Motif of “transparent dream” in visionary literature

The article offers a detailed analysis of dreams and visions as literary motifs, which Russian authors often presented as one category. However, other authorial traditions, from Dante and Byron all the way to the modern day, have distinguished the notions of dreams and visions. The article describes the motifs of a“transparent” or “wondrous” dream as a visionary mark in Russian prose of the XIXth and XXth centuries (Turgenev’s After Death, Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, and Pelevin’s Chapaev and Pustota).The motif of “transparent dream” emerged in the Middle Ages. The study of the XIX and XX century prose shows that the motif preserves its semantic and structural characteristics - ambivalence, constant visionary images, and the opposition between visions and ordinary physiological dreams.