Quote Originally Posted by snowblizz View Post
I think what G meant was that they could have been generally known and shared cultural aspects, the few who haven't read Tolkien in the west can sorta pin it down to elfs and halflings or some such, not necessarily Soviet-hobbits (though that would probably be it's own kind of awesome). I think you make a fair point about the system not being so fond of flights of fancy, fairytales, fantasy and such belonging to a "mysticism" box along with religion. At least that's the impression I get. It seems sci-fi was more a communist thing, especially the stuff showing the brave new world of technology and progress it was gonna lead to. Star Trek but waaay over the top sort of. Didn't Asimov write a lot of his stuff under the suffocating blanket of Soviet censors? IIRC some things he did was clearly painting socialism better to appease the world around him?
You definitely do have strong Sci Fi from Slavic countries, including well before the wall came down - Stanislaw Lem is the giant there, internationally popular and one of his films was adapted by the great Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (and then again many years later by Hollywood).





Lem was wildly popular all over Europe, and not cautious, or in a way he was, but he walked a really fine line which matched the rising curve of his popularity and definitely pushed the limits. His work was sardonic and subversive, ranging from hilarious satirical fairy tales to much sharper, much harder Sci Fi like Solaris. His Futurological Congress was a Philip K. **** style absurd dystopia and sharp social criticism (like Philip K. ****, accurately predicting many of the grimmer aspects of modern life). His Memoires found in a bathtub, nominally a satire of the CIA, was a very effective Orwellian / absurdist send up of the Communist police state as well.

You also have guys like the Czech author Karel Capek, inventor of the word Robot (in his famous novel RUR also has some Philip K. **** vibes) and his War with the Newts is a hilarious satirical Sci Fi gem which is hard to compare to anything else I know of.


As for the East European fantasy authors, I get my sense of this from the HEMA scene, and that might be a little skewed. Every HEMA fighter I've met from Poland, Czech, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, or Sweden seems to know all about Seinkeweick and Sapovsky, and you see art from painters like Billibin and Vasnetsov showing up in art from over there routinely on their Facebook posts. It seems to be part of the whole re-enactor / pagan metal scene over there as well which a lot of them are linked to. I'm only just now starting to meet Russians, mostly from St. Petersburg in the HEMA world so I don't really know what their tastes are like. And admittedly I only know a handful of fencers from Slovakia (Anton Kuhotovic and his group) and one from Hungary and she's no longer doing HEMA.



I think it may just be an outgrowth of the internet, if you google certain search terms, and words for things like 'sword', 'knight', 'armor' etc. by their Slavic or German names you'll often find this art. That's how I originally ran across it anyway.

G