Leo Tolstoy lived several lifetimes in one, and filled them all with writing. So when his great-great-granddaughter, Fyokla Tolstaya, initiated a project to put his complete works online, free and accessible to all — a project that would involve proofreading every single scanned page from the print edition — she was facing a 46,800 pg proofreading job. Tolstaya put out an appeal for volunteers, but she had modest expectations for it; she expected to get part of the work done in six months. The result was somewhat other than expected. As Sally McGrane tells it on the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog: Within days, some three thousand Russians—engineers, I.T. workers, schoolteachers, retirees, a student pilot, a twenty-year-old waitress—signed on. “We were so happy and so surprised,” said Tolstaya. “They finished in fourteen days.” This tremendous response is apposite for Tolstoy: not only of course is he one of the most beloved of the Russian greats, but he believed in the extraordinary possibilities of collective effort. Tolstaya: “It’s according to Leo Tolstoy’s ideas, to do it with the help of all people around the world—vsem mirom—even the world’s hardest task can be done with the help of everyone.” And indeed, one imagines that Tolstoy might have loved the age of crowdsourcing and instant mass communication: for all his solitary two-hundred kilometer walks and rough peasant blouses, he was always interested in reaching as many people as possible through the many mediums they might turn to. Now, his complete works will be available for download on the website tolstoy.ru/, in formats compatible with all devices. McGrane quotes interviews with some of the volunteers, who sound almost implausibly devoted to the endeavor (shades of old rhetoric possibly bleeding through). For instance, Damir Shakurov, a IT employee from Kazan: “I think I got more out of this project than I gave to it,” he said. “When I slowly read the corrected texts, I felt that it was all worth it, no matter how monotonous or painful the proofreading. Luckily, my children are avid readers, and I hope that when they are older they will discover Tolstoy—whose works I have helped to make available online.”
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 07:32:41 +0000
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