A poet in Russia is more than just a poet. This fleeting phrase by Yevgeny Yevtushenko is repeated by anyone who can be bothered when the topic of poetry comes up. For some reason, people don’t talk about fantasists in the same way. It is unfair. A fantasist in Russia is more than just a fantasist. Sometimes, he may even be greater than fantasy itself. Not every fantasist, of course. The circle of such writers is small. Ivan Efremov, the Strugatsky brothers, Vladislav Krapivin, Kir Bulychev, Boris Stern, Mikhail Uspensky… To this rare minority justly belongs Yevgeny Lukin. For him, fantasy is an instrument similar to Leskov's microsco: you look into its eyepiece and see not only a flea on the tray, but also a key lying nearby. Reading the writer Lukin is a joy and a pleasure. The joy comes from the quality of his prose, the pleasure from the jester-like atmosphere in which his heroes reside. You read him and suddenly see how Gogol winks mischievously at you from the page, how Saltykov-Shchedrin twirls a finger at his temple, or how the tail of Behemoth's cat flicks somewhere between the chapters. Lukin's first stories and novellas were written together with Lyubov Lukina, the writer’s wife, who, alas, left this life prematurely at the age of forty-six. If you start counting all the awards and honors Lukin has received since the beginning of his writing career, you would lose count somewhere in the fifth or sixth dozen. He has over a hundred. “Aelita,” “Strannik,” “Bronze Snail,” “ABS Prize,” Interskon, Roskon, named after Ivan Efremov, the Belyaev Prize, “Golden Ostap,” and many diverse others. He was even declared the laureate of the “Golden Calf” prize by the “Literary Newspaper” for his ironic poems. In 2015, Lukin was awarded the honorary title of Grandmaster of European Fantasy.
