The Image of the Author in Tatyana Tolstaya’s Blog

• Main Author: Olga Peshkova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2018-06-01
• Series: Studia Litterarum
• Subjects: author; the image of the author; author’s mask; blog; blogosphere; virtual personality; writer; writer’s blog; speech mask.
• Online Access: http://studlit.ru/images/2018-3-2/Peshkova.pdf

The emergence of online journals and web diaries fostered the development of specific language environment in the blogosphere — the writer’s blog. The blog is a unique multifunction platform that enables creativity and self-expression and it is an effective tool of promoting the author’s work and personality to potential readers. The main feature of the blog genre is its mediality and hypertextual principle of textual organization. This essay examines the specificity of author’s image and its self-manifestations on the example of Tatyana Tolstaya’s web diary. The theoretical part of article is devoted to the study of such concept as “the image of the author” in V.V. Vinogradov and M.M. Bakhtin’s classical studies (the history of the term) and also in recent articles analyzing construction of the author’s virtual identity in the blogosphere. Bearing on the comparative analysis of theoretical works, I argue that the term implies the reflection of the author’s worldview at all the levels of the text (semantic, grammatical, structural, and ideological), however the full implementation of the “image of the author” is impossible without the reader and her perception of the text. The practical part of the article deals with Tolstaya’s case comparing Tolstaya’s image in her blog with her literary image. The structural and functional analysis of the online texts in her blog allows us to reconstruct the virtual identity of Tolstaya determined by her style of narration and authorial intention. The essay argues that Tolstaya’s virtual image is a peculiar mixture of biography and literature: actual biographical facts merge with fiction, as a result of the mask she is putting on as a blog writer.