Greek phantastike - the art of imagining) - a form of reflection of the world, in which, based on real ideas, a logically incompatible picture of the Universe is created. Common in mythology, folklore, art, social utopia. In the XIX - XX centuries. science fiction develops.
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FANTASTIC
Greek phantastike - the art of imagining), a kind of fiction where fiction gets the most freedom: the boundaries of fantasy stretch from depicting strange, unusual, fictional phenomena to creating your own world with special patterns and possibilities. Fiction has a special type of figurativeness, which is characterized by a violation of real connections and proportions: for example, the cut off nose of Major Kovalev in N.V. Gogol's story "The Nose" itself moves around St. place. At the same time, the fantastic picture of the world is not pure fiction: the events of reality are transformed and raised to the symbolic level in it. Fiction in a grotesque, exaggerated, transformed form reveals to the reader the problems of reality and reflects on their solution. Fantastic imagery is inherent in a fairy tale, epic, allegory, legend, utopia, satire. A special subspecies of science fiction is science fiction, in which imagery is created by depicting fictional or real scientific and technological achievements of a person. The artistic originality of science fiction lies in the opposition of the fantastic and real world, therefore, each work of science fiction exists, as it were, in two planes: the world created by the author's imagination somehow correlates with reality. The real world is either taken out of the text ("Gulliver's Travels" by J. Swift), or is present in it (in "Faust" by I.V. Goethe, the events in which Faust and Mephistopheles participate are contrasted with the lives of other citizens).
Initially, fantasy was associated with the embodiment of mythological images in literature: for example, ancient fantasy with the participation of gods seemed to be quite reliable for authors and readers (The Iliad, Odyssey by Homer, Works and Days by Hesiod, plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides and etc.). Homer's Odyssey, which describes many amazing and fantastic adventures of Odysseus, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, stories of the transformation of living beings into trees, stones, people into animals, etc., can be considered examples of ancient fiction. In the works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this trend continued: in the knightly epic (from Beowulf, written in the 8th century, to the novels of Chrétien de Troyes in the 14th century), images of dragons and wizards, fairies, trolls, elves and other fantastic creatures appeared. A separate tradition in the Middle Ages is Christian fiction, which describes the miracles of saints, visions, etc. Christianity recognizes evidence of this kind as authentic, but this does not prevent them from remaining part of the fantastic literary tradition, since extraordinary phenomena are described that are not typical of the usual course of events. The richest fantasy is also represented in Eastern culture: the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, Indian and Chinese literature. In the Renaissance, the fantasy of chivalric romances is parodied in Gargantua and Pantagruel by F. Rabelais and in Don Quixote by M. Cervantes: Rabelais presents a fantastic epic that rethinks the traditional clichés of science fiction, while Cervantes parodies the passion for fantasy, his hero sees fantastic creatures everywhere, which does not exist, gets into ridiculous situations because of this. Christian fiction in the Renaissance is expressed in the poems of J. Milton "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained".
The literature of the Enlightenment and classicism is alien to fantasy, and its images are used only to give an exotic flavor to the action. A new flowering of fantasy comes in the 19th century, in the era of romanticism. Genres based entirely on fantasy appear, such as the gothic novel. The forms of fantasy in German romanticism are varied; in particular, E. T. A. Hoffman wrote fairy tales (“Lord of the Fleas”, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”), Gothic novels (“Devil's Elixir”), enchanting phantasmagoria (“Princess Brambilla”), realistic stories with fantastic background (“ The Golden Pot", "The Choice of the Bride"), philosophical fairy tales-parables ("Little Tsakhes", "The Sandman"). Fiction in the literature of realism is also common: "The Queen of Spades" by A. S. Pushkin, "Shtoss" by M. Yu. Lermontov, "Mirgorod" and "Petersburg Tales" by N. V. Gogol, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" by F. M. Dostoevsky etc. There is a problem of combining fantasy with the real world in the text, often the introduction of fantastic images requires motivation (Tatyana's dream in "Eugene Onegin"). However, the assertion of realism relegated fantasy to the periphery of literature. They turned to her to give a symbolic character to the images (“Portrait of Dorian Gray” by O. Wilde, “Shagreen Skin” by O. de Balzac). The gothic tradition of fiction is being developed by E. Poe, whose stories feature unmotivated fantastic images and collisions. The synthesis of various types of fantasy is represented by M. A. Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita.
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Fantasy is one of the genres of literature, cinema and fine arts. It originates in the deep past. Even at the dawn of his appearance, man admitted the presence of mysterious and powerful forces in the world around him. The first fantasy is folklore, fairy tales, myths and legends. At the heart of this genre lies some incredible, supernatural assumption, an element of something unusual or impossible, a violation of the boundaries of reality familiar to a person.
The beginning of the development of fantasy in cinema
From literature, the genre moved to cinema almost immediately after its inception. The first science fiction films appeared in France in the 19th century. In those years, the best director in this genre was Georges Méliès. His fantastic film A Journey to the Moon was included in the golden fund of the world's masterpieces of cinema and became the first picture that tells about space travel. At this time, fantasy is an opportunity to show the achievements of human progress on the screen: amazing mechanisms and machines, vehicles.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, science fiction films have been gaining more and more popularity, and audience interest in them has been growing.
Types of fantasy
In cinema, fantasy is a genre whose boundaries are difficult to define. Usually it is a mixture of different styles and forms of cinema. There is a division into types of science fiction, but it is largely conditional.
Science fiction is a story about incredible technical and other discoveries, travel through time, cross space, use artificial intelligence to create.
The film "Prometheus" is an interesting picture with a philosophical meaning about a person's search for an answer to the main question: who are we and where did we come from? As a result, scientists have received evidence that humanity was created by a highly developed humanoid race. A scientific expedition is sent to the edge of the solar system in search of its creators. Each team member has his own interest: someone wants to get an answer why humanity was created, someone is driven by curiosity, and some pursue selfish goals. But the creators are not at all what people imagined them to be.
space fantasy
This view is very closely intertwined with science fiction. A striking example is the recently released and critically acclaimed film Interstellar about the possibility of traveling through black holes and the spatio-temporal paradoxes that arise from this. Like Prometheus, this picture is filled with deep philosophical meaning.
Fantasy is science fiction, which is closely related to mysticism and fairy tales. The most striking example of a fantasy film is Peter Jackson's famous epic saga The Lord of the Rings. Of the most recent interesting works in this genre, the Hobbit trilogy and the latest work by Sergei Bodrov, The Seventh Son, can be noted.
Horror - oddly enough, this genre is also closely related to science fiction. A classic example is the Alien film series.
Fantasy: films that have become classics of cinema
In addition to the films already mentioned, there are still a large number of magnificent paintings included in the list of the best works in the fantasy genre:
- The space saga Star Wars.
- Terminator movie series.
- Fantasy cycle "Chronicles of Narnia".
- The Iron Man Trilogy.
- Series "Highlander".
- Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio.
- Fantastic comedy "Back to the Future".
- "Dune".
- The Matrix trilogy with Keanu Reeves.
- Post-apocalyptic painting "I am a legend."
- Fantastic comedy "Men in Black".
- "War of the Worlds" with Tom Cruise.
- Combat space science fiction Starship Troopers.
- The Fifth Element with Bruce Willis and Mila Jovovich.
- Series of films "Transformers".
- Spider-Man cycle.
- A series of films about Batman.
The development of the genre today
Modern science fiction - films and animated films - continues to be of interest to the viewer today.
For 2015 alone, several large-scale and spectacular science fiction films have been announced. Among the most anticipated films are the final film from the Hunger Games series, the second part of The Maze Runner, Star Wars Episode 7 - The Force Awakens, Terminator 5, Tomorrowland, the sequel to Divergent, the new a motion picture from the Avengers series and the long-awaited Jurassic World.
Conclusion
Fantasy is what gives a person the opportunity to dream. Here you can, as a superhero saving the world, admit the possibility of the existence of other worlds and fly into the depths of space. For this, viewers love science fiction films - dreams come true in them.
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 technical 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 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 science fiction, 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 action: Mephistopheles in Faust by J.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 of 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).
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 “reference 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 a 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 provided 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 centuries, 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 based not 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 Theologian, "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 determines 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, by A.R. Lesage; “The Devil in Love”, 1772, by 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 “Ienese” fantasize, i.e. the aspiration of the imagination to 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) in L. Tieck, 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, 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 a fantastic background ("The Choice of the Bride", 1819, "The 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 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 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 fantasy (The Nose, 1836; Portrait, Nevsky Prospekt, both 1835) is no longer connected 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.
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