CAPONEU

Anna Murashova

University of Tartu, Estonia

Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, Germany

The Digitalization of the Novel and platformization of cultural production:

Practices, Hierarchies, Texts. The Russian Case

This paper explores Russian online publishing platforms and the texts published there. This is not a complete research project, but a preliminary local case study that may be developed further at the postdoctoral stage.

First, I examine how digital technologies are redefining the relationship between literature and the political sphere. I draw on both the digital ethnography research that I started in spring 2020 and on the concept of digital sovereignty as a geopolitical imaginary and a source of identity construction. Second, I analyze several texts published on self-publishing platforms as political novels. I approach them from the perspective of an interpreter, meaning both from the perspectives of a common and a professional reader. This will demonstrate how it is not the authorial intention that makes a text political, but meanings it conveys and interpretations it enables, especially in the external context described in the first part of the article.

In Russia, the Internet started as a political project. It is closely related to events in August 1991, specifically to the Soviet coup attempt. Internet communication was key to the media coverage of those events (Konradova 2021). As Konradova (2020) and Schmidt (2020) show, the Internet in Russia developed in close connection with book culture. The special term “Rulinet” (Russian literary Internet) metaphorically describes the role of literature in the emergence of the Russian Internet. The very first Internet servers and communication services for the Russian public hosted books from the Soviet tamizdat and samizdat which had been digitized and published by emigrants from the USSR and early post-Soviet Russia—a continuation of literary emancipation from Soviet regulatory practice. At this time, the launch of national-based book publishing platforms such as the Moshkov Library became “a cultural symbol of early RuNet and a marker of cultural identity for internet users also outside the Russian Federation (Mjør 2009).” The Moshkov Library was followed by proza.ru, stihi.ru, and the and the Moshkov Library’s own Zhurnal “Samizdat” (Samizdat magazine).

The 2010s saw the launch of platforms that enabled Russian-language authors to not only publish, but sell their works, regardless of their nationality or citizenship: Lit-Era, later Litnet, LitRes: Samizdat, Author.Today, and Ridero. Most readers were from Russia, but some were also from post-Soviet countries such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Moldova as well as from other countries around the world. This realized John Perry Barlow’s idea of the Internet as a space without sovereignty and borders as argued in his programmatic essay “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (Barlow 1996). Despite the existing geographical borders and geopolitical identity, Russian-speaking people all over the world were now able to read and buy books and communicate freely. Especially in its early days, the Internet was seen as a space of free circulation of information, freedom from Soviet-era censorship, and freedom of representation and authorial expression.

Since 2012, the Russian government has consistently pursued a policy of digital sovereignty—understood as state control within geographical boundaries—by implementing different legislative acts such as Federal Law No. 139, colloquially known as the “websites blacklist,” and Federal Law No. 90, the Sovereign Internet Law (see Federal Law № 139; № 90). Rulinet remained relatively unaffected by these so-called security laws. The most influential piece of legislation affecting the Internet literature sector were the anti-piracy laws, which blocked some important book projects such as LibGen and Flibusta on the territory of the Russian Federation (Ostromooukhova 2021).

In 2022, the economic sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation following its invasion of Ukraine and new laws that criminalized the public dissemination of “unreliable reports” about Russian troops in Ukraine finally destroyed the vision of a community of Russian-speaking people independent of nationality or place of residence.

This essay was written in December 2024. From this perspective, the development of nationally based platforms for e-books and book publishing could be interpreted as a sign of cultural specificity, especially in light of Russia’s history of Internet development and nationally based services such as Yandex and Vkontakte. Unlike US-dominated companies such as Amazon and Google Books, which are multilingual and globally oriented, Rulinet is a specific and separate area within the global literary Internet with its own practices.

When Mastercard and Visa ceased operations in Russia in March 2022, people living outside the country were no longer able to purchase books on Russian platforms. For users inside Russia, this meant they could no longer buy books on Russian platforms registered abroad such as Litnet.com, which was based in Cyprus.

The political views of the platform owners also play a role. Sergey Grushko, founder of Litnet and a Ukrainian citizen, stated that the funds generated by the Russian version of Litnet were used to finance the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Then the Litnet administration stated it was rebuilding the platform to allow Russian-language authors outside Russia and Belarus to publish and sell their books. Authors who lived in Russia started leaving Litnet and looking for a new publishing platform, disagreeing with Grushko’s position and fearing persecution by Russian authorities.

In June 2022, Litnet was bought by a Russian-based host. Sergey Grushko explained how it had been a mistake to invest so much time and energy in the development of Russian literature over the past seven years. Following this news, some users updated their Litnet pages with Russian flags and the slogan “Litnet is ours” (a reference to the slogan “Crimea is ours”).

On Author.Today, the administration declared the platform a literary website for anyone writing and publishing in Russian and anyone interested in their works. They stated that the nationality and political views of the site’s owner were irrelevant and that the platform was not a political resource and would therefore not not hold any political position. The platform’s administrative team deleted and switched off comments under blog posts on current events that were “inciting political discussion and political provocations” (see, for example Taj 2022; Molchanov 2022). Since Author.Today is based on Russian territory, it became impossible to sell and buy books from outside Russia on the platform, as was the case on other platforms such as LitRes, the largest electronic bookseller in Russia, and other smaller platforms. However, by autumn 2022, some of these platforms again sold books to users not based in Russia and some of these platforms were reopened to books and users from outside Russia.

These examples show how literary platforms unintentionally became an arena for political expression and how the semiotic boundaries of the Russian online literary sphere coincided with the geographical boundaries of the Russian Federation. For a comprehensive analysis of the Litnet case and the so-called “sovereignization” (Bronnikova et al. 2025) of the Russian literary Internet, see my article “Reconsidering Ru(li)net: Russian literary self-publishing platforms and the war in Ukraine. A case study of Litnet.com” (Murashova 2023).

II.

My understanding of the political novel draws on Fredric Jameson’s ideas of the political unconscious, combined with the notion of the platformization of literary production and Tarleton Gillespie’s (2010) proposed metaphor of the platform.

I will now focus on the two platforms Litnet and Author.Today. According to Jameson, when a text as both an individual literary work and a symbolic act is approached in a broader context that includes the social order, it “has itself been thereby dialectically transformed, and that it is no longer construed as an individual ‘text’ or work in the narrow sense, but has been reconstituted in the form of the great collective and class discourses of which a text is little more than an individual parole or utterance” (1981, 76). Therefore, the texts published on both platforms can be interpreted as an individual expression and unique cultural artifact and as part of a collective discourse.

In relation to the platform metaphor, Gillespie notes that the initial meaning of “platform” suggests an egalitarian arrangement that promises to support those who stand upon it (Gillespie 2010). He notes that in political context, “the term retains a populist ethos: a representative speaking plainly and forcefully to his constituents. In any of platform’s senses, being raised, level, and accessible are ideological features as much as physical ones” (Gillespie 2010, 5). Discussing YouTube, Gillespie notes that “user-generated content fits neatly, implying a sense of egalitarianism and support, and in some ways even in the political sense, i.e. giving people a public voice” (2010, 8). Thus, the platformization of literary production, i.e. the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around platforms (Poell et al. 2018) and particularly the development of literary self-publishing platforms gives people a public voice, especially those who were previously marginalized and oppressed—all those “oppositional voices of black or ethnic cultures, women’s and gay literature, ‘naïve’ or marginalized folk art, and the like” (Jameson 1981, 86). Publication on the self-publishing platform is an opportunity for these voices to be heard.

The development of self-publishing platforms where anyone can publish and sell their work gives authors the opportunity to publish works that do not adhere to editorial standards and conventions. Publishing on an online platform generates less symbolic capital for the author than publishing in a publishing house. Nevertheless, thousands of authors publish their writings on the platforms. An author who has been rejected by a publisher, who does not want to adapt their text to editorial views, or whose literary work does not meet certain quality criteria can just publish their work on the platform. It is an opportunity for authors to establish a readership and communicate with them directly.

At the same time, there are a number of unspoken conventions and reader expectations on the platforms that authors should follow if they want to become popular, be featured on the first page of the platform, or make first place in a genre ranking. Each platform has its own hierarchy based on readers’ actions, which is mediated by the platform’s technologies. Every action, such as buying books on the platform or clicking on a book title, is evaluated by the platform’s algorithm. Author and book ratings are generated based on these evaluations.

Most texts published on these platforms belong to popular genres, and each platform has its own genre setting. The predominant and most popular genre that Litnet readers like, comment on, and frequently add to libraries are romance novels of all kinds: contemporary romance novels, erotic romance novels, fantasy novels, etc. It is likely that the audience of these texts is predominantly female: there are many female nicknames and user avatars on the platform, both among authors and readers, in an attempt to create a feminine image and appeal to and represent femininity, though “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

The predominant genres on Author. Today are military and time travel fantasy, lit-RPG, and the so-called popadantsy—a specific Russian genre that describes an accidental journey into fantasy worlds or into the past. The main hero in these stories travels back in Russian history to change the course of history or provide an alternative view of historical events. Most of the writers’ nicknames on the platform imply a male author. Although the founders did not explicitly mention this, the platform is considered a male space in the self-publishing community. In the spring of 2022, when Litnet authors started to look for new places to publish, authors publishing on Author.Today stated that an influx of female authors with plots about pregnant women and rape would be tantamount to a barbaric invasion and create a certain negativity among their audience.

Since Janice Radway’s classic analysis (1983; 1991), writing and reading has been commonly accepted as a form of female empowerment, even though “romance is the most derided popular ﬁction genre” (Driscoll 2017, 63). In the online space, such writing and publishing practices give female authors more presence and agency in different cultures (see Baga 2023; Borham-Puyal and Escandell-Montiel 2021; Sharma et al. 2023; Yunyi 2023).

As I mentioned earlier, the texts on both platforms are not explicitly labeled as political, nor are they considered canonical or “high” literature. My research shows that authors who publish and sell their texts on these platforms primarily want to entertain their readers, to offer them non-realistic, escapist texts for readers to immerse themselves in and disconnect from reality. Nevertheless, we can treat these texts as political texts because they reflect opinions and experiences that do not appear in conventionally published books and more generally in culture.

Following Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that taste functions as a marker of class, John Storey argues that the popular aesthetic reverses this emphasis and subordinates form to function: “High culture is about representation, popular culture is about what is represented.” (2018, 256) The texts published on Litnet depict the experiences of women which tend to be ignored by canonical authors and general literary fiction, where supposedly “universal human issues” are in fact reflecting male values. Texts published on Author.Today about heroes who travel back to the USSR or the Russian Empire, or who find themselves in an alternative historical fantasy world can be read as reflections on the historical past and, in some cases, as expressions of resentment and even attempts to rewrite history.

Each romance novel published on Litnet has two genre hashtags—fantasy romance novel, erotic romance novel, contemporary romance novel, historical romance novel, and others. Also, each novel has two keywords that describe the plot: “in the text there is” (“в тексте есть”). The statistical analysis that my colleague and I conducted in autumn 2021 showed that the dominant keywords were “Dominating hero” (“Властный герой”), “Humor,” “Speaking intimately” (“Очень откровенно”)—a play on the double meaning of “intimate” and reflects stories that describe deep feelings and detail erotic experiences—and “From hate to love” (“От ненависти до любви”).

The Russian romance novel differs from the classic example of the genre as described by Radway. This may be a consequence of the Soviet legacy, which promoted a strong ideal of women’s emancipation more systematically than in the US and encouraged women to reject traditional gender roles. The Russian heroine is more likely to mix the conventional role of housewife with self-realization through her career (Chernyak 2004; 2015a; 2015b; Klimovickaya 2009; Bocharova 1996).

On Litnet, there are many stories about rape, the boss and his subordinate, forced marriage, rough sex, the main hero treating the heroine like a slave or literally selling her into slavery. The male characters in such novels are often cruel and aggressive, which is indicated by the aforementioned keyword “Dominating hero.” Radway notes that the readers she interviewed defined such novels as “bad” in contrast to “good romance novels” in which the hero may be violent but is always gentle toward the heroine and her family (Radway 1991, 67–68).

The constantly changing, algorithm-driven landscape of the platform’s main page reflects the most popular topics sought by readers. Since December 2023 and up to the time of writing this essay, for example, there were many stories about betrayal and divorce, and readers and authors widely discussed how betrayal is ubiquitous on Litnet. Most authors, both high-rated or lower-rated, are picking up on this trend. As a result, more and more texts are being written on the same topic. The number of texts on this topic published on the platform proves that women need a space to articulate and reflect on their unique stories. The self-publishing platforms provide this space. Apart from serving as normative prescriptions for how the family should be constructed according to traditional gender roles and patriarchal culture, such “bad” novels serve to portray women’s experiences that are typically not addressed by conventional romance novels, that imply the story of a happy love and conclude with a wedding. Reading stories about pregnancy, abuse, betrayal by a husband, single motherhood, or various sexual experiences, both good and bad ones, allows a woman to identify with the heroine and feel that she is not alone in what she is going through. It helps her overcome and find her own way in the world.

A good example is the novel Divorce. I will learn to live without you. Written by Elena Bezrukova and Margarita Dyuzheva, its publication started on September 23, 2024 and reached the top 10 in the “women’s novel” genre. This is a special feature of the platform: novels are already being published in installments while future segments are still being written, chapter by chapter. The heroine learns that she is pregnant, then that her husband has cheated on her, so she begins to prepare her divorce. She has to divide up the business she shares with her husband, find a new apartment, and sort out her relationship with a long-term admirer who returns into her life. In addition to portraying the patriarchal model in which a woman cannot exist without a relationship with a man, reading such a story and identifying with the heroine is a way for women to obtain female agency. Most likely, the heroine will find a new husband in the end (the novel had not yet been completed at the time of writing this essay), but it shows that woman should put their desires above society’s expectations of a relationship with a man, that her goals and duties are valuable, and that a happy marriage is not the only way to live a life.

On Author.Today, where plots about accidental travel or alternative history make up a significant portion of published texts, the landscape looks different. First, authors can intentionally include a political dimension in their text, and readers know that the fantasy novel could be perceived as political novel. For example, the novel Feeble (Ледащий) by Anatoly Drozdov, published in March/April 2024, tells the story of the old man Nikolay Nesvitsky. After his death, he finds himself in a fantasy world where the Variagian Empire (an allegory for the Russian state, which, according to some historical hypotheses, was founded by Norsemen called “Variagi” in Russian) is at war with Slavia, a republic in the southwest of the empire, which, according to the author’s imagination, has fallen under the influence of the empire’s enemies.

The author writes: “The novel takes place in a fantasy world invented by the author. Therefore, any analogies are meaningless, coincidences are accidental. Do not look for a black cat in a dark room, it won’t get there. :)” (Drozdov 2024). It seems as if Droszdov is trying to play with his readers to metaphorically express his attitude toward the political situation. The readers recognize his intention. One of the readers, Grinait Andrej, comments: “When you’re trying to escape the agenda, but the book hits you with it.” (Grinait 2024) He uses the emotionally charged word “Повесточка” to invoke the ideological or political ideas asserted in the text. In the context of the 2020s in Russia, this word could refer to LGBT+ or women’s rights, or to liberal ideas. For this particular novel, though, it means the current war in Ukraine, which started in 2022.

Such topics are neither new to the Russian publishing landscape nor unique to online platforms. Nikolai Kulbaka conducted the analysis of “Popadantsy” texts based on a corpus of 2087 entries collected from various platforms and published on samlib.ru (see Vyazovskiy 2021), a subproject of the Moshkov Library (see Kulbaka). In 2010, the publishing house Yauza (“Яуза”) launched the book series In the Whirlwind of Time (“В вихре времен”). It features over 100 titles such as ...save Russia: a descent into the past or The Black Death: a navy against the Baty, in which the heroes intervene in the flow of Russian history by traveling to different points in time.

Nevertheless, there are more such texts on Author.Today than in Kulbaka’s analysis and in the Whirlwind of Time book series. As of December 11, 2024, there are 29 493 books with the genre hashtag “Popadantsy” and 9139 books labeled “Alternative history.” A further detailed analysis of these texts, their practices, and their relation to political issues has yet to be conducted. For now, we may assume that online self-publishing allows authors to respond more quickly to the political agenda while also allowing for a greater variety of plots and stories than traditional publishers. Moreover, authors can use the platforms’ algorithms to test and query the timeliness of their text.

Another possible dimension concerning the political aspects of texts published on Author.Today is the representation of masculinity and the male gender role in the socalled “male fictions novels,” which often refer to masculine stereotypes and specific plot features. Here, the main heroes often behave like macho men. They engage in romantic or sexual relationships with a woman or even several women, which is an essential plot element in genres such as “Boyar-anime.” These are stories where hero travels back to alternative magical Russian empire or even earlier period, “Boyars” mean “nobles” in Russian, and hero finds himself as a young man in a noble powerful clan and grows up in a way similar to Japanese stories like Naruto.It has even brought forth the slang word “haremary” (гаремник), which is derived from “harem” and refers to stories of men who are together with a number of women.

III.

Proceeding to the conclusion, I would like to mention the following. First, the gender-specific genre division of the platforms, which is also highlighted by the platforms’ visual design—the “female” Litnet is predominantly pink, on the “male” Author.Today is mainly blue—which reflects the gender order in contemporary Russian society. Currently, Russian government strongly cultivates a patriarchal culture and traditional values that coincide with normative gender roles. Amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation adopted in 2020 declare that the state protects the institution of marriage as a union between a man and a woman (see Gosudarstvennaja duma 2020). Autumn 2022 saw the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of November 9, 2022, No. 809 “On the adoption of the Fundamentals of State Policy to preserve and strengthen the traditional spiritual and moral values of Russia.” It states, “Traditional values are moral guidelines that shape the worldview of Russian citizens, they are passed down from generation to generation and form the basis of the all-Russian civic identity and the country’s unified cultural space,” which also means a strong family. Popular mass literature represents the current civic order. Thus, is cannot not help but reflect on these novelties, albeit unconsciously, on the levels of both publication and content.

Second, following the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian state has increasingly exerted control over public and online spaces throughout the last two years, and the adoption of repressive laws such as “anti-LGBT” and “anti-child propaganda” laws, commercial online platforms like those examined in this essay are increasingly challenged in their role as a space for free expression and the independent representation of authors. By the end of 2024, it became clear that the idea of a platform as a space for a public voice in Russia was over.

This situation somewhat echoes the new policies of major Western platforms and social networks such as Facebook and Amazon, which have introduced a system of content moderation that deletes users’ posts, photos, and videos. However, different types of content control are exercised on Facebook and on Russian websites. Facebook is controlled by a large international company that operates in different languages in different countries. The Russian platforms are nationally based companies that operate in a single language and in a single country and are therefore subject to state control and national legislation. Starting as legacy of ongoing emancipation from Soviet state control practices, Russian online self-publishing platforms initially opened up more opportunities to publish and read novels that did not fit editorial conventions. Over time, however, they have become subject to a set of different constraints. Authors still use these platforms to publish their texts and find readers, but they have to adapt their content to constantly changing legal requirements.

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