The role of the literary text in the transmedia narrative: the novel ‘Heavenly Stockholm’ in the system of Oleg Nesterov’s projects

Transmedia narrative has been a widely known and used narrative practice since the second decade of the 21st century. Its existence is conditioned by the peculiarities of the multimedia environment and convergence processes. The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of two transmedia projects: Heavenly Stockholm and From the Life of the Planets created and produced by Oleg Nesterov. The projects are dedicated to the Soviet era of thaw, in both of them we note reflection on the problem of unrealized future. In total, the projects involve seven media channels. They are positioned by the author as independent, but our analysis has shown that the projects are connected with each other by the commonality of the idea, the author’s tone of expression, and are permeated with mutual allusions. The projects share the same ethics, unfold in the same time period, and their narratives are also connected and complementary. The example of the Heavenly Stockholm project shows in detail how different media participate in the formation of a unified and programmed experience of a transmedia story. Each of the involved media channels, having a high degree of independence, complements and expands the common space of meanings. The article pays special attention to the role of the literary text. The analysis has shown that the novel Heavenly Stockholm is not only a structuring medium for the project of the same name but also contains allusions to another project - From the Life of the Planets. All this allows us to perceive the two seemingly different projects as a single transmedia narrative, which took the author more than ten years to create. The result of the analysis is the construction of a schematic architecture of the project, indicating the logic of movement through various media platforms.