In Russia as elsewhere, from the late eighteenth century onwards writers have acknowledged, reflected upon, and toyed with their status as public faces. In the late eighteenth century the famous court poet Gavriila Derzhavin ‘obsessively’ defended ‘the purity of his personal motives’ in response to accusations of public political flattery. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Mikhail Lermontov exploited hyper-stylized painted portraits to consolidate his status as a Great Romantic poet. And around the 1900s, Leo Tolstoi – in one of the many paradoxes that shape his biography – combined a persistent love for the unmediated with an unusually strong media presence. In the words of the renowned cultural historian Caryl Emerson, it is this author of Russian classics who became ‘the world's first multimedia celebrity’.

Scholarly attention for this intimate connection between Russian literature, media, and public fame is growing, but as yet a cultural history of Russian literary celebrity is still to be realized. Of course, it lies beyond the scope of this chapter to repair this lack. However, my contribution does take Emerson's reference to ‘multimedia celebrity’ as a basis for a narrower media-historical analysis, one that challenges the focus on ‘Western’ authors within existing literary-celebrity scholarship. Rather than famous writers from ‘the West’, the pages that follow explore post-Soviet literary stardom. More specifically, I track 21st-century practices of literary e-self-fashioning. This term refers to literary forms of self-fashioning that build upon, and take place within, information and communication technologies. Put somewhat differently, rather than literary self-representation as such, the notion of literary e-self-fashioning covers the ways in which writers present themselves online, on social media and other digital platforms. In discussing these practices, I am indebted not only to Stephen Greenblatt's famous study Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), but also to existing studies of online lifelogging, self-documentation, and online or digital self-fashioning. The latter helpfully, if succinctly, theorize how, in the words of Geert Lovink, ‘elements of the self (diary, introspection)’ blend online with ‘the spectacle of the blogocratic few that fight over the attention of the millions’.

Here, I apply the insights of Lovink and others to literary contexts by focusing upon the online presence of one particularly popular and digitally prolific post-Soviet writer.