SOURCE: Rougle, Charles. “On the ‘Fantastic’ Trend in Recent Soviet Prose.” Slavic and East European Journal 34, no. 3 (autumn 1990): 308-21.

In the following essay, Rougle expounds on the increasing use of fantasy elements in Russian literature, especially during the 1970s and later. He also examines the major sources for fantasy elements as they are used in modern Russian literature, as well as common themes in these works, attempting to determine a common ideological ground in order to place this trend in a historical perspective.

Until relatively recently, Soviet literature was very much dominated by normative definitions of realism which dictated, among other things, the mimetic depiction of reality. Fantasy and the fantastic—used here in the broadest sense of Kathryn Hume to mean all “departures from consensus reality recognizable to the reader as such”¹—was frowned upon and, for the most part, relegated to science fiction and children's literature...