Ovids from the Province: Self-Myth-Making of Siberian Writers of the End of the 19th to the First Third of the 20th Centuries
The article deals with the life-creating self-projections to Ovid, an exiled Roman poet, that N.M. Yadrintsev and G.D. Grebenstchikoff, significant Siberian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, made. The research material includes the book Gonets. Letters from Pom-peraug by Grebenstchikoff, some of his publicist articles, including those previously unpublished, Yadrintsev's and Grebenstchikoffs letters and memoirs, and their correspondence. The author referred to the methodology of life-creating studies by Yu.M. Lotman, I. Paperno, and I. Nemirovskiy, of P. Bourdieu's sociology of literature; to works on Siberian literature and culture by K.V. Anisimov, T.G. Chernyaeva, and E.A. Makarova; to works on the literature of Russian emigration by G. Time, E.E. Anisimova. The aim of the article is to examine the mechanisms of poetics and pragmatics of Yadrintsev's and Grebenstchikoffs life-creating strategy and their self-identification with Ovid. As a result of the research, the author came to the following conclusions. In emigration, Grebenstchikoff complicated the structure of his own biographic myth as a "common people" writer by the exile motif. By entitling his main publicist book Gonets. Letters from Pomperaug, which explicitly refers us to Ovid's Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), Grebenstchikoff coded his biographic narrative by using the biographic plot of the exiled Roman poet. Self-mythologization included mediators. A.S. Pushkin could be a mediator, since he was paradigmatic for the "Ovid text" of the Russian culture of the modern history. Yadrintsev was another mediator for Grebenstchikoff. Like Pushkin, Yadrintsev experienced political repressions and thus had substantial grounds for his self-projection to Ovid, which he expressed in his pseudonym-Ovid from the Tom River. Ovid's biography in Yadrintsev's perception and viewed through the prism of Pushkin's personal mythology had a high life-creating potential. Associations with Ovid's biography for both Yadrintsev and Grebenstchikoff had a clear instrumental nature, arranging and intensifying the plot about an exiled writer. The main difference was that this plot played a minor role in Yadrintsev's biography, while Grebenstchikoff made it one of the central parts in the structure of his personal myth, created during his Siberian period (1990s-1910s): a myth of the writer from "common people" who was under continuous pressure of the hostile intelligentsia.