Summer Season in the Working Settlement: From Mushrooms to People and Back. Uralmash in Fiction and Non-fiction Literature About 1930s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of several key concepts of texts on construction and the first years of Uralmashzavod work (1930s, 1960s-1970s). They are traced on the material of artistic and diary prose, memoirs and records, in which similar motives are found. Most of the texts are stored in the Museum archive and they are either introduced into the scientific discourse for the first time or it is the first time that they become the object of philological and anthropological studies. “Excluded” loci of Ovalov's novel are “filled” with memories about Uralmash, but the main memory of “first builders” involves a surprisingly large number of concepts presented in the majority of cases only by fiction. There is an attempt to trace how the chronotope and topography of the working settlement in fiction are reflected in the identity of “old-timers” corresponding to the deep needs and expectations of the factory workers. The reconstruction of the “anthropogenesis” of a “new worker”, emerging from the meta-text about the giant plant is represented alongside with the paradox of the adoption of “wild space”, which after being cleared of the forest for the construction of the plant, upon decades turned in one of the greenest areas of Sverdlovsk-Ekaterinburg.