Repository path: workshop/translations/pripadok/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Chekhov, «Припадок» (1888) — the opening, complete

Source. Антон Павлович Чехов, «Припадок». Finished 13 November 1888; first published in the memorial collection Памяти В. М. Гаршина (St Petersburg: типография и фототипия В. И. Штейн, censor's permission 29 November 1888, imprint 1889), pp. 295–319, signed Антон Чехов. Public domain (Chekhov d. 1904).

The unit is a passage — the first three paragraphs of section I, complete, from «Студент-медик Майер…» to «…похожее на белый, молодой, пушистый снег.» 312 whitespace-separated Russian tokens (≈310 words). It stops where the sung Pushkin/Dargomyzhsky quotations begin, so the passage is continuous narrative prose with no dialogue and no embedded verse. Passage-level units of 100–500 words are what D-20260725-06's ratification named for candidate held-out material; at 312 words this is the shortest the project has built, and that is declared in the study limb that uses it.

Text and provenance. Retrieved from ru.wikisource (Припадок_(Чехов), raw wikitext, fetched 2026-07-25) and compared word by word against ФЭБ (feb-web.ru/feb/chekhov/texts/sp0/sp7/sp7-199-.htm?cmd=2, cp1251), which reproduces Полное собрание сочинений и писем vol. 7, pp. 199–221. Over the passage the two agree on every one of 312 tokens; the only two diff opcodes are FEB's inline page-number marker 200 and one whitespace artifact before a period.

State the limit of that check honestly. Wikisource declares FEB as its source. This is therefore a transcription check against the parent text, not two independent witnesses — weaker than the two-pipeline cross-checks run on «Свидание» and «Бежин луг», where each source carried its own unique corruption. It catches the realistic failure mode here (a Wikisource transcription slip) and nothing more. Two attempts at a genuinely independent third transcription (az.lib.ru, chehov-lit.ru) returned 404 and a redirect with no matching text; recorded as attempted and failed rather than skipped.

Stored as source-ru.txt, SHA-256 ce312a64f4d1247c1f6e17b6aae02fd372faaa99a6921d8ea402443a7a79f53a.

Regime. R04 v0.1 — lead close translation, source only. No API call, no cost, never ledgered (charter §6, A4).

Contamination: high. Chekhov is among the most translated authors in English and «Припадок» has been in print in English since at least the 1910s; published renderings plausibly sit in the lead's training data. No claim of independence from remembered renderings is made or should be read in. Per note (jj), that declaration is a hypothesis and not a measurement — a rank prediction covering this passage was registered in E-20260725c-contamination-sweep/design.md before any English text of this story was fetched.

Contamination, MEASURED 2026-07-25 (S026), and this is the only cell in the sweep whose prediction was made before the comparison texts had ever been opened. RS-20260725c-contamination-sweep: CI(7) = 1.643 / 1.632 at the two parameter-free extremes — the most variant-stable cell in the sweep — and perfectly symmetric: 23 shared 7-grams with Garnett, 23 with Koteliansky & Murry. Above the metric's power floor (baseline 14–19). Measured, it is the second least elevated of the six cells, against a declaration of high made on the reasoning that Chekhov is heavily translated. The declaration was right about direction and wrong about degree, which is the sweep's verdict on lead self-estimates in miniature. contamination: high is left in the front matter as the conservative label; the measurement is the informative statement.

Freeze order, which is the point. This file, its log, and source-ru.txt are committed before any English rendering of «Припадок» is opened, fetched, or searched. Both volumes that contain one — Gutenberg #1732 (Garnett) and #55283 (Koteliansky & Murry) — were already sitting in this repository at workshop/experiments/E-20260725-published-audit/runs/ when this translation was written, which makes the freeze commit the only thing separating a blind translation from a primed one. It is verifiable in git: the commit that adds this file adds no English text and touches no file under that directory. Note (f), load-bearing for the seventh session running.

Priming, declared. The story was chosen from NEXT.md action 5, which names the two published renderings by title — Garnett's "A Nervous Breakdown" and Koteliansky & Murry's "The Fit". Those two English titles were therefore visible before translating. Nothing else was: no text, no incipit, no excerpt. The effect is bounded — the passage translated does not contain the story's title, and «припадок» itself does not occur in it.

The translation

One evening Mayer, a medical student, and Rybnikov, a pupil of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, came to their friend Vasilyev, a law student, and suggested that he go along with them to S—v Lane. Vasilyev held out for a long while at first, but then he dressed and went with them.

Fallen women he knew only by hearsay and from books, and he had never once in his life been in the houses where they live. He knew that there are immoral women who, under the pressure of fatal circumstances — their milieu, a bad upbringing, want, and the like — find themselves compelled to sell their honour for money. They know no pure love, they have no children, they have no standing in law; their mothers and sisters mourn them as dead, science treats them as an evil, men speak to them with the familiar ty. But in spite of all this they do not lose the image and likeness of God. They are all conscious of their sin and hope for salvation. The means that lead to salvation they may make use of on the very broadest scale. True, society does not forgive people their past; but with God, St Mary of Egypt is reckoned no lower than the other saints. Whenever it fell to Vasilyev to recognise a fallen woman in the street by her dress or her manner, or to see her likeness in a comic paper, he remembered every time a certain story he had picked up somewhere, at some time, out of his reading: some young man, pure and self-sacrificing, fell in love with a fallen woman and asked her to become his wife, and she, holding herself unworthy of such happiness, took poison.

Vasilyev lived in one of the lanes that open onto Tverskoy Boulevard. When he came out of the house with his friends it was about eleven o'clock. The first snow had fallen a little while before, and everything in nature was under the dominion of that young snow. The air smelled of snow, the snow crunched softly underfoot; the ground, the roofs, the trees, the benches along the boulevards — everything was soft, white, young, and because of it the houses looked out differently than yesterday, the street-lamps burned brighter, the air was more transparent, the carriages rattled more dully, and into the soul, along with the fresh, light, frosty air, there asked entrance a feeling like the white, young, downy snow.

Translator's log

Written at translation time, frozen with the translation and before any evaluation of it was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

1. «в С — в переулок». Chekhov blanks the street name in the nineteenth-century manner: the Wikisource text prints в С — в переулок, which is «в С—в переулок» — the first and last letters of Соболев переулок, the real Moscow street. The blank is therefore not a single initial but a first-and-last skeleton, and an English "S—— Lane" would silently discard the final v. Rendered "S—v Lane", keeping both letters. «Переулок» is a lane or side-street off a larger thoroughfare, not a street in its own right; "Lane" was chosen over "Street" for that reason, and over "Alley", which in English implies squalor the word does not carry.

2. «не правоспособны». A term of art: правоспособность is legal capacity — the capacity to hold rights at all. Live options were "they are without legal capacity" (accurate, unreadable), "they have no rights" (readable, wrong — it overstates), and "they have no standing in law", chosen. The point of using the legal register at all is that this whole paragraph is the law student's mental furniture, and Chekhov drops a technical term into a list of homiletic ones on purpose. What is lost: an English reader will not feel it as a term of art the way «правоспособны» lands in Russian.

3. «мужчины говорят им ты» — the hardest line in the passage. English has no T/V distinction, so the sting of the bare statement cannot be carried by the pronoun. Four options were live:

• "men are familiar with them" — smooth, and it evaporates the specific act.
• "men thou them" — English does have this fossil verb for contemptuous address (Coke to Ralegh: "I thou thee, thou traitor"). It is exact, and it is unreadable to anyone who does not already know it, which turns a flat sentence into a puzzle.
• "men say ty to them" — keeps the word, and to a reader without Russian says nothing at all.
• "men speak to them with the familiar ty" — chosen. One glossing adjective carries the whole distinction, and the Russian word survives.

The cost is that Chekhov's sentence is bare — «мужчины говорят им ты», five words, no explanation — and mine explains. The flatness is part of the effect and I gave some of it up to be intelligible.

4. «наука третирует их, как зло». Третировать is not neutral "treat": it carries slighting, contemptuous handling. "Science treats them as an evil" loses that; "science disdains them as an evil" over-eggs it and reads oddly with as. Kept "treats", and this is the clearest unrecovered loss in the paragraph.

5. «образа и подобия божия». Genesis 1:26 in its Church Slavonic form. Rendered with the fixed English biblical formula "the image and likeness of God" rather than paraphrasing; the register jump is Chekhov's.

6. «Средствами, которые ведут к спасению, они могут пользоваться в самых широких размерах.» Deliberately stiff, quasi-official Russian — «в самых широких размерах» is bureaucratic, not devotional. The temptation was to smooth it ("salvation is fully open to them"). Kept the stiffness — "The means that lead to salvation they may make use of on the very broadest scale" — including the fronted object, because the awkwardness is characterising: these are sentences Vasilyev has assembled out of reading, not out of experience.

7. «где-то и когда-то им вычитанную». Вычитать is specifically to get by reading, and the doubled vagueness («где-то и когда-то») is the point. Rendered "a certain story he had picked up somewhere, at some time, out of his reading" — three units for three, at the cost of length.

8. «выглядывали иначе, чем вчера». Выглядывать is "to peer out", not the plain выглядеть "to look, appear"; Chekhov's houses peer out from under the snow. English "looked different from yesterday" is the natural rendering and kills the verb. Chose "the houses looked out differently than yesterday", which is slightly odd English on purpose and keeps the peering. Also kept "than yesterday" rather than "than they had the day before": the deixis jumps to the character's present tense in the Russian, and regularising it to past would tidy away a real feature.

9. «просилось в душу». Проситься = to ask to be let in. This governs the paragraph's last clause and the whole crescendo lands on it. "Crept into the soul" and "stole into the soul" are the idiomatic English and both make the feeling the agent of a stealthy entry, which is the opposite of asking permission. Chose "there asked entrance", inverted, so the sentence can still close on snow — Russian word order puts «пушистый снег» last and the paragraph is built to end there. Rejected the clear, uninverted "a feeling like the white, young, downy snow asked to be let into the soul", which reads better and loses the ending.

10. The three «молод-» words. «молодого снега» / «молодо» / «молодой» — young snow, everything young, a feeling like the young snow. English "fresh" would be more idiomatic in at least the first two and would break the chain. "Young" throughout, three times, deliberately.

11. «пушистый». "Fluffy" is the standard gloss and sits wrong in this cadence; "feathery" adds a metaphor Chekhov did not use. Chose "downy".

12. «экипажи стучали глуше». Стучать is knocking/clattering — the noise of iron tyres on paving — and глуше is more muffled. "Rattled more dully" keeps both the impact-noise and the deadening. Rejected "sounded more muffled", which loses the knock.

13. «Падших женщин он знал…». Object-fronting kept in English ("Fallen women he knew only by hearsay"): it is available in English, it marks the paragraph's topic shift the way the Russian does, and nothing is strained by it.

14. Present tense in «где они живут». «в тех домах, где они живут» — generic present inside a past-tense narrative. Kept as "the houses where they live" rather than backshifting to "lived"; the generalising present is how the sentence signals that this is Vasilyev's abstract category, not a particular house.

15. Not attempted. «сходить» (a there-and-back trip) is rendered flatly as "go along"; the round-trip aspect is not carried. «юмористический журнал» is "a comic paper" — the period English for the genre Chekhov himself wrote for — which is a domesticating choice made without hesitation and is recorded here as one anyway.