The lecture is structured around the theme of the prophetic power of Nikolay Nosov’s fairytale novels.
Utopian ideas initially emerged in philosophy, literature, and art before reaching everyday life. A number of attempts to build an ideal utopian state ended up with multiple tragedies and victims. Since the mid-twentieth century, utopia has been extremely popular as a literary genre, describing the type of social policy leading to an undesirable, bleak, and horrifying future, while also warning the reader against and defending them from such careless strategies. The surprising thing is that philosophical and literary utopias are being realized in reality. Nikolay Nosov’s books were written for children and can hardly be considered communist utopias, or capitalist dystopias. A spoof of sorts, perhaps. However, Nosov had ingeniously predicted many of the features of modern Russia. Is our life an invention of the author? And where, we have to question, is the borderline between reality and fiction?