Specialists of the Russian research project “Slovo Tolstoya” (The Word of Tolstoy) have made a major upgrade to the digital system dedicated to the life and work of the great writer Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. As part of the project, a unique interactive communication system was created, reflecting the writer’s wide circle of acquaintances and acquaintances, as well as a large-scale photo archive containing more than 9 thousand photos. This platform, based on the writer’s 90-volume collection of works, opens up new opportunities for studying his literary heritage with the help of modern artificial intelligence technologies.
The newly created digital communication system includes a wide circle of thousands of people with whom the writer met and corresponded in his time – from famous writers, artists and philosophers to ordinary peasants and teachers. This system serves as a unique map of the historical and cultural relations of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The project provides extensive scientific information and explanations about each of the writer’s acquaintances, such as the farmer Timofey Bondarev, whom the writer highly valued.
The bulk of the photos from the photo archive, created in conjunction with the writer’s State Museum-Reserve, are being made public for the first time. With the help of artificial intelligence tools from Yandex, the project has become a single system. Now, users can easily access the archive photo of any person in the writer’s diary, as well as the notes written on the same day and the photo taken, directly via the Internet.
In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the digital platform, several scientific studies have already been prepared by philologists. These include historical stories reconstructed based on the diaries of the writer’s contemporaries, a travel itinerary showing the places the writer visited in St. Petersburg, and an explanatory dictionary of unique words used in his writings about the theater.
