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Abstract: This article deals with the modern phenomenon of amateur interpretations of school literary classics in the contemporary Russian-speaking Internet environment – in particular, the representation of the experience of interaction with school literary classics in the Russian-language RusLit Fandom. The activity of online fandoms, that take literary material as a basis, are most often associated with the creative reworking and discussion of popular mass culture texts, so the emergence of a fandom associated with Russian classics on social networks naturally arouses research interest. The very fact of emergence of such a fandom and its development seems to challenge the widespread thesis that young people are not interested in reading, do not care a straw about classical literature, and are unable to interact with complex literary works even on the basic level. The study explores various types of interpretations created within the RusLit Fandom in the Russian-speaking segment of the blog platform TikTok and the social network VK in order to identify the main ways of modernizing classics popular among the teenage audience and to analyze their experience of interacting with the original literary material. One of the essential features of RusLit Fandom is that it was created by a young generation of readers (high school and college students) for their peers with the aim of discussing their reading experiences without the restrictions imposed by school education practices. This fact, respectfully, allows researchers to find out what becomes a subject of interest, respect, or irony for teenagers when it comes to classical literature and its school interpretations and what ideas from the classics are important and meaningful for them. The material under examination allows the authors to conclude that classical literature is still an object of keen interest, and despite pessimistic forecasts, students still strive to find relevant knowledge in its texts and seek support from other interested readers in the fandom. The research results may be useful while designing academic materials and writing didactic and theoretical reading guides for teenagers.

About the author(s) :

Elizaveta V. Litovskaia

National Taiwan University (Taipei, Taiwan)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3578-9772

 

Maria A. Litovskaya

Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin

(Ekaterinburg, Russia) ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5388-7617

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 14.11.2024; date of publication: 28.12.2024

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