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Grenzen des Albtraums: Klaustrophobische Poetik und die Verformung der Realität in Sologubs"Schwere Träume" und Kafkas "Die Verwandlung"
This article offers a comparative reading of Fyodor Sologub’s novel Heavy Dreams and Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, focusing on claustrophobic poetics as a central aesthetic response to early modernity. Drawing on the concept of a “claustrophobic modernity”, the study examines how both authors articulate experiences of spatial compression, existential suffocation, and the erosion of subjectivity through motifs of enclosed interiors, bodily deformation, respiratory distress, and the blurring of boundaries between dream and reality. Particular attention is paid to the shared condition of imperial peripherality – the Russian provincial world in Sologub’s prose and Kafka’s Prague as a semi-peripheral city within the Habsburg Empire – where modern bureaucratic and familial pressures are experienced in condensed and oppressive forms. Rather than arguing for a direct line of influence, the article proposes a model of structural affinity, interpreting the parallels between Sologub and Kafka as symptomatic responses to a common cultural and historical crisis of the late imperial subject. Methodologically, the study combines typological comparison with an examination of the German-language reception of Sologub’s work around 1900. It argues that Heavy Dreams can be read as a precursor to the radicalization of claustrophobic metaphors later developed in Kafka’s prose, particularly in The Metamorphosis, where bodily imprisonment and spatial confinement converge into a powerful literary diagnosis of modern alienation.