Russian literature in the digital age

Abstract

The article examines the influence of digital technologies on Russian literature. The author explores new poetic formations caused by Web impact. Transformation of the author’s and reader’s competencies, ideas about a literary work and its language are discussed. Web as a literary start-up determines the further creative path of the writers. Network “navigators” that help the reader look around the current literary situation are named. The opposition “literature – network literature” leads to the literary phenomena, which are functioning only on Internet. The most significant of such projects, features of text generating and reception on Web are noted. The researcher points to the implementation of different sub-paradigms of modern literature (postmodern, neo-naturalist, avant-garde, neo-sentimentalist, post-romantic, etc.) using the principles of Internet communication. The most representative phenomena of Internet creative work are characterized: blog literature in its various incarnations, both the invariant features of the blog discourse – and the searches of modern authors using that form. Modernization of genre strategies, the precedent of network drama, influence of computer games on the literary poetics are considered. Language renovations, attempts to generate texts by neural networks and other experiments that form the “digital poetics” of the newer literature are discussed.