And Verochka has a dream. She dreams that she is locked in a damp, dark basement. And suddenly the door opened, and Verochka found herself in a field, running, frolicking and thinking: “How could I not die in the basement? This is because I have not seen the field; if I had seen him, I would have died in the basement,” and again he runs and frolics. She dreams that she is paralyzed, and she thinks: “How is it that I am paralyzed? It’s old men and women who are broken, but not young girls.” “They happen, they often happen,” says someone unfamiliar, “and now you will be healthy, as soon as I touch your hand, you see, you are already healthy, get up.” - Who is saying this? - How easy it became! - all the illness has passed, - and Verochka got up, walks, runs, and again on the field, and again frolics, runs, and again thinks: “How could I endure paralysis? This is because I was born with paralysis, I did not know how to walk and run; but if I knew, I wouldn’t be able to bear it,” and runs and frolics. But here is a girl walking across the field - how strange! - both her face and her gait, everything changes, constantly changes in her; here she is English, French, now she is German, Polish; so she became Russian, again English, again German, again Russian - how is it that she has all the same face? After all, an Englishwoman doesn’t look like a Frenchwoman, a German doesn’t look like a Russian, but her face changes, and she still has the same face - how strange! And the expression on her face constantly changes: how meek! so angry! Here's a sad one, here's a cheerful one - everything changes! but everyone is kind - how can this be, and when he is angry, everything is kind? but what a beauty she is! No matter how the face changes, with each change everything gets better, everything gets better. Approaches Verochka. "Who are you?" - “He used to call me: Vera Pavlovna, but now he calls me: my friend.” - “Oh, so you’re the Verochka who fell in love with me?” - “Yes, I love you very much. But who are you?” - “I am your groom’s bride.” - “Which groom?” - "I don't know. I don't know my suitors. They know me, but I can’t know them: I have a lot of them. You choose one of them as your groom, only from them, from my suitors.” - “I chose...” - “I don’t need a name, I don’t know them. But just choose from them, from my suitors. I want my sisters and grooms to choose only each other. Were you locked in the basement? Was she paralyzed? - "Was". - “Now you got rid of it?” - "Yes". - “It was I who released you, I cured you. Remember that there are still many who have not been released, many who have not been cured. Release, heal. Will you? - "Will. But what is your name? I really want to know.” - “I have many names. I have different names. Whoever needs to call me, I tell him that name. Call me love for people. This is my real name. Not many people call me that. And you call it that.” - And Verochka walks through the city: here is the basement, - the girls are locked in the basement. Verochka touched the lock - the lock flew off: “Go” - they went out. Here is a room - in the room there are girls, broken by paralysis: “Get up” - they get up, walk, and they are all back on the field, running, frolicking - oh, how fun! It's much more fun with them than alone! Oh, how fun!

“Vera Pavlovna is the heroine of the work N.G. Chernyshevsky"What to do? From stories about new people" (1863).

The book is structured as a narrative about her life and spiritual development; The fates of other heroes are connected or intersect with her fate. Disgusted by the atmosphere of lies and violence that reigns in the family, resisting her mother’s attempts to marry her to the “trashy” young man Storeshnikov, Vera Pavlovna enters into a marriage (at first fictitious) with medical student Lopukhov, a supporter of socialist ideas. To live together, they develop a number of innovations designed to preserve love, mutual respect and complete sovereignty of each party in the family.

Vera Pavlovna organizes a sewing workshop, which gradually becomes the embryo of a commune modeled on the Fourierist phalansteries. The mutual love of Vera Pavlovna and her husband's friend, Kirsanov, ends in union.

According to the author, Vera Pavlovna “is one of the first women whose life was settled well.” At the beginning of the novel, she is characterized as an “ordinary girl” who received an “ordinary upbringing” and strives for happiness for herself and for others. However, the system of Vera Pavlovna’s “doubles” shows that her image contains a complex generalization.

Vera Pavlovna’s “doubles” form a kind of hierarchical system: the fate of each of them, in accordance with the views of Chernyshevsky (“under certain circumstances he becomes good, under others he becomes evil”, article “Anthropological principle in philosophy”), represents the possible realization of Vera Pavlovna’s fate in other circumstances. Her life could have turned out like that of the courtesan Julie, a “bad” and at the same time “honest” woman: Vera Pavlovna’s second dream depicts this possibility. At the center of this hierarchy is the image of Katya Polozova, “symmetrical” to the image of Vera Pavlovna and occupying the place of the main figure of the narrative in the penultimate chapter of the novel.

Vera Pavlovna is a brunette (in Chernyshevsky’s characterology - a sign of expansiveness), Katya is a blonde (a sign of poise); Vera Pavlovna was saved from a marriage with Lopukhov that was disgusting to her, Katya was saved from her recklessly desired marriage with Kirsanov; ultimately, Kirsanov becomes Vera Pavlovna’s husband, Katya’s husband is the “resurrected” Lopukhov-Beaumont; Katya, following the example of Vera Pavlovna, organizes a sewing workshop; Each of the heroines gives birth to a son.

Both families live together, embodying the harmony of the future commune, so that there is even a kind of interchange of character traits: Katya turns out to be more passionate, and Vera Pavlovna - calmer. The hierarchy of “doubles” is crowned by the woman from Vera Pavlovna’s dreams (“the bride of your groom”), who in the first dream constantly changes her appearance, and in the fourth finally takes on the appearance of Vera Pavlovna herself (“Yes, Vera Pavlovna saw: it was she herself... but a goddess illuminated by the radiance of love").

The search for a prototype of the heroine also led to the conclusion about the broad typical generalization of the image. The author himself noted in letters that he endowed Vera Pavlovna with the traits of his wife, O.S. Chernyshevskaya, to whom the novel is dedicated.

The reverse impact of Vera Pavlovna’s image on society was also enormous. Fictitious marriages for the purpose of saving girls from bad families were almost a duty of honor for progressive youth; Often such marriages developed into real ones.

Since the beginning of the 1860s, women have appeared in higher educational institutions, especially those of a natural science nature; with the release of the novel their number increases. Finally, in the year the book was published, the “Women’s Labor Society” was created, and the novel itself “caused many attempts to set up sewing workshops on a new basis,” recalled contemporary of the events E.N. Vodovozova.

Almost all of these attempts ended in failure."

Encyclopedia of Literary Heroes / Compiled by: S.V. Stakhorsky, M., “Agraf”, 1997, p. 70-71.

Dream as a literary method of comprehending reality

LEARNING FROM STUDENTS

Maria VITOVTSEVA,
Republican
classical lyceum,
Gorno-Altaisk
(teacher -
Olga Anatolyevna Fedyaeva)

Dream as a literary method of comprehending reality

There is one old parable. The philosopher dreamed that he became a moth. And when he woke up, he no longer knew who he was: a wise old man who dreamed that he had become a moth, or a moth who dreamed that he was a wise old man.

In this parable, dream and reality are intertwined. And if even a philosopher cannot draw a clear line between them, what then can be expected from mere mortals? Sometimes you hear that we live in a world of illusions or in some kind of made-up world. People often say that they would like to forget and get away from everyday worries. The desire to fall asleep and not see anything around one way or another arises in every person. A dream is always something mysterious, inexplicable.

The problem of sleep and dreams has interested writers and poets at all times. This work attempts to consider sleep and dreams as a means of reflecting reality, allegories and allegories using the example of works of Russian literature of the 19th century, as well as world literature of the 20th century. Are there any differences in views on the phenomenon of sleep and dreams among writers from Russia, Japan and Latin America? This issue is explored in the work along with other issues that in one way or another affect the topic of research.

The choice of topic is due to the growing interest of poets and writers in everything fantastic, supernatural and mysterious. The objects of the study are works of fiction as a form of art generated by the creative imagination of poets and writers. Of all the works that could become the subject of research, only those in which dreams are given a dominant role in the text of the narrative were selected. At the same time, not only the content side of dreams was taken into account, but also the journalistic and ideological orientation.

The problems of dreams used in works of fiction are wide and varied. Some of them have a pronounced political overtones, in other cases dreams help to better understand the subjective experiences of the characters, there are allegorical dreams, and sometimes a dream appears in a work as a means of helping to make the text more entertaining. But be that as it may, dreams in fiction always serve to more clearly reflect the connection between the writer’s creative imagination and real life.

The purpose of the work is to determine the meaning and role of dreams in the text of a particular work. When choosing works, a certain difficulty lay in their large number, but upon closer examination it turned out that the use of dreams in literary texts serves, as a rule, similar tasks, so it makes sense to limit ourselves to the most typical of them. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were solved: selection of works that best correspond to the chosen topic; determining the role of sleep in the content of this work; and finally, a comparison of dreams and dreams in the works of writers of different centuries and different countries. Research methods: analysis of literary text, work with critical, reference and popular science literature.

Dreams in Russian literature

Happiness lies in waking up from sleep

Asiliy Andreevich Zhukovsky is considered the founder and one of the most prominent representatives of Russian romanticism.

The appeal of romantic poets to the inner world of man and his experiences necessitated the search for new artistic means capable of conveying the subtlest movements of the soul. From sentimentalists V.A. Zhukovsky was distinguished by the typical romantics' aspiration to a wonderful and mysterious world, as if existing beyond the boundaries of real earthly life.

The leading genre in the work of the romantic Zhukovsky was the ballad - a lyric-epic work most often of a legendary, historical, unusual and dramatic-heroic nature. People started talking about his work in 1808, when the ballad “Lyudmila” was published, or rather, a free translation of “Lenora” by the German poet G.A. Burger. The appearance of this ballad marked the beginning of a new stage in the development of Russian poetry.

Later (1808–1812), based on the same plot, V.A. Zhukovsky created the original ballad “Svetlana”, associated with Russian folk customs and beliefs, song and fairy tale traditions. The subject of the ballad is a girl’s fortune telling on “Epiphany evening.” The image of Svetlana is the first artistically convincing, psychologically truthful image of a Russian girl in Russian poetry.

Svetlana in his poem is sometimes “silent and sad” in longing for her missing groom, sometimes “shy and timid” during fortune-telling, sometimes confused and alarmed when she doesn’t know what awaits her. The romanticism of the ballad is in the conventional landscape, an unusual incident, in indicating that the main and eternal things are in some other world, and earthly life is short-lived and illusory.

With the image of Svetlana V.A. Zhukovsky connects the idea of ​​the triumph of love over death. An important place in this ballad is given to sleep, Svetlana’s terrible dream. It was a dream about her “dear friend being dead.” Svetlana cannot make out its essence, but she is very afraid of this terrible, menacing dream. The author himself gives the answer in his ballad: “... here misfortune is a false dream, happiness is awakening.” For the first time in Russian literature, V.A. Zhukovsky told the reading public that happiness must be sought in the real world, which is the real truth, and everything else is lies and deception.

Despite the fact that the plot was borrowed from Western European literature, V.A. Zhukovsky reached out to the traditions of the Russian people and created something of his own, new and unique, “grafting his own onto someone else’s idea.” Highly appreciating his work, V.G. Belinsky wrote that the works of V.A. Zhukovsky constituted “an entire period in our literature, an entire period of moral development of our society.”

A dream in which all of Russia is visible

In 1859, the novel by I.A. was published. Goncharov's "Oblomov", in the center of which is the image of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a gentleman brought up in the patriarchal environment of the family estate and living in St. Petersburg. When characterizing the hero, Goncharov uses some artistic techniques of his predecessors, in particular N.V. Gogol. In Soviet times, the image of the main character of the novel was perceived as somewhat one-sided and straightforward, although in fact his image is much deeper and more multifaceted.

The writer depicts the life of Oblomovka as a living environment that shaped the character of the hero, as a holistic and complete way of Russian life. Goncharov saw in the formation of the bourgeois way of life not only historical progress, but also a threat to many spiritual values ​​developed by the Russian patriarchal way of life. Much in the old traditions caused Goncharov’s negative attitude (inertia, parasitism, fear of change, etc.), but many things attracted him - for example, the warmth of human relationships, respect for antiquity, connection with nature. Goncharov was worried: how, in the pursuit of progress, not to destroy what was valuable in the old, how to find their harmonious combination.

Oblomov's idleness is perceived by the modern reader, who has managed to taste all the delights of wild capitalism, not only as an expression of lordly laziness and apathy, but also as a moral challenge of a person to the reformers of that time. The chapter “Oblomov’s Dream,” as one critic puts it, is “the overture of the entire novel.” The hero is transported in this chapter to his childhood, to the happiest time of his life.

At first, Ilya Ilyich dreams of the time when he is only seven years old. He wakes up in his bed. The nanny dresses him and takes him to tea. The entire “staff and retinue” begin to shower him with affection and praise. After this, they began feeding him buns, crackers and cream. Then his mother let him go for a walk with the nanny. The day in Oblomovka passed seemingly meaninglessly, in petty worries and conversations. “Oblomov himself is an old man who is also not without activities. He sits by the window all morning and strictly watches everything that is happening in the yard... But his main concern was the kitchen and dinner. The whole house discussed dinner.” After lunch everyone slept together.

The next time that comes to Oblomov in a dream is when he has become a little older, and the nanny tells him fairy tales. “The adult Ilya Ilyich, although he later knows that there are no honey and milk rivers, no good sorceresses - his fairy tale is mixed with life, and he is helplessly sad at times, why is a fairy tale not life, and why is life not a fairy tale... He is constantly drawn to that the side where they only know that they are walking, where there are no worries and sorrows.” Ilyusha is cherished “like an exotic flower in a greenhouse.” His parents dreamed of a sewn uniform for him, “they imagined him as a councilor in the chamber, and his mother even as a governor. They believed that it was necessary to study lightly, not to the point of exhaustion of soul and body, not to the point of losing the blessed completeness acquired in childhood, but so that only to comply with the prescribed form and somehow obtain a certificate in which it would be said that Ilyusha passed all science and art."

The stillness of life, slumber, a closed existence is not only a sign of the existence of Ilya Ilyich, it is the essence of life in Oblomovka. She is isolated from the whole world: “Neither strong passions nor brave undertakings worried the Oblomovites.” And Oblomov’s dream helps us understand this. The dream reflects real life, which was typical for Russia at that time, which rejected the innovations of the West. And, quite possibly, it was Ilya Ilyich’s dream that was closer to the mindset of Russian society of that time. The life Oblomov saw in his dream is complete and harmonious in its own way: it is Russian nature, a fairy tale, the love and affection of a mother, Russian hospitality, the beauty of the holidays. This is the Russia that we lost after the 1917 revolution.

Re-reading the chapter “Oblomov’s Dream”, we understand that childhood impressions are for the main character of the novel the ideal from the height of which he judges life. Oblomov was tormented by premonitions that soon the idyll of his usual life would be destroyed, and, unfortunately, his premonitions came true. Russia, which lived with a long-standing expectation of change and revolutionary transformations, soon deprived its citizens for a long time of the very opportunity to see dreams similar to the one that Oblomov once had.

Four dreams of Vera Pavlovna

The revolution that broke out in France in February 1848 had a strong impact on student N.G. Chernyshevsky, defining the range of his interests. He immersed himself in the study of the works of utopian socialists, who were then seen as the development of Christian teaching. But in July 1862 N.G. Chernyshevsky was arrested on charges of connections with emigrants, that is, with the group of A.I. Herzen, and found himself imprisoned in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he remained for two whole years, and it was there that his novel “What is to be done?” was written.

The usual standards of that time cannot be applied to this novel. In the work of N.G. Chernyshevsky we are dealing with a philosophical-utopian novel. Thought in his novel prevails over the direct depiction of life. It is no coincidence that the novel was assessed by the revolutionary-democratic intelligentsia not as a work of art itself, but as a programmatic work on the socialist reorganization of life.

The composition of the work is strictly thought out: the image of “vulgar people”, the image of “ordinary new people”, the image of a “special person” and the dreams of the heroine of the novel Vera Pavlovna. Vera Pavlovna’s four dreams contain a philosophical concept developed by Chernyshevsky for revolutionary-minded youth.

In her first dream, Verochka dreams that she is locked in a damp, dark basement. And suddenly the door swung open, and Verochka found herself in a field. Then she dreams that she is paralyzed. And someone’s voice says that she will be healthy, as soon as He touches her hand. Verochka stood up, walked, ran, and again she was on the field, and again frolicking and running. “But here is a girl walking across the field - how strange! Both her face and her gait - everything changes, constantly changes in her.” Verochka asks her who she is. “I am your groom's bride. My suitors know me, but I am not allowed to know them; I have a lot of them". - “But what’s your name? I really want to know,” says Verochka. And the girl answers her: “I have many different names. Whoever needs to call me, I tell him that name. You call me love for people.” Then she gives instructions to Verochka - so that she lets everyone out and treats them, just as she cured her of paralysis. “And Verochka goes through the city and releases the girls from the basement, treats them for paralysis. Everyone gets up, walks, and they are all back on the field, running, frolicking.”

This dream is actually an allegory, and the thinking public of that time, able to read between the lines, found specific images and even calls to action in the text. The girl Verochka met personified the future revolution, and her suitors were revolutionaries ready to fight for the reconstruction of life.

The fourth dream paints a utopian picture of the life of a future socialist society, a real earthly paradise. In this ideal world, unprecedented luxury reigns, workshops operate, for some reason aluminum (a precious metal for that time) predominates, and everyone is happy in free labor. Fantastic descriptions of the future clearly highlight the main idea of ​​the novel: all this will easily come true in the near future, you just have to trust Rakhmetov and together “make” the revolution according to recipes taken from Vera Pavlovna’s dreams.

Unlike Goncharov, who showed in the chapter “Oblomov’s Dream” his ideal of Russia with all its troubles and weaknesses - that ideal that was turned not to the future, but to the present - Chernyshevsky in Vera Pavlovna’s dreams denies the very possibility of building a just society on basis of the tsarist regime. It seems to him that only uprising and revolution can bring happiness. But it was a utopia, and the Bolshevik party, half a century later, having attempted to build a just society according to the plans of the utopian socialists, was ultimately forced to admit its mistakes.

Dreams in foreign literature

A dream that gives freedom

Russian literature of the 19th century influenced the development of the entire world culture. Writers such as Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov became widely known in all countries of the West and East. The Japanese writer Akutagawa often said that Gogol and Chekhov had the greatest influence on his work. In his story “The Dream” (1927) we see a clear influence of Gogol’s stories of the St. Petersburg period. For example, in the story “Nevsky Prospekt” the fate of the artist is traced - and in the story “Dream” the main character is also the artist.

Akutagawa traces his relationship with his model, who surprises the artist with her indifference to everything that surrounds her. At some moments she irritated him. “Half a month passed, and the work did not progress at all,” says the writer on behalf of the artist. “Neither I nor the model revealed to each other what was in our hearts.”

One day, when she left, the artist began to leaf through Gauguin’s album and look at reproductions of paintings he painted in Tahiti, and soon he began to repeat one phrase: “This is simply unthinkable!” He understands that, compared to Gauguin, he lacks the means of expression to show something special, inherent only to his strange model. The day was hot, and he felt sleepy. The artist dreamed that he was strangling his model and at the same time experiencing a feeling close to satisfaction. He saw that her eyes were closing, and it looked like she was dead. The dream alarmed the artist, and his anxiety intensified even more when she did not come to pose in the evening.

He thought: “Last night in my sleep I strangled a woman. Well, what if it’s not in a dream?” She didn’t come the next day or the day after. The artist went in search of her, and when he was walking along one of the streets, he suddenly remembered that he had already seen this in a dream. And then the memories of the previous dream were completely erased. Akutagawa ends his story with a mysterious phrase: “But if anything happens now, it seems to me that it happened in that very dream...”

Our whole life is a dream, and if the artist and the model do not feel interest in each other, then all their relationships are lifeless, and life itself is illusory. In real life they have to observe some standards of decency, control their feelings and thoughts, but a dream gives the artist complete freedom, and he does something that he would never dare to do in real life. Or maybe his secret intentions entered the consciousness of someone else through a dream, and he carried out the artist’s secret intention? In the death of the model, his subconscious seems to justify the powerlessness of his talent, which is incomparable to the power of Paul Gauguin's talent.

Unlike Russian writers, who viewed a dream as an allegory, an allegory, simply a literary device for a more original expression of their thoughts and feelings, the Eastern tradition, and in particular the literary tradition of Japan, was based on Buddhist ideas about the world around us. For a Buddhist, human life is only a brief moment of embodiment of the eternal life of his soul. And therefore, every human life is just an illusion that is generated by human consciousness. What is a dream and what is life? The Buddhist tradition equates them - in contrast to the Western tradition, which extols the creative mind of man and his ability to transform and subjugate the world around him.

The palace that I dreamed about twice in 500 years

World literature of the 20th century, rejecting the old school of “critical realism,” created new systems of methods and techniques that were no longer reduced to elementary life-likeness. Latin American literature has given readers unsurpassed examples of so-called “magical realism.” One of the most prominent representatives of the new trend was Jorge Luis Borges.

He was born in 1899 in Argentina, but spent his youth in Europe, where in the early 20s he became close to a circle of young Spanish writers who called themselves “ultraists.” Having started with poetry, Borges essentially remained a poet forever. In his own way, Borges achieves the same thing that other Latin American writers - Amado, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar - achieved; the only difference is that their fantastic reality is fed by myths and folklore, and Borges, who worked since the mid-50s as the director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, drew his stories from thousands of books, and every time the fiction in his stories was perceived as pure truth .

In his prose, the real and the fantastic are reflected in each other, as in mirrors, or imperceptibly flow into each other, like passages in a labyrinth. “When reading his stories, I remember A. Akhmatova’s line: “Only a mirror dreams of a mirror...” Borges’ stories also often seem like dreams: after all, real people, well known to us, usually act in dreams, but incredible things happen to them. Mirror, labyrinth, dream - these images are especially loved by Borges.”

In the story “Coleridge's Dream,” Borges writes that the English poet Coleridge dreamed of the lyrical fragment “Kubla Khan” on one summer day in 1797. Sleep overcame him while reading the encyclopedist Parches, who spoke about the construction of the palace of Emperor Kubla Khan, whose fame in the West was created by Marco Polo. In Coleridge's Dream, a text read by chance began to grow; when he woke up, he thought that he had composed - or perceived - a poem of about three hundred lines. He remembered them with amazing clarity and managed to write down this fragment, which remained in his writings.

The poet had this dream in 1797, and published a message about it in 1816. Another 20 years later, the first Western translation of Rashid al-Din’s “Summary of Stories”, dating back to the 14th century, appeared in fragments in Paris. On one of the pages it was written: “To the east of Ksamdu, Kubla Khan erected a palace according to a plan that he saw in a dream and kept in his memory.”

A Mongol emperor in the 13th century dreams of a palace and then builds it according to his vision; in the 18th century, an English poet, who could not know that this structure was born of a dream, dreams of a poem about this palace, which was recently destroyed. Reflecting on this coincidence, Borges wonders: “Could Coleridge have read a text unknown to scholars before 1816?” And here Borges says that for him, hypotheses that go beyond the rational are more attractive. Why not assume that immediately after the destruction of the palace, the soul of the emperor penetrated into the soul of Coleridge so that he would restore the palace in words more durable than marble and metal.

The first dream brought the palace into reality; the second, which took place 500 years later, is a poem inspired by the palace. Behind the similarity of dreams, a certain plan was visible; the huge period of time speaks of the superhuman character of the executor of this plan. “If this scheme is correct,” writes Borges, “then on some night, from which centuries are moving us away, a certain reader of “Kubla Khan” will see a statue or music in a dream. And this person will not know about the dreams of two people who once lived, and perhaps there will be no end to this series of dreams, and the key to them will be in the last of them...”

In this story by Borges, the dream is considered in a new quality, which we have not seen in any of the other writers. The dream is used in the story as a means of adding intrigue and entertainment to the story. On the other hand, "Coleridge's Dream" is an example of real intellectual prose, in which an important place is given to the communication of new and interesting information. The interesting thing about the story about two dreams is that through them there is a transfer of new facts and knowledge, which are entertaining in themselves.

Works of literature have always reflected the time in which they were created. Using the example of Zhukovsky’s ballad “Svetlana,” we saw how the poet, for the first time in the history of Russian literature, turned to the traditions of Russian folklore. Svetlana's dream is an amazing combination of the views and opinions of romantic poets with those ideas and beliefs that were characteristic of folk culture.

The theme of traditional folk culture was further developed in Goncharov’s works. Oblomov's dream is a challenge to the entire intelligentsia of that time, who believed that Russia should follow the Western path of development. Oblomov's dream is, if you like, a hymn to the traditional way of Russian life; This is a document that accurately reflects that era.

In their disputes, Slavophiles and “Westerners” contrasted Oblomov’s dream with Vera Pavlovna’s dreams. Unlike Oblomov, Chernyshevsky’s heroes see the happiness of their people in waking up from a centuries-old sleep and taking the path of a revolutionary transformation of the surrounding reality. A dream in the novel “Oblomov” looks like a means of reflecting reality - and, conversely, in Chernyshevsky’s novel “What is to be done?” Vera Pavlovna's dreams were perceived by the reading public of that time as a call to actively invade the surrounding reality and remake it to suit their own views and ideas. We can say that Vera Pavlovna first dreamed of the revolutionary experiments of the communists, and some of her dreams turned into a real nightmare for Russia.

Unlike the Western tradition, in the East the creative will of man has never been placed in first place. The world around us may ultimately turn out to be an illusion, but the dream that the writer tells is the real reality. Using the example of the work of the Japanese writer Akutagawa, we could see exactly this.

In modern culture, the principle of diversity is recognized as dominant. Every national culture has things of global significance. As entertaining as Borges’ story “Coleridge’s Dream” was, we couldn’t help but notice that the author showed a sincere interest in the culture of ancient Mongolia. The same image appears in dreams to different people from different centuries and different countries. This is an activity that is equally interesting to residents of Argentina, England, France, Russia, and Mongolia.

Thus, we are convinced that different eras, poets and writers used the phenomenon of sleep in different ways in their work. Turning to dreams, poets and writers sought to express their innermost thoughts and feelings; sleep helped them in moments when ordinary means of expression did not produce the desired effect. And there is no doubt that the theme of dreams and visions will be further developed in the works of modern writers. A dream is always an attempt to look into the future, or, as the philosopher said: “In dreams, a person prepares for the future life.” This, in our opinion, determines the demand for the theme of sleep in fiction.

So, in this work, five works of domestic and world fiction were considered. A comparative analysis of literary texts shows that dreams and daydreams can be used by poets and writers to solve a variety of goals and objectives.

Firstly, a dream can act as a means of reflecting reality - we could see this in the example of Oblomov’s dream. Secondly, a dream can reflect fantastic dreams, far from reality, when true happiness lies in awakening. This is exactly how Zhukovsky’s ballad “Svetlana” is perceived. Thirdly, a dream can be used as an allegory, an allegory (four dreams of Vera Pavlovna in Chernyshevsky’s novel “What is to be done?”). Further, using the example of Akutagawa’s work, we saw that in the Eastern tradition, sleep and life are just an illusion generated by our consciousness, and such a view has every right to exist in the conditions of the current multipolar world. And finally, the dream in the works of Latin American “magical realism” is considered as a means of adding additional entertainment to the text.

These are the main conclusions that we come to as a result of a selective analysis of works of fiction.

Working on this topic helped the author overcome the established idea that sleep is simply a physiological state in which we find ourselves every night, and dreams are present in our minds only so that we can interpret them with the help of all kinds of fortune-telling books and dream books. The method of using sleep by writers became obvious, and in addition - its significance for a particular work, when through a dream the character of the hero, his innermost thoughts, feelings and desires are revealed; the dream acts as a mirror reflecting the soul of the hero.

An appeal to the best examples of fiction of the past and present clearly convinces us that dreams are an eternal mystery and riddle, and in order to comprehend them, it will take centuries and millennia. Our work is only an attempt to penetrate into this problem, but it also made it possible to identify significant things both for the understanding of literature and for the worldview in general.

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(1828 - 1889), which was written within the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg from December 1862 to April 1863, during the writer’s imprisonment for political reasons.

The novel describes four dreams of Vera Pavlovna (the main character of the novel). Dreams have symbolic meaning.

The first dream about women's liberation.

Vera Pavlovna is freed from the damp, dark basement in which she was locked. She found herself in a field, running and frolicking. She encounters Love for people in the form of a woman. After a conversation with this woman, Vera Pavlovna frees the other girls locked in the basements.

The second dream is about real dirt, which is good, from which a harvest is born, and about rotten dirt, which does not give birth to anything. About the importance of work and movement. About good and evil people.

The third dream is about Vera Pavlovna’s diary, from which she understands that she loves Kirsanov, and not her husband (Lopukhov).

The fourth dream is about people of the future, about the eras of human development.

Heroes of the novel

Vera Pavlovna

Vera Pavlovna Rozalskaya is the main character of the novel. She grew up in St. Petersburg in a multi-story building on Gorokhovaya Street. From the age of twelve she attended a boarding school. Vera Pavlovna learned to sew well early. Already at the age of fourteen she sews for the whole family, and at sixteen she begins to give lessons herself at the boarding school. Vera Pavlovna is cheerful and sociable.

The bourgeois atmosphere in her home oppresses Vera Pavlovna. Wanting to leave home, she marries her brother’s teacher, Lopukhov, who loves Vera Pavlovna. They live like brother and sister, in different rooms.

Vera Pavlovna opens a sewing workshop, which soon became a very successful enterprise. Profits in the workshop are distributed among the workers.

Vera Pavlovna falls in love with Lopukhov's friend Kirsanov, who loves her mutually. Lopukhov frees her from family relationships and Vera Pavlovna finds her happiness with Kirsanov.

Kirsanov

Kirsanov Alexander Matveich is the second husband of Vera Pavlovna, a friend of Lopukhov. Kirsanov has “brown hair of a rather dark shade, dark blue eyes, a straight Greek nose, a small mouth, an oblong face of remarkable whiteness.” He has great physical strength.

Kirsanov is the son of a scribe of the district court. From the age of 12, he helped his father with copying papers, and from the 4th grade of the gymnasium he began giving lessons. Kirsanov graduated from the Medical Academy, works in a hospital and heads the department.

Kirsanov falls in love with Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov's wife at that time. He finds a reason and disappears from their house for a long time, afraid to disturb the peace of his friend’s family. After some time, Kirsanov returns to cure Lopukhov of his illness. At this time, they became close to Vera Pavlovna and love arose between them.

Lopukhov frees Vera Pavlovna from marriage. At the end of the novel, Kirsanov and Vera Pavlovna get married and live happily.

Lopukhov

Lopukhov Dmitry Sergeich is the first husband of Vera Pavlovna, a close friend of Kirsanov. Lopukhov is the son of a Ryazan landowner. He graduated from high school and earned money by giving lessons.

Lopukhov fell in love with Vera Pavlovna and achieved marriage with her. They live like brother and sister, in different rooms. Before his marriage to Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov studied at the Medical Academy. After marriage, he was forced to leave his studies without receiving a diploma.

Over time, Lopukhov realized that Vera Pavlovna loved his friend Kirsanov. Then Lopukhov imitates suicide and leaves for America, freeing Vera Pavlovna from her marriage. After the marriage of Kirsanov and Vera Pavlovna, he returns under the name of Charles Beaumont and marries Katya Polozova. Lopukhov reveals his actions to his ex-wife and friend. Both families settle nearby.

Rakhmetov

Rakhmetov comes from a noble, wealthy family. Despite this, he leads an ascetic lifestyle. Rakhmetov leads the most severe lifestyle, strengthening his body and willpower. Rakhmetov even slept on nails to strengthen himself.

Mertsalov Alexey Petrovich

A priest, an acquaintance of Lopukhov. Completed a course at the Theological Academy. Mertsalov's father is a sexton in a provincial town. My father did bookbinding and often drank. There was always a shortage of bread in the house. Mertsalova’s mother made money by renting out her apartment to seminarians.

Rozalskaya Marya Aleksevna

Mother of Vera Pavlovna. He makes money by depositing money. She dreams of marrying her daughter to a wealthy man in order to get rich. Rude, has a domineering character. Tyrannizes her husband and daughter.

Storeshnikova Anna Petrovna

Mother of Mikhail Storeshnikov. The owner of the house where Vera Pavlovna's family lives. She was against the marriage of her son Mikhail with Vera Pavlovna, considering it unequal.

Composition

G. N. Chernyshevsky’s novel “What to do?” unique not only in ideological and thematic terms, but also in compositional terms. In this work, the writer expressed his ideals of a bright future, contrasting them with the harsh and unfair present.

Chernyshevsky expressed his cherished thoughts and ideals in the dreams of Vera Pavlovna. They mixed the real and the fantastic. Dreams are not just extra-plot “insertions” and “episodes”. In total, there are four dreams of the main character in the novel.

In the first two dreams, the plot about Vera Pavlovna’s relationship with “vulgar people” from the old world is completed. It also traces the heroine’s transition into the “society of pure people.” In the third dream, the plot about Vera Pavlovna’s second marriage is psychologically substantiated, and in the fourth, the spiritual, social and philosophical world of the heroine is revealed.

“Dreams” by Vera Pavlovna are presented in two varieties. In one case, these are symbolic pictures denoting the connection between the personal liberation of the heroine and the liberation of all the girls from the “basement” in general (“Verochka’s First Dream”), women’s emancipation and the social renewal of all humanity (“Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream”). In another case, there is a retrospective presentation of events that influenced the heroine’s worldview and psychology. It is through “The Second Dream of Vera Pavlovna” that the reader learns about the disputes in the Lopukhov circle over the natural science works of the German chemist Liebig, about philosophical discussions, about the real and fantastic desires of people, about the laws of historical progress and the civil war in America. At the home youth “university,” having internalized the idea that “life has labor as its main element,” Vera Pavlovna decided to organize a labor partnership of a new type.

In all the heroine’s dreams, the behavior of people in a state of sleep is psychologically explained: the reflection of real events, conversations and impressions in fantastic images, the shift of temporal and spatial boundaries. Therefore, the symbolic image of “the bride of her grooms” looks quite natural in Vera Pavlovna’s dream. It first appeared in a conversation between Lopukhov and Verochka during a quadrille with her younger sister, “Bright Beauty” (“The Third Dream of Vera Pavlovna”, the first part of “The Fourth Dream”).

Thus, the story of Vera Pavlovna’s first and second marriages, the love and happiness of a young woman is given along with the story of her spiritual development. The culmination of this development is the practical activity of the heroine: the organization and leadership of a labor commune. What inspired Vera Pavlovna’s second dream? Why did she dream about Lopukhov’s conversation with Mertsalov about different conditions for the growth of wheat? How can we explain the author’s predilection for the word “dirt”? Why was there a rethinking of this word “real dirt”, “fantastic dirt”?

To find out the origin of this “dream”, it is necessary to remember how the heroine’s day turned out the day before. In her “dream” the experiences of the previous day and conversations in the “society of pure people” were intricately intertwined: disputes about Liebig’s book about the real and fantastic desires of people, the laws of historical progress and the civil war in America.

Everything that Vera Pavlovna sees in her dream is primarily inspired by Justus Liebig’s book “Chemistry as applied to agriculture and physiology” and his other works. After all, the day before Lopukhov and Mertsalov argued so passionately about the chemical foundations of agriculture according to Liebig’s theory! That is why Vera Pavlovna dreamed that Alexey Petrovich and her husband were walking across the field and talking about the clearing, about the dirt, about the roots of the ears of corn, about the elements of rottenness and drainage.

Vera Pavlovna heard all this the day before. And the flavor of a scientific conversation is conveyed in her dream very accurately. Definitions such as “real dirt”, “fantastic dirt”, “fantastic rottenness” are introduced into conversation as “scientific terminology” by Alexei Petrovich Mertsalov.

In general, in Vera Pavlovna’s dream, the roles of her friends are interestingly distributed. Lopukhov argues in the spirit of Liebig about the specific issues of growing wheat, and Mertsalov comments and translates this specific “agricultural” conversation into philosophical language. For him, ordinary dirt turns into “real” and “fantastic” dirt.

Thus, Chernyshevsky chose a convenient form to talk about the social composition of Russian society, which is sharply divided into rich and poor. The result is the following comparison: good soil (“real dirt”) is a healthy life for working people (“... life has labor as its main element, and therefore the main element of reality is labor, and the surest sign of reality is efficiency”).

Just as good soil (“mud”) under appropriate conditions (warmth, sun, irrigation) can grow a good ear of wheat, so the conditions of working life provide a solid basis for the normal development of society and high moral and psychological qualities of a person. And vice versa, the absence of work in people’s lives is an unhealthy, unnatural, fantastic phenomenon.

An example of a dream in which a utopian bright future is expressed is the heroine’s last dream. She sees a completely different world, in which everything is subordinated to common interests.

There is no family or property in this world. Vera Pavlovna sees in front of her a huge building, standing “against the backdrop of fields and meadows, gardens and groves, with wide galleries, huge, magnificent halls, capable of accommodating thousands of visitors both during lunch hours and during evening rest.” There are fountains, greenhouses, glass, an orchestra, a choir, singers, varied and rich costumes of guests, and a magnificent dinner table all around.

All these festive details in the picture of the future life of ordinary people who know how to work and relax after a hard day today seem strange, idyllic, impossible. But the writer believed in the possibility of this future and tried with all his might to bring it closer. He said: “The future is bright and wonderful. Love him, strive for him, work for him, bring him closer, transfer from him to the present, as much as you can transfer..."

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