Reading Chekhov's Stories in Russian: A Parallel-Text Russian Reader

By Mark R. Pettus

Nine of Chekhov's most powerful and thought-provoking short stories are included here, in the original Russian and in a facing English translation, together with all the vocabulary notes and reference tables you need to make sense of Chekhov's original texts. Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the original without constantly reaching for a dictionary, this parallel-text edition features a new translation made specifically for this purpose, as well as detailed Russian vocabulary notes, including all the important forms you need (especially aspectual pairs and conjugation types for all verbs). The original Russian text is marked for stress, but is otherwise unedited and unsimplified. The short stories included in this volume are: "The Death of a Clerk" (how is a bureaucrat killed by a sneeze?), "The Student" (a moving vignette about both timeless meaning and transient youthful idealism), "A Little Joke" (an innocent joke takes on unimagined proportions - if our narrator is to be believed, that is), "Sleepy" (a servant girl, deprived of sleep, is pushed to the brink of madness), "Rothschild's Fiddle" (a deeply moving tale of intolerance, memory, and reconciliation through music), "Anna Round the Neck" (a young woman is forced to marry an older man for his money - but will she turn the tables?), "Gusyev" (a peasant soldier and an intellectual, representing starkly different perspectives on life, await death in a steamship sickbay), "The Lady with the Little Dog" (a couple finds love, and all of the anguish that sustaining it often entails), and "Ward No. 6." (a harrowing story of a provincial doctor and his patients; this unforgettable work is surely one of the most powerful treatments of madness and medical ethics - indeed, ethics is general - in all of world literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1087942586
• ISBN13: 9781087942582
• Release Date: January 2021
• Publisher: Mark R. Pettus
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Absolutely the best way to read these stories as a russian learner.

Every single book Mark Pettus has written is a must have for any russian learner. His Russian Through Propaganda series (with accompanying YouTube lectures on every single chapter!) is hands down the best way to learn russian available anywhere online. This collection of stories is broken down paragraph by paragraph in a side by side translation with all the interesting vocab explained on the same page... without disrupting the flow of your reading or the story. The format is brilliant. These translations follow his teaching system as well, so continuity is maintained throughout every book. Just buy it and support this man, he should be getting all the Duo Lingo and Babel money...