«Savage beauty and tenebrous grandeur...». A panorama of the Urals in Vasily I. Nemirovich-Danchenko's travel writings

The article is devoted to Vasily I. Nemirovich-Danchenko's book «The Kama and the Urals» («Kama i Ural», 1890) describing his travels in 1875. The Ural travelogue of Nemirovich has become an important stage in the formation of the geopoetical image of the region that was significant for Russia's history. The article explores key features of this image. The basic principle of the development of the Urals' image in Nemirovich's essays is the technique of panoraming. The panoramic effect is created not only through the unprecedented coverage of the region's area. Landscape descriptions are also constructed according to the panoramic model. One of Nemirovich's favourite techniques is to describe the surrounding countryside as if from a dominant height, which allows the author to include the adjacent territories into his itinerary. Intensive use of stories told by other narrators, especially tales of the local cultural heroes, like Yermak, the Stroganovs, the Demidovs, widens the temporal horizon of the narrative. They are mining plants that turn out to be the focus of the Ural identity in Nemirovich's essays. While describing the mining industry - mines and metallurgical processes - the author not only shows a great deal of awareness and acute observation, but also gives rein to his poetical imagination. He tells about iron recasting and steelmaking in terms of cosmogony and alchemy, and thus comes close to creating a particular mythopoetics of the Urals. The essays of V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko supplemented literary exploration of the Urals in works by D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak. Through their writings, the Urals were transformed from geographic entity into a suggestive topos of Russian literature.