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

T-zapiski-podpolye-R06-v1 — the underground man's opening, single pass

Source. Ф. М. Достоевский, «Записки из подполья» (1864), Часть I, глава I, ¶1–2, 411 Russian words, read in Russian. Copy-text ru.wikisource.org, fetched 2026-08-06; the working span is workshop/experiments/E-20260806f-persona-crossing/materials/sources.json (dost, sha256 d5e5377432d0…).

Regime. R06 — the R04 draft, stopped before self-revision and frozen as its own artifact (R04 §Procedure 2a). Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: high — measured on the R04 revision of this draft (16-token longest run and 6 shared 12-grams against Garnett 1918). Figures and reading on the R04 page; no comparator was read before this draft was written (R04 §Procedure 1) and the measurement was taken after both renderings and both logs were frozen.

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. Not that I understand a blessed thing about my illness — I do not even know for certain what it is that hurts. I am not being treated and never have been treated, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides which I am superstitious in the extreme; well, at least superstitious enough to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious.) No, sir, I decline to be treated, out of spite. That, I dare say, you will not be pleased to understand. Well, sir, I understand it. I shall not, of course, be able to explain to you whom exactly I am getting at with this spite of mine; I know perfectly well that I cannot possibly "do the doctors dirt" by not being treated by them; I know better than anybody that in all this I injure nobody but myself. But all the same, if I am not being treated, it is out of spite. My liver hurts — well then, let it hurt worse!

I have been living like this a long time now — some twenty years. I am forty. I used to be in the service; I am not now. I was a spiteful official. I was rude, and took pleasure in it. I took no bribes, after all, so I had to reward myself with something at least. (A poor joke; but I shall not cross it out. I wrote it thinking it would come out very witty, and now, having seen for myself that I only wanted to show off odiously — I shall deliberately leave it in!) When petitioners used to come up to the desk where I sat, wanting information, I would grind my teeth at them, and felt an implacable delight whenever I succeeded in distressing somebody. I nearly always succeeded. They were mostly a timid lot — petitioners, you know. But among the swaggerers there was one officer I particularly could not endure. He simply would not submit, and he rattled his sabre disgustingly. I was at war with him over that sabre for a year and a half. In the end I won. He stopped rattling. This, however, was back in my youth. But do you know, gentlemen, what the chief point of my spite consisted in? The whole trick of it, the very worst nastiness of it, lay precisely in this: that every minute, even in the minute of the bitterest bile, I was shamefully conscious in myself that I was not merely not a spiteful man but not even an embittered one, that I was only frightening sparrows to no purpose and consoling myself with it. I may be foaming at the mouth, but bring me some little doll, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and I shall very likely quiet down. My heart may even be touched, though afterwards, no doubt, I shall grind my teeth at myself and lie awake for months with shame. That is simply my way.