ABSTRACT
A visitor to Moscow at the close of the twentieth century, had he or she a smattering of Russian, might well have been forgiven for thinking that a number of different small books containing the words ‘the interpretation of dreams’ in their title indicated the belated promotion of Freud in Russia.1
Judging by the huge print runs, these books were among the most popular on sale.2 But though they had shared, along with Freud, the honour of being banned during the Soviet period, they owed nothing to modern psychoanalysis, belonging instead to a much older tradition of dream interpretation with its roots in antiquity. This tradition, which views dreams as a means of elucidating the future rather than as a key to the dreamer’s unconscious, to his or her emotional state, present or past, survives still in all European countries, though it no longer enjoys prestige or, in Britain at any rate, widespread support. The view that dreams can hold a key to the dreamer’s future is a commonly held assumption in Russia at all levels of society, though especially among women.
