Russian books difficulty ranking for learners

Below you can see our list of Russian books evaluated for difficulty. The scores range from 1 - 100, and the higher the score the higher the difficulty. Click on any column to sort, or click on the title of any text to open a more detailed analysis. You can also use the menu on the top to navigate to our other rankings. If you want to know more about what these criteria mean, scroll down. There is also a short Russian texts difficulty index available.

How to use this ranking

The ranking above provides you with a rough analysis of the grammatical, vocabulary and overall difficulty of the works, and it also includes the links to find out more, or even to read the work. It works as follows:

• title is not only the official name of the work, but also, by clicking on it, you can open a more detailed analysis;
• author, length are also pretty self-explanatory;
• grammar score is a score computed by calculating and combining various indexes (ARI, CLI, MTLD, HDD, Yule's I - you can find out more about them by clicking through to the more detailed analysis part on any of the titles);
• vocabulary score is a score based on the frequency of use of words in the text (much more analysis on it is also provided if you click through to the more-detailed analysis);
• overall score is just a grammar and vocabulary score averaged out, although sometimes these scores are also weighed and adjusted for specific kinds of literature (most prominently - for poetry);
• detailed analysis is a link to a special page with a much more detailed analysis, which we have compiled for each work;
• the 'read' link is a link to read the work in its entirety on the website (we provide such links when that is legally and technically possible);
• the 'Interlinear' link is a link to an Interlinear (or 'subtitled') version of this work when the original text has a translation below each word or expression (such a link exists only if an Interlinear text is available).

Please also have in mind that the list provided on this page is language-specific, and still experimental - thus its results might not be comparable with any results in any other of our languages (and perhaps not even with the short texts list. We might quite likely come up with more precise lists in the future as we improve our methods - but hopefully this one still give you an indication about what literature to choose.

Other resources and languages

First, you should have a look at out our other page with Russian short stories or poetry instead of books.

Then we suggest you also check out our literature discovery tool in languages other than Russian. You can do so here:

French German Lithuanian Portuguese Spanish Swedish

And finally, if you are interested in languages and literature - please take a look at our project Interlinear Books. We have a mission to bring literature to language learning, and we have been largely using Interlinear translations to do that - you can find books to purchase and short free Interlinear texts on our site. You can even find a Russian Interlinear book up for sale on our site.