Magic Realism

Magic Realism is a movement in twentieth-century prose that organically combines the realistic depiction of everyday life with elements of the fantastic, mythological, and miraculous, presented as a natural, integral part of reality, without surprise or explanation. In Magic Realism the everyday and the supernatural coexist as equals, and myth and folklore permeate the present. World fame was brought to the movement by Latin American literature — Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and the prose of Jorge Luis Borges. In Ukrainian literature a kindred phenomenon was the 'chimeric prose' (khymerna proza) of the 1970s and 1980s: the novels of Valerii Shevchuk (The House on the Hill), Volodymyr Drozd, and Vasyl Zemliak's A Flock of Swans, where the real interweaves with the folkloric-mythological, the parabolic, and the fantastic, and the sources of the imagery reach back to the Baroque tradition and the demonological motifs of Mykola Hohol (Gogol).