Author’s Strategies of the Interpretation of Russian Classical Literature in English-Speaking Community of Ficwriters

Abstract

This article studies the problem of creating readers’ identity by the participants of interpretive communities joined around adaptations (fanfiction) of the Russian classical literature. In sociology and cultural studies, the researchers pay attention to the fact that in the active readers’ online communities, the boundaries of authorship are difficult to determine, which requires using the philological methods of text analysis. The research subject is the individual strategies of the transformation of Russian classics in the English-language readers’ texts (fics). The comprehensive analysis of these texts allows us to scrutinize the perception of the Russian classics in transcultural online communities. For the first time, the author’s identity in fanfiction is considered through literary commentary on the texts. The research goal is to highlight authorial strategies of interpreting Russian classics in fanfiction texts. This article provides an overview of research approaches to the problem of authorship in fanfiction and the results of surveying Anglophone readers writing fanfiction based on the Russian literature. The questionnaire allowed distinguishing the author’s corpora of the fics based on L. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and popular serials and films. In addition, the author describes the system of narrative techniques, which allows identifying the authorship of the ficwriter. The results show that the individual reading strategies are most reflected in the composition and organization of artistic speech as parts of an authorial style.