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Abstract: The article examines the phenomenon of transfictionality, which has been developed in popular culture as a strategy for constructing fictional worlds. Fictional worlds populated by literary characters are a common plot-building technique in Western popular culture (an example of this is Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–2019)). In Russian culture, the process of employing such strategies of intertextual interaction has begun recently and is presented in a wide variety of literary segments: from fan fiction to V. Sharov’s prose. The article analyzes the first precedents of using transfictionality based on the 19th century Russian literary classics in large-scale media projects – in the film The Duelist (2016), in the TV series Anna the Detective (2016–2021), in the film and TV series Gogol (2017–2018), etc. The experiments of creating literary universes have proven successful among viewers and readers. The study concludes that the trend towards developing the strategy of transfictional imagination is obvious today, there is even an analogue in philological science – the concept of the ‘Petersburg text’ of V. N. Toporov, with its obvious aesthetically productive projections. At the same time, the attempts of constructing literary fictional worlds in the Russian mass culture remain timid enough. The fundamental reasons for this timidity are rooted in the peculiarities of the national cultural tradition. The Russian literature of the 19th century, unlike French or British ones, did not create high quality mass entertainment literature, and in its attitude to high home literary classics, Russian literature is characterized by the sacralization of authorship, which, perhaps, prevents arbitrary handling of the material. However, it is precisely these features that ultimately determine the specificity of transfictional experiments in Russian mass culture: the protagonists of the fictional Universes of Russian literature are not literary characters, but the creators themselves – classical writers, capable of creating new worlds-ontologies

About the author(s) :

Vladimir V. Abashev

Perm State University (Perm, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2712-2759

 

Marina P. Abasheva

Perm State University (Perm, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5720-7916

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt:04.11.2024; date of publication: 28.12.2024.

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