Narrative Transformations of Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin“ in Transcultural Digital Sphere

Abstract

This paper analyses the strategies of narrative interpretations of the classical literature in Russian and English fanfiction. The essay draws upon the fanfiction based on Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. To clarify and classify the algorithms of transformation of Russian classical “novel in verse” we use the theory of modèle actantiel by A.J. Greimas. English-speaking fic-writers more often than Russian-speaking readers use the two-actantial model instead of the four-actantial one as in the original meta-story: they interpret Pushkin’s texts using the mass-culture implementations of sentimental or gothic novel genres. Perceiving the novel as a conventional text, Russian-speaking fic-writers radically rework the plot and the style of the original source: e.g. they combine the narrative axes of desire and struggle in the original source, following the “children’s anecdote” model typical for Russian folklore. By transferring the classical novel to the digital environment, the narrative features of Pushkin’s novel as a text, which are immanent to an experiment with any national artistic and reading tradition, become especially vivid.