Nightmare Narratives: Terrifying Dreams in Russian Literature and Beyond

The nightmare is familiar to all of us, but we rarely reflect on its significance. This course will investigate the cultural, social, psychological and aesthetic levels of meaning of the nightmare by taking a close look at a wide array of its depictions in literature, taking us from German Romanticism through Russian Realism all the way to 1930s Persia. Our main focus will be on Slavic depictions of the nightmare in the works of such writers as Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Kharms, but we will also attempt to understand them as part of a wider dialogue with other literary and cultural traditions, including the psychological (Freud, Rank).