‘The Endless Letter’ website, produced in partnership with Red Collar Digital Agency, is the final part of the cross-platform #VictoryPages digital project launched by RT Creative Lab in 2020 and dedicated to 75 years of victory over Nazism. #VictoryPages is represented by ‘The Endless Letter’ on Instagram.
‘The Endless Letter’ is a unique graphic series featuring hundreds of excerpts from original World War II frontline letters, which have been collected from Russian archives by the team from the ‘Letters from the Front’ project. The quotes are accompanied with illustrations created by young students of the Moscow RANEPA Design School, as well as renowned artists Peter Bankov and Mikhail Sorkin. The letter fragments and illustrations were shared line-by-line on Instagram Stories, creating a kind of ‘endless letter’ with an original, non-stop score by young Russian composer Max Makarychev.
The new website gathers the frontline missives, illustrations and music into a cloud-like interactive archive.
“Our online archive of letters is an archive of feelings,” says Kirill Karnovich-Valua, the creative director at RT Creative Lab. “Every line carries an image of a real human being. This is a story about the fate of an ordinary person – a soldier, a wife, a mother, a child, a father… It is the story of millions of families, those who lived and died during that terrible war. First and foremost, it is a story of love.”
The unique user experience offers an intimate glimpse of a world at war. Karnovich-Valua says:
We wanted to create the atmosphere of reading cherished letters by candlelight, to tell a private story of that time, the stories of ordinary people.
The triangle-shaped pieces of parchment unfold when you click on them and reveal a fragment of a letter together with an illustration accompanied by music and special effects. The letters containing the author’s name and fate (when it is known) are organised chronologically.