
Émigré day-dreams: Sergey Gorny
The article deals with the phenomenon of day-dreaming as a type of memory revealed in Sergey Gorny’s books of memoirs Saint-Petersburg Visions 1925 and Things Only 1937. The major concept on which the analysis is based are those of day-dream, dream, vision, and memory. The author argues that, recalling the facts and details of his childhood and youth „as if in a dream,” „with his eyes closed,” Gorny reconstructs the long-gone reality which he nevertheless regards the only true reality as opposed to the émigré one. The concept of a dream is used by the memoirist both as a motif and as a device; hence, the general structure of the texts is that of a „dream-withina-dream.”