Tales of Revolts and Truffles. Extraordinary Russian fantastic prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
A collection of fantastic works by Russian authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Tales of Revolts and Truffles, compiled by the writer and translator Vitaly Timofeyevich Babenko, comprises works of Russian fantastic prose from the late eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century. Arranged in chronological order, the texts in this collection have been selected so as to include a variety of different genres: science fiction, fairy tale, parable, pamphlet, utopia, dystopia, allegory, and satire.
Tales of Revolts and Truffles traces the development of Russian fantastic fiction through ideas and techniques that were innovative for their time and allowed authors to create their own magical worlds. The stories and novellas in the collection are published unabridged in the form in which they were first published, retaining all the peculiarities of grammar and punctuation of their time.
Fiction likes to dress up in different clothes, likes to disguise itself, to pass off one thing for another. Fiction almost never looks like what it really is. It substitutes reality with fantasy and declares fantasy to be pure truth.
– Vitaly Babenko, excerpt from “Eight Reasons (with Epigraphs) Why One Should Be Highly Observant While Reading this Book, ” the preface to Tales of Revolts and Truffles
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).