Spectral Phenomena: Marvelous Russian Fantastic Prose of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
A new anthology of fantastic works by Russian authors.
Spectral Phenomena is the third volume in the series of Russian fantastic prose compiled by the writer and translator Vitaly Timofeyevich Babenko. Under the broad label of the “fantastic,” the collection brings together a wide range of genres, which are outlined by Babenko in his introduction: fairy tale, legend, parody, grotesque, and utopia, among others. The book features works both by canonical authors—Anton Chekhov, Alexei Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Kuprin—and by writers who have been almost forgotten today, including Vladimir Zotov, Mikhail Chistyakov, Grigory Machtet, Leonid Bogoyavlensky, and others.
All photos: Anna Zavozyaeva
Vitaly Babenko (b. 1950) is a Russian writer, journalist, translator, publisher, and educator. He lives and works in Moscow. The history of Russian fantastic literature is one of his many areas of interest.
“…It is not just the ‘fantastic spirits and nocturnal visions’ found in works by various authors that are ‘Spectres.’ If one thinks about it, writers of the past themselves are nothing but ghosts. They are long gone; we do not see or know them in the flesh. They appear to us through their works, having acquired a new material form—the books they wrote—and through these books they tell us all kinds of things: ordinary and astonishing, complex and simple, marvelous and uncanny.”
Time erases not just writers, but words. Today, one rarely encounters terms such as falya, kutsaveika, ferronnière, landrat, or khiragrik—yet they abound in this anthology, as all texts are published in the form in which they first appeared. To assist the contemporary reader, notes by Babenko clarify the nuances of a living, evolving Russian language.
Other books in the series: Tales of Revolts and Truffles. Extraordinary Russian fantastic prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ghosts from All Sides. Extraordinary Russian fantastic prose of the nineteenth century.
Editor
Evgenia Fomenko
Technical Editor
Sofia Komarova
Design and Layout
Kirill Gorbunov