Many months ago I found myself exploring a website with the collected works of Alexander Pushkin, and taking inspiration from the Samuel Pepys blog, I thought it might be fun to import Pushkin’s letters into an email client. Apart from the novelty value, the mail client provides all kinds of very useful search and sort features you don’t usually get with literary texts.
I’ve finally gotten around to trying it – you can download this mbox file of his early letters, which I have only checked with Mail.app. The titles are all in Russian, but many of the letters are written in French, so speakers of either language may find them interesting.
I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.
The messages are in HTML format because the site I got them included many links to useful supporting material. All emoticons, however, have been removed.
In the future I would like to set up an IMAP server for this kind of historical correspondence, so people can annotate letters by replying to them. For the moment, I’m just trying to amass material – drop me a line if you know of good online sources for other authors.
Unlike other notable whiners, Maciej understands that while mbox is not a standard, IMAP is. Shame about the emoticons, though.