✨ What Is This?
This is an interactive poetry experience designed for learning Russian and Japanese through classic literature. Each poem combines hand-drawn ink illustrations, AI-generated voice narration from Eleven Labs, and detailed language lessons.
The goal: make Russian, Japanese, and German poetry feel like something you discover in a dusty notebook — intimate, beautiful, and worth understanding deeply.
🎨 The Art
Most illustrations are hand-drawn on iPad using Procreate — quick ink sketches in the style of a poet's personal notebook. The aesthetic draws from early 20th-century Russian artists and the Silver Age of Russian poetry.
The parallax effects give flat drawings the illusion of depth, like loose pages floating above the sketchbook.
📚 The Poems
Pushkin's "Я вас любил" (1829) — The most famous Russian love poem. Eight lines of perfect restraint, where formal address ("вы") creates distance even as the words confess devotion.
Akhmatova's "Ты письмо мое, милый, не комкай" — A woman's voice in Russian poetry, using intimate address ("ты") and concrete physical details: worn heels, gray dresses, a crumpled letter.
Together they form a conversation across a century about who gets to speak in love poems, and how.
🔧 Built With
- KtorKotlin web framework
- RailwayCloud deployment
- ElevenLabsAI voice narration
- ProcreateiPad illustration
- Vanilla JSParallax & typewriter
- Caveat + CormorantTypography
👩💻 Who Made This?
Built by Romy — a mobile engineer learning Russian through poetry, building tools for language learners, and exploring the intersection of code and art.
This started as a Valentine's Day hackathon project at the Frontier Tower in February 2026 and grew into something more.