The article is an attempted analysis of the literary genre of fable as a case study of a selection of fables by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. In particular, the analysis focuses on the fable cycles: The New Adventures of Helen the Beautiful, Adventures of Barbie and Wild Animal Fables. The perspective adopted in the article focuses mainly on the axiological aspect of the fables and the reconstruction of their moral message. The moral sense in Petrushevskaya’s fables is veiled under their overt sense. Even the overt sense is hidden deeply under the multiple levels of “intertextual irony” (Eco). The analysis also explores the links between Petrushevskaya’s works, folk magical fairy tales and the prototypical genre of the classical Russian fable. The innovative fables created by Petrushevskaya de-conventionalize the classical schemata of the genre, and as such they constitute an ironic, mocking and sometimes a bitter commentary on the contemporary world. The fables exhibit a high degree of “poetics of everyday life” – a merger of popular and high culture. They both recreate and at the same time mock the schemata and rituals of pop culture, also displaying noticeable feminist tones. In their poetics, the fables employ cyclic and serial arrangement, and are completed with “words of wisdom” that are far from naïve moral judgements.