Utopia and dystopia designate the human dream of happiness and the human nightmare of despair when these are assigned a place (topos) in space or time. Since narrative literature "is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery," Utopian and dystopian inventions are mere extremes of literature's ongoing story. In realistic fictions, although social circumstances may range from the incidental to the decisive, the story of the movement to happiness or unhappiness is usually told in terms of individual achievement and failure. In the Utopian and anti-utopian scheme deliverance or damnation depend on the place where one has found oneself, whether it is "the good place" or "the bad place." Although Utopias are allegorical constructs of the rational mind, attempting to bring order to the disorder of life, their denial of what is for the sake of what ought to be makes them a species of fantasy literature–a dream of reason.

Isaak Babel'’s masterpiece of revolution and civil war, though a collection of short stories, is also a book shaped into an artistic whole by patterns of style and a central action or plot. Renato Poggioli detected two major stylistic strains in the work —the “epic-heroic” and the “pathetic“—an insight that criticism has yet to pursue. Though much of Red Cavalry is devoted to genre sketches and anecdotes (many told in the speech of its characters, or skaz), the epic and pathetic modes function as polarities about which the diverse tales are organized. Each has its own language and clusters of imagery, and their interplay lends the work its distinctive shape and meanings.

Scattered through Goncharov's correspondence, memoirs, several critical essays, and even his novels are many statements about the nature and purposes of art. They reflect the prejudices as well as the special insights of the practicing artist. Little interested in systematic aesthetic philosophy, Goncharov wrote about art sporadically, sometimes to defend his own work, often in the heat of current controversy. His writings on art were not intended to contribute to a comprehensive theory. Nor were they designed as a program. Goncharov did not formulate an aesthetic position and then seek to demonstrate its validity in artistic compositions. On the contrary, many of his opinions derive from a later period, when he was already an established novelist. Though they remain constant enough to permit us to extract a consistent viewpoint, Goncharov's aesthetics seem to have more bearing on some of his works than on others. Nevertheless, they provide an invaluable (and little studied) guide to the mind of the artist.