This book is a standard work for modern narrative theory. It is a German translation and expansion of the Russian work Narratologija (Moscow 2003) and presents a comprehensive foundation for narratology. The author explains and discusses in detail problems of communication structure and instances, narrative perspective, the relationship between narrator's text and character's text, and the narrativity of literary texts and the texts as events. The focus is formed by the constitutive structures of fictional narrative texts. The book postulates a theory of narration and analyses central narratological categories such as fiction, mimesis, author, reader, narrator, narrative perspective, text, story, narrative time etc. against the background of the history of narrative research. The result is a fundamental definition of the constitutive characteristics of narrative texts which provides a terminological and theoretical system of reference for future research in narrative theory. A detailed bibliography and glossary of narratological terms make this book a compendium of narrative theory which is of relevance for scholars and students of all literary disciplines.