Repository path: workshop/translations/moya-familiya/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-moya-familiya-R06-v1 — Levitov, «Моя фамилия», ch. I ¶1–5 (first pass)

Source. А. И. Левитов, «Моя фамилия (Из воспоминаний временнообязанного)», in Горе сёл, дорог и городов (М., 1874); copy-text az.lib.ru/l/lewitow_a_i/text_0030.shtml (Левитов А. И., Сочинения, М., «Худож. лит.», 1977), span from «Как глубоко я завидую» to «…которым я теперь так завидую.» — 352 Russian words. SHA-256 of the extracted span in workshop/experiments/E-20260807-narrator-unknown/materials/sources.json.

Regime. R06 — lead single pass, source only. This is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure 2a; the revision is T-moya-familiya-R04-v1. Cost $0, never ledgered.

Contamination: none. No English translation of Levitov is known to the translator or was reachable in a search of Project Gutenberg, archive.org full-text and the Internet Archive's English-language holdings (see the experiment's materials/contamination.json); no comparator exists to measure against, and the declaration therefore rests on an absence, which is stated rather than hidden.

How deeply I envy the people who have the right, with a bright joy on faces that life has crumpled, to speak of their childhood as of a golden time, unforgettable. Grimly hanging my unruly head, I look at these people from under my brows and, with a spite that tears my heart, I listen to that kind and cheerful laughter with which they commonly recall and recount their unsteady childish steps, and the help that the kindred faces around them, faces that loved them boundlessly and without self-interest, vied with one another to bring. I listen and I watch how, at the memory of those kindred figures, the storytellers' kindly gladness gives way to a quiet sorrow full of inexpressible love, and how at last, forgetting their solid years in those moments, with a wholly childish naïveté they begin to long passionately for the return both of their childhood and of those dear people who once cherished them, but who nevertheless at this present minute reside irrevocably in the secret kingdom of death, which never gives up its inhabitants.

Knowing that fatal law of the dark kingdom — never to let the eyes of its inhabitants take pleasure in the bright sun — my soul answers the wishes of the fortunate, to see so-and-so, to embrace and weep with such-and-such, with an evil and silent gladness, thus:

"No-o! Wait! He will not come to you from there as quickly as you would like. Unless you should be pleased to take the trouble of hastening thither to him yourself…"

At this wordless thought my chest fills with an evil laughter that heaves it so hard that out of its depths there come certain appallingly menacing growls…

Without the least embarrassment I confess that these bestial growls are produced in my chest by envy of another man's happiness; and since it is established that an envious man is always to be condemned and shunned, and since it is likewise established that the condemned, for their part, commonly try to justify themselves, I, by force of these two age-old customs, say: I do not wish my childhood repeated, even were that possible — I shall never call it golden, nor even iron, since iron is capital of a sort all the same — I refuse to wish, even standing on the edge of ruin, that out of that kingdom of eternal rest and peace to which the heavenly Father calls all that labour and are heavy laden there should come to me, to save me from that ruin, the people who once loved me exactly as the fortunate were loved whom I now so envy.