The Malachite Box nuggets. The story of the brothers is continued in "The Snake Trail" (alternative translation: "The Serpent's Trail"), published in 1939. In this "skaz", a young the factory worker Stepan meets the legendary Mistress of the Copper Mountain. He passes her tests and is rewarded by a malachite casket filled with jewellery for his betrothed, Nastyona. Stepan dies, leaving the Malachite Casket to his widow Nastyona. Their daughter Tanyushka likes to play with it. With black hair and green eyes, Tanyushka does not look like her mother at all, as if she was born to different parents. When she grows up,
The Malachite Box and trauma, which Bazhov endured between January 1937 and 1938, and noted that "The Malachite Box" "is filled with unprecedented for Soviet (and especially children's) literature horror". At that time Bazhov was fired from Sverdlovsk Publishing House, where he had worked since 1931, and expelled from the Communist Party for "glorification of people's enemies" in his recent book. His past as a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and a seminary teacher was also questionable. He was once summoned for interrogation by NKVD, but luckily his investigator was arrested the day before the meeting. The author was reinstated in the