The second volume of P. P. Bazhov’s works contains the writer’s tales (skaz), most of which were written at the end of the Great Patriotic War and in the postwar years. The volume begins with a cycle of tales dedicated to great leaders of peoples—Lenin and Stalin. Then come tales about Russian craftsmen of arms-makers, steelworkers, and engravers-casters. The theme of innovation is connected here with the theme of patriotic pride of the Russian worker who glorified his homeland through labor feats.
The narrator, as in the tales of the first volume, is an experienced, seasoned ore digger. But earlier, in this role, appeared “Grandfather Slyshko”—the “factory old man,” “worn out” on noble mines and placer fields, who even witnessed serfdom. In many of the tales of the second volume, the narrator is a ore digger of the new generation of the Urals. He is a participant in the Civil War who fought for Soviet power with a weapon in his hands, and later helped build socialist society. Telling about the past of the Urals, he speaks of the great changes that took place in the life of working people after the October Revolution.
Sometimes the tales carry the voice of the author himself, from whose perspective the story is told.