Karenina: Live Edition (3-4 October 2014) was an Internet project carried out jointly with Leo Tolstoy Museum Estate ‘Yasnaya Polyana’ and Google, which set out to to promote Tolstoy’s masterpieces as well as generally to encourage people to read. The combination of classical heritage and modern technology helped in particular to engage young people, prompting them to pick up the great books of Tolstoy.

This was a non-stop, 36-hour live reading marathon, with more than 700 people reading from 10 countries and more than 30 cities around the world. Each person would read a page, after which the floor would be passed to a new reader in a new location, with the help of Google technology. The entire reading was carried out and broadcast live on youtube and was viewed in more than 100 countries, which set a new Guinness World Record.

This was a non-commercial project, which was made possible thanks to the support of cultural institutions above all in Russia but also around the world. From Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula region, to the Russian State Library and Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, to the Peterhoff Summer Palace and Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, as well as museums, universities and libraries – large and small – in Vladivostok, Perm, Samara, Irkutsk, right down to a small and remote library in a provincial town of Siberia.

An important characteristic of the project was that it was very inclusive, with participants ranging from ministers and great theatre and film stars on the one hand, to ordinary students and literary fans who applied online to take part in the project. Participants also included Russians and students of the Russian language in other cities around the world, such as in the UK, Japan, Korea, France and America.

All material from Karenina: Live Edition is available now online at https://karenina.withgoogle.com, and this project later became the inspiration for other similar major Internet big read projects.