Relying on the methodology of hermeneutic interpretation and semiotic analysis, the article presents the intertextual variant of interpretation of M.N. Germanova's memoir My Treasure Casket written in emigration and retrospectively summing up the author's long and eventful life as a personality, as a famous Moscow Art Theatre actress, as a mother, as a Russian emigre preserving and representing Russian culture in exile with the intention of figuratively "handing" it to the new generations of Russian exiles who might further on bring it back to Russia. The central concept of the memoir is that of memory implicitly present in the text in a wide semiotic paradigm: from memory repository to memory-confession. It is explicated at two levels, i.e. the outer and the inner ones, the former standing for the emigre period while the latter representing the Russian years. The central conceptual image of the text - the casket as a secret repository of memory treasures - is based on the idea of personal privacy as the background and source of spiritual life. Hence, "treasures" are the metaphor representing the author's system of moral and cultural values as opposed to purely material ones and thus revealing the memoirist's axiological standpoint based on the four major factors: faith (Russian Orthodox), art, family, and Russia with Moscow as its heart. This axiology conditions the formal elements of the text, i.e., its structure, the images of "meaningful others" as well as the self-image, and the strategies the author used to construct them. Thus, the text falls into four major parts describing the author's childhood as the period pre-conditioning the whole life (Chapters I-IV), her professional life in the theatre (Chapters V-XII), her happy family life in pre-1917 Moscow (Chapters XIII-XIV), her "wandering" years during the Russian Civil War and her emigre period (Chapters XV-XIX). In the two final chapters, respectively titled "The Nocturne" and "The Last Chapter", there is no linear description of events: rather, they serve as a sort of an epilogue as well as an epistle and an axiological and somewhat didactic warning for the generations to come. The "meaningful others" present both explicitly and implicitly are Germanova's grandmother and mother - contemporary great actresses and the memoirist's teachers and colleagues in Moscow Art Theatre - her son and husband - the Muscovites and, in her emigre period, all Russian exiles of and for whom she writes her text with the intention of both having her closest circle read it and publishing it to be read by a wide audience.
