The Journey of the Learned Doctor Leonardo Подорож ученого доктора Леонардо

It is the original, not a learner’s version: the complete novel in both its books, with all 29 chapters and the epilogue, as first printed in the Kharkiv almanac «Літературний ярмарок» (book 1, 1928) and transcribed on Wikisource. The text keeps that printing’s spelling, the Kharkiv orthography of the late 1920s: подорожи for today’s подорожі, любови for любові, радости for радості, инший for інший, одповів for відповів, ініціялів for ініціалів. The verse passages are Yohansen’s own and stay. The narrator jokes frankly about sex and venereal disease, and a few characters use crude words of the period, including an ethnic slur the tree-planter applies to himself; the text is left as the author wrote it.

There is no audiobook on MovaReader: the novel is read on screen. Tap a word to see its translation; you will need it from the first page for words such as нетеча (“a backwater, a dead arm of a river”) or древонасадець (“tree-planter”, the narrator’s name for the former woodcutter who takes the travellers in).

Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps where the narrator twists a sentence around his own fiction, for example after he dismisses the old woman he invented: “Баби не було, як не було й розмови про овес” (“There was no old woman, just as there was no talk about oats”). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.

The whole novel takes about 3 to 4 hours at the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. Book One has about 5,100 words in 12 short chapters, from about 90 words (chapter XI, a poem) to about 760 (chapter I). Book Two has about 10,600 words in 17 chapters; the longest is chapter XV with about 1,300 words. Chapter XVII of Book Two is only one line long and shares its place in the contents with the epilogue.

It does not get steadily easier; it changes from chapter to chapter. The densest are chapter I of Book Two (about 35 words per sentence), chapter IV of Book Two and chapter II of Book One (about 32 each), where Leonardo or the narrator reasons at length. Chapters with more dialogue are lighter: chapter III of Book One (16), chapter V of Book Two (15) and chapter X of Book Two (14). The average for the whole novel is 21 words per sentence.

Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened. Any chapter also opens from the contents on this page, for example the portrait of the tree-planter in “V. Книга друга: розділ 5”.