduces volume 4 of Vasylchenko’s Complete Works (Повна збірка творів), published by the State Publishing House of Ukraine in Kharkiv in 1929, and it keeps that edition’s spelling: од for від, инший for інший, як-же and було-б with a hyphen, Київі for Києві. The edition numbers its parts from I to XVII but skips XI, so the contents show 16 chapters; the text runs on without a gap. One joke told in the harvest field mocks a Russian soldier’s speech with a period nickname.
Is there an audiobook?
The Tin Ring 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 harvest words: перевесло (“a straw band for tying a sheaf”), полукіпки (“small stacks of sheaves”) and ступа (“a wooden mortar for husking grain”), which puzzles the Kyiv boys as much as it may puzzle you.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most in the long descriptions, such as Широкі улиці великого міста, що раніш по них плавом плив усякий люд, тепер спорожніли (“The wide streets of the big city, where crowds of every kind used to stream along, were empty now”). 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 chapters vary a lot in size: the shortest, XIV, has about 230 words, the longest, X, about 3,400, and most have between 750 and 2,000, so one or two chapters make an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is fairly even. Chapter V, where the boys hunt for a key, is the easiest, at 7.2 words per sentence; most chapters sit between 8.5 and 10.5. It gets harder at the end: chapter XVI has the most long words (11.5%), and XVII the longest sentences (12.3 words).
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 16 chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for example VI. Розділ 6, the boys’ first day of tying sheaves in the harvest field.