When Leo Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter, the journalist Fyokla Tolstaya, announced that the Leo Tolstoy State Museum was looking for volunteers to proofread some forty-six thousand eight hundred pages of her relative’s writings, she hoped to generate enough interest to get the first round of corrections done in six months.
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.”
Now, thanks largely to the efforts of these volunteers, nearly all of the great Russian writer’s massive body of work, including novels, diaries, letters, religious tracts, philosophical treatises, travelogues, and childhood memories, will soon be available online, in a form that can be easily downloaded, free of charge. “Of course we realized there are some novels on the Internet,” Tolstaya said. “But most [writings] are not. We in the museum decided this is not good.”
“The museum wants to be more open to people, particularly young people, to help Tolstoy’s heritage,” Tolstaya added. “We decided to make it really easy to use—compatible for iPad, e-reader, Kindle.”
The definitive, ninety-volume jubilee edition of Tolstoy’s works, compiled and published in Russia from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-fifties, had already been scanned by the Russian State Library. However, converting the PDFs into an easy-to-use digital format posed a challenge. For one thing, even after ABBYY, a company that specializes in translating printed documents into digital records, offered their services for free, proofreading costs were likely to be prohibitive. Charging readers to download the works was not an option. “At the end of his life, Tolstoy said, ‘I don’t need any money for my work. I want to give my work to the people,’ ” said Tolstaya. “It was important for us to make it free for everyone. It is his will.”
That was when they hit on the idea of crowdsourcing, Tolstaya said. “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.”
The work was difficult, said Liliya Kayrakanova, a thirty-eight-year-old Russian language and literature teacher at School No. 1 in Novosibirsk—and one of twenty volunteers who, having proofed more than two thousand pages, won a trip to visit the Tolstoy estate, in the Tula region, just before the Web site launched, in September. Like all volunteers, Kayrakanova started with a batch of twenty pages. Using a split screen, she compared the PDF of a scanned page from the jubilee edition with a version created with optical-character-recognition (O.C.R.) software, cross-checking carefully for any mistakes, and then correcting them. “The project started during the summer vacation, so I had a lot of free time, which I, without any hesitation, spent checking the texts,” she wrote, adding that it took up to five hours to accomplish a single page.
In Perm, Vera Vlasova worked all day on her corrections. “I knew practically all the texts, but it was a joy to read them all over again,” said the sixty-five-year-old pensioner, who believes that Tolstoy’s writings can help twenty-first-century readers better understand their purpose in life. “I’m very content to see that Tolstoy’s descendants respect his will, making his work available to as many people all over the world as possible.”
Damir Shakurov, a forty-eight-year-old I.T. worker from Kazan, volunteered because he had had experience with ABBYY’s FineReader program and thought he could be of help. He worked on the project at night, when he got home from work, and would become so absorbed in his texts that he paused only when he started to feel pain in his back or wrist. “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.”
Anton Maltsev, a Muscovite engineer, said his first twenty pages came from Tolstoy’s “ABC Book,” written for children, which he previously hadn’t known existed. “The next batch of texts was about Tolstoy’s voyage to Switzerland, with vivid descriptions of the country’s people and landscapes. Then I read fragments from letters, diaries, ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Anna Karenina,’ letters again, and, finally, notebooks.”
Before long, the engineer was hooked. “There was no stopping me,” he recalled. “I spent all my free time ‘in conversation with’ Tolstoy. Proofreading was engrossing. You couldn’t predict what a new set of pages would be about, and this element of surprise made me want to read more.”
“Lev Nikolayevich witnessed the entire nineteenth century,” Maltsev continued. “He observed, analyzed, and changed his views in the process. In his earlier diaries, which he kept when he was living in the Caucasus, we may read something like this: ‘I’m craving a beautiful Cossack woman.’ Then, in later years, his notion of love expands greatly, the spirit ruling over the flesh. Tolstoy becomes aware that one can’t take wealth and fame with them when they die, and seeks to make his life simpler, discarding anything he deems irrelevant. To fully appreciate how Tolstoy’s thoughts developed over time, one has to think together with the writer, reading his diaries, letters, and, perhaps, only then his literary works. Tolstoy achieved a lot in his life, and could still teach us a lot. We humans are prone to make the same mistakes over and over again, but it is much safer to learn from mistakes made by others, including Tolstoy’s characters.”
The first works that went through three rounds of intensive proofreading have already been posted online; the remaining volumes will be added, in chronological order, over the next year. William Nickell, a professor in the Slavic languages and literatures department at the University of Chicago, said that O.C.R.-enabled word searches would make Tolstoy scholars’ work easier. “My first reaction was, ‘Of course the Russians figured this out—because they love literature so much and have people who are willing to do this sort of work (the proofreading),’ ” he wrote in an e-mail. “It is great that a way was found to overcome an obstacle that technology alone could not resolve.”
Duty, as much as love, was a motivating factor for the volunteer Alexander Averin, a fifty-six-year-old Ukrainian citizen who works in sea transportation and currently lives in Southeast Asia. “I certainly felt responsibility and wanted to make sure there were no errors, that Tolstoy’s texts were not distorted,” he said, adding that, in his opinion, if everyone in the world read Tolstoy, we might all be kinder to one another.
Like just about everyone involved in the project, the seaman was struck by the number of people who participated. “Frankly speaking, I didn’t expect there to be so many admirers of Tolstoy’s classical works in this mad world.”
Sally McGrane is a journalist based in Berlin.
Photograph by Hulton Archive/Getty.
