About the book: 2003 / The monograph is a continuation of the research of social utopian views of the Russian people, which he began in his famous 1967 book “Russian Social-Utopian Legends”. Based on a large historical and cultural material (historical evidence, court cases, reports of officials, monuments of peasant literature, works of art, recordings of oral poetic narratives, etc.), the author examines the development of legends about the “returning king-deliverer” and about “distant lands "in the 17th–20th centuries, and also determines the patterns in the recurrence of folklore stories of a utopian nature. Folk utopianism is explored by the author in conjunction with the eschatological ideas of the Russian people and movements of escapism, in close connection with the history of elitist philosophical and political utopianism, which survived times of reckless faith and deep disappointment (T. More, T. Campanella, A. Platonov, E. Zamyatin etc.). The book is intended for historians, folklorists, ethnographers, literary scholars, as well as a wide range of readers.