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PART ONE THE NIGHTMARE OF LITERATURE What is a nightmare as a psychological experience, a literary experiment and a cultural project? This threefold question of my research allows us to interpret classical texts in a new light, and also to look afresh at the role of the reader. Choosing the nightmare as a focal point for interpreting culture provides the opportunity to reconstruct the mosaic of coincidences that have led to experiments with nightmares being part of our everyday life. ‘Nightmarology’—a new perspective on the boundary between literary criticism and cultural research—reveals the connections joining literature and life, and the way in which their intersection has given rise to a new aesthetic system and a new system of values. I depart from the assumption that the nightmare is a particular mental state that differs from an ordinary dream. Thus, the main objective of my analysis is to inquire into the specific mental nature of the nightmare, rather than identify the role of dreams in psychological or physiological processes. This leaves a dilemma of how the nightmare as a mental state might be studied. What sources can be found that would allow us to come to an understanding of its mysterious nature? The nightmare’s secrets are kept by literature. If we are interested in the nature of the nightmare, why should we suppose that an ordinary neurotic patient or a student participating in a psychological experi- ment, or even an unusually talented psychologist is in a better position to accurately portray nightmares than, for example, Nikolai Gogol or Fyodor Dostoevsky? The first aim of my book is to use literary texts to study the nightmare as a mental state. However, using literature to carry out this investigation requires a new approach to literature itself. Therefore my second aim is to clarify what the perspective offered by nightmarology contributes to our understanding of literature. I will try to demonstrate that it enables us to establish the relations between writers’ intellectual projects and tasks which are rarely viewed as connected to one another, and whose works are not generally compared. A passion 2 part one for exploring the nature of the nightmare unexpectedly connects the writings of Charles Robert Maturin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Howard Philips Lovecraft and Victor Pelevin, allowing us to re-interpret their ideas and identify the continuity between them. Of course recreating the nightmare as a particular mental state is by no means a universal characteristic of all works of literature in which protag- onists have a terrible dream. Equally, this approach is even less applicable to works in which the protagonists have neither dreams nor nightmares. One cannot read Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, John Galsworthy or Emile Zola through the prism of nightmarology. These authors were writing about something quite different—they were concerned with the problems and story-lines that have been studied in detail within literary criticism: the drama of human relationships, ethical questions, problems relating to the interaction of hero and society, poet and tsar, and describ- ing social reality and its vices. Whereas by interpreting the prose of three classical authors—Maturin, Gogol and Dostoevsky, the founding fathers of nightmare literature— from the perspective of their striving to depict the nightmare and render it in fiction, we gain a new explanation of what has so far been construed as the unjustified structural clumsiness or unexplained stylistic problems traditionally associated with the works of these writers: the monstrously unwieldy composition of Maturin’s novel, Gogol’s illogical and grotesque prose, and Dostoevsky’s ‘careless style’ and repetitions. One of the reasons why to this day the writings of these authors— indeed, like the works of other writers—has not been approached from the nightmare perspective might be explained by the fact that a particular reading of their works during their lifetime has precluded any possibility of their interest in the nightmare being identified.1 Maturin’s novel was read by his great contemporary and supporter, Walter Scott, as a critique of Catholicism, while ill-disposed critics con- sidered it blasphemous and unworthy of the pen of a clergyman, a verdict which almost cost the author his position as curate. Gogol and Dostoevsky lived in the reactionary era of Nicholas I’s rule, when the true heroes of public opinion were ‘progressive thinkers’ and literary critics—Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolay Dobrolyubov, Dmitry Pisarev and Nikolay Chernyshevsky. From their viewpoint, the main goal of lit- erature was to purge society of its repulsive and unfair aspects and to summon people to the battle against social injustice. Anything in litera- ture that was not encompassed within this task evoked scathing criticism, in particular on the part of Belinsky (1811–1848), who was a literary critic .

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