Books, Virtually

Let’s be frank: online books and zines will never replace the real thing. Sure, you can crawl into bed with a laptop, take one to the beach with you if you are slightly insane, or even read the web version of TIME on the train. But sooner or later your batteries run down, eye-strain takes its toll, or your hard drive crashes. And, let’s face it, the cool, hard surface of a computer screen will never compare with the warm vellum texture of a good novel, or the  crisp sheen of a fine magazine. Moreover, you can’t roll up a computer to swat a mosquito, and roaming the aisles of a used computer store somehow just lacks the romance of an afternoon spent at a good used bookstore.

Case closed.

On the other hand, let’s give the internet its due – it is The Great Enabler. It may well be the greatest research and information storage device we will see in our lifetimes. This makes it ideally-suited to store hard-to-find or out-of-print literature. And that is just one of the many things it is doing quite well. All over the world, fanatics, idealists, pirates and lovers of literature are doing the hard work of digitizing novels, short stories and all manner of fiction, so that it can be publicized on the web and accessible to all. Usually for free.

So, let’s say you want to read a novel or a short story in Russian, but there is no Russian bookstore near where you live. Well, of course you could order a good, old-fashioned printed book online through one of several reputable internet booksellers (see box). But that is so 20th century! (Plus, it might be nice to sample an author in Russian before making the commitment of buying an entire book.)

So, why not explore sources for full-texts of Russian literature online? And there are plenty. Most are not much to look at, but, with a little work, you should be able to find what you are looking for.

One of the best sites is the Russian Virtual Library (www.rvb.ru). Its selection is limited to about 15 authors’ works for now. But what it lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality, with nice biographical data, photos and more. And they claim to have carefully checked the scanned texts they have put online (not a universal practice, certainly). If you want to read a Dezhavin poem or see the complete works of Pushkin or Dostoyevsky, this is the place.

At the other end of the bibliographic spectrum is the Kulichki site (www.kulichki.com/inkwell/). It is not just a virtual library, but also a catalog of links to all manner of online texts and libraries. As a result, there are alot of broken links, but there is much good here and the search tool is an invaluable place to start looking for an author. 

At the top of the Kulichki list of links is one of the oldest and best-known online libraries: Maxim Moshkov’s Library (www.lib.ru). Not limited to literature, this resource – which claims to have offered up over 25 million documents to users – has links to music as well. If you want to find some Asimov in Russian, find some historical fiction or humor writing, start here.

A recent favorite is the site Reading Room (reading-room.narod. ru). It has a simple but pleasant design and offers a nice mix of authors, from Babel and Vonnegut to Ilf and Petrov. But it can be a bit slow.

The best thing about all these sites is that, if you have Russified your browser, you can read these texts by directly following the links. No special reader or other software is required. On some sites, such as Virtual Library (www.biblial.by.ru/ index.htm), you will need to install a special reader to access archived versions of texts. It seems like a pain, but it can save a lot of download time – text files can be scrunched down to about one-tenth their original size when archived.

In some cases, authors themselves maintain good websites with complete versions of their works accessible online. The megapopular author Boris Akunin has an official website where all of his older novels are freely available, along with plus some great historical information on Moscow. (www.akunin.ru).

Likewise, one of my favorite authors, Dmitry Lipskerov, has a number of his works online. (www.lipskerov.ru)

So get out there and sample some new literature, discover a new author or two, and then go out and buy a copy of what you like. 

After all, publishers and authors have to eat too!

Where to buy books online

Here are a few of the stores we have found useful. Links to these sites, as well as to the libraries reviewed in this article, are available on our website: russianlife.net

biblio-globus.us – the biggest bookstore in Moscow now offers US delivery

eastview.com – the major supplier to libraries

kamkin.com – Kamkin Books  shut its bricks and morter stores, but the franchise lives on

kniga.com – the name says it all

petropol.com – the Boston bookstore is online

ruskniga.com - St. Petersburg publishing is one of the biggest