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 to other issues, such as beauty and ugliness, life and death, order and chaos, eroticism, the relationship of people with nature and the Mountain, the mysterious in general, the place of the person in the world. Lidiya Slobozhaninova summarizes that some parts of "The Malachite Box" "become outdated, but others gain new meaning". The stories from the collection inspired numerous adaptations, including films, radio and stage adaptations. The Soviet poet Demyan Bedny was so impressed with the tales that he decided to adapt them into poetry. He began the work on 27 June 1939 and adapted the 14 original stories