Spectral Dreamer: Aleksei Remizov’s Dream Journals as Experiments in Metaphysical Communion

• In Event: Dream Records as Historical Sources and Literary Narratives

Abstract

In the summer of 1943, in the wake of his wife’s passing, Alexei Remizov revives a long dormant ritual – fastidiously recording his nightly dreams. It is not merely incidental that Remizov would find renewed interest in his dreaming life after Serafima Pavlovna’s death. Even a cursory study of the inaugural entries to his Diary of Thoughts reveals a preoccupation with the dreams in which his beloved “S.P.” appears to her grieving dreamer. Whether the vision captures an absurdist comedy-of-errors, a touching heart-to-heart, or a simple domestic trifle, Remizov’s entries are far more exacting and sensitive to detail when she appears. Though he has lost all contact with Serafima Pavlovna in waking life, Remizov appears to cling to the ephemeral kind of togetherness made possible in the arms of Morpheus.
Though it is clear that the journaling practice serves as a powerful palliative for Remizov’s grief, the author’s records raise a bevy of fascinating questions about his understanding of dreaming. What is the theory of dreamlife that undergirds Remizov’s obsessive recordkeeping? When Remizov meets his wife in sleep, just what does he think he is encountering: an embodied composite of accumulated memories? A comforting but unreal phantom of his own desires? Or, perhaps, a real transmission from her immortal soul? A careful study of Remizov’s Diary of Thoughts will not only help to answer these questions but will contribute much to enhance the author’s reputation as a brilliant, though highly idiosyncratic, theorist of dreaming.

Author

• Ben Hooyman, Columbia U