First published in the magazine “Severny Vestnik”, 1887, No. 1. During the writer’s lifetime, it was repeatedly reprinted as part of the “Ural Stories”. The manuscript is stored in the Sverdlovsk Regional Archives. Published according to the text: D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak “Ural Stories”, fourth edition, M., 1905, vol. III, with corrections of typos from previous editions. The basis of this story was made up of real facts. Mamin-Sibiryak spoke about meeting with students at the mines during the holidays and reading natural science literature under their guidance in his memoirs “From the Distant Past,” which are distinguished by their factual accuracy. “I was about fifteen,” he wrote in his autobiographical essays “From the Distant Past,” “when I came across a new book. About ten miles from our plant there were famous platinum mines. Nikolai Fedorych, a former student of Kazan University, entered there as a manager, or, in factory terms, a trustee. Kostya and I had already wandered around the neighboring mountains with guns, visited a mine, met new people and found here a new book, a microscope, and completely new conversations. Another former student, Alexander Alekseevich, lived in the mine office, who mainly initiated us into the new faith. In the office, on a shelf, there were books unknown to us, even by name. There were botanical conversations by Schleiden, Moleschott, Vogt, Lyell, and many other famous European names. A completely new world was opening up before our eyes, vast and irresistibly beckoning us with the light of real knowledge and real science. We were simply stunned and did not know what to take on, and most importantly, how to take on it “from the very beginning”, so that later a mistake would not happen and we would not have to return to the previous one. It was a naive and happy faith in the science that was supposed to explain everything and teach everything, and the science itself was in those new books that stood on the shelf in the mine office.” In the story “The First Students,” the author expressed his warm sympathy for the progressive people of the sixties. Mamin-Sibiryak valued the ideological and moral principles of the sixties democrats. The awareness of the need to carefully preserve and develop these democratic principles was manifested in many of his works, in particular, in one of his last stories, “Mumma.”