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DOI 10.33234/SSR.14.1
Fatima Festić
(Amsterdam/Chicago/Sarajevo)
Abstract
This text offers a comparative analysis of a lyric poem, The Dream (1841) by Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov and a short story, Dreams (1886) by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, two major Russian authors embedded in the rigid Russian imperial structures. I examine their dream concepts and figurations, and their representations of various structures that permeate the human existence and human experience of the empire, as well as their poetic irony that comes as their brink. Further, I elucidate the meaning and function of the poetics and aesthetics of the written dream in the societal and political reality of life. The texts is outlined with the paradigmatic Shakespeare’s words from “The Tempest:” “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”.
My analysis involve multiple semiotic references, specifically, a dialogue between the theories by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Samuel Weber, and more recent feminist theories by Shoshana Felman, Theresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero. Within the dynamics of the other and otherness that unfolds in any dream or awakening, any language or writing, I discuss emotional, social, sexual, spatial transferences, and the complexity of transferential structures in these two short artworks. The connective focus is the “I” of the dream, its singularity and vulnerability, which as such emphasize the concept of relationality as inherent in any dream. And further, the concept of ability which, depending on one’s circumstances, shifts from one register to another, introducing comparability as the unity of dream and life – in the sense that the realities of both are limited. Or, they are “rounded with sleep” (sur-rounded or rounded off), rounded with death, and rounded socio-historically with a cruelly variable unfairness of a position or role assigned to one’ s life.