фантастика

The review is dedicated to the book written by a Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, Head of the Department of History of Slavic literatures at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Department of Slavic studies and Central European studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, member of the Union of Writers of Russia, a well-known science fiction scholar, and president of the Association of Science Fiction Researchers, E. N. Kovtun.

The article regards how the fantastic constituent is revealed on the plot, composition, and image levels of the text of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.

The article analyzes an early play by Evgeny Schwarts Adventures of Hohenstaufen. The text poetics features are distinguished on the levels of the action development, character images, language humor. The genre dominating idea is identified. The author reveals how the vaudeville, the fairy-tale, and fantastic, and the satiric elements in the text interact. In the focus of the author’s attention is the motive of a ‘usual’ miracle/magic reflecting the aesthetic principle of the playwright.

The article considers posthumous novels by Jules Verne only recently published in the original author’s versions. Despite the abundance of genre models, themes and intonations, they constitute a certain unity. Motives and characters, well known to the readers of Verne’s‘classical’ works, mix well with original narrative solutions.

The article considers the chronotope of the novel Rough Draft by S. Lukyanenko, its special features being due to the combination of two genres – urban fantasy and conspiracy novel. Even though both genres contain some common motives and figures, in the work by Lukyanenko urban fantasy genre prevails, because the main character himself mainly forms the chronotope: slows down the time, creates new locations by the power of his mind (rooms, buildings etc.).

The article analyzes the novel “La Poupée” (“Doll”) by a French writer of Italian origin Jean Galli de Bibiena, which introduced into the literature of the 18th century the theme of the doll mentoring an adult. The doll character combines, on the one hand, the ideas of the era about “man-machine”, the fascination with “live” automations, on the other hand, the tradition of depicting fairy-tale creatures, concentrated in Montfaucon de Villar’s book “Count Gabalis”.