The Meek One. A Fantastic Story. Fyodor Dostoevsky. an Annotated Russian Reader

Julia Titus, ed. The Meek One. A Fantastic Story. Fyodor Dostoevsky. An Annotated Russian Reader. Illustrations by Kristen Robinson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011. xv, 154 pp. $20.00, paper.The Meek One is a Russian reader geared towards intermediate and advanced learners of Russian. Key features of this reader include author's suggestions on how to use the book; cultural, historical and linguistic commentary in English necessary to comprehend the text; vocabulary exercises; oral and written assignments; vocabulary quizzes, and an answer key. The reader has extensive annotation of texts and glosses in the margins, which should enhance the reading process and make it more enjoyable. The glosses provide translation as well as some grammatical information (for example, aspect, case governance).The beginning of the reader provides students a brief biography of Fedor Dostoevskii, the origin of the plot, and the work's main ideas as well as notes on the main characters. The story itself is eighty-four pages long divided into ten chapters. Each paragraph is numbered; the entire text and exercises have stresses. Double-spacing of the text makes it easy to read and allows the student space to write notes in-between lines. Several illustrations accompany the text and can be used as interpretive preor post-reading activities.The chapters are followed by a section Review and which offers comprehension questions (called Questions for Discussion), work with vocabulary (Active Vocabulary), and a section with oral and written exercises geared towards the practice of the active vocabulary. As a guide for comprehension the author asks students to read questions for discussion prior to reading the text. I would suggest that students study the active vocabulary section prior to reading the corresponding chapter.The Vocabulary covers different parts of speech. Verbs are presented with information with regard to their aspectual pair and consonant alternations in the paradigm. However, the visual manner in which the verbs, their explanations, and conjugations are presented creates an impression that learners are responsible for pages of new vocabulary. Since it is a bit difficult to navigate the vocabulary pages, learners should be encouraged to highlight the verbs to make them stand out from the list. Psychologically such a device might help learners see and memorize new words more readily, rather than diving into what feels like an ocean of unknown lexicon.New vocabulary can be practised via meaningful fill-in-the-blanks exercises. However, the words to be reviewed appear in the same order in which they are listed in the Vocabulary, making some exercises easy to complete-even without learning the words-by simply going down the list of new vocabulary and filling it in into the blanks.Next, students can study word morphology (roots and semantic nests of words) and take a vocabulary quiz. However, it might be more beneficial to cover the morphology section both before studying the main Active vocabulary list and reading each chapter, so students can draw a connection between old and new knowledge prior to seeing new words in context. This is something that the author fails to explain in the preface on how to use the reader, but something that a teacher would need to focus students' attention on: students need pre-reading exercises which are missing from the reader.The Exercises section ends with Other Activities that consist of oral and written exercises, which are unfortunately repetitive and monotonous. …

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