Humanities & Social Sciences 7 (2015 8) 1325-1343 ~ ~ ~ УДК 82.09 Political Discourse and Artistic Fiction in Utopian Reality Representation Natalia V. Kovtun and Vadim V. Kovtun* Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041, Russia Received 20.01.2015, received in revised form 17.02.2015, accepted 22.04.2015 In Russian and Western literary studies, the peculiarity of Russian culture is often considered through the prism of Utopia. <...> This article discusses the formation of an utopian metagenre in Russian fi ction, tracing a change in emphasis from the political discourse to artistic means, and, conversely, archetypes that distinguish utopian world-modelling in different cultural epochs. <...> Perhaps there is no better term than “Utopia” to characterize modern literature, where the avant-garde Utopias anticipate global communist Utopia that was formalized in artistic creativity through the theory of socialist realism, which in the 1950–1960s was replaced by retrospective Utopia of “the villagers” in the diversity of author’s variants and technocratic Utopias of the “youth prose”. <...> In this paradigm the place of postmodernism as a set of techniques used for opposing Utopian intentions is determined by the role of anti-Utopia. <...> Keywords: Utopia, anti-Utopia, utopian metagenre in Russian fi ction, political discourse, utopian world-modelling. <...> Introduction The problem of studying fi ctional utopia and principles of utopian world-modelling remains one of the most important in the modern literary studies. <...> Creators of classical utopias regarded text as an opportunity to represent their own ideas, when “fi ction is necessary. only as an entertaining outline” (Morton, 1956, 117), a choice of the expression manner was dictated by the level of its entertaining and ranged from the methods of a tale to the form of a novel (Bellamy, 1893, 1–2). <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: nkovtun@mail.ru # 1325 # century it included a travelling (also undertaken in a dream) to an unknown land depicting a state of universal Law, in the 19th century it included an image of a technocratic civilization, in the 20th century it included the horrifying images of the future, stirred by the science-fi ction techniques. <...> Utopian thinking, the ways of its representation in text became the subject of analytical criticism only in the 20th century. <...> The purpose of this article is to show how gradual shift <...>