Blog literature as a phenomenon: the experience of Evgeny Gryshkovets

The article considers blog literature as a phenomenon of the current literary process in Russia. Works of contemporary writers based on blogs (on different platforms) are analyzed in the context of the debates among literary scholars and critics about its status: blogging today could be seen as a speech genre, as an Internet genre, or as a literary genre. The analysis is focused on authors' individual strategies in dealing with the blog, features of the author - reader communication, and in particular on the intra-genre and intraliterary transformations of text. Text in a blog is influenced by both laws of the Internet communication in general and the style of communication in the blog. It also depends on the creative manner and goals of the author. Since the blog is a synthetic phenomenon that exists at the intersection of literature, media, everyday life, as well as visual and musical codes, its study necessarily requires the development of interdisciplinary methods of analysis: the application of methods of receptive aesthetics, narratology and discursive analysis. In accordance with the principles of historical poetics, the article considers new forms of the transformed near-literary genres. The analysis is performed as a case study of a series of blog books (blooks) by E. Grishkovets based on his LiveJournal accounts (A Year of LJ-Life (God Zhzhizni, 2008), The Continuation of LJ-Life (Prodolzhenie Zhzhizni, 2009), 151 Episodes of LJ-Life (151 Epizod Zhzhizni, 2011), From LJ-Life to Life (Ot Zhzhizni k zhizni, 2012), Almost Manuscript Life (Pochti Rukopisnaya Zhizn, 2013), and Simultaneously: Life (Odnovremenno: Zhizn, 2014). The paper studies the processes of the blog's transformation into literature, traces the individual strategy of the writer's behavior in the Internet space, considers the significance of blogging in the work of the writer who turned his blog into literary text, into a series of books. The authors of the article come to a conclusion that the literary field is being restructured under the influence of blogging.