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

T-shinel-znachitelnoe-R06-v1 — Gogol, «Шинель», the person of consequence: his remorse, and the collar

• Source. ../source-unit.txt, 611 Russian words in two blocks (A: the significant person's remorse and his evening; B: the ghost at the collar and the flight home). Public domain; provenance on ../README.md.
• Language pair. Russian → English. The project's first unit from this work.
• Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead, source-only, single pass, no self-revision. This artifact is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure 2a; the revision is ../R04-v1/.
• Cost. $0. Lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, §6, A4).
• Contamination: high, declared before the gate was run and confirmed by it. «Шинель» is one of the most translated stories in Russian and the lead knows published English renderings of it by recall, including the phrase Person of Consequence. Measurement and the resulting restriction on what this artifact may be used for: ../README.md §Contamination.
• No published rendering of this passage in any language was opened before this draft was frozen (R04 §Procedure 1). The census span (../census-span.txt) is a different stretch of the story and two published renderings of it had been read during material selection; that priming is declared in full on ../README.md.

Translation — Block A

But we have quite deserted a certain person of consequence, who was in truth very nearly the cause of the fantastical turn taken by what is nevertheless a perfectly true story. First of all, the duty of justice requires it to be said that this certain person of consequence, soon after the departure of poor Akaky Akakievich, roasted to a cinder, felt something like regret. Compassion was not foreign to him; his heart was open to a good many kind impulses, notwithstanding that his rank very often prevented them from showing themselves. As soon as his visiting friend had gone out of the study, he even fell to brooding about poor Akaky Akakievich. And from that time on, almost every day, there rose before him the pale Akaky Akakievich, who had not withstood an official roasting. The thought of him troubled him to such a degree that a week later he even resolved to send a clerk to him, to find out how he was and whether there might not really be some way of helping him; and when it was reported to him that Akaky Akakievich had died suddenly of a fever, he was even left stunned, heard the reproaches of his conscience, and was out of sorts all day. Wishing to distract himself a little and to forget the disagreeable impression, he set off for the evening to one of his friends', where he found a respectable company and, best of all, everyone there was of almost one and the same rank, so that there was nothing whatever to constrain him. This had a wonderful effect on the disposition of his spirits. He expanded, became pleasant in conversation, amiable — in a word, he passed the evening very agreeably. At supper he drank a couple of glasses of champagne — a means which, as is well known, works not badly in the matter of gaiety. The champagne inclined him toward various extraordinary measures, namely: he decided not to go home yet but to look in on a lady of his acquaintance, one Karolina Ivanovna, a lady, it seems, of German extraction, toward whom he felt relations of an entirely friendly kind. It must be said that the person of consequence was by now a man no longer young, a good husband, a respected father of a family. Two sons, one of whom was already serving in a department, and a comely sixteen-year-old daughter with a somewhat arched but pretty little nose, came every day to kiss his hand, saying: bonjour, papa. His wife, still a fresh woman and not in the least bad-looking, would first give him her hand to kiss and then, turning it over on the other side, would kiss his.

Translation — Block B

All at once the person of consequence felt someone seize him very firmly by the collar. Turning round, he made out a man of small stature in an old worn-out uniform coat, and not without horror recognized in him Akaky Akakievich. The clerk's face was pale as snow and looked a perfect corpse. But the horror of the person of consequence passed all bounds when he saw the dead man's mouth twist and, breathing horribly of the grave upon him, utter these words: "Ah! so here you are at last! at last I have — got you, so to speak, by the collar! it is your cloak I want! you did not trouble yourself about mine, and you roasted me into the bargain — hand over your own now!" The poor person of consequence all but died. Firm of character as he was in the department and in general before his inferiors, and although at a single look at his manly bearing and his figure everyone said, "Ooh, what character!" — here he, like a great many men of heroic exterior, felt such terror that he even began, not without reason, to be apprehensive of some fit of illness. He himself flung his cloak off his shoulders as fast as he could and shouted to the coachman in a voice not his own: "Home, and drive like the devil!" The coachman, hearing the voice that is usually produced at decisive moments and is even accompanied by something a good deal more effectual, tucked his head down between his shoulders just in case, swung his whip and tore off like an arrow. In a little over six minutes the person of consequence was already at the entrance of his own house. Pale, terrified and without his cloak, instead of going to Karolina Ivanovna's he had come home, dragged himself somehow to his room, and passed the night in very great disorder, so that the next morning at tea his daughter said to him straight out: "You are quite pale today, papa." But papa said nothing, and not a word to anyone about what had happened to him, and where he had been, and where he had meant to go.

Note on this artifact

R06 output is a draft, frozen before revision and not revised. Its log is the R04 artifact's log, which records the draft's decisions and the revision's separately (R04 §Procedure 2a, 3).