This article offers an analysis of a recent Russian computer game, Pathologic 2, which simulates an epidemic in a Russian provincial town. Unusually, the game has widely been called a “literary” experience by both its players and creators. By making use of theories of narration and mediation from Peter Brooks, Friedrich Kittler, and Patrick Jagoda, I ask whether the medium of the digital game can ever produce an experience that is related to or informed by the concept of “literariness” in both a Russian Formalist and broadly intellectual sense. By exploring how Pathologic 2 incorporates material from well-known texts by Fedor Dostoevskii and Aleksandr Blok, I argue that the digital game reduces Russian literature to a “trans-medial” phenomenon, and that this reduction can be understood as one impact of twenty-first-century networked computing on literary activity and institutions. Moreover, I consider the impact of contemporary geopolitics on how the global industry of digital games understands Russia and, by extension, Russian literature.
The Russian Literature editorial team has decided that the time is ripe, first, for a modest change of journal policies and, second, for the less modest step of changing the journal name. In this editorial, editor-in-chief Ellen Rutten explains and contextualizes the two policy choices.
The second half of the 2010s to the beginning of the 2020s in the Russian context are associated with the active intervention of the state in the sphere of private life. In a situation of gender inequality, the male body is subjected to particularly strict regulation. The new normative masculinity is perceived by a significant part of society as illegitimate. In the public sphere, the conflict between the state and society often takes the form of a performance, in which the naked male body turns out to be a medium of the utterance – rebellious and “anarchic”. In contemporary Russian poetry, resistance to the pressure of power is associated with the emergence of “non-normative” models of masculinity, in the design of which bodily representations also play an important role. Victim masculinity implies unbalanced, conflicted behavior, constant readiness for a political challenge. Transgressive masculinity connects the specifics of “masculinity” with striving for all possible boundaries and provocative violation of cultural and aesthetic prohibitions. Phenomenological masculinity puts the “masculine” into question, considering it as something looked-for, and not given a priori, and the “anarchic” meaning of this model is associated with the rejection of the very idea of a behavioral “pattern”.
This cluster of articles examines Russian and Eastern European outbreak narratives and metaphors of infection. Together, these articles further the understanding of the cultural politics of contagion in Russia and Eastern Europe.
