Literary and Memorial Museum of D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak, Visim

About museum

On the western slope of the Ural Mountains, right at the border between Europe and Asia, lies the settlement of Visim, formerly the Visimo-Shaitansky factory. In 1852 a son, Dmitry, was born here in the family of the local church priest Narkis Matveevich Mamin; he later became the well-known Russian writer D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak. Dmitry Narkisovich Mamin-Sibiryak (1852–1912) is often called the "poet of the Urals." In Visim the house has been preserved in which the writer spent his childhood and youth; it was built in the 1840s. The wooden house stands on a stone foundation and has an iron roof. Its main (western) façade faces the former factory square, now Mamin-Sibiryak Street. The museum began as a small room in the district library, opened in 1959 and named the people's museum. The exhibits were mainly the writer's books, photographs and a few paintings. In 1979 a literary and memorial museum — a branch of the Nizhny Tagil museum-reserve — opened there. In 2002, on the 150th anniversary of D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak's birth, after a major renovation a new exhibition opened, awarded the Sverdlovsk Regional Legislative Assembly's "Tuning Fork" prize. The creative group's leader was the deputy for research, A.Kh. Fakhretdinova. The memorial part of the museum includes the kitchen, the father's study, a spacious living room and a child's room. All interiors were recreated according to Dmitry Narkisovich's recollections. The modest family furnishings are shown, including the much-loved bookcase, on whose shelves are not only religious literature but also works by the Russian classics. Here you can see portraits of the writer's parents, Anna Semyonovna and Narkis Matveevich, photographs of the family's friends, and the father's belongings: a skullcap and a pyx on a velvet cushion. The literary section of the exhibition is devoted to D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak's Ural-related works: the novel "The Mountain Nest", the essays "Old Perm", "From the Urals to Moscow", "Fighters" and others. In a separate small room there is an exhibition "Parish school of the second half of the 19th century."