“Reading” Pathologic 2: Russian Literature as a Trans-Medial Idea

This article offers an analysis of a recent Russian computer game, Pathologic 2, which simulates an epidemic in a Russian provincial town. Unusually, the game has widely been called a “literary” experience by both its players and creators. By making use of theories of narration and mediation from Peter Brooks, Friedrich Kittler, and Patrick Jagoda, I ask whether the medium of the digital game can ever produce an experience that is related to or informed by the concept of “literariness” in both a Russian Formalist and broadly intellectual sense. By exploring how Pathologic 2 incorporates material from well-known texts by Fedor Dostoevskii and Aleksandr Blok, I argue that the digital game reduces Russian literature to a “trans-medial” phenomenon, and that this reduction can be understood as one impact of twenty-first-century networked computing on literary activity and institutions. Moreover, I consider the impact of contemporary geopolitics on how the global industry of digital games understands Russia and, by extension, Russian literature.