In the room of Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak’s sister, Yelizaveta, there is a half-length portrait of the industrialist Akinfiy Demidov on the wall. It was made by the artist Nikolay Utkin in 1833; the original engraving is stored in the Nizhny Tagil Museum.

The engraving displayed at the exhibition was made by the artist Mikhail Distergeft in 1979. He graduated from the Ural School of Applied Arts in Nizhny Tagil. The artist created landscapes, thematic paintings, historical portraits, monumental paintings and graphic works. In the 1970s, Distergeft helped to create an exhibition of the D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak Literary-Memorial Museum in Visim.

The Demidovs were one of the most famous and the richest families among Russian entrepreneurs. They owned several Ural plants, five family estates and six mansions, including one in Italy. The ancestor of the dynasty was the gunsmith, Nikita Demidov. Emperor Peter I liked the master’s work and in gratitude he gave him the Verkhoturye ironworks.

Akinfiy was the eldest son of Nikita Demidov. The artist Nikolay Utkin depicted him waist down, facing the viewer. He is dressed in a frockcoat with a casually protruding shirtfront; he is wearing a wig. There is an author’s signature under the drawing:

There are inscriptions in red pencil on the reverse side, made by the author of the copy, Mikhail Distergeft:

The Demidovs, their circle, and related events became the basis for Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak’s novel “Mountain Nest”. It was published in 1884, in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s magazine “Patriotic Notes” [“Otechestvennye Zapiski”].

Documentary manner was the one of Mamin-Sibiryak’s works features: the writer drew upon actual events, changed some details and turned the text into a fiction. Therefore, many characters in the novel “Mountain Nest” had prototypes. For example, the owner of the Kukar plants, Yevgeny Laptev, is Pavel Demidov, the greatgrandson of Akinfiy Demidov.