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.

This article provides an overview of French translations of prose and drama on the Hungarian book market between 2000 and 2020. The quantitative and qualitative analysis is based on data from the National Library of Hungary comprising 39,792 entries, of which 2,479 are translations from French. The analysis focuses on the position of French compared to other source languages, the distribution of translations according to their literary genre, and publishers actively involved in the publication of French literature. Results indicate that French ranks third after English and German, accounting for 6.2% of the records in the sample, and is rarely used as an intermediary language for translation. Novels are the genre most frequently translated, while translations of dramatic works are sporadic. The three most active publishers of French translations in Hungary comprise one publisher of classic and contemporary literature, one of digital books and one of children’s literature.