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2.11 - The Internet

from History 2 - Mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Marijeta Bozovic
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Much of Russian literature on the internet remains closely linked to traditional written and printed forms. Russian literature born online resembles that of much of the world, but some genres and forms follow different trajectories due to the peculiarities of the early local Russian online scene. In particular, poetry and code met early and often. Russian-language poets proved early adapters to the World Wide Web. Author-posted web poetry and prose has been anarchic and politically polarised. Early Russian online poetry projects like Vavilon.ru and LitKarta reflected hope for a liberal public sphere. By contrast, much web poetry and prose in the late 2010s and early 2020s has provided a place for celebrating right populism and policing borders – of Russianness, of gender and sexuality, of literary canon, language, and form.

Keywords

Internet literatureonline poetryVavilon.ruright populism
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 407 - 422
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bozovic, Marijeta, ‘Performing poetry and protest in the age of digital reproduction: Roman Osminkin’, in Beumers, Birgit, Etkind, Alexander, Gurova, Olga, and Turema, Sanna (eds,), Cultural Forms of Political Protest in Russia (New York: Routledge, 2017).Google Scholar
Crary, Jonathan, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).Google Scholar
Gerbaudo, Paolo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto, 2012).Google Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Isaacson, Walter, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).Google Scholar
Kostincova, Jana, ‘Dora Vey lives and works in St Petersburg: Russian poetry written by people and algorithms’, Novaia rusistika 13.1 (2020), 37–43.Google Scholar
Matveev, Ilya, ‘The two Russias culture war: Constructions of the "people" during the 2011–2013 protests’, South Atlantic Quarterly 113.1 (2014), 186–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, Benjamin, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, Henrike, ‘From samizdat to New Sincerity: Digital literature on the Russian-language internet’, in Gritsenko, Daria, Wijermars, Mariëlle, and Kopotev, Mikhail (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 255–75.Google Scholar
Tenen, Dennis, and Foxman, Maxwell, ‘Book piracy as peer preservation’, Computational Culture 4 (9 Nov. 2014), http://computationalculture.net/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation/.Google Scholar

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