Issue 2. From Comrades to Classmates: Social Networks on the Russian Internet
Kåre Johan Mjør
Kåre Johan Mjør is an independent scholar. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bergen, Norway. His doctoral thesis, Reformulating Russia: The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers (2009), is devoted to the writings of Georgii Fedotov, Georgii Florovskii, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Vasilii Zenkovskii. Other fields of interest include the reception of Vladimir Solov’ev’s philosophy and Russian imperial historiography (Vasilii Kliuchevskii, Sergei Solov’ev). The author of Desire, Death, and Imitation: Narrative Patterns in the Late Tolstoy (2002), he has also written articles on the Moscow/Tartu school, the post-Soviet reception of previously forbidden literature, and on the “Russia and Europe” theme.
2.6 The Online Library and the Classic Literary Canon in Post-Soviet Russia
In this article, I discuss the ambitious Internet project The Fundamental Electronic Library of Russian Literature and Folklore (FEB), which was launched in 2002. In contrast to the Russian online libraries of the 1990s, which were based on social networking, the purpose of the FEB is to create a “cultivated,” scholarly library consisting of reliable digital editions of Russian classic literature. While its explicit programme is to present texts as “historical facts,” i.e., with philological and historical accuracy, and as virtually neutral sources of information, it turns out, however, that it is mainly oriented towards the traditional Russian literary canon, and thus embodies the normativity represented by this canon. Its historicist programme and alleged emphasis on the historical context are consequently undermined by its interest in canonicity, and such inherent contradictions have often led to misunderstandings among its users in the post-Soviet and post-totalitarian situation as to the historicity of its texts.
Language of contribution: English