Dreams of terror: Dreams from Stalinist Russia as a historical source

Kritika

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 793-824

  Paperno, Irina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63849259539     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: 15385000     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2006.0054     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. On various use of dreams in historical scholarship, see Peter Burke's pioneering essay, "The Cultural History of Dreams" [1973], in his Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 23-42
2. see also Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper, eds., Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2004)
3. Alain Corbin, "Dream Imagery," A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), vol. 4, 514-15
4. Reinhart Koselleck, "Terror and Dream: Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during the Third Reich" [1979], in his Future's Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 218. The phrase "dreams of terror" is Koselleck's
5. On such accounts, see Irina Paperno, "Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience," Kritika 3, 4 (2002): 1-35
6. In this and in the present study, I have been inspired by the pioneering effort to connect intimacy and terror in Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995) - hereafter Intimacy and Terror, the phrase "intimacy and terror" is Thomas Lahusen's. See xi for a comment on dreams
7. What has been largely abandoned, even by psychoanalysts, is Freud's dismissal of the manifest content of dreams as a distortion of their "true," latent meaning; his belief in the impossibility of interpreting dreams unless one has the dreamer's associations; and his insistence that the function of dreams is limited to wish fulfillment. See, for example, Melvin R. Lansky, "The Legacy of The Interpretation of Dreams," in Essential Papers on Dreams, ed. Lansky (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 3-31
8. and James L. Fosshage, "The Psychological Function of Dreams: A Revised Psychoanalytic Perspective," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 6, 4 (1983): 661
9. Loosely after Ernest Hartmann, "The Psychology and Physiology of Dreaming: A New Synthesis," in Dreams 1900-2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind, ed. Lynn Gamwell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 61-75
10. This understanding implies not that dreams are symbols, but that dreams can be experienced as inherently meaningful and symbolic. See also Harry T. Hunt, The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination, and Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9, 208, and passim
11. See, for example, Hunt, The Multiplicity of Dreams, 214
12. Both statements are from Bert O. States's remarkable study of the rhetoric of dreams, Dreaming and Storytelling (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3, 76
13. It was Foucault who insisted that dreaming is a specific form of experience and knowledge. See his "Dream, Imagination and Existence," in Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence: A Special Issue from the Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, ed. Keith Hoeller (Seattle, 1986), 43 and passim
14. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 4 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1967), 112
15. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest, trans. Jeremy L. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 219-20
16. Among others, George Steiner noted the strength of the belief in the prophetic nature of dreams in modern societies; see his "Les rêves participent-ils de l'histoire? Deux questions adressées à Freud," Les débats, 25 May 1983, 167
17. According to the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, the dream constitutes a fictional fore-runner of reality, in which, based on prior knowledge, dream thoughts "play about" with the possibilities for the future. See Christopher Bollas, Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom (Northvale, NJ: Free Association Books, 1989), 47
18. Self psychology (associated with Heinz Kohut) goes further, maintaining that, in the waking life, the reaction to dreams catalyzes self-change; the dream thus serves as a bridge to the personal future. These psychological approaches were successfully used in a historical study of revolutionary America: Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)
19. I am extending and reversing Habermas, who speaks of "the unique relation to self that resides in listening to oneself talk": "the intimacy and transparency, the absolute proximity of the expression animated simultaneously by my breath and my meaning-intention" (Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987], 176)
20. The wording is from Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 92-93
21. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 1, 273
22. For information on nightmares, I have used John Mack, "Toward a Theory of Nightmares," Essential Papers on Dreams, 344
23. Charlotte Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traumes (München: Nymphenburger, 1966; 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981 [with afterword by Reinhart Koselleck])
24. English translation The Third Reich of Dreams, trans. Adriane Gottwald, with an essay by Bruno Bettelheim (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968)
25. Biographical information on Beradt from Martine Leibovivi's preface to the French translation of Beradt's book, Rêves sous le III Reich, trans. Pierre Saint-Germain (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 2002)
26. Koselleck, "Terror and Dream," 217
27. "Afterword to Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams [1981]," in Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 335
28. After Koselleck, "Afterword to Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams," 333-34
29. L. K. Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi (Moscow: Soglasie, 1997), vol. 1, 11-12
30. English from Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals, vol. 1, trans. Milena Michalski and Sylvia Rubashova (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 5. The part of Chukovskaya's diaries that has been preserved and published is the chronicle of her friendship with Anna Akhmatova
31. Biographical information from A. S. Arzhilovskii, "Dnevnik 36-37-go godov," Ural, no. 3 (1992), 138 (published by Konstantin Lagunov)
32. hereafter Ural; English translation "Diary of Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky," in Intimacy and Terror, 111-12
33. Arzhilovsky's diary for 18 December 1936: Ural, 148
34. For Napoleon's name see Ural, 141
35. Intimacy and Terror, 115). Both this story and the record of the dream contain the word "spit" (the translation in Intimacy and Terror did not preserve it)
36. Mikhail Grobman, Leviafan: Dnevniki 1963-1971 godov (Moscow: Novoe literatutnoe obozrenie, 2002), 469
37. "'Prosti menia, Koba...': Neizvestnoe pis'mo N. Bukharina," Istochnik, no. 0 (1993): 23-24. The letter is dated 10 December 1937
38. Reported by Bukharin's wife; see A. M. Larina (Bukharina), Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow: APN, 1989), 317
39. English translation Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget, trans. Gary Kern, with an introduction by Stephen P. Cohen (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 302
40. "Prosti menia, Koba," 23-24. The Hegelianism of this appeal has been noted by Jochen Hellbeck in "With Hegel to Salvation: Bukharin's Other Trial," forthcoming in Cahiers du monde russe
41. L. G. Zorin, Avanstsena: Memuarnyi roman (Moscow: Slovo, 1997), 261
42. Jacques le Goff extended Georg Misch's notion of "oneiric autobiography" (a classic example of which is Augustine's Confessions) in "Christianity and Dreams," in le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 200. According to le Goff, oneiric autobiography is also represented in Romanticism and Surrealism
43. M. M. Prishvin, Dnevniki (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 417 (29 January 1952)
44. M. M. Prishvin, "1930 god," Oktiabr', no 7 (1989): 146, 161
45. Prishvin, Dnevniki, 209-10
46. Heinz Kohut discussed an example from the Hitler era. It concerned the Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter who, on the basis of his religious ideals, refused to serve in the German army. Describing how he came to this decision, Jägerstätter related the dream he had in the summer of 1938 (after the Anschluss): he saw adults and children who streamed toward a beautiful railroad train that circled around a mountain; very few resisted being carried along. The voice told him: "This train is going to Hell." After the dream, step-by-step, he came to the idea that death was preferable to surrender. (He was guillotined in 1943.) See Heinz Kohut, The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut, ed. Paul H. Ornstein, 4 vols. (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1978-91), vol. 3, 138-39
47. Mechal Sobel discussed this dream in her Teach Me Dreams, 10-11
48. M. M. Prishvin, "'Zhizn' stala veselei...': Iz dnevnika 1936 goda," Oktiabr', no. 10 (1993): 14
49. See the entries for 1 and 3 April 1939; M. M. Prishvin, "Dnevnik 1939 goda," Oktiabr', no. 2 (1998): 153-54
50. M. M. Prishvin, "Dnevnik 1938 goda," Oktiabr', no. 1 (1997): 130
51. M. M. Prishvin, "Dnevnik 1937 goda," Oktiabr', no. 11 (1994): 148
52. V. A. Kaverin, Epilog: Memuary (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1989), 224
53. I borrowed the phrase from Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); this study describes such Stalinist practices as "purging" and "reforging," mentioned in my article
54. I wish to thank Boris Gasparov and Alan Timberlake for linguistic commentary
55. Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2, 363. The Trial was first published in Russian in 1965
56. I used the work of the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg, "Kafka and the Dream," in Modern Literary Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Irving Howe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 197 and passim
57. Ia. S. Druskin's Son i iav' has not yet been published in full. Excerpts published in Yakov Druskin, Vblizi vestnikov, ed. Genrikh Orlov (Washington, DC: H. A. Frager, 1988)
58. The chapter containing dreams about his dead friends appeared in Sborishche druzei, ostavlennykh sud'boi: A. Vvedenskii, L. Lipavskii, Ia. Druskin, D. Kharms, N. Oleinikov. Chinari v tekstakh, dokumentakh i issledovaniiakh (n.p., 1998), vol. 1, 855-61
59. Druskin, Dnevniki (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 132
60. included in Druskin, Son i iav', see Sborishche druzei, 857. Kharms died in the prison hospital on 2 February 1942
61. Druskin, Dnevniki, 397
62. included in his Son i iav'; see Sborishche, 860
63. I could not find this dream in the published diary. It is included in Druskin's Son i iav'; see Sborishche, 861
64. Georgii Vasil'evich Sviridov, mentioned in the dream, is a Soviet composer
65. "Alles ist tot, und wir sind tot," says the German musician Lemm, a character in Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, The Nest of the Gentry (Dvorianskoe gnezdo), chap. 44
66. Druskin, Dnevniki, 249-50
67. Ol'ga Berggol'ts, "Iz dnevnikov," Zvezda, no. 6 (1990): 168
68. Alain Besançon, in Histoire et expérience du moi (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), calls prototypical literary dreams - such as Raskol'nikov's dream in Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment - "the dreams of the culture."
69. Peter Burke echoed the idea of culturally pervasive dreams in his "The Cultural History of Dreams," 29
70. Carl Gustav Jung, Dreams, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 52