I. Розділ 1
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A 1920s sanatorium novella for C1
The Tale of the Sanatorium Zone Повість про санаторійну зону
Mykola Khvylovy, 1928
Mykola Khvylovy’s complete novella in Ukrainian, first published in 1924, not an adaptation, in the text of the 1928 Kharkiv edition. For advanced learners (C1) who want to meet Ukrainian modernism of the 1920s at its most experimental: a sanatorium full of burnt-out revolutionaries, seen through a patient’s diary and a third-person story. About 34,800 words in a prologue and twenty chapters, about 6 to 10 hours of reading.
- C1
- 34 776 words
- 6-10 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 the dialogue scenes are manageable, but the 1928 spelling (инший, иноді, хорий), the sanatorium and party vocabulary (лежанка, губздрав, плебеї) and the long lyrical landscapes, full of the author’s own coinages, will stop you on almost every page.
B2C1
This text
At C1 it reads over a week or two, a chapter per sitting: the quarrels between the cots move fast, while the landscapes that open the chapters and the anarch’s inner monologues are worth taking slowly.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 the language sets no obstacles; what remains is the method: the voices of the diary and the narrator overlapping, the refrains that keep returning (“санаторійна зона”, “командна висота”) and the irony hidden in them.
Start readingAbout one word in nine has 9 letters or more (11.2%), level with Khvylovy’s I (Romanticism) (11.1%) and A Sentimental Story (11.0%) and far above Kotsiubynsky’s Fata Morgana (6.4%). Sentences average 11 words, but 494 of the 1,079 paragraphs are dialogue lines, so the narrated passages are longer and denser than the average suggests, and they are lyrical: Khvylovy builds his own words and images, such as тиховійна жура (a softly wafting sorrow) or присмерковий час (the twilight hour). The 1928 edition keeps the spelling of its time: инший and инакше for інший and інакше (59 times), иноді for іноді (19), відповідальности, матеріял, спеціяльно. Older words return all the time: хорий for хворий (“sick”, 62 times; хворий never appears), мисль for думка (40), єсть for є (19), завше for завжди (13). Add the sanatorium routine (лежанка, the rest hour on cots; койка; палата; ординатор) and the politics of the 1920s (плебеї, махаївщина, губздрав). Every chapter has between 8.7% and 13.7% long words. Hence C1. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 34 776
- words
- 11
- words in an average sentence
- 6-10
- hours of reading
- 1928
- Державне видавництво України
Державне видавництво України, 1928. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Summer in a sanatorium zone on the edge of a provincial town: a river, apple trees, an experimental farm and, beyond the fields, the town prison. The patients lie on their cots through the prescribed rest hours, gossip, quarrel over cards and “twist the button”, the local slang for a holiday romance. At the centre are the “anarch”, a huge, shaggy former revolutionary whom the beautiful, mocking Maya nicknames Savonarola; Khlonia, a nervous young man who writes pathetic stories and reads them to the anarch in secret; and the gentle nurse Katria. One day a small, arrogant typesetter named Karno turns up with a bundle and declares that he will stay, by revolutionary means if necessary. Nobody knows who he is, the whole zone talks about him, and the anarch grows convinced that Karno is watching his every step. As summer turns into a rainy autumn, the anarch can hardly tell phantoms from reality any more. A patient’s diary opens the story and frames it. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Повість про санаторійну зону
X. Розділ 10
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Choose an underlined word.
Khvylovy’s own words
Тиховійна is not in the dictionary: Khvylovy built it from тихо (“quietly”) and віяти (“to blow, to waft”), so тиховійна жура is “a softly wafting sorrow”; жура is a poetic form of журба. Присмерковий comes from присмерк (“dusk”). Look for the root inside such words. Саєта (“arrow”) is a rare borrowing from Spanish saeta.
The spelling of 1928
Иноді is today’s іноді (“sometimes”) and Иншої is іншої (“other”): the 1928 spelling wrote и at the start of these words, as in инший and инакше (59 times in the novella). Note also хорий (“sick”), used 62 times where today’s Ukrainian says хворий, and the split of the patients into плебеї (“plebeians”, the workers) and інтелігенція.
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
Khvylovy’s narration slips between the real and the imagined, and that is where whole-sentence translation in Reader helps most, for example “Моменти фантастики так переплутались із дійсністю, що він иноді буквально не міг відрізнити примари від реальної речи” (“Moments of fantasy had become so tangled with reality that at times he literally could not tell a phantom from a real thing”).
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not a learner’s version: Mykola Khvylovy’s complete novella, first published in 1924, with its prologue and all twenty chapters. The text follows volume II of Khvylovy’s Works (Державне видавництво України, Kharkiv, 1928) as transcribed on Wikisource, so the spelling is that edition’s: инший for today’s інший, иноді for іноді, відповідальности for відповідальності, матеріял for матеріал, and older words such as хорий for хворий.
Is there an audiobook?
The Tale of the Sanatorium Zone has no audiobook on MovaReader: the novella is read on screen. Tap a word to see its translation; you will need it from the first pages for words such as лежанка (here the rest hour that patients spend on their cots, not a stove bench) or метранпаж (a typesetter, from French metteur en pages).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps in the anarch’s daydreams, for example “Він бачив, як у небі росла хрустальна фортеця з неможливо синім фасадом” (“He saw a crystal fortress with an impossibly blue façade growing in the sky”). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole novella takes about 6 to 10 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. Most chapters have about 1,300 to 2,400 words, so one chapter makes a sitting; chapter VIII is the longest (about 2,400 words), while the prologue (about 800) and the closing diary entry, chapter XX (under 400), are the shortest.
Where does the text get easier?
It is fairly even. In chapters I to XIX sentences average about 9 to 12 words, except chapter II (about 14); the prologue and the closing diary entry (chapter XX) run in long, breathless sentences. Long words are densest in chapters I, VII, X and XV (13% to 14%) and thinnest in chapters V, VI, VIII and XVII to XIX (under 10%), so the last stretch reads a little faster.
Will my place in the book be saved?
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 chapter XI (XI. Розділ 11).