FEBRUARY 1/2009 www.kultura-rus.de NOTES FROM THE VIRTUAL UNTERGRUND. RUSSIAN LITERATURE ON THE INTERNET Conceived by Russian-cyberspace.org (Ekaterina Lapina-Kratasyuk, Ellen Rutten, Robert Saunders, Henrike Schmidt, Vlad Strukov) editorial Caught in the Web? The Fate of Russian Poets on the Internet 2 Henrike Schmidt (Berlin) analysis ‘Holy Cow’ and ‘Eternal Flame’. Russian Online Libraries. 4 Henrike Schmidt (Berlin) sketch Digital (After-)Life of Russian Classical Literature 9 Vlad Strukov (London/Leeds) focus The Defence of Copyright on the Russian Internet 11 Pavel Protasov (Zhukovka, Bryansk Oblast) analysis Literary Weblogs? What Happens in Russian Writers’ Blogs 15 Ellen Rutten (Cambridge/Bergen) interview ‘Distinguished Poet of the Internet’ 20 Interview with Alexander Kabanov (Kyiv) kultura. Russian cultural review is published by the Research Centre for East European Studies at Bremen University. Editorial board: Hartmute Trepper M.A., Judith Janiszewski M.A. (editorial assistance) Technical editor: Matthias Neumann The views expressed in the review are merely the opinions of the authors. The printing or other use of the articles is possible with the permission of the editorial board. We would like to thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation for their kind support. ISSN 1867-0628 © 2009 by kultura | www.kultura-rus.de Forschungsstelle Osteuropa | Publikationsreferat | Klagenfurter Str. 3 | 28359 Bremen tel. +49 421 218-3257 | fax +49 421 218-3269 mailto: [email protected] | Internet: www.forschungsstelle.uni-bremen.de Forschungsstelle Osteuropa FEBRUARY 1/2009 CAUGHT IN THE WEB? THE FATE OF RUSSIAN POETS IN THE INTERNET Henrike Schmidt editorial The poet, writer and publicist Dmitri Bykov com- lance artists’ pass judgement on texts. The profes- pares the Russian literary Internet to the stories and sional writer entering the Web, says Bykov provoc- novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky: ‘In fact, it would atively, must regret being born in ‘the world’s most be no great exaggeration to say that it was Fedor well-read country’. The poet Igor Irtenev formu- Mikhailovich who invented the Rulinet—the Rus- lated the same conclusion more self-deprecatingly sian literary Internet— 150 years before it actually than polemically. His ‘Corpse at his Laptop’ does appeared.’1 Although Bykov admires the novelist’s indeed describe the digital version of the under- writing, the analogy is not intended as a compli- ground individual quite well: ment: it refers to the bored, cynical and malicious The Poet’s Fate underground individual who is constantly involved I sit at the laptop day and night in polemics against himself and others – charac- Stare at the screen, chew tobacco, teristics that for Bykov are typical of the average I don’t love anyone, I’m not nice to anyone Russian user and his cultural complexes and liter- Once I was a cheeky cossack, but now I’m a ary ambitions. At the same time, Bykov, a multi- sitting corpse. media jack of all trades, is the embodiment of the contemporary literary entertainer: he is ubiquitous, For him, as for Bykov, there is no salvation from not only in literature and on the television, but also the ubiquity of the Net: in the Internet. Why? He answers that he likes to There is a dot in space called .ru, keep a type of The Diary of a Writer; many of the I am caught here – for a long time and prob- thoughts expressed spontaneously in the Internet ably forever. are important for his novels, and a number of forum I fear that I will snuff it at this dot. discussions were converted in their entirety into I fear that the end will come. If only I knew one of his books. The Net, therefore, is a place of when on the dot. polemical inspiration and a quarry for his own lit- The lyrical dedication to the ‘dot.ru’ could be said erary creation. Alongside these somewhat prag- to be symbolic of the Russian literati’s relationship matic motivations, Bykov confesses to have a pecu- to the Internet, which alternates between feelings liar and uncontrollable passion for the Internet: he of oppression and passion as a new writing tool, a reads certain texts and sites, and the majority of the communication network, a rumour mill, a public forum discussions, with an ‘an aesthetic, possibly space (albeit a distorted one). even erotic, pleasure’. The particular intensity of this relationship ema- This paradoxical, negative duality of identifi ca- nates from the past, from the specifi c situation fac- tion with the literary culture of the Net is typi- ing Russia in the 1990s, during which the Inter- cal of a number of Russian writers. They polemi- net was transformed from an exclusive mini-club cise against the medium in which ‘programmers, to a mass medium. The Web’s special signifi cance housewives, New Russians, accountants and free- for Russian literature stems from three factors: the social upheaval that brought about a normative and 1 Within the ‘community’, the abbreviation ‘RuNet’ for the economic crisis in the state-run cultural infrastruc- ‘Russian Internet’ and Rulinet for the ‘Russian literary Inter- net’ are popular. The lack of selectivity – sometimes it only ture (publishing houses, sponsoring institutions includes domestic resources and sometimes foreign ones and associations), the opening up of the country translated into Russian – has its roots in the Internet’s global character. after decades of isolation and the ensuing re-crea- 2 FEBRUARY 1/2009 editorial tion of a common space of communication with the it presents the subversive deconstruction of the Russian literature of the diaspora, and the unique literary canon in BINTERNET ART. It gives a por- size of the country, which grants the Internet great trait of the unavoidable LiveJournal, the Russian importance as a medium for the regions. The result version of the globally successful BBLOG. Lastly, of these interlacing factors is the large number of the Russian-Ukrainian poet Alexander Kaba- texts and messages which also ‘draw’ those liter- kov answers questions on the signifi cance of the ati into the Net who , such as Bykov, have little in world-wide-web for BLOCAL POETIC MYTHOLOGY. common with it aesthetically or normatively. The Thus the grand master of literary dialogue, Fyo- overwhelming majority of these texts are aesthet- dor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, is not the worst ically conventional and do not exploit the Inter- choice of archetype for this type of aesthetic and net’s full potential for poetics. BHYPERTEXT and ideological polyphony. BDIGITAL, ANIMATED POETRY are not the innovative genre of the new Internet literature. The aesthetic From the German by Christopher Gilley innovation came from other, completely unex- pected quarters: the often obscene and politically incorrect virtual subcultures collectively created ABOUT THE AUTHOR: a new language, the jargon of the so-called ‘good- Henrike Schmidt is a literary scholar and transla- for-nothings’ (BPADONKI), which writers such as tor. She is currently undertaking research at the Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin incorporate Peter Szondi Institute for General and Comparative into their work. The mass BDIGITAL FOLKLORE has Literature at the Free University in Berlin on the yielded characters and narratives which have also sociology and aesthetics of Russian literature on infected the offl ine language of journalism, PR the Internet. She is a member of the international and politics. research project on new media in Russia and East- Of course, the genres, authors and aesthetic forms ern Europe, Russian-cyberspace.org. presented in this edition of kultura cover only a small portion of the cultural activity on the Rus- READING SUGGESTIONS: sian Internet. Alongside the pragmatic yet essen- Bykov, Dmitrii, ‘Dostoevsky and the Psychology tial question of the availability of literature on the of the Russian Literary Internet’, Russian Studies Web (BELECTRONIC LIBRARIES and BCOPYRIGHT), in Literature, Vol.41, 2005, No.2, p.64–74. 3 FEBRUARY 1/2009 ‘HOLY COW’ AND ‘ETERNAL FLAME’. RUSSIAN ONLINE LIBRARIES. Henrike Schmidt analysis The old myth of Russian culture’s literary rootedness lives on in the Internet. Although in the offl ine world there are complaints of sluggish sales and poor quality, the Web libraries are abundantly fi lled. These not only act as enormous repositories of texts, but also as meeting places for a readership spread through- out the world. This fact explains their symbolic status and their importance as a point of identifi cation. However, the pressure on the Russian Internet libraries is growing: commercialisation and integration into the offl ine legal norms are changing the conditions in which they exist. Two tendencies are evident: the development of libraries that charge for their services alongside the retreat into copyright piracy. ONLINE LIBRARIES AS A NATIONAL CULTURAL do not possess the minimal requirements of bib- ASSET? liographical documentation. However, in the self- I am proud that the collections of books in perception of RuNet, as the Russian segment of the the Russian internet are considerably larger internet is often called by its users, these projects than comparable online libraries in other coun- perform the role of libraries. tries. I am pleased by a further piece of evi- dence that, even in this electronic age, Rus- THE PEOPLE’S LIBRARIAN AND HIS HOLY COW sia remains a literary country, a country of One of the nuclei of Russian literature in the the book. I like to think that the traditions of internet is the library run by programmer Maxim Soviet samizdat are alive and well today. Ser- Moshkov (http.//www.lib.ru). Roman Leibov, the gei Kuznetsov ‘inventor’ of Russian literary hypertext and an Is the writer and publicist Sergei Kuznetsov’s pride early cult fi gure among Russian bloggers himself, concerning the unique status of Russian electronic calls the site the ‘holy cow of RuNet’.