Language through Literature
About
I’m Tom. I’m an engineer, I live in Vienna, and I make Language through Literature on my own.
How it started
I began learning Russian in 2024 for one reason: I wanted to read Dostoevsky in the original. Crime and Punishment was the first book I tried. I learned almost entirely by reading rather than by speaking, and somewhere along the way I fell for Chekhov’s short stories, which is where most of the Russian shelf still comes from.
What slowed me down was never the stories. It was everything around them: stopping for a dictionary, guessing where the stress falls, and looking up the same word for the tenth time because nothing remembered I had met it before. I wanted a page where a tap on any word gives its dictionary form and meaning, where a sentence’s translation waits until I ask for it, and where the reader keeps count of the words I have met. I could not find that for the books I wanted to read, so I built it.
What it became
The Russian room came first: Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in modern spelling, with a course that leads from zero toward the stories. The same idea then went to the Grimms’ tales in German, Horacio Quiroga’s Cuentos de la selva in Spanish, and Perrault and Daudet in French. Today the four rooms hold 48 works, and the explanations around them can be read in English, German, Spanish or Russian.
I am still a learner myself, a little further into Russian every month. Much of what the reader does exists because I needed it the week before.
How it is made
The texts are in the public domain. The dictionary forms, meanings, stress marks and translations were prepared for each book, and readers and teachers who wrote in have caught mistakes that are now corrected. The narration is a synthetic voice, not a human reader. The details, and the limits, are on How the reader is made.
It is a one-person project with no advertising on the page. Membership opens the whole library, and it is what keeps the project going. What is free and what membership opens.
Write to me
If you teach, if you have found a mistake, or if there is a book you would like to see on the shelf, write to me at [email protected]. Every letter reaches me.
I also wrote about learning Russian through its literature, and the five books behind this reader, for Five Books.