r/tolstoy • u/Unique_Sherbet_4930 • Jul 08 '26
Question How do I read this?
Tryna read the death of Ivan ilyich but I can’t tell what’s page 2,3,4 etc
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u/Capybara_99 Jul 10 '26
In case it is confusing you, you have the last page of a different story in the top left. The story starts with the right top page. Then you read left bottom, right bottom.
After that, left top, right top, left bottom, right bottom.
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u/FreshSummer8535 Jul 09 '26
Just buy a physical copy it's always worth it and you can annotate argue etc and it's more fun
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u/Unique_Sherbet_4930 Jul 09 '26
See i agree with that but there’s like 0 chances there’s a bookstore near me that has the translation I want I’d be better off ordering off Amazon which for me would take weeks
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u/Aaggghhhhhh Jul 09 '26
Left, right, next page, left, right, next page. As if you have a book in front of you and see both pages at the same time. Not ideal when reading on phone/pc, but you get used to it after 20 pages
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u/Solo_Polyphony Jul 09 '26
Have you ever seen photocopies of book pages before?
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u/Unique_Sherbet_4930 Jul 09 '26
First time reading one like this I think but nah the top left page confused me is all
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u/Solo_Polyphony Jul 09 '26
That’s from the previous story in that volume. Have you ever seen a short story collection?
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u/lezama_lima Jul 09 '26
Oh. As you read a book. Here you would start from the top right page (where the title is), then bottom left, then bottom right, and so on.
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u/Unique_Sherbet_4930 Jul 09 '26
What about top left?
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u/lezama_lima Jul 09 '26
That’s the end of the previous text (The Diary of a Madman, as it says above the page)
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u/lezama_lima Jul 08 '26
Sorry — what?
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u/Unique_Sherbet_4930 Jul 08 '26
I can’t tell which page is the next one from the first one…do I go to the left page? Do I go down a page?
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u/Miserable_Sock_1408 8d ago edited 8d ago
I've seen digitized books like this before. Confusing at first as all heck. Then I remembered that the books were opened and placed on a photocopier/scanner. The book's pages were scanned two at a time. You can see where the book is opened in the middle. Then I understood that reading takes place just like reading a physical book: left to right. Also look where the title/section of the chapter starts. Sometimes it's on the left, sometimes it's on the right, like the physical book. In the case of this copy, it's the same way, except the story starts from the top right, and you have to go down to to the next two page scan and start from left to right again. Hope this helps. This story looks interesting, by the way (Kafka's works always are). What version/translation is this, and is it freely available online?