The author, putting the metaphor of “a living dead” to the interpretation, tries to find the common points in the creative output of both writers i.e. Pushkin and Kharms. Both writers, belonging to extremely different literary periods and using other medium, were interested in the most important matters, among others the matter of life and death. Paradoxical metaphor of “a living dead” may imply not only a person being physically exhausted but above all a person deprived of emotions, experience and human reactions, whose fate brings nothing else but the inevitability of death. However, the matter that links both Pushkin and Kharms is the concept of “a coincidence”, which rules human fate, which is unpredictable, hard to avoid and which is a tool at hands of the providence.

The article portrays the motif of dream and its symbolic meanings in Vladimir Nabokov’s short story Terror, what has not been the subject of detailed research so far. It has been determined that the experience of dream in the analysed story denotes the protagonist’s attempt to escape from the surrounding world and a shift into the sphere of the unconscious (mysterious anaesthesia). Thus the topos of dream/dream fantasy in Terror implies the existence of a hero in a particular kind of chronotope, and is connected with the semantics of the passage – from demonic chaos and metaphysical terror to restoration of cosmic (microcosmic) order and to “becoming oneself” (Ricoeur). Moreover, dream in Nabokov’s text is intrinsically linked with the problem of compatibility/ incompatibility of the two worlds: the real and the oneiric one, existing in reality and reflected in a mirror, and also with the motif of a doppelganger which bears references to Dostoyevsky’s writings. Also, an oneiric image of a laughing woman is analysed in detail in the article. It has been proven that laugter (giggle) of the story’s heroine unveils ambivalent and demonic dimension of femininity and is a reference to Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades.

The Koran became an inspiration to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), made obvious in many of his works, such as Imitations of the Koran, The Prophet, and In a Secret Cave. Pushkin studied the translation of the Koran carefully and used many verses of its Surahs in his texts. Many of his contemporary poets and followers were influenced by his poetry, like Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), who continued the traditions of Pushkin. Bunin repeated many thoughts from Koranic discourse and placed them in his poems that were full of faith and spirituality. He wrote many of them at the beginning of the 20th century1, before his emigration to France in 1918, for example: Mohammed in Exile, Guiding Signs and For Treason. It has been noted that Bunin was quoting verses from the Koran to create an intertextual relationships between some Surahs and his poems, showing a great enthusiasm to mystical dimension of Islam. We find this aspect in many works, such as The Night of al-Qadr, Tamjid, Black Stone of the Kaaba, Kawthar, The Day of Reckoning and Secret. It can also be said that a spiritual inspiration and rhetoric of Koran were not only attractive to Pushkin and Bunin, but also to a large group of Russian poets and writers, including Gavrila Derzhavin, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Yakov Polonsky, Lukyan Yakubovich, Konstantin Balmont, and others.