J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth as a spatial model in Russian fantasy

The article analyses the reception of John R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth in the Russian fantasy in the late 20th century to trace the influence of Tolkien's tradition on the Russian writers and the reasons of breaking with it. The writers represent the fictional world constructing syncretic spatial models, based mainly on psychological rather than scientific certainty, borrowed from oral folk arts, historical sources, mythology, and chivalric romances. However, some fantasy worlds are not original, since their creators use existing spatial models as well as plots and ideas commonly found in the canonical texts in the context of fan fiction. The borrowed spatial model used as a means of remote dialogue with the origin is rare enough in Russian literature. In this respect, Tolkien Middle-earth has become a popular basis for about a hundred Russian stories, including free expositions and continuations, parodies, and apocryphas. The article focuses on the creative revision of the Middle-earth chronotope and the genre canons of the classic fantasy, which results from the antithetic reconstruction of Tolkien's fictional world in the novels by Nick Perumov, Kirill Eskov, Natalia Vasilyeva, and Natalia Nekrasova. Discussing the creative interaction, the article concentrates on the spatial models in Tolkien and Russian fantasy writers, since these models construct the fictional world. The chronotope of Middle-earth emphasizes the conflict of Light and Dark. In this world, the Good and the Evil become the original "points of attraction of the images of space and time." By rejecting the original image of Middle-earth and substituting it with their own models, Russian fantasy writers introduce a new content in Tolkien's world. Perumov and Eskov shift away from Tolkien's concept, proposing their version of the world, where the good and the evil do not have distinct lines and where there is the third neutral power. The transformation of the Middle-earth spatial model in Russian postmodern fantasy is determined by the substitution of the traditional "good - evil" dichotomy with the ethical relativism due to "the rehabilitation of the evil forces" in the fantasy of the late 20th century, which is brought about, on the one hand, by the global transition to the policy of tolerance, and on the other hand, by "the imperative of the search of originality".