The Autobiographical “I”-Narrative as a Stylistic Device in Dina Rubina’s Prose

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the family stories included in Dina Rubina’s 2024 collection, Don’t Cross Me Off the List!. The aim of the study is to explore how the writer’s autobiographical self-narrative is constructed. The author’s style of conveying memories is marked by an artistic and symbolically metaphorical representation of personal experiences. The narrative in these texts is shaped by the narrator’s exalted self-reflection, which is artistically embodied in language, allowing the narrator to be described as an accentuated personality. Fragmented family stories—involving her grandmother, grandfather, mother, and numerous relatives—reveal a prophetic meaning in which the narrator discerns the predestination of her own fate. The analysis focuses on the specifics of the narrator’s self-identification within the utterance (characterized by self-irony, melodrama, and emotionality), which reflect a distinctive style of personal self-expression. The article also examines forms of self-definition and self-realization in the narrator’s speech, particularly through the use of first-person self-address and inner speech directed at herself in the second person (“you”). This approach makes it possible to interpret the self-narrative as a confessional dialogue with one’s own personality—a personality that simultaneously enacts an ancestral program and shapes its individual identity through language. Ultimately, the image of the writer that emerges in her self-narrative largely coincides with her public media persona. However, certain deeply personal aspects of the narrator’s communicative and behavioral style can be observed, which are linked to the fulfillment of a generational program encoded in the lineage of her female ancestors.