Monday, February 7, 2011

Hply eva afta - a fairytale for Twitter

From Hply eva afta - a fairytale for Twitter by Andy Potts:

Russia’s literary traditions could soon be abridged – with the epic novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky replaced by the shortest of stories.

A new competition is out to prove that brevity is the soul of wit by encouraging Muscovites to submit fairy tales suitable for Twitter.

While the short story has a proud heritage in this country, mastered by the likes of Krylov, he never had to contend with an abrupt word count of just 140 characters – but that’s the challenge facing modern day wordsmiths.

There are three categories – tales for children, tales of friendship and tales of Moscow – and the rules are quite clear that miniature masterpieces must follow the folkloric pattern of a series of magical events and conflicts.

Only after that can the heroes – and the eventual prizewinners – hope to live happily ever after, helped by the award of a new electronic gadget for the best entries.

The Moscow Community Association (Moskovskaya Assotsiatsiya Zemlyachestv) is organising the competition following the success of a similar city-wide game set up by Ded Moroz’s Moscow residence.

Here is a link to the Twitter page which you can read if you read Russian or use the internet to translate but somehow I think much will be lost in translation with this one.

So does anyone have a Twitter fairy tale to share in English?

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