Cover for The Mistress of the Copper Mountain by Pavel Bazhov
Illustration by Vyacheslav Nazaruk
This is the story of ‘The Mistress of the Copper Mountain’ and its author Pavel Bazov, who survived Stalin’s Great Purge.
Stepan, a worker at a mine in the Ural mountains is visited by the Malachite Maid, and told to relay this message to his bailiff:
“The Mistress of the Copper Mountain orders you, ye stinking goat, to get out of Krasnogorka mine, or I shall sink all the copper in Gumeshky so deep ye’ll never find it again.”... Tell him that, and I’ll marry you!” She then changed into a lizard, and crawled up a big pile of rocks.
This is how Pavel Bazhov introduces the Mistress, his muse-like nature spirit - protector of the mountain’s precious stones and minerals, and patron of descent, working folk.
In his collection of tales from the Urals, grounded in the mining and mountain lore he heard as a child, and based on his extensive research of his people’s folklore, Bazhov created an original piece of literature that has fascinated millions.
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Once Stepan delivered the Mistresses’s command, the bailiff had him flogged and chained to a worthless part of the mine, and gave him an impossible quota to meet. Lucky for him the Mistress appeared, and while her lizards did his work, she invited him into her home, at the heart of the mountain, and offered him a dowry big enough for a Tsar.
Tempted though he was, he refused her offer of marriage, seeing as he was promised to another.
“True heart, Stepanushko,” she said. “I praised ye for the bailiff, but I have double praise for this. You didn’t snatch at my wealth, you didn’t give up your Nastasya for a maid of stone.”
As a reward she gave him a malachite casket full of jewels and ornaments of every sort, a gift for his beloved. And for him, a handful of tears that changed into copper emeralds; and one final request “Beware—see ye don’t get thinking and remembering me after. That'll be my third test.”
I wish I could tell you this was the beginning of his happily ever after, but when it comes to the Mistress, there is always a price to pay.
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At the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, Bazhov received a summons to the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB). He arrived at the appointed time, but after waiting for several hours he realised they had forgotten about him. Bazhov quietly went home and with his wife Valentina spent a year in isolation, surviving solely on her sister’s meager teacher salary.
Bazhov worked in their vegetable patch by day, composing his stories in his head, and wrote them down at night.
Some of his colleagues and contemporaries weren’t so lucky - many would’ve surely ended up in the gulag. Narrowly escaping such a fate, he created stories in which he highlighted the similarities between the suffering of miners in the era of serfdom, and the forced use of prison labour in Soviet mines.
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Back in the mine, Stepan’s bailiff continued asking him to find more and more riches, until one day the Master of the mine caught wind of this and went there himself. He promised him freedom from his serfdom, in exchange for a piece of malachite “big enough to make columns thirty-five feet long”. Stepan negotiated for the agreement to include his betrothed Nastasya, and with the help of The Mistress herself, complete his work in the mine. The malachite was made into columns which the Master gifted to the biggest church in St. Petersburg.
When Stepan left, so did the riches in the mine. He and Nastasya married, made a home for themselves, and had three children, but all the while he was rarely, if ever, happy.
His health and strength slowly went away, until one day he went hunting in the mountains and didn’t come back. People found him dead by a great rock where the Mistress first came to him, and he had a smile on his face. The copper emeralds that were in his hands, crumbled into dust. Beside him they saw a great green lizard, crying over his lifeless body.
The storyteller ends the tale by saying “That’s what she’s like, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. It’s a chancy thing to meet her, it brings woe for a bad man, and for a good one there’s little joy comes of it.”
Stepan escaped the mines, but the malachite and its Mistress fatally entered his body and mind, and kept his spirit inside the mountain for the rest of his life.
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“In Stalin’s Russia hundreds of thousands of people, deemed to be dissenting voices, were snatched up without warning, swept away to a distant realm of snow and ice. And even if some of them were returned to their homes after a decade of two, they would never be the same again.
If folktales remained important in Russian culture, it may be because the dramatic extremes of folktale, more than most supposedly realist literature, encapsulates people’s real, lived experience.”
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If you want to learn more, I recommend the book ‘Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov’, as well as the thesis ‘The Iron Bridge and Digging deep’ by Rebecca Hurst.
Join me in the next video, where I will be talking about the sequel to this tale, called The Malachite Casket, and what happened to the author after he finally left his sanctuary.
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