THE PROJECT | microstories

SOME WORDS OF MICHAEL KERINS ...

For me, being a storyteller is constantly to be on a journey, there is always a new place to visit and a new theme to explore. This most recent journey, Towards Lermontov started as these journeys often do after a very casual conversation.

Sometime around 2011/2012 I hosted a collection of about thirty Russian Librarians at home, for one of my Best Seat In The House storytelling parties. Their course leader currently Director of Moscow Gorky Public Library, and I quickly became friends.

I was invited to work with him and the Russian Library service to help mark the 2014 celebrations of the birth of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter.

In October 2013 I was once again in Moscow and I suggested that I start recruiting a series of NEW WORKS. Since Lermontov’s influence on later Russian literature can still be felt through his poetry, prose and fiction and he is regarded as the father of the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.

We should start a series of short stories or poems with the strict word limit of exactly 27 words. Then introduce to this a major contest both online and offline in Russia and in the UK. The contest of “Lermontovian” stories based on the main subjects of the great poet’s work (freedom, nature, loneliness, spiritual quest, creativity, mountains) in Russian and English languages in 27 words with subsequent public performance-media products (video, media posters, scribing, animation).

The Director and I then set up a request for new writing. Stories, poems or prose, on any subject. They should however be exactly 27 words long. No more – No less. With a worldwide network as a storyteller I soon had to include languages other than English and Russian. First Swedish and as of beginning of September 2015 we now have 28 languages and growing.

Artworks's usage given by the Gorky Public Library for the Lermontov Microstories Project