Is tale a lie?

The article discusses a question about the balance between fantasy as such and various definite ideas (technical, scientific or sociological) which can be found in fantasy-fiction - i.e. about the balance between the “lie” and the “hint”, as Alexander Pushkin put it in his well-known poem The Golden Cockerel. It is traditionally believed that fiction (especially science fiction) is created by authors to express some ideas they consider essential. This opinion was common among book critics from 1920s to 1950s, and even nowadays, some researchers and reviewers support this view. A large part of this article is devoted to the debate with such speculations. The analysis shows that if we give primary importance to the author’s ideas and regard fantasy genre only as a nice “wrapping” for these ideas (or, in Puskin’s terms, the author’s “hints”) which is used to attract readers’ attention and make them catch the “hints”, understand the expressed ideas and learn the lessons, it may lead to the destruction of the fantasy (visionary) world and the ideas embedded into the text. The article also covers such subjects as “pleasure from reading fiction”, the escapism of fantasy-fiction, the absoluteness of fictitious narrative in the structure of a piece of fiction, and the absolute notion of the possible and the impossible in such books (as contrasted with the relative and historically changing balance between the possible and the impossible in empirical reality). The article also contains certain arguments against some critics who analyze Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita from the perspective contested by the article’s author.