Fairyland and its surroundings

Traveling through the boundless universe of literature in the Magic Land, we are like the looking-glass King and Queen, whose inhabited world fits into the room of the little girl Alice Liddell. He is huge and tiny at the same time. Like the worlds of “The Chronicles of Narnia”, “Harry Potter”, “The Wind in the Willows”, “Winnie the Pooh”, “Peter Pan”, “The Lord of the Rings” - we all visited them in childhood and youth. Nikolai Epple's book “The Magic Land and Its Surroundings” is a way to return to this universe as adults. See its structure, understand what has long been well known, and discover a lot of new things. And also to pick up keys for her next guests - our children.

The literature of the Magic Land is a direction that eludes strict genre definitions. Philologist, translator, specialist in English literature Nikolai Epple talks about it as a story of intense internal dialogue between very different authors, but belonging to a single, clearly traceable tradition. Rowling, when coming up with Platform 9 and 3/4, had the Wardrobe in mind from Lewis's Narnia. Pratchett was a Tolkien fan. The strongest theatrical impression of Tolkien himself was the production of “Peter Pan” by Barry, who was also Milne’s friend and mentor... From these subtle relationships was born literature of the imagination, a secondary reality, in demand in difficult times. “When the guidelines are lost, black becomes white, and white becomes black. A magical land in which, as Macdonald says, everything is arbitrary except the moral law, is a means not to escape from reality, but to remind oneself and others of it,” Nikolai Epple.

The reissue is decorated with photographs of English writers, illustrations for their works, reproductions of graphics and paintings, manuscripts and covers of first editions.