January 01, 2019

Four Million Words


Four Million Words

We have had a website since 1993. It began as an ecommerce site, to sell all our books and maps. (For the record, Amazon did not get started until 1994. Just sayin'.)

When we took over Russian Life magazine in 1995, the site added information about issue contents, online-only articles, and of course we also sold subscriptions online.

There have been several redesigns, reboots, and enhancements over the years, and databases have always been an important part of the Russian Life website (to make it more dynamic and useful) – from a catalog of all our magazine's articles, to historical dates, to companies, to schools where Russian is being taught.

Views of Websites Past

 

Last July we decided to kick things up several notches. Our New Russian Life crowdfunding campaign raised funds to (1) rationalize and unify all of our databases and digital content, and (2) put all of the back issue content of Russian Life online – saving it for posterity, while making it accessible to readers and researchers anywhere in the world.

We have been thinking for many years about how we would do all this, what tools we would use, and how it would all look. Executing on those ideas over the past six months has been a huge undertaking (and we're not done yet). Nothing we have done with our website over the previous 25 years can even begin to compare. A huge shout out goes to our web engineer and full stack developer Scott Widmer. He has helped make this process smooth and rational.

The website is built on the very powerful, open-source CMS system called Mura. We have been using Mura for over a decade to manage the website, but never have we used it to its full potential until now. Mura will allow us to scale the site up immeasurably, to manage and edit articles from contributors from all over the world, and to have it all perform at high speed and efficiency. Together with a Slatwall ecommerce solution, it will also allow us to sell online subscriptions, manage print subscriptions, and unify our content-focused website with our commerce-focused website for the first time into one seamless whole.

When complete, the online archive of 24 years of Russian Life will include over 8,000 articles, and over 4,000,000 words, all indexed and searchable.

And it will only grow from there!

Thank you to all our readers, supporters, backers and partners in this upgrade. We encourage you to bookmark and return to the site weekly. Our audacious goal is to make russianlife.com the most useful, influential online resource for Russophiles the world over. And we can only do that with your help.

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Some of Our Books

A Taste of Chekhov

A Taste of Chekhov

This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.
Turgenev Bilingual

Turgenev Bilingual

A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
A Taste of Russia

A Taste of Russia

The definitive modern cookbook on Russian cuisine has been totally updated and redesigned in a 30th Anniversary Edition. Layering superbly researched recipes with informative essays on the dishes' rich historical and cultural context, A Taste of Russia includes over 200 recipes on everything from borshch to blini, from Salmon Coulibiac to Beef Stew with Rum, from Marinated Mushrooms to Walnut-honey Filled Pies. A Taste of Russia shows off the best that Russian cooking has to offer. Full of great quotes from Russian literature about Russian food and designed in a convenient wide format that stays open during use.
Woe From Wit (bilingual)

Woe From Wit (bilingual)

One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
White Magic

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
The Latchkey Murders

The Latchkey Murders

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha, in which a serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow...
Okudzhava Bilingual

Okudzhava Bilingual

Poems, songs and autobiographical sketches by Bulat Okudzhava, the king of the Russian bards. 
Survival Russian

Survival Russian

Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

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Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955