Transmedia strategies in school literary education: deconstructing kitsch and the semiotics of readerly creativity

1 Statement of the issue

One of the critically important aspects of literary education in schools is the substitution of living classical texts with their simulacra, kitsch interpretations. Considering kitsch as an approach to structuring the world in a manner that connects it with the needs of the ordinary, “naïve” reading consciousness, we explain this tendency in school literature education with the desire of some methodologists and teachers to make the world understandable and reliable for the ordinary consciousness, in this case, their own consciousness and the consciousness of schoolchildren. The kitschy interpretation of classical literary works arises through the replication of a set of clichés related to the perception of the naïve reader, to the requests of dominant ideology, and to educational objectives. It is the cliché that allows us to answer a question that has no answer by definition: “What did the author want to say with their work?”

Teaching methods and textbooks reproduce a set of pedagogical clichés that a number of teachers and parents insist on (“we must preserve tradition,” “this is how we were taught”). For this, it is enough for students to get acquainted with the text in abbreviated form, or even in retellings. This leads to a loss of the skill of reading complex texts. As a result, the student receives a set of simple narratives built around texts, not actual knowledge of canonical texts. Russian schools have another efficient tool for transforming complex and ever-changing classical texts into kitsch, something made up of clichés as if it were built using intellectual Lego – the traditional essay, which basically can’t be written without reproducing clichés, without reducing three-dimensional images to the level of kitsch.

In this manner, a living culture is replaced with its lesser unliving clone, and many traditional methods are offered for working with this clone. The school literature program, however, is based on the notion that a significant portion of Russian society believes there are generally accepted values and generally accepted artistic models, and that the task of the school is to transmit these values from generation to generation. Philological researchers call this view of literature “naïve realism,” and claim that it is a legacy of pre-revolutionary and early Soviet schools (Ponomarev 2017). This approach proved to be extremely viable, as research confirms. Respondents to the 2020 study by Asonova et al. said that “literary education should be aimed at educating children within the correct system of values, filling internal deficits and helping them solve life problems, in some cases the transmission of cultural codes with the help of literature was mentioned” (2020: 165). Many consider literature itself not to as something that possesses an artistic value, but as a textbook for life.

The same pragmatic approach to art is characteristic of kitsch. After all, its goal is not the production of new artistic images or new knowledge. It repackages familiar signs and plots, creating the illusion of a stable and understandable world, providing a sense of security and mental comfort. Favorite topics of kitsch – family and children, historical-political, love, and the exotic (Yakovleva 1990) – still clearly dominate the selection of quotes from literature in textbooks and suggested topics for discussion.

Of course, there were other approaches to the study of literature in Russian schools, but they never became mainstream. Teachers continue to make sure that students perceive the text the same “correct” way. In order to fit kitschy clichés, it was common to interpret the characters of classic literature unambiguously, either as sharply negative or emphatically positive. While they are complex characters in the novels, they are greatly simplified in questions relating to the text and essay topics. Metaphors that fit the patterns of kitsch are still the starting point for retelling ideas of literary critics of the past, substituting real analysis of the text, which assumes finding new points of contact between the reader and the author’s intent.

The use of other formats (adaptations for the screen, among others) does not solve the issue, because screen adaptations at school are most often offered not as a complication and expansion of the original, but as an illustrative set of clichés. Instead of transcending the boundaries of a narrowly understood text, there is even more movement toward clichéd simulacrum.

As has been observed, by the authors of this article too (Arkhangelsky and Novikova 2021), one of the issues of teaching literature in school lies in the conflict between at least two educational objectives and, consequently, strategies: 1) to involve the new generation in reading literature, primarily fiction, and 2) to transmit the tradition, embodied in Russia by the national literary canon and its foundation, the classics. Following the famous literary scholar Sukhikh (2016), we prefer the definition of the literary canon: “the body of texts that are considered exemplary in a given poetological system.” Under classics we assume a set of texts regarding which there is informal agreement in society: they have passed the test of time and will retain their significance in the long term. To be more precise, an illusion of agreement.

Blind adherence to tradition leads to the substitution of living classical texts with their simulacra. Remembering the classification of simulacra, which goes back to Deleuze/Baudrillard, with simulacra of disappeared authenticity (Baudrillard 1994). Thus, as soon as we deny the classical tradition the right to change radically, quantitatively (a set of texts) and qualitatively (a set of interpretations), the living life of the classics ends, it turns into a simulacrum on the level of a digest, and sometimes on the level of substitution. And with it ends the living contact between new readers and the old text. The problem, let us repeat, is not so much that some words, realities, or conflicts are incomprehensible to contemporary schoolchildren, but that fluid classical texts are replaced by their fixed, kitschy counterparts.

Meanwhile, the modern student is living in a transmedia era, where culture is focused on fragmentation and construction of new meanings from fragments, on studying the world through self-expression, on communicating using new technologies – sometimes several devices simultaneously, such as a computer, a smartphone, and a fitness bracelet to maintain good physical shape, etc. The interactivity of new media enables a person not only to simply participate in an interaction with media content, but also to become a creator, choosing from a variety of stories, formats, design styles only those that they personally like. Transmedia storytelling allows the author or authors to start the story from several places at once, on behalf of different characters, but in the end to capture the attention of the audience completely, involving them in the space of screen action, immersing them in the deep semantic layers of the story. In other words, transmedia takes us beyond the process of kitschification, contrasting the simulacrum with the fluidity and mobility of everything, including work with classical heritage. At the very least, transmedia has this potential.

It would seem that relying on the possibilities transmedia offers allows the contradiction described above to be solved in school. But sections of the pedagogical community perceive any media-interpretation of texts as a retreat away from them into a “game,” setting reading and illustrativeness or visualization as opposites, claiming the latter as primitive commentary. Moreover, the battle against gamification, visualization, and illustrativeness is presented as a necessary element of a war against kitsch, a war for an inviolable, aesthetically high, and eternally living classic. In our opinion, the effect is opposite to the stated goal. Properly used, contemporary media practices can break through the armor of kitsch that grows around works that are part of the school literary canon, which grows precisely because of attempts to sacralize classics. Whereas the transmedia strategy we propose (Arkhangelsky and Novikova 2021) is not a departure from the text, but an attempt to get closer to it.

The authors of textbooks, on the other hand, most often rely on unambiguous interpretations and a rigid essay structure, on a knowledge-based approach that does little to educate the reader. This is especially obvious when one considers the fact that the methodology has not provided an answer to the question of what “knowing a fiction text” means. Keys to finding the answer to this question are offered in the traditions of semiotic studies (Milyakina et al. 2020). In our opinion, it also provides a methodological basis for the development of independence while teaching students the process of transmedia creation.

2 Educational possibilities of semiotics in the context of transmedia

The discussion on this topic started in the twentieth century, and it is inextricably linked to the polemic about trusting the reader and their right to interpretation. In the mid-1970s, proponents of the receptive school of literary studies called for trust in the collective opinion of readers, believing that a literary work activates the psychological work of the audience and directs perception in the direction that the author intended (Iser 1972). It is not obvious, however, that even literary scholars themselves – supporters of trusting the collective opinion of readers “as a source of ‘correct’, ‘average’ and ‘permissible’ readings of artistic texts” (Zholkovsky and Shcheglov 1996) – have always remained on the same page as the author. Umberto Eco warned of the possibility of “misinterpretation” (Eco 1972), drawing researchers’ attention to the fact that the reader possesses their own cultural experience, one that is significantly different from that of the author, and that they may interpret the text differently than was intended.

Expanding this logic, in the late 1980s Hodge and Kress introduced the concept of “social semiotics” (Kress 2016: 82–83), a position from which interpretations cannot be right or wrong at all, but depend on many factors: popular discourses, the social environment in which people grew up, their personal perception of the set of signs they distinguish in a particular text. Similar views were held by Gasparov, who wrote: “When a text travels from the semantic environment of the author to the semantic environment of each new addressee, it changes the conditions of its existence every time” (Gasparov 1993: 275). The main goal is to be aware of one’s own reading strategy and to soberly assess the meaning of one’s intellectual work. And this is what the experience of “school philology” is for, which is even more of a “service of understanding” (Averintsev 1969) than academic literary studies. Thus, we do not deny the necessity of literary studies in the school teaching process, but we are talking about the limits of their applicability, about unlocking these limits, transforming teaching into contemporary creative practices.

These considerations are important for us to determine the possibilities of applying the transmedia approach to modern pedagogy and its influence on the production and distribution of modern texts, on the interpretation of traditional texts that are part of the school literary canon, and on the methodology of developmental learning, which has deep roots in Russia (Polivanova and Bochaver 2022).

Here it is necessary for us to clarify the concept of transmedia, because it is different in various research traditions. It is most actively developed within the framework of media studies and is largely focused on the study of the features of the modern media industry (Jenkins 2006). But there are other approaches, which can be found in specialized scientific works (Gambarato and Freeman 2019). In this case, we will consider transmedia in the meaning that is closer to narrative and semiotic studies (Hansen et al. 2017), that is, as a kind of narrative conducted using different types of languages (verbal, visual, audio, etc.) on several media platforms (movies, comics, television, video games, etc.) (Scolari 2017). In other words, we are talking about special multimodal intermedial narratives.

The notion of multimodality in semiotic studies is usually used to denote a special type of statement, which constructs a common meaning using a wide set of resources from different modalities – means of transferring meaning (written text, images, sounds, etc.). Screen culture, which started with cinema and television, has established multimodality as the norm, and digital culture has expanded the technological possibilities for authors to combine several modalities into a single work. So modern creative practices are in most cases multimodal. Also, modern creative practices are characterized by the desire for constant transformation of signs and forms of communication, which can significantly complicate the task of interpreting the classics with the help of the language of new media, which is the goal we set for ourselves.

That is why researchers talk about the necessity of developing a new type of competence for both teachers and students – multimodal and transmedia literacy – “a set of skills, practices, values, priorities, feelings, and learning strategies developed and applied in the context of new cultures of participation” (Scolari et al. 2018). This is now becoming a prerequisite for successful communication between social groups and the transmission of cultural values to the generations to follow.

3 Methodological approaches to overcoming kitsch

Considering a transmedial strategy to teaching literature at school, we look at the potential of multimodality as a means for interactive media communication with the literary text, its author and interpreters, and historical and scientific context, as well as among different social groups – students, their parents, teachers, school librarians, textbook authors, methodologists, and directors of film adaptations and dramatizations. By creating their own multimodal texts around a literary work, students become both readers and co-authors, immersed in creative self-reflection and social identification.

This seems possible to us in situations where teachers begin their work with a classic literary text by deconstructing kitsch. We propose using creative practices and methods traditional for humanities research, in particular semiotic, formal, and narrative approaches. By uniting on the basis of semiotics, these approaches shed their limitations and make it possible to work toward the single goal of identifying clichés, breaking them down, and moving away from kitsch.

An analysis of “dominants” and metaphors in texts of a different nature, related to the classic literary text (for example, various screen adaptations and other interpretations) can be a starting point for this work. Such an analysis helps not just in abandoning clichés in the process of interpretation, but also in organizing creative work in a manner that facilitates the creation of transmedia extensions of the literary text. And the analysis of different narratives within the text of the novel allows us to look at the story from different points of view, which is important not only for the students’ subsequent creative work, but also for forming the habit of reading. After all, immersive reading doesn’t have to be linear. It can begin with passages that are more interesting to the reader and then move on to those whose comprehension requires more effort.

Let us illustrate our approach with the works of Leo Tolstoy. This choice is related, above all, to the special position of this writer in the school literature curriculum. It is studied from the very first grades, when his fairy tales are studied, all the way to high school, where War and Peace holds a significant, venerated position. It would seem that this should lead to a universal deep acquaintance with the work of the writer, especially considering the work’s diversity of characters (from ordinary people to historical figures) and details, both of historic events and home life in specific periods, interwoven in Tolstoy’s works with philosophical musings on human life and historical processes. All this allows for discussions on an almost limitless range of topics, which was successfully proven in the research of Eichenbaum (2009).

However, Tolstoy’s works remain among the most difficult to study. A significant number of schoolchildren read only excerpts from War and Peace. The girls often start with chapters related to the personal relationship between the characters, and the boys start with battle scenes. And it is not the whims of teenagers, but an intuitive understanding of the changeable nature of perception and evaluation of artistic achievements.

Roman Jakobson already noted this changeability, speaking of constant shifts in the system of artistic values, implying the same shifts in the evaluation of various phenomena in art. As a result of these shifts, norms that used to be treated with disdain are now accepted as positive values with the passing of time (Jakobson 1976: 122–124). It is important to note that Jakobson is, of course, talking about poetic norms. Using his ideas, in particular the concept of “dominant,” in our work, we are not following him exactly, but attempting to develop his ideas in a creative manner. He reflects on the system of poetic norms which are important for one or another poetic genre, and on the elements which originally served as the dominant, and over time may become subsidiary and optional, or, on the contrary, transition from being secondary to the status of primary. But we are talking, first of all, about substantial dominants and about the freedom of a researcher or a director-interpreter to draw the attention of spectators not toward those elements of history and ideas which in literary criticism are considered core to a specific author, and not even toward those the author himself defines as core to themselves (Leo Tolstoy, for example, wrote quite a lot in his diaries about what he considered important in his literary works), but rather toward the elements that are most consonant with the contemporary cultural context or line up with the personal interests of each of the students.

Here are a few examples to illustrate this point. In the postface to his book Literary leitmotifs, literary critic Boris Gasparov analyzes the first scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in detail (Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s salon) and points out that its leitmotif is the writer’s repetitive comparisons between the conversations of the visitors of the salon with the whirring of spinning spindles (Gasparov 1993: 285). For so-called “extra-textual associations,” Gasparov draws on ancient mythology, where the motion of spindles is a characteristic attribute of goddesses of destiny (the Greek Moirai and the Roman Parcae), who spin the thread of human destiny. Developing the thought further, the researcher finds more and more allusions to antiquity in Tolstoy’s text: descriptions of Helen, the neoclassical image of Emperor Alexander, etc. For Gasparov, this example provides a basis for formulating the principles of semantic induction at the core of the text’s analysis. For projects, however, the sound image of buzzing spindles and the visual images of antique elements in the interiors of secular drawing rooms and clothes depicted in ceremonial portraits may become key metaphors around which pupils could build their transmedia stories. There is no danger in adding this to the classic text. As proof of this, we would like to quote Gasparov once again; he writes that “the addition of new elements does not blur the borders of the text but increases the number and intensity of associative links within the text, and by this means asserts the unity of the text” (Gasparov 1993: 285). But such additions are dangerous to the spread of kitschy interpretations of the classics, because this approach is very likely to lead away from clichés. And this is exactly what we should aim for when attempting to develop readers’ creativity.

Examples of this fruitful approach to classical texts can also be found in film and theater. For example, the creators of the BBC series War and Peace (2016) focused the audience’s attention on the melodramatic relationships between the characters, adapting the classics to narratives and visual language characteristic of modern television shows. This not only introduced Leo Tolstoy to younger Western viewers, but also attracted Russian viewers (the series was shown in Russia on Channel One). Similar freedom of interpretation should be, in our opinion, offered to schoolteachers and students.

We spoke above, first of all, about substantive dominants. Another tool that we consider important when working on transmedia stories based on literary classics is the identification and analysis of key metaphors that the text relies on. According to researchers, metaphor is a kind of filter. It “selects, highlights, and organizes some, quite specific characteristics of the main subject, and eliminates others” (Black 1955). At the same time, metaphorical transference may work quite differently from how the author intended, not in the way that was customary at the time when the work was written or when the textbook author’s understanding of the world was formed.

Another approach to understanding the role of metaphor is to treat it as a “container for emotions” (Kövecses 2000: 223), an artistic tool closely connected to a person’s everyday experience and bodily sensations, helping them understand and explain the world. This understanding of metaphor allows us to talk about the efficacy of its use in the educational process. Innovative metaphors, ones which create and activate entirely new conceptual connections, disrupt the constructs of kitsch, and trigger reader’s creative interaction with the author’s intent.

Theater and film directors have been using this approach for a long time, sometimes repeating the author’s metaphor in a film adaptation or production and sometimes finding an analog. Thus, Sergei Bondarchuk starts his famous film War and Peace (1965–1967) with shots of a flying comet and of grass sprouting from seeds. The comet, the seed, and the grass are metaphors for Tolstoy’s most important reflections on the driving forces of history, the lives of individuals, families, clans, and people. They are collected and described as succinctly as possible in the epilogue, where all the threads of the epic narrative come together. By introducing these metaphors at the start of the film, Bondarchuk emphasizes their dominant role. Following this scene, the sky and clouds appear in frame as symbols of eternity. This is an almost literal illustration of a part of the description of when Prince Andrei is wounded on the battle field at Austerlitz, meaning, the director directly violates the sequence in which the metaphors appear in the novel’s text, but does not destroy the author’s logic, because the seed, the sky, and the clouds, just as in Tolstoy’s text, remain the narrative’s tuning fork. But the specifics of dramaturgy in cinema require a more active demonstration of these metaphors at the beginning of the spectacle on the screen.

The American film War and Peace (1956) starts differently. Its first shots are close-ups of fragments of picturesque battle paintings depicting the Napoleonic Wars. After these, the audience sees an animated map of Europe and then the Russian army leaving Moscow. These details are crucial to the film. The director seemingly rummages through the pages of an illustrated history book before the audience’s eyes. Fragments of paintings, thanks to close-ups, gather additional emotional weight, they become grotesque. And it is against this background, in abstracted scenery, that we see the development of the relationships between the protagonists. The tuning fork of this relationship is also a metaphor, the yellow dress of Natasha Rostova (played by Audrey Hepburn).^[1] In the novel, Natasha also appears once in a similar dress. Prince Andrei sees her in Otradnoye in a yellow chintz dress, in a crowd of running girls. The color and the material (chintz), and the behavior (running), all of this Tolstoy uses to confirm the heroine’s roots in culture and the everyday nature of the episode (chintz was used primarily in everyday household clothing). This dress is an indication of Natasha’s joyful world view, full of life. In this sense, the film does not contradict the author’s idea. But in the film, Natasha is in a yellow dress in the very first scenes, seeing off the troops, flirting with Pierre. Basically, performing a set of secular ritual actions. The bright sunny color of the dress, taken together with the more expensive material, can be perceived to show Natasha’s desire to attract everyone’s attention.

In Rimas Tuminas’ stage production of War and Peace (premiered in 2021) at the Evgeny Vakhntangov Theater, the director chose a long green chiffon scarf as a metaphor for life, and children run with the scarf across the stage many times in the Rostov house. It both draws attention to Natasha and demonstrates the special democratic attitudes in this family. Vivid and ambiguous, this metaphor allows each viewer to fill it with their own meanings. A metaphor of a completely different scale, and virtually the only decoration in the play, is a huge gray wall, symbolizing the entire world order, around which the characters have to build their lives. It is a part of the city, the countryside, and the interior of the masters’ houses – everywhere it’s equally impenetrable and overwhelmingly invulnerable.

Following the methodology we propose, students work in a manner similar to directors. Using semiotic analysis (in particular, looking for additional emotional and semantic dominants in the text, and non-trivial metaphors, cross-cutting narratives, relevance to contemporary literature, etc.), they identify stories that are important to themselves within classical literary texts, tell them using a multimodal artistic language, and exhibit them on media platforms.

4 Experience with Leo Tolstoy’s texts

The approach to organizing creative work that we propose can be divided into three stages: analyzing narratives in literary texts, identifying dominants and key metaphors; choosing media platforms, formats, and multimodal ensembles for the creative activity, creating multimodal texts; combining individual parts of the project into a transmedia narrative, at the core of which a classic literary text remains.

Let’s consider each of these stages using examples of projects by trainees at the Sirius Educational Center (students from grades 7–11, participants in literary segments), with whom our research team worked from June to August 2021 and in March 2022, adapting the novel Childhood by Leo Tolstoy and the novel War and Peace for the format of a multimedia exhibition.^[2]

The first stage is text analysis. The dominant concept is not absolute, but relative, we say in the footsteps of Roman Jakobson. It depends on the reader’s interpretation, and on the cultural context in which the original work ends up. Since we often have several centuries of time between us and the writers (in particular writers from the nineteenth century, whose works have become the core of schools’ curricula), we can hardly hope for an invariable dominant or definitive interpretation of metaphors. So the traditional route, going from reading and analyzing the text to studying the statements by the writer and the opinions of his contemporaries and critics – very important for researchers – does not seem to us to be the only correct one as far as schoolchildren are concerned. A more fruitful approach is to ask students to identify for themselves what parts of the classical text evoke an emotional response in them and a desire for creative involvement, while assuming that these may not necessarily be central episodes or main characters.

Discussing different options in class, students justify their choices with arguments and quotes. This motivates them to return to the text, to go deeper into it, even if only to disagree with someone else or to confirm their own opinion. But often during such discussions, students agree on two or three key topics that interest a majority of them. It is these topics that we propose students consider as dominants, which then serve as the basis for building their educational multimedia stories.

For the trainees from grades 7–9 (June 2021 shift), we suggested working with Leo Tolstoy’s story Childhood. The authors of most of the textbooks we analyzed (Korovina 2012; Merkin 2016) suggest that the analysis of this work should focus on the family–child theme, characteristic of kitsch culture. Of course, this in no way contradicts Leo Tolstoy’s intention.^[3] But Childhood does not fit neatly into the framework of kitsch and the family–childhood theme. First of all, this is because it is polyphonic: in it the reader can hear the voices of the character, the author, and the narrator. We assumed that this narrative quality would interest our trainees, since they often encounter this in contemporary TV shows and narrative video games. This did not happen, however, although they recalled that teachers in school, following the logic of the curriculum, had paid attention to this polyphony.

For themselves, they chose children’s games in storytelling as their dominant focus. And central to the project was a game that Leo Tolstoy talks about in The ABC, not in Childhood – a magical, philosophical or even religious story about a green handkerchief and the “antebellum brotherhood” (Eichenbaum 1969). This important episode in the life of the Tolstoy brothers, who dreamed of universal happiness and well-being, continues to touch teenagers to this day. Of course, the emotional life of Tolstoy’s characters is also important to textbook authors. But they focus not on the complexity and contradictions of the inner life of individuals, ideas that attract modern teenagers, but on the “soulfulness of Nicholas,” “the charm and poetry of childhood.” Yes, Leo Tolstoy writes a hymn to childhood. But this is only one of the colors of the story, and there is a lot of drama, sometimes tragic. It contains unsolvable contradictions and broken human destinies. And this dramatic tension prevents us from perceiving childhood as a beautiful time, although Tolstoy tries to convince us of this. Our trainees discussed this contradiction in class and tried to expound on it in their project.^[4]

The second dominant topic of discussion was that of fools and Tolstoy’s conflict with church authorities. Many of the characters in the story seemed strange to our trainees, as did some of the actions of the writer himself. They tried to explain them in terms of modern morality. This was reflected in a longread about “the experiences of Tolstoy’s life.”^[5] The text is built around a reevaluation of the meaning of family, love, and faith in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Perceptions of students from grades 7–9 were not entirely accurate and also extremely evaluative. In creative assignment discussions, participants described their experiences of reading Leo Tolstoy. “Marina” (15 years old, 9th grade student) stated that “man nowadays does not rush for reciprocity, but puts ‘self-realization’ first.” Several other participants agreed that “light and lofty feelings remain, but are expressed differently: first of all, love for oneself, and then – for one’s neighbor.” Natasha (14 years old, 8th grade student) stated that “most believers now combine tradition, canon, and progress.” We discussed this but did not correct them. It was important for us to show how the age and cultural attitudes of the students shifted the perceptions of students on Tolstoy’s works.

The visualization of this part of the project was very modest. Most of the trainees in this group tried to illustrate their texts with photographs or reproductions of paintings, as is often done in popular science books and textbooks, although the green stick could obviously have become the central metaphor of the project and the seed for a set of artistic solutions that would have tied the parts of the project together. But the 7th grade interns lacked the artistic and multimedia experience to visualize this idea. They generally found it difficult to use their experience in visual and sound storytelling in their work, although many of them told the class that they were good at drawing or doing music. But it turned out to be simpler for them to limit themselves to writing text.

“Strangeness” in the behaviors of Tolstoy’s characters and the writer himself were also noted by students in grades 9–11. This interest was reflected in the part of their project where the trainees wanted to consider the religious and philosophical predecessors and followers of the writer.^[6] The core of the project – the rumination on the structure of the universe, which was emphasized by Sergej Bondarchuk in his film War and Peace. In the schoolchildren’s project, “space” (the starry sky) also becomes a key metaphor. Philosophers, writers, and theologians appear in the form of separate planets whose cosmic trajectories sometimes intersect. In terms of content, the project is a collection of quotes. However, a well-thought-out artistic solution offers additional meanings, and pushes the readers to formulate their own analogies and draw their own conclusions.

The search for the project’s format and visual solution was the second stage of our work. We assumed we’d proceed to the format after the children decided what story they wanted to tell. But in some cases, not the story or metaphor were dominant, but the format or genre. Thus, for all three groups of students, the travel genre was one of the most important.^[7] With Tolstoy’s texts, the trainees focused primarily on passages containing the motif of travel. In their creative works, many sought to make a journey the backbone of the story, using various multimedia formats: from an audio tour of the house-museum in Khamovniki to a quest into the past. Of course, the theme of the journey is not the dominant theme for the story Childhood. Tolstoy barely describes the road from the estate to Moscow, whereas for a travel narrative, the process of the hero’s movement and having new experiences during the adventures they experience along the way is important. Schoolchildren tried to fill this “gap” in the projects by offering their readers additional information, with maps and geographical/historical details. In this manner, not only the hero was the traveler, but the audience too.

We have an impression that the travel narrative is a kind of universal dominant, and the map is a universal metaphor that updates and adapts virtually any text for the perception of young people. This is probably due to the prominence of stories constructed according to the “hero’s journey” model (Campbell 1968). Of course, in this case, we are also dealing with a pattern that has the potential to become kitsch. But multimedia formats make it possible to thread additional details onto the kitschy construction, keeping the story from becoming solid. The selection of an unusual multimodal ensemble to tell a rather banal story offers an escape from the boundaries of the template: the use of memes popular among young people, as was done by one of our trainee groups,^[8] or use of the format of Tinder (a dating application), as another group did.^[9] As we wrote above, the use of multimodal ensembles that are characteristic of a particular format and familiar to a certain group of users increases the feeling of involvement and engagement and makes the understanding of complex material easier. This was confirmed in discussions with Sirius Festival of Workshops participants, where trainees showcase their work at the end of the training cycle.

It is important to keep in mind that the semiotics of reading are influenced by several factors in such situations: the author’s dominants and metaphors contained in the literary source, the dominants and metaphors characteristic of the media platforms and formats, and the esthetic habits of their audience (most often, students focus on the group they know best, the one they belong to themselves). Minimizing the tension associated with a desire to “please” everyone allows the third stage of the work, which is to combine individual stories into a transmedia narrative.

Because the transmedia approach assumes that the story will be told simultaneously on several media platforms and will connect the original text and its multi-format extensions in a manner that will make the overall project interesting and understandable to different groups of users, this allows us to combine semiotic polyphony into a unified (though not always homogeneous) whole. We have to admit, not all of our trainees’ transmedia projects can be considered successful or cited as examples. Most of the works we referred to above are collections of individual multimedia stories. We called them exhibitions. The project “From Ivan Goncharov to Leo Tolstoy and Back” was the closest we got to transmedia. It combined a multimedia longread with a story on the role of travel in the lives and literary careers of the two writers, an interactive map with reference material about the travels of different Russian writers, and an exhibition, which the trainees created especially for the Sirius festival. It was dedicated to the friendship between Tolstoy and Goncharov, and its viewers could see not just multimedia exhibits, but also a selection of letters from the writers to each other. This approach allowed the children to present extensive, complex historical and literary material in a visual and interactive format (the multimedia projects also included tests and games), without harming its informative and educational value. They took the travel/adventure format from Goncharov, preserving it as the content dominant. The metaphor of the “Pallada” frigate remained core. And the second main metaphor was the letter as a sign of uninterrupted connection between people that are close in spirit, who love to put their thoughts about the structure of the universe into words. It was not only writers who communicated with each other through letters. Viewers could also receive a letter from one of the writers and respond by attaching it to an interactive board or sending it through social networks. This project best reflects the ideas of our creative approach and allows us to use the available variety of transmedia resources.

5 Conclusions

Of course, we want to mention once again in the conclusions that such multimedia projects should by no means be considered a substitute for becoming acquainted with a text. They do not even guarantee an in-depth familiarity with the text. But such work implies something more global: a reorientation, shifting the idea behind reading literature from a passive process, making personal growth and collaboration the goal, condition, and main educational result of teaching literature at school.

The teacher guides students through the stages described in this article: 1) analysis of narratives in literary classics, 2) their comparison with the narratives of famous film adaptations, 3) returning to the text, reconsidering it through the prism of contemporary issues, 4) identifying the dominants and metaphors that will allow deconstruction of the kitsch interpretations of the text, and 5) creating new transmedia multimodal texts based on them. All this together allows them to formulate their own artistic statement. In essence, the reader and viewer transforms into a prosumer (Bruns 2008).

This is how any expansion of platforms in art works, and it began long before the digital age. Even in the pre-digital era, the text began to turn into a fluid statement that has a beginning but no end. Take the usual set of extensions – a book, a screen adaptation, a dramatization, an audiobook. And add new ones – a computer game, a virtual museum, video poetry, creating blogs for the characters, composing fanfics. In that case, the universe of the classic literary text expands, and the role of the recipient grows even more, their mind, imagination, emotional reaction become part of the co-creation process. The core of the process is always the original literary work, the familiar narrative, but the limits become blurred.

What does it mean to “read” in this situation? It means engaging with an infinitely changing meaning and a form that never solidifies; reading a book means at the same time watching a film, listening to an audio version, playing, composing in response, and superimposing impressions on one another. This means that digitalization implies not the appearance of a new set of convenient tools for preparing and conducting a traditional lesson, but a different approach altogether – different tasks, betting on the position of co-author, on the intellectual and creative independence of the student. This means that semiotic and narratological research tools are in demand not just for analysis of the text, but also for transmedia multimodal creativity.