sazhen

plural sazhens · plural sazheni · alternative sagene · alternative sajene

1. A unit of length formerly used in Russia, equal to seven feet (just over two meters).

   1995: And it will not yield more than ten sazhens of wood to the desyatina…and he is paying me at the rate of two hundred roubles. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. Louise & Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998, p. 166)

   3 more examples

   For how if he were to end by getting drowned? True, the river’s normal level lay four sazheni down—the remembrance of that (for he had often descended thither to draw water) comforted him for a moment; […]

   1929, Ivan Nazhivin, translated by C[harles] J[ames] Hogarth, Rasputin (Continental Fiction), volume 1, New York, N.Y.; London: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, page 169

   Although in his diary he listed its intended dimensions as 200 by 100 sazheni (1400 x 700 ft.), the resulting structure probably measured only 818.75 x 425.75 feet (230 x 130m).

   1978, David R. Jones, editor, The Military-Naval Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union, volume 3, Academic International Press, →ISBN, page 75

   In 1883, peasant representatives from two villages in Voronezh Province petitioned the governor, detailing their hardships. In 1863 they had chosen to receive gratuitous allotments that amounted to a minuscule 2,080 sazheni (86.7 percent of one desiatina) per soul; since then, however, population growth had reduced their allotment size by more than one-half, to eight hundred sazheni per soul.

   2024, Peter Kolchin, Emancipation: The Abolition and Aftermath of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, →ISBN