Tales from the Netherworld explores the theme of katabasis, the descent to the underworld, in Russian literature from its earliest secular texts—folktales—until the end of the New Economic Policy (1921–1928), when official dictates affected the subjects that writers might safely explore. Barbara Henry argues that descent is a means of tracing and claiming ancestry and inheritance, and that the proliferation of netherworld themes tends to coincide with significant generic and formal shifts in Russian literature itself as well as, less frequently, momentous events in history.
In ancient and pagan literature, the land of the dead is a place not just of punishment, but of transformation and rebirth and it is these ideas that predominate in Russian literature. This book focuses on texts that typify the underworld descent story, offering a lens through which to observe the comic and tragic range of the form in the Russian context. With the exception of the folktales, whose dates of origin are difficult if not impossible to establish, each work is separated from the others by roughly thirty years and represents a generational inflection point in the motif's development.
As Tales from the Netherworld shows, Russian stories about the land of the dead range from the very funny to the utterly devastating, which demonstrates the flexibility of the theme and its continued relevance today. Even in its grimmest exemplars, the katabasis asserts that death is not the end—not of life, or consciousness, or love, or art.