Year after year, adult fiction occupies a major position amongst the books most worth reading. Films and computer games with fairy-tale and fictional elements have a comfortable and constant place in the hearts and minds of people for whom childhood has long passed. And more often than not it not even so-called science fiction, which tries to foresee the elements of future progress and describe them, but works of art of a purely fairy-tale nature. And when people outside the literary world accuse lovers of fantasy literature of escapism and a wish to hide away from real problems in more congenial invented worlds, people of a more literary bent have a quite different opinion. There are many profound and ancient reasons for adults to choose fairy-tale worlds, and I would like to tell you about some of them.

Firstly, how a fairy-tale world, free of the usual social, national and political prejudices, allows an author to show some problem on its own, allowing a reader to approach it sincerely, unhindered by the usual mental crutches.

Secondly, how the fairy-tale elements used in fantasy literature, to which the German scientist K. G. Jung gave in his day the name “archetypes”, have over the centuries helped people to keep their mental equilibrium in a changing world. Unchanging and living the same in all of us, they appeal to us, told again and again in the customary fairy-tale form, because they support our belief that even in the modern world, in which we like so much to emphasise our uniqueness, there is something common to all of us, something that makes us all the same.

Thirdly, how there is no person, of any age, who does not sometimes dream of being the greatest hero, and a fairy tale is what allows them to do that. The era of romantic literature, centred on a real hero, has long passed; we now see the arrival of the era of literature about special “ordinary” people.