I. Злодій
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Galician village life in 19 more stories
The Thief and Other Stories Злодій та інші новели
Vasyl Stefanyk, 1942
Nineteen complete stories by Vasyl Stefanyk in the original Ukrainian, first published between 1897 and 1929, not an adaptation. They complement The Stone Cross and Other Stories, the catalogue’s first Stefanyk collection, with no story in common. It is for learners at C1, or strong B2 readers ready for the Pokuttia dialect of western Ukraine, which fills the dialogue and much of the narration. About 19,700 words in 19 chapters, one story each, from about 500 words to about 1,900.
- C1
- 19 712 words
- 3-5 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 the stories are short and the scenes simple, but forms such as шо, меш, як-єс, мнєкий and боїтси stop you in nearly every line of dialogue, and the narration uses some of them too.
B2C1
This text
At C1 it reads with word taps: the same Pokuttia forms come back in every story, and readers of Камінний хрест will know most of them; the longest sentences are in Дід Гриць and Роса, the plainest in Лесева фамілія.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 only rare words of the farm, the church and Austrian rule (ґрейцар, орчик, кременал) still need a tap; the rest reads for Stefanyk’s terse, almost spoken style.
Start readingSentences average 12 words and only 5.0% of the words have 9 letters or more: the same share as The Stone Cross and Other Stories (5.0%, C1) and well below the 7.4% of Тіні забутих предків. What makes it C1 is the dialect of Pokuttia, Stefanyk’s home region. The text writes шо for що 220 times; reflexive verbs end in -си instead of -ся in over 200 forms (боїтси, дивиси, лишилиси), and си stands alone 28 more times; over 200 words write є where standard Ukrainian has я (мнєкий, весілє, взєв, тєжко); 73 times a personal ending sticks to a small word (би-м, шо-м, аби-сте). Short dialect words recur on every page: ци (whether) 30 times, аді (look) 23, дес (somewhere) 21, біг-ме (by God) 18, гет (completely) 16, коби (if only) 15, відай (probably) 13. Dialogue makes up 487 of the 802 paragraphs, so the dialect is rarely out of sight. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 19 712
- words
- 12
- words in an average sentence
- 3-5
- hours of reading
- 1942
- Українське видавництво
Українське видавництво, 1942. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
In the title story a farmer catches a thief in his storeroom at night and brings him down with a log; then he sends for two neighbours, and the three men sit the bleeding thief at the table with vodka, bread and bacon while they talk over what he deserves. The other eighteen stories stay in the villages of Pokuttia between the 1890s and the 1920s: a village council meeting in a room that doubles as a cholera ward, a grandmother on Christmas Eve listening to a letter from her son in the Stanislaviv prison, a wedding brawl that leaves two rich farmers dead and a village that holds its own trial, old men who meet every Sunday at the barber’s, a deaf old friend who hears music again, market women who stage an unlawful meeting for a son jailed over newspapers, a dying man who will not repent of a sin over his land, and Stefanyk’s own memories of the town of Sniatyn. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Злодій та інші новели
X. Лист
„ , , . , . ! . , , , , , , . , . , , . , .
Choose an underlined word.
Person endings on small words
Pokuttia speech often hangs the person on a short word instead of the verb: як-єс ліз means як ти ліз (when you climbed), би-с дух спустив is ти б дух спустив (you would give up the ghost). Меш is the local short form of будеш, so як меш бити is як будеш бити (when you beat me).
Carols and endings in a prison letter
Колєда, колідувати and заколідуют are the dialect forms of коляда, колядувати and заколядують: carols and carolling. Third-person verbs drop the soft sign (поведут, наслухают for поведуть, наслухають), and the instrumental ends in -ов, so із скрипков is зі скрипкою (with a fiddle).
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
The beaten thief answers the farmer in a line that whole-sentence translation in Reader makes clear: “Нашо, аби гірше боліло, як меш бити, кров то є сама біль” (“What for, so that it hurts more when you beat me? Blood is the pain itself”).
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Ukrainian books B2 Earlier The Stone Cross and Other Stories Камінний хрест та інші новели Another book by the same author C1
All books at this level
Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
Yes, every story is complete and in the original Ukrainian, but the selection of 19 stories and their order are the catalogue’s own: Stefanyk never published them together under this title. It complements The Stone Cross and Other Stories, with no story in common, and keeps only stories first published by 1929. The earliest, Лист, У корчмі and Побожна, appeared in 1897 in the Chernivtsi newspaper “Праця” (Labour); Злодій first appeared in the collection Дорога (1901); the latest, Дурні баби, in the Lviv journal “Проти хвиль” in 1929. The text comes from his Works (Твори, Українське видавництво, Lviv, 1942) on Wikisource and keeps that edition’s spelling, with the author’s dialect forms, older endings such as крови and смерти (today крові and смерті) and Galician spellings such as кляса and парлямент. Some stories use a period word for Jews that is offensive today; it is left as written.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no audiobook on MovaReader: the stories are read on screen. Tap a word to see its translation; you will need it most for dialect words such as відай (probably) or ґрейцар (a small Austrian coin).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most where the dialect bends the grammar, as when deaf old Hryts says: “Мука бути глухому, слова в’єнут на язиці” (“It is torture to be deaf, words wither on your tongue”). 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 word translation, slower than a native speaker. The stories are uneven: Злодій and Засідання run to about 1,900 words each and Суд to about 1,700, while Межа has about 500 and Скін, Роса and Слава-Йсу about 600, so every story fits into one sitting.
Where does the text get easier?
Each story stands alone, so the difficulty jumps rather than rises. The plainest sentences are in Лесева фамілія (about 8.5 words per sentence), Побожна and Осінь (about 10); the longest in Дід Гриць and Роса (about 18), then Вістуни and Лист (about 17). Long words stay between 3% and 7% in every story but the last, Слава-Йсу, a memoir in more educated language with 11.7% long words and less dialect. Лесева фамілія or Побожна is a gentle way in.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your place and the words you opened. Any of the 19 stories opens from the contents on this page, for example X. Лист, the Christmas Eve letter from prison.