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Dreams play an important role in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1875-77). Tolstoy opens the novel with Oblonsky's dream of a dinner party, and he highlights several climactic scenes with the dreams of Anna and Vronsky. For example, Anna reports a recurrent dream at the beginning of her adulterous involvement, and both she and Vronsky report similar dreams during the period she is pregnant, a pregnancy which eventually forces an open break with her husband Karenin. However, these dreams have not been examined from a psychoanalytic perspective. Such an examination can both reveal the personalities of the characters, who are presented as real people in a “realistic” context, and, in consequence, deepen our understanding of the novel.
When working with the dream of a fictional character, the psychoanalytic literary critic is under certain limitations. He cannot focus on what the psychoanalyst would in working with a patient's dream. For instance, transferential feelings, step-by-step associations of the dreamer, and past and current analytic material do not exist in the literary work. However, much of significance remains. In terms of the dream's emotional context, one of the foremost guidelines used in interpretation, the dream in a novel is dreamt and reported at a particular point in the action, after particular events have occurred, and at a time when the character may be grappling with a particular emotional concern. In addition, there may be day-residues; that is,