The Authentic D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak: Publication Principles and the Reception of the Writer’s Oeuvre

Abstract

The editions of D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak’s works published so far, including the most representative 12‑volume collections, do not give a complete idea of the creative heritage of the writer. The article focuses on the problems of publishing the Complete Works of Mamin-Sibiryak in 20 volumes conceived based on the Bank Kulturnoy Informatsii publishing house in Yekaterinburg and carried out by the efforts of the research team of the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature of Ural Federal University in collaboration with the Centre of Russian Literature of the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The author of the article considers three large sets of problems in the realisation of the project. Firstly, they concern the principles of arranging works in separate volumes. As is customary with complete collections of works, the chronological principle functions as the dominating one but with indispensable consideration of the genre-generic specifics and Mamin’s characteristic tendency to cyclising minor prose genres. The author examines issues related to the typology of documentary and journalistic works and their differences from purely fiction texts and topical issues behind the representation of the writer’s epistolary heritage in the planned edition. Secondly, the author singles out the complexities of the textological order in a separate group examining problems of attribution of unknown texts by Mamin-Sibiryak. He also considers the problems of working with the literary texts published in the writer’s lifetime under different names and in different versions and editions. Special attention is paid to the problem of the author’s punctuation, which is significant in terms of editorial practice. Thirdly, the article considers problems of commenting and reception of Mamin-Sibiryak’s oeuvre. The author provides a typology of comments to the planned scholarly and critical publication highlighting textual, historical, literary, and linguo-culturological comments. It is noted that the issues of reception of works of art – primarily in terms of their problems and poetics – should take their rightful place in summary articles for each volume. Finally, the article provides a list of a few promising projects, for example, the Reference Dictionary (a preliminary work for the future Mamin Encyclopaedia), the virtual scholarly laboratory Mamin-Sibiryak: Materials and Research which should be considered a necessary incentive and a logical consequence of work on the complete works of the writer.