THE MERCHANTS

"The house, not a carriage, owns Uncle James ..."
 Clearly, Nekrasov's s Uncle James was a born salesman. Such traders loved their job and took care of the family's professional dignity, rank, and honour. The most offensive and insulting to them was indiscriminate, obviously a bad attitude; they say, if you are a dealer, you cheat the Orthodox people and make profit and money.
   Such an assessment was particularly unsuitable for the travelling salesmen - carriers of small goods, sellers of books, lithographs and cheap popular images.
 Among them were the true devotees. "Going to the people" also took this form. A famous Russian publisher Sytin began his educational activities with just this occupation. As a boy, he worked as a travelling bookseller. A peasant and urban commoner respected an honest merchant with reverence for the trading business. Therefore, they often got on a hook to a deceiver and con artist.
   Using people's credulity, trade rogues sold damaged goods and made fun of people. These merchants treated honest traders with contempt, passing into hatred. How, they say, one can trade without cheating? On the other hand, a trader, who sells without cheating, is rapidly gaining popularity among the people and therefore getting rich quickly. Many then increased revenue and expanded the business. Others artificially slowed the business, assuming it was a sin to increase trade.      The latter enjoyed great respect among the people. Not by chance, in old epics, frequently there is a guest trader, a hero, who is rich not because he deceived and pinches pennies, but because of the breadth of his soul, honesty and athletic bravado. The Epic "Sadco" is not very similar to Lermontov's Kalashnikov. But both of them are not suspected of commercialism or soul pettiness.
 But the conscientious traders and unscrupulous traders had something in common. It was love for the trade, the desire to communicate with people through trade, the ability to make jokes, entertain, and knowledge of proverbs.
    A gloomy trader was not popular. Seller Alexander Kalabashkin traded in the village store, declaring the price of the toy roosters and adding: -"They will sing in the spring." Like Nekrasov's Uncle James, he often gave a small fairing to an orphan or weakling.
 A Russian Fair made all traders participants; it seemed to be played down the urban rich and raised the professional dignity of a temporary seller of his food and products. Then, at the end of the XIX century, merchants world-first began supplying the peasant village parvenus and bouncers that worked as the shop clerks. Many of them, coming to visit, began to look with contempt on rural labour, calling village folk clumsy. But Smerdyakov's philosophy, for a long time, could not penetrate the national consciousness; it twisted around a little.