D. N. MAMIN-SIBIRYAK AS AN AUTO-READER

The issue of a writer’s interpretation of their own works has been under study since the time of F. Schleiermacher, who considered the author to be the “first reader” of their works; he found it important to understand the concept of a work “in itself”, and “what significance it has for the entire life” of the artist. But by no means always the writer acts as a ‘first reader’ of his text, his judgements of this kind are recorded very rarely, more often we get the author’s response to his work, given later and caused by some incident. Quite often the author’s position in relation to his own work expresses the opinion of a certain writer’s circle, one should also take into account his upbringing, family environment and the context of the time. The object of attention in the article is the auto-reader’s position of the popular writer of the last decades of the 19th and early 20th century D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak. This is his creative self-assessment, ideas about the literary process, about his creative personality, his position in the literature of his time. Mamin-Sibiryak was not very fond of expressing himself about his works, repeatedly emphasised that literature interests him mainly as a source of income. In reality, however, he was concerned about both the critics’ reviews and his own status as a writer. In the 1880s he assessed himself as one of the new generation of writers and in letters to his brother tried to justify the originality of his own work. The source of the study is mainly Mamin-Sibiryak’s letters, as well as F. F. Fidler’s diaries, taken in the broad context of the statements of contemporaries and critics.