Means and methods of building emotion in online flash fiction

Online fiction is often known as an experimental platform for searching new literary forms and unconventional ways of making an emotional impact on readers. Contests hosted by many online platforms uncover high-profile texts. The article deals with a story in the genre of nanofantasy (up to 5,000 symbols) “The Final Cup of Wine” written by D. Laputina and published on M. Moshkov’s Samizdat platform as part of the 2021 contest conducted by the Chemistry and Life journal for several years in a row. The story stood out both for its bright and sensible images and for the emotional response of the readers. The article examines the means and methods of building emotion in the story from the ethical and esthetic points of view. Flash fiction implies the highest concentration of sensibility in the text as a mechanism for grasping the world sensually. A number of esthetic categories used in the text deserve special attention. At the same time, moral issues are closely woven into the narrative fabric, presenting a complex set of problems related to artificial intelligence, respect for human life, murder, ethics, and so on. The ultimate inability to verify an online author’s identity acts as an additional emotional component of the overall esthetic impact on the reader. Moreover, the competitive environment presupposes the possibility of interpersonal communication between the author and the reader when comments on the text become an integral part of the text itself. These comments can take various forms and serve as an object of a separate study. This article, however, considers comments as a means of intensifying emotional impact actively used by online authors through the example of a particular story and its anonymous author.