The Emergence and Evolution of Russian Entrepreneurship in Works by Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak

The article is devoted to the history of Russian regional entrepreneurship reflected in works by Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak. It is also about his contemporary readers' attitude to his novels, stories and essays. The main periods in the writer's work were identified and marked: first, he described the life and routine of the Urals population in his essays, and then wrote the epic novel The Privalov Fortune, which made him a name among Russian writers. As a democrat writer and a follower of critical realism, Mamin-Sibiryak constantly turned to the theme of the development of capitalism in Russia and showed many aspects of this process in his works. One of the themes was the agrarian development of the country, because in the novel Bread the writer depicted the influence of capitalist relations on all aspects of the provincial life of the Trans-Urals (Zauralye). Several works by Mamin-Sibiryak tell about the mining industry, primarily about the development of veined and placer gold mines. The writer recalls the times of serfdom, when non-economic coercion was one of the main means of extracting gold. In the post-reform time, Mamin-Sibiryak describes another type of management by individuals and gold mining companies that had to resort to different ways of attracting capital to the industry and improving methods of mining the precious metal. The main sources of this research are the works by Mamin-Sibiryak, memories of his contemporaries, critical and literary articles. Additional sources were some works of historians, sociologists and literary critics that show the features of Mamin-Sibiryak's works, the evolution of the sociopsychological image of Ural-Siberian merchants during almost four decades of the 19th century. The conception suggested by Appolon Grigoryev and Dmitry Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, famous historians of literature and critics, who believed that the merchant class was an inseparable part of the people and possessed a lot of positive qualities underestimated by their contemporaries, is closest to the author's opinion. This applies to the estate as a whole, as well as to its individual representatives. Mamin-Sibiryak's works are based on a deep knowledge and understanding of the way of life and the activities of the merchant class, which became known due to many historical studies only recently. The novelist Mamin-Sibiryak showed the sprouts of new relations in the Russian reality of the second half of the 19th century, which gave positive results. The article notes that Mamin-Sibiryak first describes Russian entrepreneurship and commerce in the post-reform period as rudimentary and primitive, but later, at the end of the 19th century, changes the description and shows positive results of the development.

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