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Virtual Archive To myopic scholars searching hundreds of hours for that needle in the haystack, a growing online library of Russian literature holds promise of a dust-free academic life. By Alexander Osipovich For generations, scholars of Russian literature have spent countless hours in libraries poring over dusty volumes of Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy. But thanks to the Internet, this could well be about to change. The creators of Fundamental Electronic Library of Russian Literature and Folklore have an ambitious goal -- to create the world's most complete and accurate library of Russian literature online. In the first two years of its existence, the web site has acquired thousands of loyal users, and is beginning to transform the field of Russian philology. The site, located at www.feb-web.ru, was launched in 2002. Since then, according to statistics compiled by the site's creators, it has been visited by over 200,000 unique users around the world. In late February, it underwent a major redesign, and among other things, the creators added an English version in order to serve anyone who has an interest in Russian literature, no matter where in the world they are located. "The point is that a specialist, working in Moscow, Vladivostok or Los Angeles, will be able to access all of this information," said Konstantin Vigursky, the general director of the project, during a recent interview. Vigursky said that about 60 percent of the site's users come from Russia, while about 20 percent come from Europe and another 10 percent from the United States. The site has developed a loyal following among scholars of Russian literature throughout the world. It is "the most remarkable web resource for the study of Russian literature I have ever seen," wrote David Powelstock, a professor at Brandeis University and one of North America's leading specialists on the 19th-century poet Mikhail Lermontov. "I've been working with the Lermontov database, and it is hard to exaggerate how wonderful a tool this is. ... It's really phenomenal." One reason the project has so many fans in academia is its thoroughness. The site -- also known by its Russian initials, FEB -- presents the complete works of several important authors, with rigorous attention paid to accuracy. For example, it reproduces five different versions of the complete works of Pushkin, including a 20-volume set published between 1937 and 1959. Every page of the 20 volumes is presented online, right down to the last page, which lists each book's price (25 Soviet rubles). Moreover, Pushkin's poems, stories and letters are all reproduced in their original pre-Revolutionary orthography. According to Vigursky, the most popular sections of FEB are the ones devoted to Pushkin and Russian folklore. At the moment, the site's major drawback is that the number of authors is limited. FEB offers the complete works of several authors, including Pushkin, Tolstoy and Alexander Griboyedov. But other important authors -- such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov -- are unrepresented. Vigursky explained that the site is a work in progress, and the FEB staff is constantly preparing new authors -- a laborious, time-intensive process. FEB employs about 30 full-time staff members in two separate Moscow offices. The Informregistr Center for Scientific Research and Development, part of the Transportation and Communications Ministry, handles the technical side of the project, while the Gorky Institute of World Literature, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, handles the philological aspects. Yandex, the company that created Russia's most popular web portal, helped develop the site's search tool. In addition to presenting the complete works of important Russian authors, FEB includes several encyclopedias for philological research. The site also offers ancient works of Russian literature, such as the 12th-century epic "The Lay of Igor." Visitors can even see the earliest-known manuscript of the "Lay," presented onscreen as a scanned image. Later this year, the creators of FEB plan to add the works of 20th-century novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, as well as an authoritative edition of Russian fairy tales. In 2005, they plan to add English translations of certain texts, using the translations that are most commonly used in U.S. universities. (Currently, all the texts are in Russian; the site's English-language version only provides a translated interface, not translations of the texts themselves.) But FEB is more than a large repository of information. It is a tool that could revolutionize the field of philology, said Igor Pilshchikov, the site's editor-in-chief and a prominent literary scholar. "The potential of what we're doing is much larger than what you see on the surface," said Pilshchikov in a recent interview. Pilshchikov said that many of his colleagues now use FEB every day, and the site has vastly reduced the amount of time they spend searching for materials. "In philology, as in other fields of the humanities, a great deal of effort is spent on routine tasks like searching," Pilshchikov said. "Traditionally, philologists spend about 80 percent of their time searching for material, and 20 percent actually analyzing it. With our site, this ratio can be reversed." Pilshchikov added that FEB is an invaluable tool for linguistic research. It allows researchers to quickly compile databases of how often authors used certain words; such databases provide a statistical "fingerprint" for the given author. FEB can also be helpful in tracing the etymology of words, Pilshchikov said, referring to his friend, a professor at Moscow State Pedagogical University, who used the site to write a paper about the word sharaton. The word, which means "dandy," or a man who is obsessed with his outward appearance, fell out of common usage in the 19th century. It left only a few traces in literature -- for example, it appears exactly once in all of Pushkin's writings. Pilshchikov's colleague spent 20 years hunting for references to the elusive word. But after FEB was launched, he was able to do the same research much more quickly, using the site's sophisticated search tool. "It took 10 minutes," Pilshchikov said. Источник:
The Moscow Times: Context. 2004. April 9 — 15. P. 3. |