Dreams, reality and “hallucinations” in depicting “celebrities” in “Russia in whirlwind” by A.M. Remizov

The article examines the principles of the portrayal of “celebrities”, the author’s contemporaries, in A.M. Remizov’s book “Russia in Whirlwind” (“Vzvihry-onnaya Rus’”). The main motifs associated with the images of contemporaries in connection with their depiction “in reality”, in dreams and “hallucinations” of the narrator are revealed. The main regularity revealed in the course of the analysis should be recognized as semantic and valuable “dominance” of the “layer” of dreams (the narrator’s dead friends, Blok and Rozanov, are “saved” by him by being transferred into dreams), and the main motif in the book is creative “jealousy”. As a result, contemporaries are often depicted in a reduced, caricatured form. On the one hand, there is carnivaliza-tion and some “profanization” of the images of the “living classics” (especially Andrei Bely), on the other hand, there is narrator’s ambivalent attitude towards his own friends (Prishvin, Shestov, Ivanov-Razumnik), when the feeling of gratitude is mixed with irony. However, the “jealousy” of the narrator of “Russia in Whirlwind” is not fueled by resentment, but by the energy of creative competition, prompting the narrator to improve his own artistic skills in an attempt to stand on a par with the most famous writers of his time. The appendix to the article contains a table of the main mentioned “celebrities” with their “assignment” to the “layers” of dreams, “reality” and “hallucinations”. Only mentions of celebrities by last name as the most frequent were taken into account. Although the name index to “Russia in Whirlwind” was created a long time ago, the division of names into dreams and “reality” and the subsequent analysis of the identified patterns is being carried out for the first time.