The Origins of the Personal Type of Narrative in D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak’s Shorter Prose

Abstract

Based on D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak’s shorter prose (essays, stories), the author distinguishes various types of narrative, i.e. first and third person narration and a personal type of narration. In several stories of the essay type, special markers of the presence of the personal narrator stand out expressed in characteristic motifs of admiration, interest, and curiosity. The author proves that during the period of the so-called “second debut” (1881–1882), Mamin began with the development of the form of a personal narrator, most characteristic of the genre of the essay, and gradually switched to the auctorial type of narrative, typical already of the genre of the story and assuming the form of an objective narrator author. It is also noted that in the form of an auctorial narration, Mamin successfully mastered the device of non-personal direct speech, or the speech interference of the character and the narrator author, which brings us to the rudimentary forms of “personal” narrative. From about the mid-1880s, the tendency towards a personal narrative became apparent, which is most noticeable in the stories Korobkin, Doctor Osokin’s Amendment and Simply, which focus on the state of the split consciousness of the character who finds himself in a situation of “man in front of a mirror” (M. M. Bakhtin) and acts as a direct subject of cognition. In the works of the same period (stories Between Us, The Old Fife, and others) a personal type of narration emerges clearly, which continues logically in the stories of the 1900s (Influenza. Monologue, A Dumpling and a Blot). The writer pays attention to the situation of the relationship between the character and the stereotyped nickname imposed on him, a certain “foreign” word-nomination, which leads to an increase in the act of self-awareness of the character and an intensification of the personal narrative. Finally, the article concludes that the development of a personal point of view in the narrative structure of the story leads Mamin-Sibiryak to the emergence of a new genre form, i.e. a personal “monologue” or “diary”, as well as to focus on the aesthetic potential of receptive poetics, which reveals points of convergence with genre variation of Chekhov’s “discovery story”.