Abstract: The subject of the study is the ego-documents (polemical comments in the journal "Son of the Fatherland" in 1818) by V. B. Bronevsky and P. P. Svinyin – the authors of documentary travelogues about the Mediterranean campaign of Admiral D. N. Senyavin, as an example of reflection on the originality of writers' attitudes in travel notes. The purpose of the study is to determine the specifics of the author's problem in a documentary travelogue, to identify individual author's strategies in the structure of the narrative, ways of expressing the author's origin in the text. The theoretical basis of the research was the works of E.G. Mestergazi, O.V. Kublitskaya, N.A. Ermakova, A.E. Kozlov, devoted to the analysis of the narrative structure of the documentary travelogue. To understand the specifics of the ways of author's self-expression in the documentary travelogue, the following research methods are used: biographical, structural-typological, historical-literary. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the special material and the approach used: the works presented in the "thick" magazines of the XIX century rarely fall into the research field, although they often demonstrate to a greater extent both stereotypical, "fashionable" writing trends and individual authorial ones. V. B. Bronevsky insists that the subject of the narrative must absolutely coincide with the biographical author of the text, observe accuracy in the transmission of facts about the journey, describe only what the witness witnessed on a real trip. P. P. Svinyin, on the contrary, argues that the author has the right to describe not only his own impressions, but also to be guided by someone else's opinion, to convey a general impression of significant events. Using the example of the highlighted differences, it is concluded that the authors of documentary travelogues imagined the distance between the biographical author and the subject of the narrative differently, reflecting on the process of text generation.