The history of Ural literature. 19th century. In 2 vols.

Abstract

The review deals with a monograph co-authored by 61 scholars from 19 research centres located in Russia and across the world. The authors chose to follow a geographical approach, counting all writers who had ever resided in the Urals and surrounding area (Western Siberia) as belonging to the region’s literature, irrespective of their ethnicity. The book discusses the history of Russian literature in the Urals in the first and second halves of the 19th c., as well as literatures created by the Bashkir, the Udmurt, and the Komi — the peoples inhabiting the Urals alongside Russians. The authors of the monograph also examine the work of exiles to the Urals, travellers’ impressions of the region, the origins and evolution of the region’s journalism, bookselling, and libraries, as well as the Urals’ most prominent writers, with the figure of D. MaminSibiryak looming large. The approach feels completely justified: we are presented with a glorious patchwork of a literary world created by Russian, Bashkir, Ukrainian and even Polish writers, whose fate brought them to the Urals.