images from Olga Lialina's Anna Karenina project (discussed by Vlad Strukov in the kultura issue in question)Henrike Schmidt has already blogged about the German version, but since yesterday the English version is available as well: 'Notes From the Virtual Underground. Russian Literature and the Internet', the first 2009 issue of the online journal of Russian cultural life kultura, is now online, available in full-text format for free. Conceived by the Russian Cyberspace team, 'Notes From the Virtual Underground' is a thematic kultura issue focusing entirely on the production and consumption of Russian literature on the Internet. As Henrike wrote, it complements the contents of our own first journal, 'Virtual Power: Russian Politics and the Internet', with explorations of the cultural and literary spheres - think analyses of electronic libraries (Schmidt), of deconstructions of the literary canon in net art (Strukov), the specificities of Russian literary blogs (Rutten), and interviews with Pavel Protasov and Aleksandr Kabanov, on copyright issues and local Internet mythologies, respectively.In her entry Henrike also pointed out the links between this and earlier kultura issues, which zoomed in on Russian libraries and the nexus between Russian language and social change, among other topics. For those interested in the latter, I would like to add another link, to Landslide of the Norm, the Bergen-based research project on interrelations between Russian linguistic liberalisation and literary development in - mainly - the post-Soviet period. Not only was Landslide of the Norm the forerunner of the emphatically new-media oriented research project The Future of Russian: Language Culture in the Era of New Technology (in which yours truly is involved since March 1, and about which you'll hear more in this blog in the future) - but the Landslide team itself also devoted considerable attention to the question how linguistic identity and linguistic norms are performed online. If you want to know more, have a look not just at the site, but also at the ensuing book publication, Landslide of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia. (Lunde & Roesen, eds., Bergen 2006). The 'Landsliders' are currently preparing another book, on post-Soviet (linguistic) norm negotiations, which will contain additional RuNet-related material. We'll keep you updated, ofcourse; but for the moment, that publication is still in the making.ER