Introduction. The interest of modern literature in folklore involves clarifying the causes of this phenomenon, determining the nature of the dialogue with tradition, and, most importantly, discovering how the author's value system manifests itself in this dialogue. The purpose of our research is to show how moral values manifest themselves in the interpretation and transformation of folklore genres, motifs and images in L. S. Petrushevskaya’s fairy tales, which become system–forming in her artistic world. Materials and methods of analysis. The material of the study is Petrushevskaya’s stories, tending to the genre of a fairy tale. Structural, comparative-typological and intertextual methods of analysis are used. Research results and discussion. In Petrushevskaya’s fairy tales, dialogical connections with folklore reveal themselves at almost all levels of the literary text, starting with the title, the features of the narrative, oriented to the reader-listener, and ending with the plot structure. The dialogue with the tradition of the fairy tale is associated in her works with the parody-game transformation of well-known types of heroes (beauty, wizard, sorcerer, assistants), their role-playing functions, traditional motifs, and a three-part plot scheme. The dialogue-polemic with the folklore tradition defines the complex interaction of the points of view of the author, the narrator and the hero. In Petrushevskaya’s stories, there is a synthesis of fairy tales and other folklore genres (parables, horror stories). Conclusion. Petrushevskaya develops the folklore tradition and simultaneously transforms stable fairy-tale models, motifs and images with the help of postmodern technologies, synthesizes different folklore genres. Nevertheless, in general, the pathos of her fairy tales is humanistic, playing with tradition is subordinated to the affirmation of family values, home, love, unity.