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 showed that he used vague folkloric beliefs and molded then into an original mythology. When asked whether his early stories were closer to folklore sources, Bazhov agreed. As time went by, he became less depended on the folklore and more independent as a writer. The current consensus among the folklore specialists is that he used the fragments of legends and bound them together by his own creative imagination. The first edition of "The Malachite Box" was released on 28 January 1939. It consisted of an introduction titled "The Watchhouse on Dumna Mountain" and 14 stories, based on the oral lore