Ilya Klishin's ReadMe.txt
Literary curiosities and forgotten stories from Russian letters, from 18th-century fan fiction to the origin of the "lyrical hero".
What it is
ReadMe.txt is Ilya Klishin's Telegram channel about the books he reads, literary curiosities and the history of Russian literature. It's written in Russian, in long posts with hook-style headlines, and each one works like a small investigation where one discovery leads to the next. There are no ads — the channel description says so outright.
Why we picked it
Klishin finds things in the classics that no school syllabus mentions. How does a 19th-century anecdote about the fictional Lieutenant Kijé connect, through a chain of retellings, to Terminator 2 and Nolan's Oppenheimer? How did Byron, Pushkin, Mérimée and Aleksey Tolstoy end up "giving us" Black Sabbath? Did Leo Tolstoy really say "Do what you must, come what may"? He did — with a serious caveat.
Many posts are built on text corpora: how often Gogol actually writes about "fools" and "roads" and where the famous saying about Russia's two troubles really came from, or all three uses of a certain rude word in Tolstoy, each in context. Others deal with censorship, from the first Russian lesbian novella, defended by a deputy prosecutor after 1905, to the books pulled from Russian marketplaces in 2024. For a Telegram channel about Russian literature, it reads like good popular science, just shorter.
Where to start
- Sumarokov's "Russian Hamlet": 18th-century fan fiction whose author was teased by Lomonosov.
- The post on "password" and "slogan" in Zhukovsky and Tolstoy, told through a night watch in 1812.
- The piece on the "lyrical hero" — is that term really only used in Russia?
- The Kijé-to-Hollywood chain, the best example of how the author builds a story.
- Read one post a day: they're long but self-contained.
Who it's for
Readers of Russian who love literature but are tired of school-style readings, philology students, translators and anyone who enjoys the backstory of words and quotations. If you want a book channel on Telegram without ads or blurb recaps, start here.
Quick answers
What language is it in? Russian.
How often does it post? Based on the public preview, several times a week, mostly long-form posts.
Do I need Telegram to read it? No. The web preview opens in a browser without an account; you'll need one to subscribe or join the chat.
