The genre of the dream visions in Old Russian literature (based on alphabetical patericon material)

The article examines a dream vision genre, which was very popular in the Middle Ages. In Old Russia, dream visions (also called dream allegories) used to be included into different collections of didactic material - patericons, menaia, or synaxaria. Visions analyzed in this article were taken from the Alphabetical Patericon issued in 1791. There are two types of dream visions: those of the afterlife, in which a visionist makes a pilgrimage into another reality (the realm of the dead), and those, in which the representatives of the afterlife reveal themselves to visionists (usually in their dreams while sleeping). The article demonstrates the similarity between dream allegories and fairy tales, since both genres developed from the same range of ideas about the afterlife, and use similar images and motifs (i.e. ordeals the hero undergoes, crossing the border between the worlds, appearance of a magical helper etc.). Medieval dream allegories do not belong to the fantastika in the strict sense of this term, however, they had a certain impact on this type of literature during the early modern period. For example, a literary technique, called the “the covert fantastika” by Yury Mann, obviously derives from the dream vision genre.