A Confession — alignment and capture notes

How confession.ru.md (PSS «Исповедь», t. 23, pp. 1–59) and confession.en-wiener.md (Leo Wiener’s 1904 translation, My Confession, from the Complete Works of Count Tolstoy vol. 13) were made paragraph-parallel, so the two share one paragraph coordinate — paragraph N of chapter K in either version points to the same place in the work.

Both versions segment to 16 sections / 212 paragraphs and pass reader.segment --spine-json (the per-section paragraph-count check).

Maude 1921 — the reading text since 2026-10-01

confession.en-maude.md is Aylmer Maude’s translation as proofread by Standard Ebooks (local copy primary-sources/standard-ebooks/leo-tolstoy_a-confession_aylmer-maude.epub). It replaced Wiener as the English reading text and read-along after Johan’s reading notes on Wiener (see the dive’s annotations.md). It segments to 16 sections / 212 paragraphs / 954 sentences and passes the spine check.

Same rule as for Wiener: Maude’s wording is untouched, and only paragraph breaks were moved, at sentence boundaries. Maude has 215 paragraphs in sixteen chapters plus an “Afterword” (the 1882 dream); the Afterword is folded into chapter XVI, where the Russian has it, without its heading. Fourteen Maude paragraphs were split and twenty-four joins were made. Every paragraph’s opening and close was then read against the Russian, not just counted — a count check alone would have passed two boundary slips. Maude’s eleven footnotes are kept as [^n] notes (the reader shows them; the audio skips them), and the dates “1879.” and “1882.” stay at the ends of XVI.5 and XVI.8 as Maude prints them.

• Chapter III — a closing paragraph the Russian spine does not have. Maude (and Wiener) end the chapter with “I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed…”. The PSS text ends at «И я ничего и ничего не мог ответить.» in all three local Russian sources (the TEI file, the Jubilee fb2, and tolstoy.ru’s fb2), so this is the translators’ source text, not a gap in ours. The extra paragraph is joined to III.16 (“But there was no answer. I felt…”), the paragraph it follows.
• Chapter XI — a half-sentence offset. The Russian starts XI.3 with «И я понял, что мы действительно такие сумасшедшие», which Maude runs into the end of his previous sentence (“…such madmen? and I understood that we really are such madmen.”). Splitting there would open a paragraph mid-sentence, so the clause stays at the end of XI.2.
• IV.8 — quotation marks restored (2026-10-10). One of two changes to Maude’s text (with VI.16 below). The Russian closes the paragraph with a quoted thought, «А ему смешно...»; Maude dropped the quotation marks, so the line now reads “And he was amused. …”. Maude’s words and italic are kept. Johan’s reader note; see the dive’s annotations.md.
• VI.16 — opening quotation mark added (2026-10-10). Maude runs “All things come alike to all…” on inside the previous paragraph after “…”; our split to match the Russian left the new paragraph without the “ that every other paragraph of Solomon’s speech opens with. The Russian opens it with «. Johan’s reader note.
• Wiener’s chapter VI boundaries are slightly off (found while doing this). The counts match, but Wiener’s paragraphs drift by one around the Socrates and Solomon quotations (VI.11–VI.17) and in IV.1–IV.3 against the Russian. Left as it is, since Wiener is no longer the reading text.

Which version defines the coordinate

The Russian is the spine. Unlike The Great Sin — where the English was the incumbent because its read-along audio was already aligned to it — nothing had been built here yet when the alignment was done, so the English was fitted to Tolstoy’s paragraphing rather than the other way round. Wiener’s wording is untouched throughout; only paragraph breaks were moved to match the Russian, and only at real sentence boundaries.

Capture notes

These four notes were written during the 2026-07-17 alignment pass and originally sat inline in confession.en-wiener.md as HTML comments. They were moved here on 2026-08-09: the segmenter splits paragraphs on blank lines, so a standalone comment counted as a paragraph and broke the alignment check in all four chapters. resolve_reading_text() also strips CriticMarkup and wikilinks but not HTML comments, so leaving them attached to a paragraph instead would have leaked the note text into the reading display and the spoken audio. Two of the notes already pointed at this file by name.

Chapter IV — a ~500-word gap, restored

The source e-text (and the underlying tolstoyarchive.org epub) dropped roughly 500 words: “The thought” ran straight into “him.”, skipping the rest of that sentence, four whole paragraphs (the “complete happiness” / “stupid trick played on me” passage), and the opening of the well/dragon fable.

Restored verbatim — not re-translated — from the Wikisource proofread transcription of this same Wiener 1904 edition (en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Count_Tolstoy/Volume_13/My_Confession, itself transcluded from the scanned Complete Works vol. 13 djvu pages on the Internet Archive).

Chapter V — a duplicated passage, removed

The source e-text repeats the preceding four paragraphs a second time verbatim — a scan/OCR duplication — with the repeat’s first paragraph spliced onto the true opening of the next section (“I must confess, there was a time when I believed all” plus the tail end of the “experimental sciences” paragraph above). Confirmed as a defect in the source itself, not in our capture. The genuine next paragraph (Russian ch. V, para 13) resumes unaltered after the cut.

This is the same kind of defect as the still-open duplicate-narrative question in the Resurrection dive.

Chapter VII — an omission that is Wiener’s own

Wiener’s translation omits Solomon’s shorter “I commended mirth” saying (Ecclesiastes 8:15), which the Russian carries as «И похвалил я веселье…». Confirmed against the clean Wikisource transcription of this same edition, so this is the translator’s own choice, not a digitization defect. Nothing restored — filling it from another translation’s wording would misrepresent what a reader of Wiener 1904 actually saw.

Chapter XI — a missing heading, restored

The “XI.” heading is absent from the e-text; chapters X and XI run together there. Restored at the paragraph whose opening matches the Russian chapter XI opening («И вспомнив то, как те же самые верования отталкивали меня…»), and whose preceding paragraph matches the Russian chapter X ending.

Open items

• Verify the chapter XI heading against the printed page (Wiener vol. XIII facsimile) when convenient. The placement is well-evidenced from both sides of the join, but it has not been checked against the scan.
• бог 1 и 3 (Russian ch. IX) reads like an OCR-mangled “God, one and threefold” — «бог 1 и 3» where the numerals stand in for the Trinity formula. Worth a facsimile check against PSS t. 23; not repaired, since the reading is a guess. The machine translation renders it “God, one and three”, following this reading.

Spine defects found while translating (2026-08-10)

Three small transmission faults in confession.ru.md surfaced during the machine-translation pass. None is repaired in the spine — repairing the source text is a separate decision — and each is translated as intended rather than mirrored, so the English does not carry a digitization artefact forward as if it were Tolstoy’s.

• слитком (ch. I, para 4) is a typo for слишком: “one should not take all this too seriously”. A single letter substitution, so the homoglyph sweep would not have caught it. Checked against the page image 2026-09-23 and repaired: PSS Tom 23 (local vol83/vol83.pdf, PDF page 40, printed p. 2) reads «слишком». The scan’s own text layer also says слитком, which is how the error got into the extract. The Great Sin had the same slip — see its alignment notes.
• Unclosed « (ch. III, para 14) — the paragraph opens «Случилось то, что случается… with no closing quote anywhere. The English renders the paragraph without the stray mark. Checked against the page image 2026-09-23 and repaired: the printed paragraph (Tom 23, PDF page 49, printed p. 11) has no opening quotation mark at all — the « was our extract’s, so it is removed rather than closed.
• Stray semicolon (ch. V, para 11) — inside the sciences’ reply, мы не имеем; ответов и этим не занимаемся splits “have no answers” across the punctuation. Read as мы не имеем ответов. Checked against the page image 2026-09-23 and repaired: the page (PDF page 56, printed p. 18) reads «мы не имеем ответов» with no punctuation — a small ink speck on the foot of the «м» is what the scan’s text layer read as ;.

Open item from the translation

• Capitalization of “God”. The PSS text lowercases бог throughout («бога нет», «бог есть жизнь»). That reads as a Soviet editorial convention rather than Tolstoy’s manuscript, so the English capitalizes God: lowercasing it would carry an edition artefact into the translation as though it were authorial. Worth confirming against the printed page.

• Evidence that the capitalization call was right. The Great Sin’s spine (PSS Tom 36, «Великий грех», 1905) capitalizes «Бог» throughout — «Бог», «Бога», «Богу», every occurrence — while this spine (Tom 23) lowercases throughout. The same edition series treating the same word differently from one volume to the next looks like a per-volume house decision rather than anything authorial, which supports capitalizing in the English here. Noted 2026-08-10 while translating The Great Sin; still worth confirming against the printed page.