Fyokla Tolstaya: “If in our country there are no at least a couple of hundreds of people for who loves the name of Leo Tolstoy, then it is as good as lost‎!”

The great-great-granddaughter of the great writer told Kazan teachers about the digitalization of works by her great-great-grandfather.

(KZN.RU, November 27, Alena Miroshnichenko). Great-granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy Fyokla Tolstaya told Kazan teachers of Russian language and literature about how the works of the great writer adapted to the digital age. Her public lecture “Tolstoy in the digital age” was held today at the national cultural center “Kazan”. Fyokla Tolstaya's visit took place as part of the project “Tolstoy Readings”.

The project, dedicated to the Year of Tolstoy in Tatarstan, gives teachers of Russian language and literature, librarians and high school students who are interested in humanitarian subjects, an opportunity to attend free lectures by famous Russian and foreign writers and philologists.

Today, Kazan citizens met with Fyokla Tolstaya, a journalist, a TV presenter, the head of the development department of the State Museum of L. Tolstoy in Moscow, the author of projects on digitizing the writer's works and popularizing his work. She is the great-great-granddaughter of L. Tolstoy on the line of his second son Ilya.

For the past few years, F. Tolstaya has been involved in online cultural projects. She told the Kazan audience about it. “I am glad that once again, I came to Kazan, I love coming here very much”, she noted. “I work in a literary museum and mainly engage in digital projects. I allowed myself to take a very broad topic, because I wanted to tell you about several projects”.

One of the projects was created in the Leo Tolstoy State Museum, it is called “All Tolstoy in one click”. The project participants digitized, processed, and published in the public domain the most complete, 90-volume, collected works of the writer. It was published for 30 years and includes diaries, letters, drafts, and other materials of Tolstoy. “Now many organizations and structures have official pages, but Russian writers do not have them. We need resources where responsibly verified electronic publications would be collected”, the speaker explained the main motivation of the project. “It is important that everything that Soviet and Russian philology has studied in the last century or even more is kept there. If we say that this is the most important cultural heritage, then we should at least keep it in order”.

Volunteers were involved in the work on the reconciliation of the material when translating the paper version into digital. Initially, not all project creators believed that a sufficient number of volunteers would join them, because the work is painstaking, notes Fyokla Tolstaya. “At those moments, I was saying “You know what! If in our country there are no at least a couple of hundreds of people for who loves the name of Leo Tolstoy, then it is as good as lost‎!”, she said. However, there were not a few hundred people who wanted to join the project, but significantly more.

As Fyokla Tolstaya told, the project was presented at a press conference. In the three hours that it lasted, people downloaded 6 volumes of the writer's collected works, and they read all 48 thousand pages of 90 volumes after 12 days. Then, of course, the text was checked by auditors and editors. In total, 3249 participants were involved in the work on the project, including Russian language and literature teachers, waiters, managers, students of the aviation institute, computer scientists, and others.

With the participation of Fyokla Tolstaya, the mobile application “Live Pages” was released in 2015, presenting works of Russian classics in an interactive format. The program adapts works of Russian classics for the most comfortable perception by modern youth. The creators of the application took all the details into account. Thus, in “War and Peace” they delimited historical events and literary events, clearly showed the life of each character and their relationship with other characters. The events of the book “Crime and Punishment” are transferred to the map, every building and street is marked in it. In the famous novel by Ilf and Petrov, the “journey” of each of the 12 chairs is displayed on the map.

Teachers and librarians, who gathered in the hall of the NCC Kazan, became interested in the new mobile format for presenting works of Russian writers and noted that it will help modern young people to master the classics.

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27.11.2018 16:26

The lecture of Fyokla Tolstaya at the NCC "Kazan"