Children’s Folklore (Scary Stories) in Lena Obukhova’s Urban Fantasy

The relevance of the study is that children’s folklore (“horror stories”) is actively being introduced into literature – both in children’s, and in the more “adult” fantasy genre, and in other texts by modern writers. Lena Obukhova’s works include a variety of legends, partly borrowed from children’s folklore, partly created within the framework of a genre thematically oriented towards the atmosphere of mysticism and horror. The purpose of the study is to examine the series of L. Obukhova’s novels “Urban Legends”. The novelty of the work is in the analytical approach to the series of novels by a modern fantasy writer: the works are considered from the point of view of their use of the traditions of horror literature and children’s folklore. The methodological basis of the work is the historical-literary, phenomenological, typological and comparative approaches. The article analyzes L. Obukhova’s novels “The Mistress of the Old Manor”, “The Night Watchman”, “The Awakening of the Doll” from the series “Urban Legends”, and also points out the folklore subtext in the novel “The Man Behind the Black Door”. “Urban Legends” combines the genres of a detective and a fantasy, a fairy tale and a Gothic novel, revived scary stories from children’s folklore and adventure works. It is this contamination of genres that allows the writer to move freely between traditional Gothic, modern horror literature and urban folklore, which has changed over more than twenty years of the current century. Scary stories from children’s folklore are woven into literary and cinematic traditions, which opens up several layers of narrative which is rich in allusions, associations and intermedia references. Prospects for further study of the work by Obukhova and other writers working in the urban fantasy genre are associated with the study of material that includes contamination of known genres and generates new ones from a combination of classical literature and folklore

Adventure · Fantasy · Folklore · Folkloristics · Mysticism · Romance · Subtext · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Logistics and Transportation Systems · Themes in Literature Analysis