Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project

Russian History and Culture #10

by Dina Khapaeva, Rosie Tweddle (Translator)

What is a nightmare as a psychological experience, a literary experiment and a cultural project? Why has experiencing a nightmare under the guise of reading a novel, watching a film or playing a video game become a persistent requirement of contemporary mass culture? By answering these questions, which have not been addressed by literary criticism and cultural studies, we can interpret anew the texts of classic authors. Charles Maturin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Howard Philips Lovecraft and Victor Pelevin carry out bold experiments on their heroes and readers as they seek to investigate the nature of nightmare in their works. This book examines their prose to reveal the unstudied features of the nightmare as a mental state and traces the mosaic of coincidences leading from literary experiments to today’s culture of nightmare consumption.

274 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Dina Khapaeva joined the School of Modern Languages in 2012. She received a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia. She studies Russian literature and culture, including the grand literary tradition and Soviet and post-Soviet fiction and film. Her research and teaching interests lie on the intersection of cultural studies, memory studies, medievalism, history of emotions, and death studies. Her most recent book project The Celebration of Death in Russia and America (forthcoming at the University of Michigan Press) compares the ways of engaging with death and representations of violent death in Russian and American popular culture.

In Spring 2016, Khapaeva lectured on Russian ideology and politics at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, France).