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Abstract: The article deals with the functioning of the phenomenon of “fairy tales of life” which determined the specificity of the artistic world of a number of works of Russian literature of the first two decades of the 20th century. The article opens with a description of key peculiarities of the universal super-genre category of “the fairy tales of life”, and then passes on to a diachronic analysis of a number of works of the 1920s, which most saliently reflect the development of the phenomenon in various perspectives. The article presents the results of an analytical research of a sample of texts of the period under study united by the common idea of the synthesis of fairy-tale and realistic components. The author explores the role and immanent properties of fairy-tale semantics in the system of the associative background of the work and explains the specificity of the term “fairy tales of life”. The article dwells on the works of several writers of the early 20th century for the first time and makes up a list of cycles and periodicals the titles of which include the nomination “fairy tales of life”. Each of the works considered demonstrates similar principles of composition on the level of title complex, semantic-structural organization and architectonics: the authors’ interest in the artistic model of the cycle; the presence of markers of modernity and reality associated with magic and elements of fairy-tale; the striving to meet social requests; the orientation towards a mass reader (all works of fiction focus on entertainment and are easy for perception). The motif of searching for happiness that is characteristic of the literature of the 1920s becomes a dominant linking element in each cycle. In each work under analysis, the characters seek to achieve happiness either through individual practices or through joining a collective. The latter way is characteristic of the works that contain an ideological component, formed by the new Soviet power in the 1920s and corresponding to the then social demand. The authored approach in which genre syncretism is determined by the structural logic of the synthesis of fairytale and realistic components is typical of a number of works of the whole period of the 1920s.