The article is devoted to the novel by Vladimir Makanin “Fright” (2006) and to the development of one of the writer’s key themes: the hero's search for freedom within his time. The article analyzes the writer's view on the most difficult period of post-Soviet history – the time of reforms in the early 1990s – and explores the phenomenon of the main character, the old man Alabin, a “satyrman” and a sleepwalker who resists living on the sidelines through the realization of erotic fantasies. The rela-tionship between the real and the fantastic is also considered in the chap-ters “The White House Without Politics” and “Old People and the White House”, in which Alabin not only overcomes the “gravity” of life, but also stops the civil confrontation in 1993.
modern Russian prose; Vladimir Makanin; novel “Fright” (“Shelling”); essay “Quasi”; 1990s; political and constitutional crisis of 1993.