About the fantastic: axioms, paradoxes, problems

The concept of the fantastic is one of the most complicated topics of terminology. It can hardly be explained in a rational way. Almost all definitions are supposed to have exceptions. None of them covers the phenomenon. The discussion of the problem is compounded by the translation of the category of Aristotle’s poetics αδύνατο/impossibile/невозможное, of the concepts fantasy, fantastic, adopted from Greek, into various languages and by the alteration of their meanings. Aristotle did not introduce the term the fantastic or the fantastika, but he conceived a theory of the fantastic. “The possible by necessity” that goes beyond “the possible in probability” is properly what we define as the fantastika. In Russian theory of literature “the fantastic / the fantastika” is not a genre or sort of literature or art, neither is it conventionality or a sort of it, but a category of aesthetics and poetics that is an indispensable requisite of Art and captures the essence of creativity. One of the controversial issues resides in the fact that reviewers have to distinguish fantastic imagination and non-fantastic one. There is left a certain remain in a literary work, that is not identified in relation to “the real” but remains the phantom of the author’s imagination. The rules of art are not identical to the rules of an empirical world. In the art everything is fiction, fancy, invention and at the same time everything is real, both the possible and the impossible. In art everything is possible, including the impossible - something that can not happen. The fantastika infringes the “rules of space and time, existence and intelligence”. It is impossible in the real world, goes beyond the empirical experience of man, but regardless of common sense it is real in the artistic world. It is here where an aesthetic effect of the fantastic resides in.