“In the Unity and Diversity of Artistic Traditions” (Book Review: Sozina, E.K. (Ed.) (2020) Istoriya Literatury Urala. XIX Vek: V 2 Kn. [A History of Ural Literature. 19th Century: In 2 Books]. Moscow: LRC)

Abstract

One often comes across the opinion of researchers that there are many lacunae in the history of regional literatures. Until quite recently, this could be said about the liter-ature of the Urals. The publication of the first volume of A History of Ural Literature gives literary scholars a reason to hope that, with the full implementation of the project of the Ural academic literature, many of its blank spots will be closed. It seems that at least half of these hopes have already been justified since, in 2021, the second volume of A History of the Literature of the Urals was published. It is a multi-page publication in two books, the result of many years of work by a team of Russian literary critics. The volume’s editor-in-chief is Doctor of Philology, Professor Elena Konstantinovna Sozina The idea of “crossing regional and national breeds on the basis of the literature of a certain region”, preached by the book compilers, seems extremely productive. The peculiarity of this book, as the introduction claims, is “that the history of regional Russian literature is united here with the histories of a number of national literatures of peoples who have lived in the Urals since ancient times and have a cultural, and now also administrative, autonomy within the region”. The book’s authors rightly emphasize the “social” character of the literature of the mining Urals in the nineteenth century. They write that the specificity of the Urals largely determined the characteristic feature inherent in its culture, art, literature: sociality, sometimes even sociology, manifested, among other things, in the minds of the inhabitants of the region, in their constant and persistent interest in public affairs, in their positioning of the region as working, collectivist, united by a common destiny and common interests. The publication is superbly prepared (the materials were edited by the Cand. Sci. (Philology) T.A. Arsenova) and illustrated (the selection of illustrative material was made by the Cand. Sci. (Art History) E.P. Alekseev). Thus, thanks to the efforts of the authors, we are dealing with a systematic work on the history of the Ural litera-ture of the 19th century, which will undoubtedly be addressed by both novice and expert researchers.