Concept
View.Point (Точка.Зрения at litpoint.org) is a community of professional writers with over twenty years of history. We create and curate a daily literary content feed in Russian by the same name.
Our goal is to publish original literary works in a variety of forms and styles, including song lyrics, that are relevant to the current moment in history. Our focus is on work that is outside the mainstream. We strive to preserve the authenticity of the author’s voice.
Regardless of the style of each text, we require high quality of form and of substance.
The volunteers who make up our project team live in Russia and many other parts of the world. They are united by affinity for and affiliation with Russian-language culture. We see the Russian literary tradition as an integral part of world literature, and hope to promote interactions between Russophone writers and authors rooted in other cultures. The English language portion of this site seeks to promote such contacts.
History
The View.Point literary association was founded by Moscow-based poet and musician Alexey Karakovski on October 10, 2000. The original 17 members were rock musicians, poets and novelists who had experience as DIY (“samizdat”) authors in the1990s. In September of 2001, the web site of the association was reformatted into a web journal. In 2003 and 2005 View.Point published its own periodical.
In June of 2003, the View.Point internet magazine acquired its current domain name, litpoint.org. In 2005, the publication reached its peak popularity. View.Point hosted literary contests, organized readings and concerts at the Moscow House of Writers, as well as at various museums, bookstores and clubs, and at Koloniya cafe (Russian: Колония, «The Colony»), owned by the writer Maria Polyanskaya. At that time Alexey Karakovski began working for the Writers’ Union of Moscow, and the leadership of View.Point passed to Sergei Alkhutov. Active members of the community at the time were novelists Alexey Petrov, Stanislav Furta and Anna Bolkiseva, poets Artyom Shepel, Vyacheslav Pamurzin, Georgy Bartosh, Elena Barinova and Kirill Kovalji, art critic Elena Safronova, and others.
After 2011, the View.Point site became a target of frequent cyber-attacks. The team was able to save the site, but it remained vulnerable, and its functionality was greatly reduced. In the summer of 2021, we closed down the site for major renovations. The site re-opened on February 1, 2022 as a stream that is updated on a daily basis. Shortly afterwards we added an English-language section to the View.Point site.
In September 2023, the site received a new domain name, LITPOINT.ORG, registered by a German citizen. Thus, the project has been transferred to be covered by the jurisdiction of Germany. The editorial board includes: Elena Mokrushina (Russia), Yulia Nemirovskaya (USA), Alena Maksakova (Germany), Olga Agur (Israel). The participants of the project take part in it on a voluntary basis. They use their own funds to cover its expenses, and they do not receive any income for their participation.
