The Ural mining and factory province in the late 19th–early 20th c. literature

About the author:

Yana V. Sapsa, Postgraduate Student, Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, Ekaterinburg, Russia
yana_sapsa@mail.ru

Abstract:

In Russian literature of the late 19th–early 20th c., the Ural region is presented as a special type of Russian province: e. g., F. M. Reshetnikov and D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak describe the social and economic situation of the Urals and provide an insight into the life of the Urals workers. Many Ural writers of that period highlight the main link in the region’s economy — the factory. With the emergence of new relevant literary genre forms (stories, essays, sketches), the image of the factory becomes multifaceted, presented from different angles. The factory is now described not so much as a single organism that gives life to a huge region (e. g., Three Ends by Mamin-Sibiryak), but rather as an abandoned, empty enterprise, receding into the past (e. g., A. S. Pogorelov’s, P. I. Zayakin-Uralsky’s, and A. G. Turkin’s stories). The purpose of this article is to analyze the transformation of the artistic image of the factory in the works of writers of the early 20th c. That involves historical and literary analysis of the Ural writers’ literary work in the temporal and literary context, the analysis of mythopoetics of the artistic text, and the analysis of the literary work’s narrative structure. We analyze in detail P. I. Zayakin-Uralsky’s essay “Trapped in Iron” (1912), which presents the author’s myth of the factory and leads to the population’s ambivalent attitude towards the factory.

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