Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Jun 2019)
The Plot of Spiritual and Moral Transformation in D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak’s Stories
Abstract
This article describes a corpus of little-known and almost unexplored later stories by D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak (mid-1890s — early 1900s): The Man with the Past, Without Special Rights, Аround the Willow Bush, For Precious Stones, and Love of a Doll. The author demonstrates that all the stories are united by a situation of spiritual and moral crisis, existential catastrophe leading to a very problematic (basically unsuccessful) or achieved (despite all the dramatic upheavals) transformation of the character, and their resurrection for a new life. Thus, the problematic nature of the character’s personal rebirth in the story The Man with the Past is motivated by the character carrying the burden of past mistakes, and in the case of the character of Without Special Rights by the motif of “dubious paternity”. It is also noted that in the plot considered, Mamin-Sibiryak joins the perception of the mythological topos of Siberia as a place for potential “resurrection from the dead”, but immediately destroys the usual mythological model. In the two other stories, i.e. For Precious Stones (1896) and Love of a Doll (1902), with a view to mastering the spiritual and moral complex of sin, guilt, and repentance the writer directly refers to the universal situation of the “prodigal son”. Due to its parable depth and archetypical symbolism, it is this plot situation that turns out to be the most organic for the later works of Mamin-Sibiryak. The examples considered prove the involvement of the Ural writer in the mainstream of Russian classical literature, testifying in favour of a “special type of meditation on a person” (A. P. Chudakov), directly correlating with the traditional principles of Christian anthropology.
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