MARTYN ZADEKA: Les Arts Mimiques

"It has been largely overlooked that the textual emancipation of dreams is a process that began much earlier than the surrealist "revolution" of the 1920s. A key figure in this respect is the Russian writer Aleksei Remizov, whose first dream recordings antedate the surrealists by two decades. The goal of this article will be to determine the place of Remizov's dream-writings in the larger contexts of both classical Russian literature and the European surrealist avant-garde...Remizov's dreams constitute a sui generis phenomenon. Although they are rooted to some extent in the Russian literary tradition as a variant of Ivan Turgenev's genre of the stikhotvorenie v proze (poem in prose), Remizov's writings at the same time appear more "modern" than the surrealist dream experiments in their radical challenge to any rational epistemology. No other Russian writer has been as obsessed with dreams as Aleksei Remizov. According to Sona Aronian's count, Remizov's published work contains no fewer than 340 different dreams,(n1) In addition to his fictional dreams incorporated in novels and short stories, Remizov throughout his long life published a series of shy (dreams) which he claimed to be unadorned transcriptions of his own dreams.(n2) He always kept notepaper and pen at his bedside in order to write down his dreams immediately after awakening. Nulla nox sine somnio could have served as his motto. He declared, "a night without a dream for me is like a day lost."(n3)