Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Sleepwalker in a Fog” or “The Life is a Dream” in a Neobaroque manner

Abstract

The proposed analysis of the oneiric elements in the early prose writing by Tatyana Tolstaya, most notably in the short story “Sleepwalker in a Fog”, attributes the highest heuristic value to the traditional Baroque metaphor “life is a dream”, and attempts to close read the text by using this premise as a focal point. The stated metaphor which, as an impor-tant vehicle for construction of narrative reality, is present only implic-itly in the text, contains two distinct semantic aspects. The fi rst can be defi ned as the claim that the protagonist observes objective reality as a dream, with disintegrated and lessened attention, passively and absent-mindedly, since he is completely absorbed in his inner life. What con-stitutes reality for him is the activity of his spiritual sphere whereas the real world looks completely unreal, as if he were dreaming about it. The metaphor “life is a dream” has, however, another meaning which can be defi ned as an observation that reality can sometimes have a dreamlike character. Hence, the protagonist is not necessarily submerged into his inner life but rather observes the external world with sharp and vigilant perception, and has a strong feeling that what surrounds him is not real, i.e. that the external reality is objectively like a dream. There is no doubt that the reality of the late socialism as described in the short story “Sleepwalker in a Fog” has a quality of a chaotic, oneiric chronotope in which events evolve incoherently, illogically, and in a dreamlike manner.