Virtual Personalities in Russian Cyberculture:
General Remarks

There is a difference between Western and Russian cyberculture in relation to virtual identity. If the West has tended to consider VP as a more or less private experience, even if in a framework of a virtual community such as MUD or electronic forum, then in Russia VP has usually considered (and acted) rather as a productive creator whose work had a value for a much broader online audience. The notion of VP has been linked not so much with nicknames in chat rooms or multi-user games but rather with the creative works of net writers and artists. This difference can be explained in a threefold way.

First, the Internet appeared in Russia later than in Western countries. If in the USA and UK the internet connection has been available in universities or via commercial ISP since the mid-1980s, then the first internet connection in Russia was established only in 1990 and the internet became available to users on a perceptible scale not earlier than in the mid-1990s, that is, around the time as the WWW appeared and displaced or at least forced out preceding protocols and ways of spending time in cyberspace.

Second, as far as I know, MUDs have never been particularly popular among Russian users. Even those of them who got connected to the Net before WWW (these were, as a rules, Russians studying or working in the West), preferred political and poetical debates in Usenet groups to online adventures in Dungeons and Dragon style. This cannot be explained by linguistic reasons, because Russian students in America had no problems with English. It may be assumed that it was rather caused by cultural reasons.

Third, speaking of the specifics of national mentality of the Russians, two factors seem noteworthy in the present context: Russian “literature centrism” and a peculiar combination of individualism and collectivism. The first can be explained by the unusually important role that literature has traditionally played in Russian society. In the context of strong state power and the weakness of civic institutions, public opinion has been formed predominantly by writers. Literature in Russia has taken many of the functions that in the West belonged to the church, parliament, court or media. A poet in Russia has always been “more than a poet” (E. Evtushenko) – from the emergence of Russian literature in the 18^th century to at least the collapse of the Soviet Union. This has defined the high value of the written word and a depreciation of the spoken word. In MUDs, forums, and chat rooms it was the spoken word that dominated, if even in the form of written speech. Usenet and then WWW proved to be more oriented to the rhetoric of the written word, and this is precisely why they have had a higher axiological status for the Russian mind online. Finally, the collectivist tendency inherent to the Russian mentality urged users to share the products of their creativity with others, and again, developed literary forms seemed intuitively more appropriate for this aim than ephemeral chitchats in MUDs and other interactive textual environments. Of course, these environments were also used and enjoyed; however, they have not played a significant role in the production of actual VPs. In brief, virtual personality in Russia has had a distinct literary genesis.

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