Ghosts from All Sides.
Extraordinary Russian fantastic prose of the nineteenth century
A collection of unknown fantastic works by Russian authors of the nineteenth century.
Ghosts All Around is the second volume in the collection of Russian fantastic prose from the late eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century compiled by the writer and translator Vitaly Timofeyevich Babenko. Continuing where Tales of Revolts and Truffles left off, Ghosts All Around presents a wide range of nineteenth-century Russian fantastical prose. As in the previous volume, works are arranged in chronological order, allowing readers to familiarise themselves with the panorama of Russian fiction of the period.
Vitaly Babenko (b. 1950) is a Russian writer, journalist, translator, publisher, and teacher. He lives and works in Moscow. The history of Russian fiction is one of his many interests. He is the author and compiler of a collection of Russian mystical prose of the nineteenth century titled Strange and Vice Versa (Moscow: Boslen, 2016).
I dare say that what you have in front of you is an extraordinary collection of extraordinary fiction. This is not self-promotion, not at all, just a statement of fact. Why is this collection extraordinary? Firstly, because these works have never been collected together before. Secondly, because these works are very different, even unusually different. And thirdly… there are some literary discoveries here.
– Vitaly Babenko, excerpt from “Fantasies of Wakeful People, ” the preface to Ghosts All Around
Many of the stories and novellas contained in Ghosts All Around are difficult to categorise into any of the traditional genres of science fiction, and Vitaly Babenko had to come up with a number of new genre definitions that are described in detail in the volume’s preface—zombie fiction, gambling fiction, and simple-minded fiction, for example. All texts are published unabridged in the form in which they were first published, retaining all the grammar and punctuation peculiarities of their time.