Dream in Prose by Gaito Gazdanov as an Anarrative Strategy

The article discusses sleep as an anarrative author’s strategy. The special role of this motif in
the writer’s metaromaniac cycle is indicated by its presence in strong positions of the text
(“Evening at Claire’s”, “The Ghost of Alexander Wolf”, “Awakening”) and the generalization
of the theme of sleep in works with stories about the Civil War and post-war emigration
(“The Prisoner”, “Return of the Buddha”). Anarrative elements that undermine the evidence
of events are described as a system of opposing the current state of affairs of eternity. In this
connection, in the first novel by G. Gazdanov, an incomplete “love triangle” is analyzed – the
absence of Claire’s husband as a motivated witness to the reliability of the narrative, “errors”
in the sequence of events, as well as a number of strange, mysterious words and expressions.
Anarrativity allows us to separate the world of becoming a narrator and the metaphysical
world of the author-creator. As a result of the structural-typological analysis, a distinction
is made between the concepts of “pre-incarnation” and “rebirth” in the writer's thesaurus. The first forms a narrative model of “catching” in the world of illusions, and it is connected
with the outlook of the heroes who have lost their native soil and are trying to overcome de-
pendence on external circumstances. Second, “rebirth” refers to the “outside” position of the
author-creator, which is attributed to the penetration of anarrative elements in novels with
traces of experience of participation in war. In later texts, anarrativity flows into narration,
and the author’s voice does not create dissonance in the discourse of G. Gazdanov’s dominant
themes: “contemplation”, “randomness of the nonrandom”, the neighborhood of “life” and
“death”, each of which intersects with the idea of a dream existence. Being a universal, sleep
(a state akin to hypnosis) turns out to be the ultimate form of contingency, a fatal trap of the
loss of selfhood, on the one hand, on the other, as a dream, it can be a mode of creative transformation of the world. As an alternative to this opposition, there is a mode of existence beyond the extremes of the thoughtless (mainly, these are the images of officers in “Evening at
Claire’s” and “The Prisoner”) or intellectually exalted (narrators in post-war novels) ways of
life, demonstrated in the active manifestation of altruism and compassion of the “average
Frenchman” Pierre (“Awakening”).