The Vital Mission of Creative Work in Contemporary Authors’ Ego-Narratives

Abstract

This article examines literary interviews of Ural authors A. Salnikov and E. Simonova. The narrative analysis of the interview makes it possible to identify how the writer defines the writer’s mission, draw a conclusion about the strategies of public self-perception, its emotional dominants, and aspects of understanding the legitimacy of writing in the current literary process. The narrative about the author has a metatextual character, which is a result of the reconstruction of recurring (repetitive) motifs which are personally (emotionally) or supra-personally (culturally, regionally, nationally) conditioned. The “history of authorship” is enclosed in a narrative frame (the dialogue structure of the interview, non-free speaking). Speech genres of various types (“memory”, “anecdote”, etc.) freely circulate inside the interview. The writers’ narrative is interpreted as part of a “big story” about authorship told by its participants for a wide range of interested persons. The comparative analysis of the selected authors relates to the general moments of the creative fate of the writers (participants of the “Nizhny Tagil Renaissance” and, more broadly, the literary life of the Urals). The narrative frame of their interview depends on the fact of the “second debut” and puts Simonova and Salnikov in a situation of retrospective introspection. The event of entering the world of writers (the effectiveness of the event) is understood as a deviation from the natural course of things (Salnikov). Simonova’s self-perception speaks of a return to normality, to the natural existence of the creator in the world of words. The author makes a conclusion regarding the peculiarities of Salnikov’s and Simonova’s individual and creative self-mythologisation. For Salnikov, it is marginalisation: the writer mythologises the author’s path by crossing the border between the world of “non-writers” to the marginal world of poets. For Simonova, it is ironic casualisation: she deliberately denies poetic insights, giving importance to the ethical symmetry of talent and man through the development of self-depreciation traditional for Russian literature etiquette. The situation of the “second debut” (widely known among the reading public of different types), depending on different factors in each case but equally significant in the manifestation of writers in the public space, demonstrates the stability of the conditions accepted for themselves as authors throughout the creative path, is a way to establish the foundations of personal vitality.