Recently, I decided to reread “Eugene Onegin”. During the process, the idea of an online book was born, in which each line that could theoretically raise questions is clickable, providing a short explanation at first click, and a detailed one upon the second.
After all, even now, about thirty percent of it is genuinely incomprehensible. It reminds me of the (joking?) experiment where children were asked to draw a picture based on “Plowing the fluffy grooves, / A daring carriage flies. / The coachman sits on the arc / In a sheepskin coat, in a red sash.”
The grooves then turned out to be little animals, because who else can be fluffy. A mix between a beaver and a thrush. Not to mention, children totally missed on carriage and sash.
I thought it would be interesting to explain such things in context. You read, you click if it’s unclear, you learn something new, then you go back to continue reading.
And here I googled it, and found a very similar service – genius. And someone has even started annotating Eugene Onegin there.
But it would be much more interesting to make a separate domain book, in such a way to make it convenient for reading on mobile and screen, a bit every day, where every confusing segment includes stories and explanations, quotes from books and academic works, with links to originals and additional materials.
If this interests someone else and a small team assembles, I would be delighted to participate. Theoretically, such a thing could even be released in epub, since it supports internal hyperlinks.
I’m sure if there were tools and APIs for creating such books, other topics and volunteers would emerge too.
Here is the link to genius, where it is very close to what I imagined, but hosting Pushkin on this platform doesn’t seem like a great idea. Nevertheless, the implementation is close to what I had in mind.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 