Love and Death. Russian Gothic Prose

One hundred years of Russian Gothic novella — such a subtitle could be given to a collection that unites writers of such different backgrounds. The publication opens with "The Laufer's Poppy" by A. Pogorelsky, which is considered the first work in Russian literature with a mystical plot, and concludes with A. Grin's story "The Gray Car." Gothic became fashionable in the early 19th century. Orienting itself on European models, and turning to folk tales and legends, Russian writers of the 1820s-1830s fully paid tribute to this genre. Among them were A. S. Pushkin and N. V. Gogol, A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinksy and V. F. Odoevsky. The realm of the supernatural, beings from another world — ghosts, sorcerers, the dead, vampires and other evil spirits — fill the pages of the books. But even later, the interest in the mysterious, irrational, and fantastic in Russian literature did not wane, as evidenced by the works of A. K. Tolstoy, I. S. Turgenev, N. S. Leskov, and other authors. The new fascination with mysticism came during the Silver Age, when A. I. Kuprin, F. Sologub, L. N. Andreyev, and others created their works. Widely known works of Gothic prose sit alongside rarely published compositions in the pages of the collection.