The Malachite Casket

Pavel Bazhov’s fate is a happy one. Born on January 27, 1879, in the Urals, into a worker’s family, he was—thanks to circumstance and his own abilities—given the chance to study. He finished a school, then the Perm Theological Seminary. For eighteen years he taught. He happily married his student and became the head of a large family with seven children. He welcomed the October Revolution as a way to end social inequality, fought in the Civil War on the Red side, became a journalist, and later an editor; he wrote books about the history of the Urals and collected folklore records. He always worked a great deal— as they would have said in Soviet times, he was a "rank-and-file laborer." And then, so to speak, overnight, fame came to him— and what fame it was...

In 1936, his first fairy tale, “Azovka the Girl,” was published in a journal. In 1939, the first collection of tales, “The Malachite Casket,” was released by Sverdgliz. In 1942 and 1944, a noticeably expanded “The Malachite Casket” was published in Moscow by major central publishers. He became a State Prize laureate and was awarded the Order of Lenin for his literary work. In 1944, “The Malachite Casket” was translated into English and published in London and New York, then in Prague; in 1947 it appeared in Paris. It was also translated into German, Hungarian, Romanian, Chinese, and Japanese—altogether, according to the Lenin Library, into 100 languages of the world.