Mass literature in modern Russia: challenges of the digital age

The paper presents an analytical review of the collection of scientific articles Cult-Goods: Mass Literature of Modern Russia between the Letter and the Digit (2018) and identifies the main ideas that form the problem field in researching modern mass literature. The collection is shown to be part of Russian studies of popular culture and presented as a result of the implementation of yet another stage of the large-scale multi-year project ‘Cult-Goods’, initiated by the leading experts in the field of modern literature (M. A. Chernyak (St. Petersburg), M. P. Abasheva (Perm), I. L. Savkina (Tampere), M. A. Litovskaya (Ekaterinburg)). The project is aimed at interdisciplinary research on mass culture in real time: a team of experts gathers annual scientific conferences, where researchers raise topical issues and identify current trends in the development of the modern literary process which are formed under the influence of extra-literary factors. The main trend of recent times is total digitization, affecting all spheres of a modern person’s life, and it constitutes the central theme of the reviewed collection. The team of authors includes more than twenty leading experts in the field of the modern literary process. M. A. Chernyak, M. P. Abasheva, V. V. Abashev, I. L. Savkina, M. A. Litovskaya, E. A. Ermolin, G. L. Tulchinsky, E. V. Kozlov and others study the way the new media technologies influence modern literature, the mechanisms of transformation of literature and its composition under the impact of digitalization, the qualitative change in the concept of mass culture. Nowadays, mass literature is understood as literature in demand. Therefore, the study of this stratum of culture appears to be a necessary condition for scientists to understand the semantic picture of the world of modern man. Analysis of the articles allows us to identify the most significant trends of the modern literary process: a cultural shift from the verbal code to the visual, the transfer of literature into the Internet and cinema space, the transformation of the cultural roles ‘author’, ‘reader’, as well as of the content of the concepts ‘literature’, ‘text’, ‘mass literature’, ‘elite literature’; a shift in the genre evolution of the novel towards the series.