Approaches to studying kreativs (short stories) on Russian padonki-websites.

new phenomenon in the modern Russian literary landscape, the so-called kreativ or kreatiff (Rus. креатив/креатифф, derived from the English word creative), which is a short fictional story. First kreativs appeared on the Internet fifteen years ago as a means of developing and stabilizing a new internet slang, Novograf (alias the padonki language, after the word подонок –– scumbag, riffraff) that constitutes a linguistic practice characterized by deliberate orthographic distortions and use of publicly unacceptable, obscene lexics (so-called mat). During this period a number of "trash culture" websites published tens of thousands of kreativs, which are far from being studied. Moreover, no approach to such a study has been developed.

The paper aims to close this gap and proposes to consider the corpus of kreativs to be a valuable historical document of a specific Internet counterculture, at the same time linked organically to modern folklore. This document should be analyzed as a modern virtual countercultural discourse with its own ideology and set of topics, rhetorical instruments and strategies.