Jelena Kovtun

ELENA KOVTUN is a Doctor of Philology, Professor, Leading researcher, Head of the Department of the History of Slavic Literatures at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Department of Slavic Studies and Central European Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities. She graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Slavic Department of the Faculty of Philology (1987), postgraduate studies (1990) and doctoral studies (1999) in the Department of Slavic Philology. In 1991–2021, she was a lecturer in the history and culture of the Czech Republic, the history of Czech literature, and the history of Russian and foreign science fiction and fantasy at the same department. Her research interests include Czech and other Slavic literature, modern Russian, foreign Slavic and Western science fiction and fantasy, theory and history of sci-fi, fantasy and artistic fiction. She is the author of more than one hundred and fifty scientific publications, including the monographs Karel Chapek and the Science Fiction of the XX-th century (1998), The Poetics of the Extraordinary: The Artistic Worlds of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Utopias, Parables and Myths (1999), The Artistic Fiction in the Literature of the XX-th Century (2008); The Intertext of the Afterlife Universe in Science Fiction and Fantasy of the XX–XXI Centuries (2024).