... by Steven Seagal, who was driven to kill.


"Ídiot durák! Pídaras!"  Translation: "Idiot-fool! Homosexualist!"

"Ubéi egó, on yóbnuty!" Translation: "Kill him, he's a deviant!" More of a threat, than an insult. Emphasizes the intolerance of a speaker.

"Pídaras from the GULag." Translation: "Homosexualist from the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies". A most horrible insult. No Russian would bear it without a long, excruciating laughter.

For the rest of the gems, watch the movie. An excellent comedy, that was.

Well, I witnessed firsthand the emergence and development of the subj, and therefore can say a few words about it without being too false.

The beginning was probably the numerous sequels to the foreign works: Conan the Barbarian, Colin Wilson's world of spiders, Harry Harrison's postmodernist nonsense, etc. It is certain that there was no fantasy in USSR. There was excellent Soviet sci-fi, a genre within a genre, but fantasy? No way. And the most famous stuff published after 1991 were the sequels mentioned.
There was a funny thing about it, though. A common bibliophile of the time would gladly buy and read some another "Conan the Barbarian and the Drowned Corpse of a Deceased Deadman", but only if the author was foreign. "Russian author? Bah! We're all sick'n'tired of this totalitarian ideology-ridden propaganda they always fed us with! And the foreign is always better, too!" - the guy would say, reluctantly passing by the bookstore full of new, shiny copies of "Conan the Barbarian and a Father Who Married a Step-Daughter of his Son's Wife" by an obscure Ivan Ivanoff. The craziness reached the apogee when the publishers would stop accepting the works of non-foreign authors. Or the authors with non-foreign names, at least. That spawned an immense number of Jimmie Dorsets from Ryazan, Paul Winlows from Moscow, and other Olaf Bjorn Loknits from St. Petersburg (former Leningrad). Some of them are still there, like Kyle Itorr. Or is he Etorr? I've no idea how it is spelled in English.

That wouldn't go on forever, of course. Censorship barriers were dropped, democracy and freedom ravaged... I mean, flourished, and writing was not a privilege of the totalitarian and ideologic Union of Writers anynmore. Any idiot could grab a typewriter, jump on it a few times, take the paper out and bring it to a publisher. And they did!
The time gave birth to many horrible monsters, like Vasily Golovachev, Andrei Dashkov, Sergei Lukyanenko, and many others. Millions of trees were wasted for naught. But let's give the due credit to the beginning writers: they weren't bad intentionally (though it looks quite like they were sometimes). They just had very little skill and experience. Skill and experience were relics of the totalitarian past back than.
Unfortunately, many works that were actually good were lost among the incredible amount of wasted paper. Who knows of Dmitry Chistov and his magnificent "Time of the Chariots" today? And of Alexei Ivanov, with his great novel "Ships and the Galaxy"? Virtually no one.

But the progress was inevitable. Fidonet helped it a lot - there, young and talented writers were able to get more than enough criticism. The most likely person to be credited as a pioneer of this New and More-or-Less Better Age of Russian Fiction is Nick Perumov. (And that is not a pseudonym.) Perumov's books had everything: the drive, the magnitude, and even some national colouring... Dragons, elves, swordfighting, powerful True Mages that revolved the universe around themselves  to fuel their mighty magicks... (that was a literal one. In many works of Perumov, each True Mage had to revolve the universe around himself to do his sorcery. I never understood how it was possible for more than one of them to exist.)  People loved that guy. Though today, as one reader said, Perumov's fantasy can be considered naive and silly, at its own time it was great, and every person interested in fantasy would read it.

Perumov was not the only one. Many good authors published their works in the new century: my compatriot Victor Nochkin-Is'eminy, the great (not _famous_, mind you) Andrei Smirnov, the "Magnificent Belorussian Writer" Olga Gromyko... Though trees are still wasted for naught sometimes, it may be said there is a solid body of good authors, and it is already impossible to call it small.

Today, Russian fantasy is doing great. Many good publishers, like "Lenizdat", "Krylov", and "Alpha-Kniga", publish many good writers. Many more good writers are in process of getting published. The future is unknown, but it can't be bad - too much good basis already exists.