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| Eugene Gorny: The Virtual Self: |
The first Russian virtual personalities appeared in Usenet in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were fictitious characters that participated in endless flame-wars. The most notorious of them were created by the legendary Usenet intriguer Dmitri Vulis who was doing his Ph.D. at City University of New York (CUNY) and was known for his absurd accusations towards his fellows of all the deadly sins, which he not only disseminated through Usenet groups but also used to send to the university’s authorities or employers of his opponents (Fridman 1998). One of his creatures was a character called Vladimir Fomin who attacked one of Vulis’s victims, Peter Vorobyov, accusing the latter of racism and appeals for genocide. At the same time, Vulis and his adherent were sending numerous forged postings to various groups on behalf of Vorobyov and complaints to his ISP provider and his employer. As a result, Vorobyov’s account was closed and he had problems at work. Later it was discovered that Vladimir Fomin was not a mere virtual character but a “zombie” – a dead man raised from the grave. Somebody found his death certificate from which it followed that he had been decapitated by a shell in Afghanistan. When the certificate was published in Usenet, Fomin joyfully accepted this fact. He admitted that it was true but also made it clear that his head was of no earthly use. Another Vulis’s creation was Rabbi Shlomo Rutenberg who accused a biologist Dmitri Pruss, a man of Jewish persuasion, of anti-Semitism, posting messages with subjects like “Soviet-Nazi anti-Semite in Nat.Inst.of Health paid for with your tax $$$” and, again, urging all self-respecting Jews to send complaints about Dmitri’s to his work (which they actually did). Pruss was not fired, but he was forbidden to use the internet and a psychotherapist was appointed to look after him. Vulis also created an artificial intelligence called “Simulation Daemon” which sent countless offensive postings and whose signature included a phrase ‘Better to have artificial intelligence than none’. Vulis came to no good: in 1996 Vorobyov and the others complained about him to the FBI and the FBI came for him. Usenet methods of discussion were later sometimes practices in WWW boards and forums. However, Vulis’s ingenuity, it seems, has never been excelled.
If Vulis was the very exemplification of evil, them Mai Ivanovich Muxin [it is pronounced as Mukhin; from “mukha” meaning a fly] has become the personification of kindness, humour and wisdom. ‘The first and the last pensioner on the World Wide Web’ (Muxin’s later title) appeared in public on the 6 September 1995 when an interview with him was published in a Tallinn-based Russian-language newspaper Den’ za Dnjom(Babayev 1995).
The reporter, Mirza Babayev, claimed that he became acquainted with Muxin via the internet and then met him in real life. He describes Muxin’s small and cosy room in a quite street on the outskirts of Tartu, a small university town, with photograph of his relatives on the walls and collections of Russian and foreign classic authors on the bookshelves, the crackling of birch logs in the stove and the taste of Ceylon tea he is treated to.
Then he notes a PC 486-DX monitor sitting on a low ancient table covered with a lace tablecloth and asks how Muxin got such an expensive computer. The talkative old man, by answering the question, tells the story of his life. It comes to light that he was born in Viatka, a provincial Russian town, in 1917, three days before the well-known events that shook the world. Unlike most of his coevals, he has lived to see another revolution – the computer one. And he not only saw it but also became its active participant. Muxin quietly narrates about his relatives that have been dispersed throughout the world, interspersing his story with colourful details. It turns out that the computer he got as a gift from his nephew Anatoly who lives with his family in Australia. Then his old Circassian friend Khmel Lezginych, with whom he had ‘served as a security guard in the North’ and who became a computer seller, set up the internet connection for him. Mai Ivanovich has become enthusiastic about the internet, learned HTML and created his personal homepage in which he gathered links to search engines and other resources he found useful. He also published some material from his archives there. He patiently explained to Babayev (and his readers) what the internet is, how it works and for what ends it can be used. He demonstrates to the reporter how to write hypertext document using a line from a Soviet wartime song. He also teaches him how to search information and he gives him on a floppy disc a full collection of lyrics of Babayev’s favourite group King Crimson that has retrieved from the internet before his very eyes.
The interview with Muxin won him a tremendous popularity. It was reprinted by a number of Moscow magazines and translated into Estonian (the Estonian translation was published in a yellow newspaper under a different name, and Babayev managed to get compensation for moral damage when he threatened to sue the newspaper). According to a legend, Lennart Meri, the Estonian president at that time, cited the progressive Tartu pensioner as an example in his speech about the government plans for the internetization of the country (though without mentioning his name). Muxin’s
The next Babayev interview with Muxin, published on the 16th February 1996(Babayev 1996), added more details about Muxin’s personality. It was made by e-mail because it turned out that Muxin had gone to Stockholm by invitation of his great nephew who got married to a Swedish girl and moved from Australia to Sweden. It was probably the first interview in Russian conducted in cyberspace. Muxin emailed from an internet café where he got a reduction because of his venerable age and because his example drew other clients. At that time, internet cafés were a novelty (in Russia there was only one in Saint-Petersburg) and Muxin’s experience was quite progressive. As an illustration for the interview, an old photograph was published that showed Leonid Brezhnev, a general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Broz Tito, the Yugoslavian leader, in their hunting suits and with rifles. Between them, on the background, there was a smiling man in military form – that was Muxin. Asked about how he had happened to be in such company, Muxin answered reluctanly that he had served some time at a special hunting ground and shared some memories about Brezhnev. The photography added credibility to the whole story.
Muxin was not only a character about which you could read in a newspaper. He had a homepage and email address to which many people sent questions relating to the internet and sometimes asked for a personal advice. He took part in online literary games such as Bouts-rimés as well as in discussions on IRC where at some point he even created a channel #muxin, which soon became very popular among Russian users. Later he started a weekly column in Zhurnal.ru where he reviewed interesting online resources. He also published his memoirs (under a punning title “/Me Moirs” alluding to commands used on IRC). Although some people questioned the reality of Muxin’s existence, and some suggested that Muxin was actually a creation of his literary secretary Roman Leibov, a Tartu philologist and one of the founding fathers of Russian cyberculture, he has never been completely de-virtualized. It is noteworthy that Mirza Babyev, who contributed to his fame by his writings, has also been a virtual personality.
[Other virtual personality to be considered:
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