Spinning Up a CPU-Only Micro-LLM with LoRA for Literary Style

Kashif Salahuddin and Samiya Kashif developed SamKash-Tolstoy, a lightweight LoRA adapter designed to emulate the style of 19th-century Russian literature, particularly the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Built on top of the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B model, this adapter utilizes a dataset comprising public-domain books from Project Gutenberg and filtered articles from the OSCAR web corpus, focusing on Russian literary themes. The project aims to maintain the authentic tone and moral depth characteristic of Russian classics while offering a tool for generating concise literary-style content. The adapter is available on Hugging Face and is designed to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware like an Apple M1 Max. It is not intended for factual Q&A without sources or imitating living authors. The developers emphasize ethical sourcing and invite feedback to improve the model, highlighting its potential as a literary tool for enthusiasts and educators alike.