Fantasy in literature. Fantasy is a genre in literature

Fantasy is a kind of fiction in which the author's fiction from the depiction of strange, unusual, implausible phenomena extends to the creation of a special - fictional, unreal, "wonderful world". Fiction has its own fantastic type of figurativeness with its inherent high degree of convention, frank violation of real logical connections and patterns, natural proportions and forms of the depicted object.

Fantasy as a field of literary creativity

Fantasy as a special area of ​​literary creativity maximally accumulates the creative imagination of the artist, and at the same time the imagination of the reader; at the same time, this is not an arbitrary "realm of imagination": in a fantastic picture of the world, the reader guesses the transformed forms of real - social and spiritual - human existence. Fantastic imagery is inherent in such folklore and literary genres as a fairy tale, epic, allegory, legend, grotesque, utopia, satire. The artistic effect of a fantastic image is achieved through a sharp repulsion from empirical reality, therefore, at the heart of any fantastic work lies the opposition of the fantastic and the real. The poetics of the fantastic is connected with the doubling of the world: the artist either models his own incredible world that exists according to its own laws (in this case, the real “starting point” is hidden, remaining outside the text: “Gulliver’s Travels”, 1726, J. Swift, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man ”, 1877, F.M. Dostoevsky), or in parallel recreates two streams - real and supernatural, unreal being. In the fantastic literature of this series, mystical, irrational motives are strong, the carrier of fantasy here appears in the form of an otherworldly force interfering in the fate of the central character, influencing his behavior and the course of events of the entire work (works of medieval literature, Renaissance literature, romanticism).

With the destruction of mythological consciousness and the growing desire in the art of modern times to look for the driving forces of being in being itself, already in the literature of romanticism there is a need for fantastic, which in one way or another could be combined with a general setting for a natural depiction of characters and situations. The most stable methods of such motivated fiction are dreams, rumors, hallucinations, madness, plot mystery. A new type of veiled, implicit fantasy is being created, leaving the possibility of double interpretation, double motivation of fantastic incidents - empirically or psychologically plausible and inexplicably surreal ("Cosmorama", 1840, V.F. Odoevsky; "Shtoss", 1841, M.Yu. Lermontov ; "Sandman", 1817, E.T. A. Hoffmann). Such a conscious fluctuation of motivation often leads to the fact that the subject of the fantastic disappears ("The Queen of Spades", 1833, A.S. Pushkin; "The Nose", 1836, N.V. Gogol), and in many cases its irrationality is generally removed, finding prosaic explanation as the story progresses. The latter is characteristic of realistic literature, where fantasy narrows down to the development of individual motifs and episodes or performs the function of an emphatically conditional, naked device that does not pretend to create in the reader the illusion of trust in the special reality of fantastic fiction, without which fantasy in its purest form cannot exist.

Origins of fiction - in the myth-making folk-poetic consciousness, expressed in a fairy tale and a heroic epic. Fiction is essentially predetermined by the centuries-old activity of the collective imagination and is a continuation of this activity, using (and updating) constant mythical images, motifs, plots in combination with the vital material of history and modernity. Fiction evolves along with the development of literature, freely combining with various methods of depicting ideas, passions and events. It stands out as a special kind of artistic creativity as folklore forms move away from the practical tasks of mythological understanding of reality and ritual and magical influence on it. The primitive worldview, becoming historically untenable, is perceived as fantastic. A characteristic sign of the emergence of fantasy is the development of an aesthetics of the miraculous, which is not characteristic of primitive folklore. There is a stratification: the heroic fairy tale and the legends about the cultural hero are transformed into a heroic epic (folk allegory and generalization of history), in which the elements of the miraculous are auxiliary; the fabulously magical element is perceived as such and serves as a natural environment for a story about travels and adventures, taken out of the historical framework. Thus, Homer's Iliad is essentially a realistic description of an episode of the Trojan War (which does not interfere with the participation of celestial heroes in the action); Homer's "Odyssey" is primarily a fantastic story about all sorts of incredible adventures (not related to the epic plot) of one of the heroes of the same war. The plot, images and incidents of the Odyssey are the beginning of all literary European fiction. Approximately the same as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Irish heroic sagas and the Voyage of Bran, son of Febal (7th century) correlate. The prototype of many future fantastic journeys was the parody "True History" (2nd century) by Lucian, where the author, in order to enhance the comic effect, sought to pile up as much incredible and absurd as possible and enriched the flora and fauna of the "wonderful country" with many tenacious inventions. Thus, even in antiquity, the main directions of fantasy were outlined - fantastic wandering-adventures and fantastic search-pilgrimage (a characteristic plot is a descent into hell). Ovid in his Metamorphoses directed the original mythological plots of transformations (the transformation of people into animals, constellations, stones) into the mainstream of fantasy and laid the foundation for a fantastic-symbolic allegory - a genre more didactic than adventurous: "teaching in miracles." Fantastic transformations become a form of awareness of the vicissitudes and unreliability of human destiny in a world subject only to the arbitrariness of chance or a mysterious divine will. A rich collection of literary processed fairy tales is given by the tales of the Thousand and One Nights; the influence of their exotic imagery was reflected in European pre-romanticism and romanticism, Indian literature from Kalidasa to R. Tagore is saturated with fantastic images and echoes of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. A kind of literary remelting of folk tales, legends and beliefs are many works of Japanese (for example, the genre of “a story about the terrible and extraordinary” - “Konjakumonogatari”) and Chinese fiction (“Stories about miracles from the Liao cabinet” by Pu Songling, 1640-1715).

Fantastic fiction under the sign of "aesthetics of the miraculous" was the basis of the medieval knightly epic - from "Beowulf" (8th century) to "Perceval" (circa 1182) by Chretien de Troy and "The Death of Arthur" (1469) by T. Malory. The legend of the court of King Arthur, subsequently superimposed on the chronicle of the Crusades, colored by the imagination, became the frame for fantastic plots. Further transformation of these plots are monumentally fantastic, almost completely losing the historical epic basis of the Renaissance poems "Roland in Love" by Boiardo, "Furious Roland" (1516) by L. Ariosto, "Jerusalem Liberated" (1580) by T. Tasso, "The Fairy Queen" (1590 -96) E. Spencer. Together with numerous chivalric romances of the 14th-16th century, they constitute a special era in the development of fantasy. A milestone in the development of the fantastic allegory created by Ovid was the Romance of the Rose (13th century) by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The development of Fiction during the Renaissance is completed by "Don Quixote" (1605-15) by M. Cervantes - a parody of the fantasy of knightly adventures, and "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (1533-64) by F. Rabelais - a comic epic on a fantastic basis, both traditional and arbitrary rethought. In Rabelais we find (chapter "Theleme Abbey") one of the first examples of the fantastic development of the utopian genre.

To a lesser extent than ancient mythology and folklore, religious and mythological images of the Bible stimulated fantasy. The largest works of Christian fiction "Paradise Lost" (1667) and "Paradise Regained" (1671) by J. Milton are not based on canonical biblical texts, but on apocrypha. This, however, does not detract from the fact that the works of European fantasy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as a rule, have an ethical Christian coloring or represent a play of fantastic images and the spirit of Christian apocryphal demonology. Outside of fantasy are the lives of the saints, where miracles are fundamentally singled out as extraordinary, but real events. Nevertheless, the Christian-mythological consciousness contributes to the flourishing of a special genre - visions. Starting with the "Apocalypse" of John the Evangelist, "visions" or "revelations" become a full-fledged literary genre: different aspects of it are represented by "The Vision of Peter Plowman" (1362) by W. Langland and "The Divine Comedy" (1307-21) by Dante. (The poetics of religious "revelations defines W. Blake's visionary fiction: his grandiose "prophetic" images are the last pinnacle of the genre). By the end of the 17th century. Mannerism and Baroque, for which fantasy was a constant background, an additional artistic plane (at the same time, the perception of fantasy was aestheticized, the living feeling of the miraculous was lost, which was also characteristic of the fantastic literature of subsequent centuries), was replaced by classicism, which is inherently alien to fantasy: its appeal to myth is completely rationalistic . In the novels of the 17th and 18th centuries, the motifs and images of fantasy are casually used to complicate the intrigue. Fantastic search is interpreted as erotic adventures (“fairy tales”, for example, “Akazhu and Zirfila”, 1744, C. Duclos). Fiction, having no independent meaning, turns out to be an aid to a picaresque novel (“The Lame Demon”, 1707, A.R. Lesage; “The Devil in Love”, 1772, J. Kazot), a philosophical treatise (“Micromegas”, 1752, Voltaire). The reaction to the dominance of enlightenment rationalism was characteristic of the second half of the 18th century; the Englishman R. Hurd calls for a heartfelt study of Fiction ("Letters on Chivalry and Medieval Novels", 1762); in The Adventures of Count Ferdinand Fathom (1753); T. Smollett anticipates the beginning of the development of science fiction in the 1920s. gothic novel by H. Walpole, A. Radcliffe, M. Lewis. By supplying accessories for romantic plots, fantasy remains in a secondary role: with its help, the duality of images and events becomes the pictorial principle of pre-romanticism.

In modern times, the combination of fantasy with romanticism turned out to be especially fruitful. “Refuge in the realm of fantasy” (Yu.A. Kerner) was sought by all romantics: the “Ienes” fantasize, i.e. the aspiration of the imagination into the transcendent world of myths and legends, was put forward as a way of familiarizing with the highest insight, as a life program - relatively prosperous (due to romantic irony) by L. Tieck, pathetic and tragic by Novalis, whose "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" is an example of a renewed fantastic allegory, comprehended in the spirit of the search for an unattainable, incomprehensible ideal world. The Heidelberg romantics used Fantasy as a source of plots that give additional interest to earthly events (“Isabella of Egypt”, 1812, L.Arnima is a fantastic arrangement of a love episode from the life of Charles V). This approach to science fiction proved especially promising. In an effort to enrich its resources, the German romantics turned to its primary sources - they collected and processed fairy tales and legends (Peter Lebrecht's Folk Tales, 1797, edited by Tieck; Children's and Family Tales, 1812-14 and German Legends, 1816 -18 brothers J. and V. Grimm). This contributed to the formation of the literary fairy tale genre in all European literatures, which remains to this day the leading one in children's fiction. Its classic example of H.K. Andersen's fairy tale. Romantic fiction is synthesized by Hoffmann's work: here is a gothic novel ("Devil's Elixir", 1815-16), and a literary fairy tale ("Lord of the Fleas", 1822, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", 1816), and an enchanting phantasmagoria ("Princess Brambilla" , 1820), and a realistic story with fantastic background ("The Choice of the Bride", 1819, "Golden Pot", 1814). Faust (1808-31) by I. W. Goethe presents an attempt to heal the attraction to fantasy as to the “abyss of the otherworldly”: using the traditional fantastic motive of selling the soul to the devil, the poet discovers the futility of the wandering of the spirit in the realms of the fantastic and affirms the earthly as the final value. vital activity that transforms the world (i.e., the utopian ideal is excluded from the realm of fantasy and projected into the future).

In Russia, romantic fiction is represented in the works of V.A. Zhukovsky, V.F. Odoevsky, A. Pogorelsky, A.F. Veltman. A.S. Pushkin (“Ruslan and Lyudmila”, 1820, where the epic-fairy-tale flavor of fantasy is especially important) and N.V. Gogol turned to fantasy, whose fantastic images are organically merged into the folk-poetic ideal picture of Ukraine (“Terrible Revenge” , 1832; "Viy", 1835). His St. Petersburg fiction (The Nose, 1836; Portrait, Nevsky Prospekt, both 1835) is no longer associated with folklore and fairy tale motifs and is otherwise conditioned by the general picture of "escheated" reality, the condensed image of which, as it were, in itself generates fantastic images.

With the establishment of realism, fantasy again found itself on the periphery of literature, although it was often involved as a kind of narrative context, giving a symbolic character to real images (“Portrait of Dorian Gray, 1891, O. Wilde; “Shagreen Skin”, 1830-31 O. Balzac; works by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, S. Bronte, N. Hawthorne, Yu. A. Strindberg). The gothic tradition of fantasy is developed by E.A.Po, who depicts or implies the transcendent, otherworldly world as a realm of ghosts and nightmares that rule over the earthly destinies of people. However, he also anticipated (The History of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838, The Thrown into the Maelstrom, 1841) the emergence of a new branch of Fantasy - scientific, which (starting with J. Verne and G. Wells) is fundamentally separated from the generally fantastic tradition; she draws a real, albeit fantastically transformed by science (for worse or for better), the world, a new view of the researcher. Interest in photography as such revived towards the end of the 19th century. neo-romantics (R.L. Stevenson), decadents (M. Schwob, F. Sologub), symbolists (M. Maeterlinck, A. Bely’s prose, A. A. Blok’s dramaturgy), expressionists (G. Meyrink), surrealists (G .Cossack, E. Kroyder). The development of children's literature gives rise to a new image of the fantasy world - the world of toys: L. Carroll, K. Collodi, A. Milne; in domestic literature - from A.N. Tolstoy ("Golden Key", 1936) N.N. Nosov, K.I. Chukovsky. An imaginary, partly fairy-tale world is created by A. Green.

In the second half of the 20th century the fantastic beginning is realized mainly in the field of science fiction, but sometimes it gives rise to qualitatively new artistic phenomena, for example, the trilogy of the Englishman J. R. Tolkien "The Lord of the Rings" (1954-55), written in line with epic fantasy (see), novels and dramas by the Japanese Abe Kobo, works by Spanish and Latin American writers (G. Garcia Marquez, J. Cortazar). Modernity is characterized by the above-mentioned contextual use of fantasy, when an outwardly realistic narrative has a symbolic and allegorical connotation and will give a more or less encrypted reference to a mythological plot (“Centaur”, 1963, J. Updike; “Ship of Fools”, 1962, K.A. Porter). The combination of various possibilities of fantasy is the novel by M.A. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita" (1929-40). The fantastical-allegorical genre is represented in Russian literature by the cycle of “natural-philosophical” poems by N.A. Schwartz. Fiction has become a traditional auxiliary means of Russian grotesque satire: from Saltykov-Shchedrin (“History of a City”, 1869-70) to V.V. Mayakovsky (“Bedbug”, 1929 and “Banya”, 1930).

The word fantasy comes from Greek phantastike, what does it mean in translation- the art of imagining.

In the Explanatory Dictionary of V. I. Dahl we read: “Fantastic - unrealizable, dreamy; or intricate, quirky, special and different in its invention. In other words, two meanings are implied: 1) something unreal, impossible and unimaginable; 2) something rare, exaggerated, unusual. With regard to literature, the first sign becomes the main one: when we say “fantastic novel” (story, short story, etc.), we mean not so much that it describes rare events, but that these events are completely or partially - generally impossible in real life. We define the fantastic in literature by its opposition to the real and existing.

This contrast is both obvious and extremely variable. Animals or birds endowed with a human psyche and owning human speech; the forces of nature, personified in anthropomorphic (i.e., having a human appearance) images of the gods (for example, ancient gods); living creatures of an unnatural hybrid form (in ancient Greek mythology, half-humans-half-horses - centaurs, half-birds-half-lions - griffins); unnatural actions or properties (for example, in East Slavic fairy tales, the death of Koshchei, hidden in several magical objects and animals nested in each other) - all this is easily felt by us as fantastic. However, much also depends on the historical position of the observer: what today seems fantastic, for the creators of ancient mythology or ancient fairy tales, has not yet been fundamentally opposed to reality. Therefore, in art there are constant processes of rethinking, the transition of the real into the fanatical and the fantastic into the real. The first process associated with the weakening of the positions of ancient mythology was noted by K. Marx: “... Greek mythology was not only the arsenal of Greek art, but also its soil. Is that view of nature and social relations that underlies Greek fantasy, and therefore Greek art, possible in the presence of self-factories, railways, locomotives and electric telegraph? Science fiction literature demonstrates the reverse process of the transition of the fantastic into the real: scientific discoveries and achievements, which seemed fantastic against the backdrop of their time, become quite possible and feasible with the development of technological progress, and sometimes even look too elementary and naive.

Thus, the perception of the fantastic depends on our attitude to its essence, that is, to the degree of reality or unreality of the events depicted. However, for a modern person, this is a very complex feeling, which determines all the complexity and versatility of experiencing the fantastic. A modern child believes in fairy tales, but from adults, from informative radio and television programs, he already knows or guesses that "everything is not so in life." Therefore, a share of disbelief is mixed with his faith, and he is able to perceive incredible events either as real, or as fantastic, or on the verge of real and fantastic. An adult person “does not believe” in the miraculous, but sometimes it is common for him to resurrect in himself the former, naive “childish” point of view in order to plunge into an imaginary world with all the fullness of experiences, in a word, a share of “faith” is added to his disbelief; and in the obviously fantastic, the real and genuine begin to “flicker”. Even if we are firmly convinced of the impossibility of fantasy, this does not deprive it of interest and aesthetic appeal in our eyes, because fantasy becomes in this case, as it were, a hint at other, not yet known spheres of life, an indication of its eternal renewal and inexhaustibility. In B. Shaw's play “Back to Methuselah,” one of the characters (the Snake) says: “A miracle is something that is impossible and yet possible. That which cannot happen and yet does happen. Indeed, no matter how deep and multiplied our scientific knowledge, the appearance of, say, a new living being will always be perceived as a "miracle" - impossible and at the same time quite real. It is the complexity of experiencing fantasy that allows it to be easily combined with irony, laughter; create a special genre of ironic fairy tale (H. K. Andersen, O. Wilde, E. L. Schwartz). The unexpected happens: irony, it would seem, should kill or at least weaken fantasy, but in fact it strengthens and strengthens the fantastic beginning, as it encourages us not to take it literally, to think about the hidden meaning of a fantastic situation.

The history of world literature, especially modern and recent times, beginning with romanticism (late 18th - early 19th centuries), has accumulated an enormous wealth of fiction artistic arsenal. Its main types are determined by the degree of distinctness and relief of the fantastic beginning: explicit fantasy; fantasy implicit (veiled); fantasy that receives a natural-real explanation, etc.

In the first case (clear fantasy), supernatural forces openly come into play: Mephistopheles in Faust by I.V. Goethe, the Demon in the poem of the same name by M.Yu. Lermontov, devils and witches in N.V. Gogol, Woland and company in The Master and Margarita by M. A. Bulgakov. Fantasy characters enter into direct relationships with people, trying to influence their feelings, thoughts, behavior, and these relationships often take on the character of a criminal conspiracy with the devil. So, for example, Faust in the tragedy by I.V. Goethe or Petro Bezrodny in N.V. Gogol's "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" sell their souls to the devil to fulfill their desires.

In works with implicit (veiled) fantasy, instead of the direct participation of supernatural forces, strange coincidences, accidents, etc. occur. none other than the cat of the old poppy seedling, reputed to be a witch. However, many coincidences lead us to believe this: Aristarkh Faleleich appears exactly when the old woman dies and no one knows where the cat disappears; there is something feline in the official's behavior: he "pleasantly" arches his "round back", walks "smoothly speaking", grumbles something "under his breath"; his very name - Murlykin - evokes quite definite associations. In a veiled form, a fantastic beginning is also manifested in many other works, for example, in The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Queen of Spades by A. S. Pushkin.

Finally, there is such a kind of fantastic, which is based on the most complete and completely natural motivations. Such, for example, are the fantastic stories of E. Poe. F. M. Dostoevsky noted that E. Poe “only admits the external possibility of an unnatural event (proving, however, its possibility and sometimes even extremely cunningly) and, having admitted this event, is completely true to reality in everything else.” “In Poe’s stories, you see so clearly all the details of the image or event presented to you that, finally, as if you are convinced of its possibility, reality ...”. Such thoroughness and "reliability" of descriptions is also characteristic of other types of fantastic, it creates a deliberate contrast between the obviously unrealistic basis (plot, plot, some characters) and its extremely accurate "processing". This contrast is often used by J. Swift in Gulliver's Travels. For example, when describing fantastic creatures - midgets, all the details of their actions are recorded, up to giving exact numbers: in order to move the captive Gulliver, “they drove in eighty pillars, each one foot high, then the workers tied ... the neck, arms, torso and legs with countless bandages with hooks ... Nine hundred of the strongest workers began to pull the ropes ... ".

Fiction performs various functions, especially often a satirical, accusatory function (Swift, Voltaire, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, V.V. Mayakovsky). Often this role is combined with another - affirmative, positive. Being an expressive, emphatically vivid way of expressing artistic thought, fantasy often captures in public life that which is just being born and arises. The moment of advance is a common feature of science fiction. However, there are also types of it that are specifically dedicated to foresight and forecasting the future. This is the science fiction literature already mentioned above (J. Verne, A. N. Tolstoy, K. Chapek, S. Lem, I. A. Efremov, A. N. and B. N. Strugatsky), which is often not limited to foresight future scientific and technological processes, but seeks to capture the entire social and social structure of the future. Here it comes into close contact with the genres of utopia and anti-utopia (“Utopia” by T. Mora, “City of the Sun” by T. Campanella, “City without a name” by V. F. Odoevsky, “What is to be done?” by N. G. Chernyshevsky).

Fiction (from other Greek φανταστική - the art of imagination, fantasy) is a genre and creative method in fiction, cinema, fine arts and other forms of art, characterized by the use of a fantastic assumption, an "element of the extraordinary", a violation of the boundaries of reality, accepted conventions. Modern fiction includes such genres as science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism and many others.

Origins of fiction

The origins of science fiction are in the post-mythological folklore consciousness, primarily in a fairy tale.

Fantasy stands out as a special kind of artistic creativity as folklore forms move away from the practical tasks of mythological comprehension of reality (the oldest cosmogonic myths are essentially non-fantastic). Primitive world outlook collides with new ideas about reality, mythical and real plans are mixed, and this mixture is purely fantastic. Fantasy, in the words of Olga Freidenberg, is “the first offspring of realism”: a characteristic sign of the invasion of realism into myth is the appearance of “fantastic creatures” (deities combining animal and human features, centaurs, etc.). The primary genres of fantasy, utopia and fantasy travel, were also the oldest forms of storytelling as such, most notably in Homer's Odyssey. The plot, images and incidents of the Odyssey are the beginning of all literary Western European fiction.

However, the collision of mimesis with myth, which produces the effect of fantasy, has so far had an involuntary character. The first one who deliberately pushes them together, and, therefore, the first conscious science fiction writer, is Aristophanes.

Fiction in ancient literature

In the era of Hellenism, Hekatey of Abdera, Eugemer, Yambul combined the genres of fantastic travel and utopia in their works.

In Roman times, the moment of socio-political utopia, characteristic of Hellenistic pseudo-travels, had already weathered; there was only a series of fantastic adventures in different parts of the globe and beyond - on the moon, connected with the theme of a love story. This type includes "The Incredible Adventures Beyond Thule" by Antony Diogenes.

In many ways, the continuation of the tradition of a fantastic journey is the novel of Pseudo-Callisthenes "The History of Alexander the Great", where the hero finds himself in the realm of giants, dwarfs, cannibals, freaks, in an area with strange nature, with unusual animals and plants. Much space is devoted to the wonders of India and its "naked sages", the Brahmins. Not forgotten is the mythological prototype of all these fabulous wanderings, visiting the country of the blessed.

Fantasy in medieval literature

In the period of the early Middle Ages, approximately from the 5th to the 11th centuries, there is, if not rejection, then at least the suppression of the miraculous, the basis of the fantastic. In the XII-XIII centuries, according to Jacques Le Goff, "there is a genuine invasion of the miraculous into scientific culture." At this time, one after another, the so-called "books of miracles" (Gervasius of Tilbury, Marco Polo, Raymond Lull, John Mandeville, etc.) appeared, reviving the genre of paradoxography.

Fiction in the Renaissance

The development of fiction during the Renaissance is completed by M. Cervantes' Don Quixote, a parody of the fantasy of knightly adventures and at the same time the beginning of a realistic novel, and F. Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, which uses the profane language of a chivalric novel to develop a humanistic utopia and humanistic satire. In Rabelais we find (the chapters on Theleme Abbey) one of the first examples of the fantastic development of the utopian genre, although it is primordially uncharacteristic: after all, among the founders of the genre, T. Mora (1516) and T. Campanella (1602), utopia gravitates towards a didactic treatise and only in “ New Atlantis” by F. Bacon is a sci-fi fantasy game. An example of a more traditional combination of fantasy with a dream of a fabulous realm of justice is Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Fiction in the 17th and 18th centuries

By the end of the 17th century, Mannerism and Baroque, for which fantasy was a constant background, an additional artistic plan (at the same time, the perception of fantasy was aestheticized, the living sensation of the miraculous was lost), was replaced by classicism, which is inherently alien to fantasy: its appeal to myth is completely rationalistic.

French "tragic stories" of the 17th century draw material from the chronicles and depict fatal passions, murders and cruelties, demonic possession, etc. These are the distant predecessors of the works of the Marquis de Sade the novelist and the "black novel" in general, combining paradoxographic tradition with narrative fiction . Infernal themes in a pious frame (the story of the struggle with terrible passions on the path of serving God) appear in the novels of Bishop Jean-Pierre Camus.

Fantasy in Romanticism

For romantics, duality turns into a split personality, leading to a poetically beneficial "sacred madness." “Refuge in the realm of fantasy” was sought by all romantics: among the “Yenese” fantasizing, that is, the aspiration of the imagination into the transcendent world of myths and legends, was put forward as an initiation to higher insight, as a life program - relatively prosperous (due to romantic irony) in L. Tick , pathetic and tragic in Novalis, whose "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" is an example of a renewed fantastic allegory, comprehended in the spirit of the search for an unattainable and incomprehensible ideal spiritual world.

Romantic fiction was synthesized by the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann: here is a Gothic novel (“The Devil's Elixir”), and a literary fairy tale (“Lord of the Fleas”, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”), and an enchanting phantasmagoria (“Princess Brambilla”), and a realistic story with a fantastic background ("The Choice of the Bride", "The Golden Pot").

Fantasy in realism

In the era of realism, fantasy again found itself on the periphery of literature, although it was often used for satirical and utopian purposes (as in Dostoevsky's stories "Bobok" and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"). At the same time, science fiction proper was born, which in the work of the epigone of romanticism J. Verne (“Five weeks in a balloon”, “Journey to the center of the Earth”, “From the Earth to the Moon”, “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea”, “Mysterious island”, “Robur the Conqueror”) and the outstanding realist G. Wells is fundamentally separated from the general fantastic tradition; she paints the real world, transformed by science (for worse or for better) and opening up in a new way to the gaze of the researcher. (True, the development of space fantasy leads to the discovery of new worlds, which inevitably somehow correlate with the traditional fairy tale, but this is a passing moment.)

More about the genre

The question of singling out fantasy as an independent concept arose as a result of the development of science fiction in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. literature, strongly associated with scientific and technological progress. The plot of science fiction works was based on scientific discoveries, inventions, technical foresights… Herbert Wells and Jules Verne became the acknowledged authorities of science fiction of those decades. Until the middle of the 20th century. fantasy kept a little apart from the rest of literature: it was too closely connected with science. This gave grounds for the theorists of the literary process to assert that fantasy is a completely special kind of literature, existing according to rules inherent only to it, and setting itself special tasks.

Subsequently, this opinion was shaken. The statement of the famous American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury is characteristic: "Fiction is literature." In other words, there are no significant barriers. In the second half of the 20th century old theories gradually receded under the onslaught of changes that took place in science fiction.

Firstly, the concept of "fantasy" began to include not only "science fiction" proper, i.e. works that go back basically to the samples of Jule Verne and Wells production. Under the same roof were texts related to "horror" (horror literature), mysticism and fantasy (magical, magical fantasy).

Secondly, significant changes have also taken place in science fiction: the “new wave” of American science fiction writers and the “fourth wave” in the USSR (1950–1980s of the 20th century) led an active struggle to destroy the boundaries of the “ghetto” of science fiction, to merge it with literature. "mainstream", the destruction of the unspoken taboos that dominated the classic science fiction of the old style. A number of trends in "non-fantastic" literature somehow acquired a pro-fantastic sound, borrowed the entourage of science fiction. Romantic literature, literary fairy tale (E. Schwartz), phantasmagoria (A. Green), esoteric novel (P. Coelho, V. Pelevin), many texts that lie in the tradition of postmodernism (for example, Mantissa Fowles), are recognized among science fiction writers as “their ” or “almost their own”, i.e. borderline, lying in a wide band, which is covered by the spheres of influence of both the literature of the "main stream" and science fiction.

At the end of the 20th and the first years of the 21st centuries. the destruction of the concepts of “fantasy” and “science fiction” familiar to science fiction literature is growing. A lot of theories have been created, one way or another, fixing strictly defined boundaries for these types of fiction. But for the general reader, everything was clear from the surroundings: fantasy is where witchcraft, swords and elves are; science fiction is where robots, starships and blasters are.

Gradually, “science fantasy” appeared, i.e. "scientific fantasy" that perfectly connected witchcraft with starships, and swords with robots. A special kind of science fiction was born - "alternative history", later replenished with "cryptohistory". And there, and there, science fiction writers use both the usual entourage of science fiction and fantasy, and even combine them into an indissoluble whole. Directions have arisen in which it does not really matter at all to belong to science fiction or fantasy. In Anglo-American literature, this is primarily cyberpunk, and in Russian literature it is turborealism and "sacred fantasy".

As a result, a situation has arisen where the concepts of science fiction and fantasy, which previously firmly divided science fiction literature in two, have been blurred to the limit.

Fantasy - genres and subgenres

It is known that fiction can be divided into different areas: fantasy and science fiction, hard science fiction, space fiction, combat and humorous, love and social, mysticism and horror.

Perhaps these genres, or as they are also called, subtypes of science fiction, are by far the most famous in their circles. Let's try to characterize each of them separately.

Science Fiction (SF)

So, science fiction is a genre of literature and film industry that describes events taking place in the real world and differs from historical reality in some significant way.

These differences can be technological, scientific, social, historical, and any other, but not magical, otherwise the whole idea of ​​the concept of "science fiction" is lost. In other words, science fiction reflects the impact of scientific and technological progress on everyday and familiar human life. Among the popular plots of the works of this genre are flights to unknown planets, the invention of robots, the discovery of new forms of life, the invention of the latest weapons, and so on.

Among admirers of this genre, the following works are popular: "I, Robot" (Azeik Asimov), "Pandora's Star" (Peter Hamilton), "Attempt to Escape" (Boris and Arkady Strugatsky), "Red Mars" (Kim Stanley Robinson) and many other great books.

The film industry has also produced many sci-fi films. Among the first foreign films, the film by Georges Milies "Journey to the Moon" was released. It was filmed in 1902 and is truly considered the most popular film that was shown on the big screens.

You can also note other paintings in the genre of "science fiction": "District No. 9" (USA), "The Matrix" (USA), the legendary "Aliens" (USA). However, there are films that have become, so to speak, classics of the genre.

Among them: "Metropolis" (Fritz Lang, Germany), filmed in 1925, struck with its idea and vision of the future of mankind.

Another film masterpiece that has become a classic is 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, USA), released in 1968. This picture tells about extraterrestrial civilizations and very much resembles rather scientific material about aliens and their lives - for the viewers of the distant 1968, this is really something new, fantastic that they had never seen or heard before. Of course, you can't ignore Star Wars.

Hard science fiction, as a subgenre of sci-fi

Science fiction has a so-called sub-genre or subspecies called "hard science fiction". Solid science fiction differs from traditional science fiction in that during the narrative, scientific facts and laws are not distorted.

That is, we can say that the basis of this subgenre is the natural scientific knowledge base and the whole plot is described around a certain scientific idea, even if it is fantastic. The storyline in such works is always simple and logical, based on several scientific assumptions - a time machine, ultra-high-speed travel in space, extrasensory perception, and so on.

Space fiction, another sub-genre of sci-fi

Space fiction is a subgenre of science fiction. Its distinctive feature is that the main plot takes place in outer space or on various planets in the solar system or beyond.

There is a division of space fiction into types: planetary novel, space opera, space odyssey. Let's talk about each type in more detail.

1. Space odyssey. So, the Space Odyssey is a storyline in which the actions take place most often on space ships (ships) and the heroes need to complete a global mission, the outcome of which depends on the fate of a person.
2. planetary romance. The planetary novel is much simpler in terms of the type of development of events and the complexity of the plot. Basically, all the action is limited to one particular planet, which is inhabited by exotic animals, people. A lot of works in this kind of genre are devoted to the distant future in which people move between worlds on a spaceship and this is a normal phenomenon, some early works of space fiction describe simpler plots with less realistic modes of movement. However, the goal and main theme of the planetary novel is the same for all works - the adventures of heroes on a particular planet.
3. Space Opera. Space opera is an equally interesting subspecies of science fiction. Its main idea is the maturing and expansion of the conflict between the heroes with the use of powerful high-tech weapons of the future to conquer the Galaxy or free the planet from space aliens, humanoids and other space creatures. The characters in this cosmic conflict are heroic. The main difference between space opera and science fiction is that there is an almost complete rejection of the scientific basis of the plot.

Among the works of space fiction that deserve attention are the following: Paradise Lost, The Absolute Enemy (Andrey Livadny), Steel Rat Saves the World (Harry Harrison), Star Kings, Return to the Stars (Edmond Hamilton ), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) and other great books.

And now let's note some bright films in the space fantasy genre. Of course, you can not get around the well-known film "Armageddon" (Michael Bay, USA, 1998); "Avatar" (James Cameron, USA, 2009), which blew up the whole world, which is distinguished by unusual special effects, vivid images, rich and unusual nature of an unknown planet; "Starship Troopers" (Paul Verhoeven, USA, 1997), also a popular film in its time, although many film fans today are ready to revise this picture more than once; It is impossible not to note all the parts (episodes) of George Lucas' Star Wars, in my opinion, this masterpiece of science fiction will be popular and interesting to the viewer at all times.

Fighting fiction

Combat fiction is a type (subgenre) of fiction that describes military operations taking place in the distant or not so distant future, and all actions take place using super-powerful robots and the latest weapons unknown to man today.

This genre is quite young, its origin can be attributed to the middle of the 20th century during the height of the Vietnam War. Moreover, I note that combat fiction became popular and the number of works and films increased, in direct proportion to the growth of conflicts in the world.

Among the popular authors-representatives of this genre are: Joe Haldeman "Infinite War"; Harry Harrison "Steel Rat", "Bill - Hero of the Galaxy"; domestic authors Alexander Zorich "Tomorrow War", Oleg Markelov "Adequacy", Igor Pol "Guardian Angel 320" and other wonderful authors.

A lot of films have been made in the genre of "combat fiction" "Frozen Soldiers" (Canada, 2014), "Edge of Tomorrow" (USA, 2014), Star Trek: Retribution (USA, 2013).

humorous fiction

Humorous fiction is a genre in which the presentation of unusual and fantastic events takes place in a humorous form.

Humorous fiction has been known since antiquity and is developing in our time. Among the representatives of humorous fiction in literature, the most striking are our beloved Strugatsky Brothers “Monday begins on Saturday”, Kir Bulychev “Miracles in Guslyar”, as well as foreign authors of humorous fiction Prudchett Terry David John “I’ll put on midnight”, Bester Alfred “Will you wait? ", Bisson Terry Ballantine "They are made of meat."

Love fiction

Love fiction, romantic adventure works.

This type of fantasy includes love stories with fictional characters, magical countries that do not exist, the presence in the description of wonderful amulets with unusual properties, and, of course, all these stories have a happy ending.

Of course, you can not get around the films made in the genre. Here are a few of them: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (USA, 2008), "The Time Traveler's Wife" (USA, 2009), "She" (USA, 2014).

social fiction

Social fiction is a type of science fiction literature that focuses on the relationships between people in society.

The emphasis is on the creation of fantastic motives in order to show the development of social relations in unrealistic conditions.

The following works were written in this genre: The Strugatsky Brothers "The Doomed City", "The Bull's Hour" by I. Efremov, H. Wells "The Time Machine", "451 degrees Fahrenheit" by Ray Bradbury. Cinema also has films in the genre of social fiction in its piggy bank: The Matrix (USA, Australia, 1999), Dark City (USA, Australia, 1998), Youth (USA, 2014).

As you can see, science fiction is such a versatile genre that anyone can choose what suits him in spirit, in nature, will give you the opportunity to plunge into the magical, unusual, terrible, tragic, high-tech world of the future and the inexplicable for us - ordinary people.

How is fantasy different from science fiction?

The word "fantasy" came to us from the Greek language, where "phantastike" means "the art of imagining". "Fantasy" comes from the English "phantasy" (tracing paper from the Greek "phantasia"). The literal translation is “imagination, imagination”. The words art and imagination are key here. Art implies certain patterns and rules for the construction of the genre, and the imagination is limitless, the flight of fantasy does not obey the laws.

Science fiction is a form of reflection of the surrounding world, in which a logically incompatible picture of the Universe is created on the basis of real ideas about it. Fantasy is a type of science fiction, a type of fantastic art that depicts fictional events in worlds whose existence cannot be logically explained. The basis of fantasy is a mystical, irrational beginning.

The fantasy world is a kind of assumption. The author sends his reader on a journey through time and space. After all, the basis of the genre is the free flight of fantasy. The location of this world is not specified in any way. Its physical laws cannot be explained by the realities of our world. Magic and magic are the norm of the described world. The "miracles" of fantasy operate according to their own system, like the laws of nature.

The heroes of modern science fiction, as a rule, oppose the whole society. They can fight a mega-corporation or a totalitarian state that controls the life of society. Fantasy is based on the antithesis of good and evil, harmony and chaos. The hero goes on a long journey, seeking truth and justice. Often the plot of the plot is some kind of incident that awakened the forces of evil. The hero is confronted or helped by mythical fictional creatures, which can conditionally be united into certain "races" (elves, orcs, dwarves, trolls, etc.). The classic example of the fantasy genre is JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

conclusions

1. The word "fantasy" is translated as "the art of imagining", and "fantasy" - "representation", "imagination".
2. A characteristic feature of works of fiction is the presence of a fantastic assumption: what would the world be like under certain conditions. The fantasy author describes an alternate reality that is not connected to the existing reality. The laws of the fantasy world are presented as a given, without any explanation. The existence of magic and mythical races is the norm.
3. In fantastic works, as a rule, there is a conflict between the norms imposed on society and the protagonist's desire for freedom. That is, the heroes defend their dissimilarity. In fantasy works, the main conflict is connected with the confrontation between light and dark forces.

Cinematic fiction

Film fiction is a direction and genre of artistic cinematography, which can be characterized by an increased level of conventionality. The images, events and surroundings of science fiction films are often deliberately removed from everyday reality - this can be done both to achieve specific artistic goals, which it is more convenient for the filmmakers to achieve by means of science fiction than by means of realistic cinema, or simply to entertain the viewer (the latter is typical primarily for genre films). movie).

The nature of the convention depends on the specific direction or genre - science fiction, fantasy, horror film, phantasmagoria - but all of them can be broadly understood as cinematic fiction. There is also a narrower view of sci-fi as a mass purely commercial genre of cinema; according to this view, for example, "A Space Odyssey 2001" is not science fiction. This article uses a broad understanding of cinematic fiction, which allows you to give a more complete picture of the subject.

The evolution of science fiction has largely followed the evolution of the much more dynamic science fiction literature. However, cinematography from the very beginning possessed the property of visuality, which written literature is practically devoid of. The moving image is perceived by the viewer as authentic, existing here and now, and the feeling of authenticity does not depend on how fantastic the action unfolding on the screen is. This property of the viewer's perception of cinema acquired special significance after the advent of special effects.

Film fiction actively uses the mythology of the technical era. Mythology is part of science fiction films.

FANTASTIC IN LITERATURE. The definition of fantasy is a task that has caused a tremendous amount of discussion. The basis for no fewer disputes was the question of what science fiction consists of, how it is classified.

The question of singling out fantasy as an independent concept arose as a result of the development of science fiction in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. literature, strongly associated with scientific and technological progress. The plot basis of fantastic works was scientific discoveries, inventions, technical foresights... Herbert Wells and Jules Verne became recognized authorities of science fiction of those decades. Until the middle of the 20th century. fantasy kept a little apart from the rest of literature: it was too closely connected with science. This gave grounds for the theorists of the literary process to assert that fantasy is a completely special kind of literature, existing according to rules inherent only to it, and setting itself special tasks.

Subsequently, this opinion was shaken. The statement of the famous American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury is characteristic: "Fiction is literature." In other words, there are no significant barriers. In the second half of the 20th century old theories gradually receded under the onslaught of changes that took place in science fiction. Firstly, the concept of "fantasy" began to include not only "science fiction" proper, i.e. works that go back basically to the samples of Jule Verne and Wells production. Under the same roof were texts related to "horror" (horror literature), mysticism and fantasy (magical, magical fantasy). Secondly, significant changes have also taken place in science fiction: the “new wave” of American science fiction writers and the “fourth wave” in the USSR (1950–1980s of the 20th century) led an active struggle to destroy the boundaries of the “ghetto” of science fiction, to merge it with literature. "mainstream", the destruction of the unspoken taboos that dominated the classic science fiction of the old style. A number of trends in "non-fantastic" literature somehow acquired a pro-fantastic sound, borrowed the entourage of science fiction. Romantic literature, literary fairy tale (E. Schwartz), phantasmagoria (A. Green), esoteric novel (P. Coelho, V. Pelevin), many texts that lie in the tradition of postmodernism (for example, Mantissa Fowles), are recognized among science fiction writers as “their own” or “almost their own”, i.e. borderline, lying in a wide band, which is covered by the spheres of influence of both the literature of the "main stream" and science fiction.

At the end of the 20th and the first years of the 21st centuries. the destruction of the concepts of “fantasy” and “science fiction” familiar to science fiction literature is growing. A lot of theories have been created, one way or another, fixing strictly defined boundaries for these types of fiction. But for the general reader, everything was clear from the surroundings: fantasy is where witchcraft, swords and elves are; science fiction is where robots, starships and blasters are. Gradually, “science fantasy” appeared, i.e. "scientific fantasy" that perfectly connected witchcraft with starships, and swords with robots. A special kind of science fiction was born - "alternative history", later replenished with "cryptohistory". And there, and there, science fiction writers use both the usual entourage of science fiction and fantasy, and even combine them into an indissoluble whole. Directions have arisen in which it does not really matter at all to belong to science fiction or fantasy. In Anglo-American literature, this is primarily cyberpunk, and in Russian literature it is turborealism and "sacred fantasy".

As a result, a situation has arisen where the concepts of science fiction and fantasy, which previously firmly divided science fiction literature in two, have been blurred to the limit.

Fantasy as a whole is today a continent populated very variegatedly. Moreover, individual "nationalities" (directions) are closely related to their neighbors, and sometimes it is very difficult to understand where the borders of one of them end and the territory of a completely different one begins. Today's science fiction is like a melting pot in which everything fuses with everything and melts into everything. Within this cauldron, any clear classification loses its meaning. The boundaries between the literature of the main stream and science fiction have almost disappeared, in any case, there is no clarity here. The modern literary critic does not have clear, strictly defined criteria for separating the first from the second.

Rather, the publisher sets the boundaries. The art of marketing requires appealing to the interests of established readership groups. Therefore, publishers and sellers create so-called "formats", i.e. form the parameters within which specific works are accepted for printing. These "formats" dictate to science fiction writers, first of all, the entourage of the work, in addition, the methods of constructing the plot and, from time to time, the thematic range. The concept of "non-format" is widespread. This is the name of the text that does not fit in its parameters to any established "format". The author of a “non-formatted” science fiction work, as a rule, has difficulties with its publication.

Thus, in fiction, the critic and the literary critic do not have a serious influence on the literary process; it is directed primarily by the publisher and bookseller. There is a huge, unevenly defined "world of fantasy", and next to it - a much narrower phenomenon - "format" fantasy, fantasy in the strict sense of the word.

Is there even a nominally theoretical difference between fantasy and non-fiction? Yes, and it applies equally to literature, cinema, painting, music, theater. In a laconic, encyclopedic form, it reads as follows: “Fiction (from the Greek phantastike - the art of imagining) is a form of displaying the world, in which, on the basis of real ideas, a logically incompatible (“supernatural”, “wonderful”) picture of the Universe is created.

What does this mean? Fantasy is a method, not a genre and not a direction in literature and art. This method in practice means the use of a special technique - the "fantastic assumption". A fantastic assumption is not difficult to explain. Each work of literature and art involves the creation by its creator of a "secondary world" built with the help of imagination. There are fictional characters in fictional circumstances. If the author-creator introduces elements of the unprecedented into his secondary world, i.e. that, in the opinion of his contemporaries and fellow citizens, in principle could not exist at that time and in that place with which the secondary world of the work is connected, then we have a fantastic assumption. Sometimes the whole "secondary world" is completely real: let's say it's a provincial Soviet town from A. Mirer's novel House of wanderers or a provincial American town from the novel by K. Simak All living things. Suddenly, something unthinkable appears inside this familiar reality for the reader (aggressive aliens in the first case and intelligent plants in the second). But it can be completely different: J.R.R. more real than the reality around them. Both are fantastic assumptions.

The quantity of a work unprecedented in the secondary world does not play a role. The very fact of its existence is important.

Let's say times have changed and the technical fiction has become something ordinary. So, for example, high-speed cars, wars with the massive use of aircraft, or, say, powerful submarines were practically impossible in the time of Jules Verne and HG Wells. Now this will surprise no one. But the works of a century ago, where all this is described, remain fiction, because for those years they were.

Opera Sadko- fantasy, because it uses the folklore motif of the underwater kingdom. But the ancient Russian work about Sadko itself was not fiction, since the ideas of people who lived at the time when it arose allowed the reality of the underwater kingdom. Movie Nibelungen- fantasy, because it has an invisibility cap and "living armor" that made a person invulnerable. But the ancient German epic works about the Nibelungen do not belong to science fiction, since in the era of their appearance, magical objects could appear as something unusual, but still really existing.

If the author writes about the future, then his work always refers to science fiction, since any future is, by definition, an unheard-of thing, there is no exact knowledge about it. If he writes about the past and admits the existence of elves and trolls in ancient times, then he falls into the field of fantasy. Perhaps the people of the Middle Ages considered the presence of a “little people” in the neighborhood possible, but modern world science denies this. Theoretically, it cannot be ruled out that in the 22nd century, for example, elves will again become an element of the surrounding reality, and such a representation will become widespread. But in this case, the work of the 20th century. will remain fiction, given the fact that it was born fiction.

Dmitry Volodikhin

In modern literary criticism and criticism, the issues related to the history of the emergence of science fiction have been relatively little studied, and even less studied the role in its formation and development of the experience of "pre-scientific" fiction of the past.

Characteristic, for example, is the statement of critic A. Gromova, the author of an article on science fiction in the Brief Literary Encyclopedia: war, although the main features of modern science fiction were already outlined in the work of Wells and partly of K. Chapek" (2). However, while quite rightly emphasizing the relevance of science fiction as a literary phenomenon, brought to life by the uniqueness of the new historical era, its urgent needs and needs, we must not forget that the literary genealogical roots of modern science fiction go back to hoary antiquity, that it is the rightful heir to the greatest achievements of the world. science fiction can and must use these achievements, this artistic experience in the service of the interests of modernity.

The Small Literary Encyclopedia defines fantasy as a kind of fiction in which the author's fiction extends from the depiction of strange, unusual, implausible phenomena to the creation of a special fictional, unreal, "wonderful world".

The fantastic has its own fantastic type of figurativeness with its inherent high degree of convention, frank violation of real logical connections and patterns, natural proportions and forms of the depicted object.

Fantasy as a special area of ​​literary creativity accumulates the creative imagination of the artist, and at the same time the fantasy of the reader; at the same time, fantasy is not an arbitrary "realm of the imagination": in a fantastic picture of the world, the reader guesses the transformed forms of real, social and spiritual human existence.

Fantastic imagery is inherent in such folklore genres as a fairy tale, epic, allegory, legend, grotesque, utopia, satire. The artistic effect of a fantastic image is achieved due to a sharp repulsion from empirical reality, therefore, fantastic works are based on the opposition of the fantastic and the real.

The poetics of the fantastic is connected with the doubling of the world: the artist either models his own incredible world that exists according to its own laws (in this case, the real “starting point” is hidden, remaining outside the text: “Gulliver’s Travels” by J. Swift, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” by F. M. Dostoevsky) or parallel recreates two streams - real and supernatural, unreal being.

In the fantastic literature of this series, mystical, irrational motives are strong, the science fiction writer here acts as an otherworldly force interfering in the fate of the central character, influencing his behavior and the course of events of the entire work (for example, works of medieval literature, Renaissance literature, romanticism).

With the destruction of the mythological consciousness and the growing desire in the art of modern times to look for the driving forces of being in being itself, already in the literature of romanticism there is a need for motivation of the fantastic, which in one way or another could be combined with a general attitude towards a natural depiction of characters and situations.

The most stable devices of such motivated fiction are dreams, rumors, hallucinations, madness, plot mystery. A new type of veiled, implicit fantasy is being created (Yu.V. Mann), leaving the possibility of a double interpretation, a double motivation of fantastic incidents - empirically or psychologically plausible and inexplicably surreal ("Cosmorama" by V.F. Odoevsky, "Shtos" by M.Yu. Lermontov, "The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffmann).

Such a conscious fluctuation of motivation often leads to the fact that the subject of the fantastic disappears (“The Queen of Spades” by A.S. Pushkin, “The Nose” by N.V. Gogol), and in many cases its irrationality is generally removed, finding a prosaic explanation in the course of the development of the narrative .

Fantasy stands out as a special kind of artistic creativity as folklore forms move away from the practical tasks of mythological comprehension of reality and ritual and magical influence on it. The primitive worldview, becoming historically untenable, is perceived as fantastic. A characteristic sign of the emergence of fantasy is the development of an aesthetics of the miraculous, which is not characteristic of primitive folklore. There is a stratification: the heroic fairy tale and the legends about the cultural hero are transformed into a heroic epic (folk allegory and generalization of history), in which the elements of the miraculous are auxiliary; the fabulously magical element is perceived as such and serves as a natural environment for a story about travels and adventures, taken out of the historical framework.

So Homer's "Iliad" is essentially a realistic description of an episode of the Trojan War (which does not interfere with the participation of celestial heroes in the action); Homer's "Odyssey" is primarily a fantastic story about all sorts of incredible adventures (not related to the epic plot) of one of the heroes of the same war. The plot images and incidents of the Odyssey are the beginning of all literary European fiction. Approximately the same as the Iliad and the Odyssey correlate with the heroic saga "The Voyage of Bran, the son of Febal" (7th century AD). The prototype of future fantastic travels was Lucian’s parody True Story, where the author, in order to enhance the comic effect, tried to pile up as much incredible and awkward as possible and enriched the flora and fauna of the “wonderful country” with numerous tenacious fictions.

Thus, even in antiquity, the main directions of fantasy were outlined - fantastic wanderings, adventures and fantastic search, pilgrimage (a characteristic plot is a descent into hell). Ovid in his Metamorphoses directed the primordial mythological plots of transformations into the mainstream of fantasy (the transformation of people into animals, constellations, stones, etc.) and laid the foundation for a fantastic-symbolic allegory - a genre more didactic than adventurous: "instruction in miracles." Fantastic transformations become a form of awareness of the vicissitudes and unreliability of human destiny in a world subject only to the arbitrariness of chance or the mysterious supreme will.

A rich collection of literary processed fairy-tale fiction is given by the tales of the Thousand and One Nights; the influence of their exotic imagery was reflected in European pre-romanticism and romanticism. Literature from Kalidasa to R. Tagore is saturated with fantastic images and echoes of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. A kind of literary remelting of folk tales, legends and beliefs are numerous works of Japanese (for example, the genre of “a story about the terrible and extraordinary” - “Konjaku monogatari”) and Chinese fiction (“Stories about miracles from the office of Liao” by Pu Songling).

Fantastic fiction under the sign of the “aesthetics of the miraculous” was the basis of the medieval knightly epic - from Beowulf (8th century) to Peresval (c. 1182) by Chrétien de Troy and The Death of Arthur (1469) by T. Malory. The legend of the court of King Arthur, subsequently superimposed on the chronicle of the Crusades, colored by the imagination, became the frame for fantastic plots. The further transformation of these plots is shown by the monumentally fantastic, which almost completely lost their historical and epic background, the Renaissance poems “Roland in Love” by Boiardo, “Furious Roland” by L. Ariosto, “Jerusalem Liberated” by T. Tasso, “The Fairy Queen” by E. Spencer. Together with numerous chivalric novels of the 14th - 16th centuries. they constitute a special era in the development of science fiction. A milestone in the development of the fantastic allegory created by Ovid was the "Romance of the Rose" of the 13th century. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun.

The development of science fiction during the Renaissance is completed by Don Quixote by M. Cervantes - a parody of the fantasy of knightly adventures, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by F. Rabelais - a comic epic on a fantastic basis, both traditional and arbitrarily rethought. In Rabelais we find (chapter "Theleme Abbey") one of the first examples of the fantastic development of the utopian genre.

To a lesser extent than ancient mythology and folklore, religious mythological images of the Bible stimulated fantasy. The largest works of Christian fiction - "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" by J. Milton are not based on canonical biblical texts, but on apocrypha. This does not detract from the fact that the works of European fantasy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as a rule, have an ethical Christian coloring or play fantastic images in the spirit of Christian apocryphal demonology. Outside of fantasy are the lives of the saints, where miracles are fundamentally singled out as extraordinary. However, the Christian mythological contributes to the flourishing of a special genre of fantasy fiction. Starting with the Apocalypse of John the Theologian, "visions" or "revelations" become a full-fledged literary genre: different aspects of it are represented by W. Langland's "Vision of Peter the Ploughman" (1362) and Dante's "Divine Comedy".

To con. 17th century Mannerism and Baroque, for which fantasy was a constant background, an additional artistic plane (at the same time, the perception of fantasy was aestheticized, the living feeling of the miraculous was lost, which was also characteristic of the fantastic literature of subsequent centuries), was replaced by classicism, which is inherently alien to fantasy: its appeal to myth is completely rationalistic . In the novels of the 17th - 18th centuries. motives and images of fantasy are used to complicate the intrigue. Fantastic search is interpreted as erotic adventures (“fairy tales”, for example, “Acajou and Zirfila S. Duclos”). Fiction, having no independent meaning, turns out to be an aid to a picaresque novel (“The Lame Devil” by A.R. Lesage, “The Devil in Love” by J. Kazot), a philosophical treatise (“Voltaire's Micromegas”), etc. The reaction to the dominance of enlightenment rationalism is characteristic of the 2nd floor. 18th century; the Englishman R. Hurd calls for a heartfelt study of fantasy (“Letters on Chivalry and Medieval Romances”); in The Adventures of Count Ferdinand Fatom, T. Smollett anticipates the beginning of the development of science fiction in the 19th - 20th centuries. Gothic novel by H. Walpole, A. Radcliffe, M. Lewis. By supplying accessories for romantic plots, fantasy remains in a secondary role: with its help, the duality of images and events becomes the pictorial principle of pre-romanticism.

In modern times, the combination of science fiction with romanticism turned out to be especially fruitful. “Refuge in the realm of fantasy” (Yu.L. Kerner) was sought by all romantics: fantasizing, i.e. the aspiration of the imagination into the transcendent world of myths and legends, was put forward as a way of familiarizing with the highest insight, as a relatively prosperous life program (due to romantic irony) for L. Tieck, pathetic and tragic for Novalis, whose “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” is an example of a renewed fantastic allegory , meaningful in the spirit of the search for an unattainable and incomprehensible ideal-spiritual world.

The Heidelberg school used fantasy as a source of plots, giving additional interest to earthly events (for example, “Isabella of Egypt” by L. A. Arnim is a fantastic arrangement of a love episode from the life of Charles V). This approach to science fiction proved especially promising. In an effort to enrich the resources of fantasy, the German romantics turned to its primary sources - they collected and processed fairy tales and legends (“Peter Lebrecht's Folk Tales” in Tiek's processing; “Children's and Family Tales” and “German Traditions” by the brothers J. and W. Grimm). This contributed to the formation of the literary fairy tale genre in all European literatures, which still remains the leading genre in children's fiction. Its classic example is the fairy tales of H. K. Andersen.

Romantic fiction is synthesized by Hoffmann's work: here is a gothic novel ("Devil's Elixir"), and a literary fairy tale ("Lord of the Fleas", "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King"), and an enchanting phantasmagoria ("Princess Brambilla"), and a realistic story with a fantastic background ("Bride's Choice", "Golden Pot").

Faust by I.V. Goethe; using the traditional fantastic motif of selling the soul to the devil, the poet discovers the futility of the wandering of the spirit in the realms of the fantastic and affirms earthly life that transforms the world as the final value (i.e., the utopian ideal is excluded from the realm of fantasy and projected into the future).

In Russia, romantic fiction is represented in the work of V.A. Zhukovsky, V.F. Odoevsky, L. Pogorelsky, A.F. Veltman.

A.S. turned to science fiction. Pushkin (“Ruslan and Lyudmila”, where the epic fairy-tale flavor of fantasy is especially important) and N.V. Gogol, whose fantastic images are organically poured into the folk poetic ideal picture of Ukraine (“Terrible Revenge”, “Viy”). His St. Petersburg fantasies (“The Nose”, “Portrait”, “Nevsky Prospekt”) are no longer connected with folklore and fairy tale motifs and are otherwise conditioned by the general picture of “escheated” reality, the condensed image of which, as it were, in itself generates fantastic images.

With the establishment of critical realism, fantasy again found itself on the periphery of literature, although it was often involved as a kind of narrative context that gives a symbolic character to real images (The Picture of Dorian Gray by O. Wilde, Shagreen Skin by O. Balzac, works by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin , S. Bronte, N. Hawthorne, A. Strindberg). The Gothic tradition of fantasy is developed by E. Poe, who depicts or implies the beyond, the other world as a realm of ghosts and nightmares that dominate the earthly destinies of people.

However, he also anticipated (The Story of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Fall into the Maelstrom) the emergence of a new branch of fantasy - science fiction, which (starting with J. Verne and G. Wells) is fundamentally separated from the general fantasy tradition; she draws a real, albeit fantastically transformed by science (for worse or for better), world, according to the new view of the researcher.

Interest in science fiction as such is reborn towards the end. 19th century neo-romantics (R.L. Stevenson), decadents (M. Schwob, F. Sologub), symbolists (M. Maeterlinck, A. Bely’s prose, A.A. Blok’s dramaturgy), expressionists (G. Meyrink), surrealists (G . Cossack, E. Kroyder). The development of children's literature gives rise to a new image of the fantasy world - the toy world: L. Carroll, K. Collodi, A. Milne; in Soviet literature: A.N. Tolstoy ("The Golden Key"), N.N. Nosova, K.I. Chukovsky. An imaginary, partly fairy-tale world is created by A. Green.

In the 2nd floor. 20th century the fantastic beginning is realized mainly in the field of science fiction, but sometimes it gives rise to qualitatively new artistic phenomena, for example, the trilogy of the Englishman J. R. Tolkien "The Lord of the Rings" (1954-55), written in line with epic fantasy, novels and dramas by Abe Kobo works of Spanish and Latin American writers (G. Garcia Marquez, J. Cortazar).

Modernity is characterized by the above-mentioned contextual use of fantasy, when an outwardly realistic narrative has a symbolic and allegorical connotation and gives a more or less encrypted reference to some mythological plot (for example, "Centaur" by J. Andike, "Ship of Fools" by C.A. Porter ). The combination of various possibilities of fantasy is a novel by M.A. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita" The fantastic-allegorical genre is represented in Soviet literature by a cycle of “natural-philosophical” poems by N.A. Zabolotsky (“The Triumph of Agriculture”, etc.), folk fairy-tale fantasy by the work of P.P. Bazhov, literary fairy-tale - plays by E.L. Schwartz.

Fiction has become a traditional auxiliary means of Russian and Soviet grotesque satire: from Saltykov-Shchedrin (“The History of a City”) to V.V. Mayakovsky ("Bedbug" and "Bath").

In the 2nd floor. 20th century the tendency to create self-sufficiently integral fantastic works is clearly weakening, but fantasy remains a lively and fruitful branch of various areas of fiction.

Yu. Kagarlitsky's research allows us to trace the history of the science fiction genre.

The term "science fiction" is of very recent origin. Jules Verne did not use it yet. He titled his cycle of novels "Extraordinary Journeys" and called them "novels about science" in correspondence. The current Russian definition of "science fiction" is an inaccurate (and therefore much more successful) translation of the English "science fiction", that is, "scientific fiction". It came from the founder of the first science fiction magazines in the United States and the writer Hugo Gernsbeck, who in the late twenties began to apply the definition of "scientific fiction" to works of this kind, and in 1929 for the first time used the final term in Science Wonder Stories magazine, entrenched since then. This term received filling, however, the most different. As applied to the work of Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsbeck, who closely followed him, it should perhaps be interpreted as "technical fiction", for H. G. Wells it is science fiction in the most etymologically correct sense of the word - he is not so much talking about the technical embodiment of old scientific theories , how much about new fundamental discoveries and their social consequences - in today's literature, the meaning of the term has expanded unusually, and now there is no need to talk about too rigid definitions.

The fact that the term itself appeared so recently and its meaning has been modified so many times testifies to one thing - science fiction has traveled most of its path over the past hundred years, and has developed more and more intensively from decade to decade.

The fact is that the scientific and technological revolution gave science fiction a huge impetus, and it also created a readership for it - an unusually wide and diverse one. Here are those who are drawn to science fiction because the language of scientific fact, with which it often operates, is their own language, and those who, through fantasy, join the movement of scientific thought, perceived at least in the most general and approximate outlines. This is an indisputable fact, confirmed by numerous sociological studies and extraordinary circulations of science fiction, a fact that is fundamentally deeply positive. However, one should not forget about the other side of the issue.

The scientific and technological revolution took place on the basis of the centuries-old development of knowledge. It bears in itself the fruits of thought accumulated over the centuries - in the full breadth of the meaning of this word. Science not only accumulated skills and multiplied its achievements, it reopened the world before mankind, forced from century to century to be amazed by this newly discovered world again and again. Each scientific revolution - ours in the first place - is not only the rise of subsequent thought, but also an impulse of the human spirit.

But progress is always dialectical. It remains the same in this case. The abundance of new information that falls upon a person during such upheavals is such that he is in danger of being cut off from the past. And, on the contrary, the awareness of this danger can in other cases give rise to the most retrograde forms of protest against the new, against any restructuring of consciousness in accordance with the present day. Care must be taken to ensure that the present organically includes what has been accumulated by spiritual progress.

Until recently, one heard most often that the science fiction of the 20th century is a completely unprecedented phenomenon. This view has endured so strongly and for a long time in large part because even its opponents, who advocate the deeper connections of science fiction with the past of literature, sometimes had a very relative idea of ​​this past.

Science fiction was criticized for the most part by people who had a scientific and technical, and not a liberal education, who came from the environment of the science fiction writers themselves or from amateur circles (“fan clubs”). With one exception, albeit a very significant one (Extrapolation, published under the editorship of Professor Thomas Clarson in the USA and distributed in twenty-three countries), journals devoted to the criticism of science fiction are the organs of such circles (they are commonly referred to as "fanzines", that is, "amateur magazines"; in Western Europe and ... the USA there is even an international "fanzine movement"; Hungary has recently joined it). In many respects, these journals are of considerable interest, but they cannot make up for the lack of specialized literary works.

As for academic science, the rise of science fiction also affected it, but prompted it to be concerned primarily with the writers of the past. Such is the series of works by Professor Marjorie Nicholson, begun in the thirties, on the relationship between science fiction and science, such is the book by J. Bailey, The Pilgrims of Space and Time (1947). It took a certain amount of time to get closer to the present. This is probably due not only to the fact that it was not possible, but could not be possible in one day to prepare positions for this kind of research, to find methods that meet the specifics of the subject, and special aesthetic criteria (one cannot demand from science fiction that approach to the depiction of the human image, which is characteristic of non-fiction literature. The author wrote about this in detail in the article "Realism and Fantasy", published in the journal "Problems of Literature", (1971, No. I). Another reason lies, one should think, in the fact that only recently has a long period in the history of science fiction come to an end, which has now become the subject of research, whose tendencies had not yet had time to sufficiently reveal themselves.

Now, therefore, the situation in literary criticism is beginning to change. History helps to understand a lot in modern science fiction, while the latter, in turn, helps to appreciate a lot in the old. Fiction is being written about more and more seriously. Of the Soviet works based on Western science fiction, the articles by T. Chernyshova (Irkutsk) and E. Tamarchenko (Perm) are very interesting. Recently the Yugoslav professor Darko Suvin, who is now working in Montreal, and the American professors Thomas Clarson and Mark Hillegas have devoted themselves to science fiction. Works written by non-professional literary critics also become deeper. An international Association for the Study of Science Fiction has been created, bringing together representatives of universities where science fiction courses are taught, libraries, writers' organizations in the United States, Canada and a number of other countries. This association established the Pilgrim Prize in 1970 "for outstanding contributions to the study of science fiction." (Prize 1070 was awarded to J. Bailey, 1971 - M. Nicholson, 1972 - Y. Kagarlitsky). The general trend of development now is from review (which, in fact, was the frequently cited book of Kingsley Amis "New Maps of Hell") to research, moreover, historically grounded research.

The science fiction of the 20th century played its part in preparing many aspects of modern realism in general. Man in the face of the future, man in the face of nature, man in the face of technology, which is becoming more and more a new environment for him to exist - these and many other questions came to modern realism from fantasy - from that fantasy that is called "scientific" today.

This word characterizes a lot in the method of modern science fiction and the ideological aspirations of its foreign representatives.

An unusually large number of scientists who have exchanged their occupation for science fiction (the list is opened by Herbert Wells) or who combine science with work in this area of ​​​​creativity (among them are the founder of cybernetics Norbert Wiener, and prominent astronomers Arthur C. Clarke and Fred Hoyle, and one of the founders of the atomic bombs Leo Szilard, and the great anthropologist Chad Oliver and many other well-known names), is not accidental.

In science fiction, that part of the bourgeois intelligentsia in the West has found a means of expressing their ideas, which, by virtue of their involvement in science, understands better than others the seriousness of the problems facing humanity, fears the tragic outcome of today's difficulties and contradictions, and feels responsible for the future of our planet.