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The Politics of Fantasy
Magic, Children's Literature, and Fandom in Putin's Russia
Eliot Borenstein
“This volume shows how importing J. K. Rowling’s multimedia franchise into Russia has provoked not only Russians’ fantasies but also their national anxieties and fears. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, The Politics of Fantasy provides an invaluable guide through the Russian multiverse that Harry Potter has inspired.”
—Julie Cassiday, author of Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism
Moral panics surrounding Western-inspired children’s culture
In this book, cultural historian Eliot Borenstein asks what happened when J. K. Rowling’s mega-blockbuster, born in the United Kingdom and launched to global heights by Hollywood and the full force of Western marketing, came knocking on President Putin’s door. The arrival of boy wizard and international star Harry Potter in a recently neoliberal Russia was enormously influential but neither smooth nor uncontested. The franchise quickly became a lens that focused Russians’ national ambitions and fears during an era characterized by both the hegemony of popular culture and a conservative backlash.
With crisp, engaging prose, Borenstein leaps from Harry Potter into an exploration of the culture wars and moral panics sparked by the development of Western-inspired children’s culture, extending back into the Soviet period and through the invasion of Ukraine, guiding us along a path as treacherous and intriguing, with as many surprising characters, dark corners, and historical side streets, as the wizarding world’s Diagon Alley. As cultural products pitched ostensibly to children, the Harry Potter books and films became the perfect objects for criticism, translation, adaptation, parody, attack, mimicry, and meme-making, allowing Russians to carve out their own space in the worldwide market of magical multiverses.
Eliot Borenstein is a professor of Russian at New York University and the author of several books, including, most recently, Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny and Soviet Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism in Contemporary Russia.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translations and Transliteration
Introduction: Confessions of a Reformed Pirate
Chapter 1 . . . and the Arrival of a Franchise
Chapter 2 . . . and the Fantasy Genre Controversy
Chapter 3 . . . and the Cheap Knock-Offs
Chapter 4 . . . and the Rise of Fandom
Chapter 5 . . . and the Russian Culture Wars
Chapter 6 . . . and the Transgender Russophone Satanic Wizard
Chapter 7 . . . and the Dark Lord Putin
Conclusion . . . and the Cruel Optimism of the Wizarding World
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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Larger images
August 2025
184 pp. 6 x 9
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