Tatyana Tolstaya, a Blogger: Ways of Self-Presentation

Tatyana Tolstaya is a writer who understands the rules of the times she lives in. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the epoch of literature centrism has been replaced by the epoch of visualization, the traditional paper version of literature becomes network-based, more free in writing and expansion. This tendency is not to shy away from diaries - they become the basis of the blogosphere. Blogger is the inherent creative role of Tatyana Tolstaya in the 2010s. Her blog appeared in 2007 on the LiveJournal platform and then was transferred to Facebook. Initially, it was a way of self-presentation, but in the course of time it became the basis for a new creative strategy development - a shift from the third to the first person in her prose. Blog on the LiveJournal platform was initially created for answering questions related to the show “The School for Scandal”. Themes of blog posts widen gradually -recipes, previews, everyday sketches, dreams, stories about the family and the past appear. In its few years of existing, texts of all genres (including everyday sketches) acquire a strongly pronounced artistic discourse The theme of “imperceptible worlds” first appeared in the blog; later it became one of the main themes of Tolstaya's new prose. “Imperceptible worlds” is an unreal space closely connected with the real world; in this space, meetings with the dead loved ones are possible, and animated things have their own fate. In 2014-5, Tatyana Tolstaya published a tetralogy in a traditional paper version. It had 4 books: Aestherial Worlds (2014), The Girl in Bloom (2015), The Invisible Maiden (2015), Felt Age (2015). The tetralogy was composed of Tolsataya's early prose, publicistic texts and autobiographical texts from her two blogs. For Tolstaya, her blogs become closely connected with offline art - they fulfill functions of a writer's traditional paper diary. After publishing the tetralogy, Tolstaya entirely switches to Facebook. The genres and stylistics of her posts remain the same at first, but the writer gradually changes the style of her blogging. Tolstaya's Facebook is more edgy than LiveJournal, the writer speaks simply, in a rough style. The posts' themes are concrete, frequently invective; usually there is no turning away from the everyday to the existential. On Facebook, Tolstaya also has a dialogue with users, and her answers are often quite rude and sarcastic. From 2016 to 2017, Tolstaya also has a blog as part of the project Insider.Moscow (it is a restaurant guide that publishes objective reviews of eating places in Moscow). The project encourages a free style of writing, and Tolstaya makes an extensive use of it. Formulating her own worldview in the blog posts, Tolstaya creates the new poetics of her prose. After performing its function, the blog loses its focus on artistic discourse and becomes an instrument of communication. An autobiographical character is substituted by the writer Tatyana Tolstaya, who speaks her mind and shares her perception of contemporary life with users.

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