MORAL EDUCATION THROUGH THE IMAGE OF THE HERO IN CHINESE NETWORK LITERATURE AND ITS RUSSIAN PARALLELS

Abstract

The article addresses online literature as an underused resource for the moral education of young people. The authors proceed from the premise that literature has for centuries shaped ideas of duty, honour and justice, and that with the spread of the Internet this function has not disappeared but moved into the digital environment: by the end of 2025 the number of online literary works in China exceeded 33 million, while the Russian audience runs into tens of millions of readers. The study aims to identify the moral and educational potential of the hero image in Chinese online literature and its Russian parallels. Its objectives are to define the concept of the hero image, to identify the genres that reveal it most fully, and to compare moral orientations. The material comprises three principal Chinese genres – wuxia, xianxia and xuanhuan – juxtaposed with the Russian survival narrative, LitRPG and heroic fantasy; the methods employed are theoretical analysis, comparison and generalisation. The Chinese model is shown to be built on ascent from a mortal warrior to an immortal sage or all-powerful ruler, transmitting the values of harmony, duty and spiritual perfection, whereas the Russian hero focuses on solitary struggle for survival and the accumulation of power in the absence of external support, embodying endurance, self-reliance and personal overcoming. External genre similarity is shown to be deceptive, concealing a fundamental divergence of cultural codes. It is concluded that the hero image of online literature can be employed in family reading and literature lessons, including through comparison with classical works, allowing moral dilemmas to be discussed and the cultural code to be preserved in a form engaging for young people.