Dmitrii Narkisovich Mamin, who wrote under the pseudonym D. Sibiriak, was the most significant writer from the region of the Ural mountains that separate European Russia from Siberia and a leading figure in late nineteenth-century Russian literature. His works were popular with both the general reading public and other writers. Author of fifteen novels and hundreds of stories, sketches, and tales, he was also an interesting journalist, finding his own themes and a distinctive voice. Accounts by many contemporaries attest to Mamin's important place in Russian literary life and the generally high regard in which contemporaries held his talent. In 1887 Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko wrote of Mamin's "striking store of artistic strength," his "clarity of mind," and his ability to characterize people "faithfully and forcefully." Nikolai Semenovich Leskov, attracted by the "freshness and immediacy of the writer's talent," was "ecstatic" over the novel Zoloto (Gold, 1892), and he gave the...