Hi Vladimir Volovich,

 > note that the collection on the above URL is transliterated on
 > the fly by web server

I did not spot that; by CGI script?  The xxx.lanl.gov science
research archive similarly provides ".dvi", ".ps", ".pdf" on the fly,
all from ".tex" source.

 > original texts are stores in 8-bit cyrillic encoding (to avoid mixing
 > with latin letters).

Well, outside of Russia, one might now want do the opposite and
store only in (faithful readable and encoding-independent ;^)
ASCII-Cyrillic form. The efficiency is essentially the same.

        (Just joking!)

          Laurent Siebenmann