The Ural mountains of Mikhail Prishvin: the sun's storeroom, a new business and the tower of Babel

This article aims to provide insights into the history, dynamics, structure, motives and meanings of the Ural text by M.M. Prishvin, which resulted from his journeys to the Ural mountains in 1889, 1909, and 1931. This text acquired particular relevance in the 2010s due to the discovery of Prishvin’s legacy as a photographer and author of the eighteen volumes of Diaries (1905-1954). The integrative research methodology combines the experience of geopoetics and travel anthropology to identify the main provisions of the theory of travel in the writer’s Diaries where a journey is treated as both a biographical and literary fact. I reconstruct the history of Prishvin’s Ural text from “The Journey from Pavlodar to Karkaralinsk (Siberian Diary)” (1909); “Zavoroshki” (1913), and “Kashcheeva tsep’” (1922-1928, 1954) to the Diaries of 1931 and the essay “Ural” (“Zolotoy Rog”, 1934). In spite of a connection between Prishvin’s Ural and Siberian texts, the originality of the Ural text is manifested in its function, structure, and motives. Prishvin’s journeys in 1889 and 1909 were his own test of the Russian dream of “trying one’s luck in new places”, which resulted in his discovery of the Urals as a special environmental and geocultural space. In 1931, Prishvin observed tragic confrontation between the two Ural worlds and spaces: the richness in natural resources (the motifs of animals, stones, “the sun’s storeroom and eternal joy of man”) and building socialism, the “new business” of the Bolsheviks (the Tower of Babel).