Discussion summary
There are private efforts in Russia to digitize Soviet-era books, mainly in Russian, with some interest in translations. Researchers note the high quality of Soviet research due to cultural attitudes and limited emigration. American research was also prominent during the Cold War.
What the discussion says
- Russia has private digitization efforts mostly for Russian texts.
- Soviet researchers excelled due to cultural values and limited options to leave.
- American research was also highly influential during the Cold War.
“There are private efforts in Russia, mostly digitizing Soviet books in Russian.”
“Soviet researchers had high quality due to passion and access to education.”
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- Hacker News
- I have very fond memory of these books. We are from lower middle class family in India. My dad was fond of books. Western books were costly, but Soviet and Chinese books were of high quality and cheap. So we used to get loads of them from book fair.by blackoil
- Better link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
- Since we are on the topic of russian literature I'd definitely recommend reading something other than the usual suspects Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
One of my personal favourites is Bulgakov'с Master and Margarita and The Bull's Hour by Ivan Efremov.
Bull's Hour is actually amazing as it explores societies built on different principles using a form of a novel.
by nullorempty - They were very cheap, and some like Landau and Lifschitz's textbooks on physics, world-class (and extremely challenging, volume 1 on mechanics assumed mastery of the calculus of variations).by fmajid
- A discussion on this happened recently here*:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739003
Someone (@rramadass) made me a good set of recommendations from the titles.
* Edit: I see now that linked comment too is from @clmul, the OP here. Thanks clmul!
by alok-g - Maintainer/curator of the blog here. Please feel free to ask anything.
Glad to see this on the front page on HN, we had a similar bump some years back!
by the-mitr - These were big in India until the mid-90s. I recall one book of "tales from the Baltic states" which we had at home. There were others, but I can't remember the titles very well. And for stuff coming from the Soviet era, they were remarkably non-judgy about the Tsareivichs and Tsarinas who inhabited the tales...
On the technical front, one book that I fondly recall, but I haven't seen since is Experiments Without Explosion by O.M.Olgin: https://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions The title, as well as the content...
by shash - I loved these old books. I think I had the Seven Clam Sisters or something like it. My parents managed to rescue and bring to the US two childhood stories I really enjoyed: The Long Haired Maiden, and Shihan and the Snail[0].
These old folk tales are really entertaining. Often there’s no real moral or anything. It’s just a story. And to this day I really like these stories that are just “this happened and that person did that” and so on which don’t have to say “And the message is X”.
Unrelatedly, my wife jokes that I ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman because my childhood was spent reading folk tales about Chinese women.
0: both these are somewhere on archive.org e.g. https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden
by arjie