Run report — The Living Corpse (Живой труп) dive

Slug: 1900-the-living-corpse · Mode: interactive, --novel (drama flex) · Date: 2026-06-12 Subject: Tolstoy’s unfinished 1900 drama, PSS Tom 34. Record-creating workRecord (plays/drama).

Scope contract (as run)

• Question: Is The Living Corpse an indictment of legal/church marriage and the divorce machinery — honesty against the institution — and was its abandonment driven mainly by Tolstoy’s reluctance to wound the real Gimers?
• Corpus surface: PSS Tom 34 (play v34_007_099; plans v34_407_410; variants v34_411_483; commentary v34_533_543 + v34_543_545); diaries Tom 53 (1897 seed) + Tom 54 (1900); letters Tom 72 (Posse) + Tom 88 (Chertkov).
• Marquee (named up front): two-pronged (institutional indictment; reason for abandonment), tested as hypothesis.
• Visuals intensity: heavy. Companion text: none.
• Gates: --choice=reg --notes=auto; verify_quotes.py exit 0; separate-pass verifier; commit, don’t push.

Coverage ledger

Marquee outcome

confirms + complicates + extends. (1) Institutional indictment — confirms (scholarship agrees) + extends (the primary text shows it is structural, no villain, and legal-circle sourced like Resurrection). (2) Abandonment — complicates (the “spared the Gimers” account is real but partial) + extends (the diary names the conscience-turn the scholarship only infers). Sub-claim: the “about-face from Kreutzer” reading is complicates (Tolstoy grouped the play with Kreutzer).

Work-orders for the (later, human-in-the-loop) ingestion

Entity work-order (by ingestionPriority, then dependency): - Priority 1: Fyodor Protasov (character), Liza Protasova (character), N. S. Gimer (person), E. P. Gimer (person), + the record-creating workRecord. - Priority 2: Viktor Karenin, Masha (character); N. V. Davydov, A. F. Koni, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stanislavski, Chertkov (person, Chertkov exists); the 1911 MAT premiere + Gimer-trial (event). - Priority 3: Anna Pavlovna, Ivan Petrovich Aleksandrov, Afremov (character); E. A. Simon, A. P. Ivanov, Moskvin, Chekhov, Biryukov (exists), Posse (person); Moscow gypsy choirs (group); Moscow Art Theatre (institution); Redemption-1918 + Otsep-1929 (adaptation). - All missing except Vladimir Chertkov and Pavel Birukoff (exist).

Work-record work-order (record-creating proposal → website/src/works/plays/drama/the-living-corpse/The Living Corpse.md): - High confidence: id, titles (+ alternatives Труп / Redemption / The Man Who Was Dead / The Live Corpse), Plays/Drama, genre play, language ru, completionStatus incomplete, publishedDuringLifetime/InRussia false, dateFirstPublished 1911-10-06 NS / 1911-09-23 OS (Russkoe Slovo), dateWritingStarted 1900-02-08 NS / 1900-01-27 OS, themes, synopsis, jubileeEdition vol 34, bans [] (author-withheld), censorshipNotes. - Medium: dateWritingCompleted 1900-08-28 NS (first draft; approximate), authoringLocations (Moscow / Pirogovo / Yasnaya Polyana). - Low / deferred: relatedWorks [] (no enum value fits the Kreutzer/PoD/Resurrection thematic grouping — human call); wordCount 0. - At ingestion: expand the dossier date sub-flags oldStyle:/approximate: to the schema’s per-field keys (<field>OldStyle / <field>Approximate).

Visuals work-order: 12 PD images cached (git-ignored visuals/; metadata in dossier). Acquire: a PD manuscript / 1911 first-edition facsimile (try GMT / RGB / State Tolstoy Museum); a photo of Moskvin as Fedya; an N. V. Davydov portrait; a Barrymore Redemption production still.

notCovered queue

Full variant collation (рук. №№ 1–14); the Meyerhold/Alexandrinsky production + European tour in depth; the full English-translation lineage; the 11–12 Oct 1887 Tolstoy→Biryukov letter (Tom 64); the separate «большая драма» of the 7 Sept 1900 diary.

needsReview (human-judgment deferred)

Karenin←Chistov (conjectural, not in PSS); Masha prototype (milieu, not a model); the unverified Koni “14 Jan 1900 self-sacrifice letter” web claim; any incidental 1911 stage-censorship (bans [] proposed); whether Kryukova/Afremov earn their own character nodes; wordCount.

Evaluation self-assessment (work-dive checks)

• Interlocutor sweep yielded people? YES — the prototype + witness network is dense (Davydov, Koni, the Gimers/Simon, Ivanov, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Chertkov, Posse, Gnedich).
• Russian society/church reception covered? PARTIAL-BY-NATURE — none existed pre-1911 (withheld); the posthumous 1911 staging reception is covered. Honestly marked partial.
• workRecord fill accurate & provenanced? YES — record-creating; every field evidence-anchored; OS/NS dates correct (incl. the leap-century gap); verifier confirmed.
• coverage honest? YES — verifier confirmed no covered overstating a partial.
• --choice=reg extracted cleanly? YES — no stderr warnings.
• Spine stayed bare? YES — attribute-don’t-assert; verifier PASS on voice.

Gates & models

• verify_quotes.py: 40/40 verbatim, exit 0 (PASS).
• Separate-pass verifier (opus): CLEAN-WITH-MINORS (0 blockers, 5 minor/note); 2 minor text fixes applied (reception-figure attribution; stale comment 43→40).
• Models: orchestration + close-read + synthesis + marquee on the main (opus) context; reception/scholarship sweep + visuals sweep on sonnet sub-agents; verifier on opus.

Output paths

• docs/research/1900-the-living-corpse/index.md (+ rendered index.html)
• docs/research/1900-the-living-corpse/dossier.yaml
• docs/research/1900-the-living-corpse/extracts/*.txt (PD, committed)
• docs/research/1900-the-living-corpse/visuals/* (git-ignored cache; _visuals-sweep.md catalogue)
• docs/research/1900-the-living-corpse/{_scholarship-sweep.md, _verifier-report.md, session-log.md}
• website/src/posts/notes/2026-06-12-the-living-corpse.md (draft: true)

Reminder: wiki ingestion is a separate, human-in-the-loop step. This dive is the plan and the pointer, not the writer — no vault pages were created.