Yu. Trifonov as a Reader: Reception of His Own Texts

This article refl ects on the receptive experience of Yu. Trifonov and reconstructs the attitudes that manifest themselves in the practice of reading and rereading texts. It is proved that in reviews of previously written works, the author records a change in the moral, spiritual and aesthetic perspective of human comprehension, notices the dynamics of his own artistic conception and outlines the periodization of his work. Interviews and articles in which Yu. Trifonov evaluates readers’ reviews of his own texts allow us to reconstruct the image of an ideal reader in the author’s mind. Protesting against incorrect or inaccurate interpretations of his works by critics, the writer suggests the right path for reader refl ection and sets the right criteria for evaluating his prose. Yu. Trifonov protests against a straightened reader’s view of the text, which requires a visible form of expression of the author’s position; against excessively broad receptive perspectives; against reading-distance, when a character is perceived as “Other, diff erent from me”. The ideal reader for Yu. Trifonov is a reader who is dispassionate in his perception of the text, capable of seeing drama in the “patch of life”, open to recognizing the Other in himself and himself in the Other, capable of catching in the characters and in himself the manifestation of the phenomenon of time. The process of text reception for Yu. Trifonov-reader is not a process of meaning generation, but of meaning revelation. Approaching what the author has put in becomes for him an ethical and aesthetic criterion of (in)accuracy of interpretation and analysis.