Authentic Russian Material

[B.M. SHUTTLEWORTH]

Dear SEELANGers

To contribute to teaching and research programmes at the University
of Leeds, I am trying to put together a corpus of authentic written and
spoken Russian texts representing a range of different genres.  Can
anyone tell me if they know of (or where I could find out about) any
such corpora which are already in existence?  The genres I am
particularly interested in are:-

1. Student essays from Russian schools/universities
2. Personal/official letters
3. Conversation and other spoken material.

I'd be most interested in machine-readable archives (preferably KOI-8
format), and failing that printed/typed rather than handwritten material.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Please respond either to my
e-mail address or to the list.

With many thanks in anticipation

Mark Shuttleworth
Dept of Modern Slavonic Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
Great Britain
rusms at leeds.ac.uk