A Manchester engineer in Озёры

My great-great-grandfather, John Matthew Frost — Иван Матвеевич (Ivan Matveyevich), to the Russians who knew him — was a Manchester engineer who moved to Russia sometime in the 1860s. He ended up in Озёры (Ozyory — “lakes”), a small town about 80 km south of Moscow, running the textile mill of the Shcherbakovs — a Russian merchant family of peasant origin who had built the local cotton industry from nothing, and who would later stand godparents to several of John’s children. He’d been brought over to introduce new technology (fire-prevention equipment, at first) and was paid a fairly princely 5,000 roubles a year plus board. He stayed long enough to design a new red-brick factory building in the English style, with tall arched windows. The building is still there.

The Shcherbakov mill in Озёры in the early 1900s.
The Shcherbakov mill in Озёры in the early 1900s.

It wasn’t an unusual life choice. England had just been through the Industrial Revolution and the Russian Empire was hungry for the expertise that came with it, so a steady trickle of English engineers made the trip east. There were enough of them to populate more than one book — Harvey Pitcher’s The Smiths of Moscow tells a very similar story about a Manchester family running an engineering works in Moscow, and Anthony Cross has written extensively on the wider British community in Imperial Russia.

The Frosts were English people who happened to live in Russia. Not Russians. They kept their English names. His first wife — Elizabeth Anne — died in Озёры in 1879 giving birth to twins. Her sister, Agnes Jane Walker, came out from England to help look after the children, and a year later, on 20 September 1880, the two of them were married at the British Chapel on Вознесенский переулок (Voznesensky Lane) in central Moscow. The parish register still records it: John Frost, 35, widower; Agness Jane Walker, spinster; Chaplain Walter Beck. Two years later that chapel was demolished and replaced on the same site by what’s now St Andrew’s Anglican Church, which still stands. (Under the Soviets it was confiscated and turned into a recording studio for Melodiya — Shostakovich and Rostropovich both recorded there — before being returned in 2001.)

The British Chapel in Moscow, photographed in the 1860s — this is the building where the wedding took place.
The British Chapel in Moscow, photographed in the 1860s — this is the building where the wedding took place.

John and Agnes had seven daughters, all born in Озёры. One of them — also called Agnes, after her mother — is my father’s grandmother on his mother’s side: my great-grandmother. The girls were baptised in the local Orthodox church in Озёры, after some confused negotiation between the priest and the Protestant factory manager about how that was supposed to work, and the family kept icons everywhere. They eventually moved north to Богородск (Bogorodsk; today’s Ногинск / Noginsk), another big textile town, and returned to England in the very late 1890s, settling near Stratford-upon-Avon.

Icons in the attic, and a Cold War kid

The icons came back with them. As a child I’d find them in the attic at my grandparents’ house — my Irish grandmother didn’t care for icons in the living room, so they lived upstairs, and I’d climb up to look at them. My dad still remembers his grandmother Agnes — the daughter, born in Озёры — who spoke English with a heavy Russian accent her whole life despite leaving Russia as a young girl, and who used to play a Russian finger-play rhyme, сорока-белобока (soroka-beloboka — the magpie cooking porridge for her children), with her English grandchildren, in Russian only.

One of them is no longer in the attic. My grandfather donated the family’s largest icon — a Mother of God in a gilded riza inside its original wooden case — to St Peter’s Church in Formby in 1977, where it’s still brought out each Christmas. It’s about 150 years old and is thought to have been Elizabeth Anne’s own icon: given on her marriage in the Russian tradition, and returned to the family after she died in Озёры in 1879.

The Frost family icon, now at St Peter's, Formby — Mother of God in a gilded riza, marked МР ΘΥ in the upper corners.
The Frost family icon, now at St Peter's, Formby — Mother of God in a gilded riza, marked МР ΘΥ in the upper corners.

I grew up during the Cold War, and the icons sat oddly against the news on the television: who were these people, with their strange-looking language, who’d been our allies in the war but were now apparently our enemies? I wanted to learn Russian. It wasn’t on offer at school. I’d have to wait.

The wait turned out to be about thirty years. When Duolingo finally released its Russian course in 2016, I was very ready. I devoured it in about 300 days.

The “what next?” problem

Then I hit the wall every learner hits. Apps get you to a point — but the point isn’t fluency, it’s the start of being able to engage with real content. I got a teacher, which helped a lot. But what I really wanted was to read. Real Russian. Books, articles, anything.

It’s hard. You hit unknown word after unknown word. You stop, look one up, lose the thread of the sentence; look up the next, lose the thread of the paragraph. Reading becomes lookup with a side of reading.

I tried everything I could find.

ToolThe goodThe not-so-good
ChromeBuilt-in text-to-speech that does a pretty good job of reading any webpage aloud, in most languages.Word translation is three clicks away and bounces you out to the Google Translate app every time. Nothing is saved. Impossible to generate content.
ReadlangThe OG of this genre — Steve Ridout showed the way, and the core reading-and-tapping model still holds up.Hasn’t had a real refresh in about a decade. Audio is limited because there are no per-word speech marks. One-page-at-a-time pagination breaks the flow.
LingQCovers similar ground to Readlang, with a big content library.The reader is cluttered by constant nagging to buy “lingots.” I’d rather not think about a meter running while I read.
Language ReactorHad a fledgling article reader I liked.The reader was always second fiddle to the video product, and the whole thing feels close to abandonware now.

Each of them got something right, and the people who built them solved real problems. They just weren’t the exact shape of the gap I had. What I really wanted was something that synthesised the best bits of all of them — Chrome’s “just read me the page” audio, Readlang’s tap-to-translate flow, LingQ’s vocab habit, Language Reactor’s contextual translations — into one product that didn’t make you choose. That’s what I set out to build.

So I built the version I wanted

After enough years of muttering “I really wish this existed,” I finally sat down and built it. Polyreader is what came out:

  • Generate content with AI at your CEFR level, on any topic you feel like reading about today.
  • Import from a URL — paste a news article or blog post and read it the same way.
  • Upload your own documents.
  • Single-page view. Read straight through, like a news article or blog post — no clicking from page to page mid-paragraph.
  • Per-word translations with context. Words mean different things in different sentences; the translation should reflect that, not hand you a dictionary entry to triage.
  • Phrase translations for the chunks that don’t lift word-for-word.
  • Seamless audio with speech marks, so the highlight follows the word being spoken and you can read and listen at the same time.
  • Automatic vocab capture, exportable straight to Quizlet for spaced repetition later.
  • Grammar annotations on every word — lemma, case, tense, mood, the lot.
  • Pay as you go. No monthly fee. Top up when you want; the credit doesn’t expire. $10 gets you a fairly generous fifty 500-word articles.

It’s the product I wanted, and I enjoy using it.

One day, Озёры

The English-style factory tower John Matthew Frost designed, still standing.
The English-style factory tower John Matthew Frost designed, still standing.

The factory my great-great-grandfather designed is still standing. The mill itself went bankrupt in 2000 — broken by cheap imports, like a lot of post-Soviet factories — and the buildings have been re-let since as an industrial park. Frost’s red-brick block is one of them. The Trinity Church where his daughters were baptised is still standing too, and active again as a parish, though the side chapel where the baptisms actually happened was demolished under the Soviets in the 1930s.

The Shcherbakovs stayed in Russia after 1917. They lost everything — the mills, the houses, the lot — and Mikhail Fyodorovich died quietly in 1936, just before the worst of the purges; his children went on to lives as Soviet accountants, fire-service officers and academics. The Frosts had the option of going home. The Shcherbakovs didn’t.

Now that I can hold a conversation in Russian and read most of an article without hitting the wall, I’d like to go and see it all for myself. Walk the streets Frost walked. Find the house where Agnes was born. Have the conversations with the people who still live there that nobody in my family has had since 1899.

That’s partly why I built this. If you’re stuck in the same gap between finishing your course and actually reading something — or if you’ve got your own Озёры to get to — I hope Polyreader helps. There’s a feedback button in the app; if it isn’t doing what you need, tell me why.

Happy learning.

— Justin

Sources

Family history and photographs

The Frost icon at St Peter’s, Formby

  • Nick Philpott, “Our Russian Icon,” parish magazine of St Peter’s Church, Formby — for background on the icon (drawing on the NADFAS report of 1991 and the inscription on its wooden case), and the date of first display at Christmas 1979.

St Andrew’s Anglican Church, Moscow

Озёры today

The Shcherbakovs

The wider British community in Imperial Russia