The dream in Valentin Rasputin’s prose
As Svetlana Semenova puts it, dreams are „Rasputin’s trademark artistic feature.” Indeed, one can hardly find dreamless pieces in his oeuvre. There are compensation and divination dreams and the protagonists seem to inhabit the middle zone between reality and dreamscape. The dreams involve visitations and translocations to other dimensions. Often they appear alongside the motif of death. The oneiric elements may function as author’s commentary, thus freeing it from the onus of overt moralising. They may determine the purpose of the events constituting the plot and leading up to a tragic finale. Combined with folklore, such as beliefs, superstitions, fortune-telling, and demonology, they put Rasputin among the authors unashamed of their folk roots and deliberately incorporating folk outlook on the world in their writing.