I’ve purchased several of the readers from Boost Your Russian including this story by Chekhov. The reader is high quality with useful translations. Very enjoyable to read. Learning a language is hard, but these readers make it a bit easier. Highly recommend.

I’m an intermediate Russian learner. I loved being able to read a classic Russian story in the original with the translation close by. My only recommendation would be to have the English and Russian text formatted in two columns rather than one after the other. That said the content was very helpful and I would recommend this book for intermediate learners.

I love the short version of this book and her other books and stories, especially the slow and normal reading by Kristina. I am always invited to keep reading/listening, with the help of handy translations. They are perfect for my level. Enough of a stretch, yet not beyond my grasp.

This book is still in my playlist, I enjoy listening and reading it on a regular basis. I think you’ve done a great job. It’s very useful. There were quite a few words I didn’t understand at first and it was a bit difficult to get through the book but the purpose of this purchase was also to have something I could go through for a long period of time. Now I understand most of it but it’s still very useful to re-read it from time to time. I recommend 100%. This was (is) a great help!

I found the accompanying sound files very helpful. The slow version was great for improving my pronunciation. I paused the recording after each sentence and repeated aloud. In the beginning this would have been tough to do with the normal version. This combined with the accent signs in the book makes the book a valuable resource for improving pronunciation and listening skills. The only improvement I can suggest is that it would be nice to have somewhat more control questions at the end of each chapter.

I found this book easy to read as it is a good match for my level of Russian. It taught me some new vocabulary which I plan to memorize by listening to Kristina read the text many more times. The combination of text & audio works well, as it is important to train the eye to recognize words and the ear to pronounce them and recognize the sound of proper grammatical phrases. The book tells a good story, even if the ending is somewhat non-conclusive.

I have already read four of these books and this one is my favorite. This one and Jane Eyre. They both suit my level and interest. I studied it first hearing it and with the help of the book and now I just try to hear it and try to remember some phrases before going to bed. It is really good to have both text and voice.

I bought a lot of books from Kristina. This one is the one I liked the most from her selection. It addresses the eternal topic of relationship between man and woman and how love emerges from opportunity and attraction. Instead of the other books I read all episodes in one row even though I sometimes struggled with the vocab. My #1 from a pure learning point of view, I can highly recommend her 500 phrases series. Perfect to train listening on a long road trip at the autobahn. And also very useful as a translation trainer from English to Russian. Read the right column, translate it into Russian and then look up on the left side if you were right or wrong.

I liked this book very much. My Russian level is not very high but I found this book to be the perfect level for me. One thing I liked was the explanations defined phrases and not just individual words like other books. This helped put the world into context, very helpful for learning Russian. I’d recommend this book to other learners.

I had tried a dual language version of the book but it was too tough. That is what makes these books so awesome. You can be introduced to Russian stories at an elementary level so you do not have to wait 20 years to read them. It was a perfectly distilled version of the story that everyone should be able to read.