The Fantastic Element in Dostoevsky’s Post-Prison Short Stories: Genre Characteristics of the Fantastic Prose and European Literature
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The article analyzes the regular and often central, plot-building place Dostoevsky accords to the fantastic element in his so-called "shorter prose" (malaya proza, malye formy) in the post-prison period, particularly compared to the episodic presence of the fantastic in his larger novels. Generally, the problem of the fantastic is treated here in the context of the overall development of European literature and of the conceptualization of the fantastic in literary criticism depending on a specific literary movement that dominated a given era. The article traces the evolution of the fantastic from an optional plot device in satires and utopias of Modernity (Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone, Voltaire's Le Micromégas, etc.) via "the mysterious" of the Gothic of horror that inherits the perception of the fantastic as an element of some exotic culture (Gothic romances are generally set in some country foreign to their authors) to the "fantastic" of the European Romanticism where it either forms a world of its own contrasted with the everyday world of bourgeois life, or is perceived as an element of the folk culture. In Russian literature, "the fantastic" is perceived primarily in this folklore vein and, consequently, as proper for shorter prose texts. However, as something linked to the myth and the fairy tale, the fantastic is also an example of macro-contents enclosed in a mini-form. Dostoevsky, on the one hand, treats the fantastic as a plot device specifically for shorter texts, while on the other, he links the fantastic not only and not so much with folklore, as with the "miraculous" taken in its religious sense; therefore, Dostoevsky is able to actively use shorter texts primarily as part of larger works; he retains their combination of a laconic form and a potentially extensive content; shorter texts manifest the miraculous and allow readers to treat shorter texts as "folded" novels.
Author: Tatyana V. Kovalevskaya
Institution: Russian State University for the Humanities
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Northwestern University
OpenAlex ID: W7214680903