Leo Tolstoy’s descendent, Fekla Tolstaya, continues her digital revolution as she finds new ways to bring the works of her ancestor and other Russian classics online. In doing so, she is transforming the way people can consume and share classical literature all over the world.
“The original idea was inspired by the words of my great great grandfather, who believed that all of his works should be made freely available to everyone,” Fekla said in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “I have no doubt that had Tolstoy had the Internet, he would have been all over it. So what we are doing today – this is his will.”
Tolstaya’s first major step towards digitalising Russia’s literary heritage was her ‘Tolstoy in one Click’ project. With the help of a successful crowdsourcing campaign, she recruited volunteers from around the world to proofread more than forty-six thousand pages of Tolstoy’s works.
Fekla Tolstaya in her studio (Photo credit: F. Tolstaya)
Tolstaya initially hoped to generate enough interest to get the first round of corrections done in half a year. Within days, she had engineers, IT workers, teachers, waitresses, pilots, retirees and many others on the case. “We finished in 14 days,” said Tolstaya.
Fekla Tolstaya moved on to set records with her innovative online reading marathon concept. Starting with Anna Karenina, then on to Chekhov’s short stories, and lastly the denouement – War and Peace. With this project, Tolstaya united East and West. Tolstaya brought online readers from countries all over the world from the US to UK to Russia to China; from the Arctic to outer space.
Tolstaya’s War and Peace project has not gone without notice. While drawing the attention of leading international media (The Guardian, The New Yorker), it set a new Guinness World Record for the ‘largest audience for an online reading marathon’ (with viewers from more than 100 countries).
Later, the project went on to win ‘Event of the Year’ at Russia’s prestigious TEFI television awards.
Tolstaya seemingly has no intention of slowing down. Next she plans to collaborate with several academic institutions, including Moscow State University and Harvard University, to create the Tolstoy Digital Universe. This will be an online encyclopaedia that will allow users to have access to all of Tolstoy’s texts at their fingertips, allowing them to search for particular quotes, texts or correspondence.
“We have still only started to scratch the surface in terms of what can be done,” Tolstaya told EWDN.
