Man With a Box

Pavel Bazhov, born 27 January 1879

For several generations, the works of Pavel Bazhov were a feature of Soviet childhood. In the early grades we read his tales (or abridged versions), which were labeled with the somewhat confusing term skaz, a genre we vaguely understood as being related to the words skazat (to say), skazka (fairy tale), and rasskaz (short story). These stories took place in the faraway Urals, in seemingly fairy-tale mountains where people – Danila the Master, Stepan, and others – worked wonders with stone. They went out into the fairy-tale mountains to look for stones and met magical beings there. The most impressive of these was the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, who sometimes seemed beautiful and sometimes evil. She might even have been a serpent.

Danila, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, Stepan, and Stepan’s daughter Tanyushka all appeared in illustrations in children’s books, and there were also plenty of films – with actors, animation, or puppets – or you could put filmstrips, called diafilmy, into a special projector that could be easily set up in a kindergarten, school, or even at home. These filmstrips were sold in little boxes, and they had pictures with lines from Bazhov’s stories. Parents would turn a little handle and the wondrous stone flowers that Danila the Master was dreaming of making would show up on the screen, which was usually just a sheet hung on the wall.

Truly lucky children were taken to the theater by their parents to see Prokofiev’s ballet, The Stone Flower, and older children might listen to the opera, the tone poem, or orchestral suite. When Kalininsky Prospect sprung up in the center of Moscow, its monstrous girth (which earned it the nickname “Broadway”) displacing what had once been charming Arbat alleyways, there appeared a large jewelry store named after Bazhov’s best known skaz: The Malachite Box, a collection of stories that few read from start to finish and fewer still understood.

Pavel Bazhov had a complicated and eventful life. During the first twenty years of Soviet rule he served the government faithfully: he fought in the Civil War and went underground when the Whites came to his native Urals. He coordinated the actions of guerilla detachments, put down uprisings against the Reds, organized a congress of district soviets, and expropriated grain when the party ordered prodrazvyorstka – a slightly euphemistic term for the policy of seizing grain from the peasants who grew it, the first step toward collectivization. He also created courses for schoolteachers, published a newspaper, and collected folklore.

One of his regular occupations was defending himself against various accusations and denunciations. He was in a precarious position, since before joining the Bolsheviks in 1918 he had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party – a political black mark on his resume that put him in increasing danger as the Stalinist regime continued to widen its net and cast for more and more enemies.

Mark Lipovetsky, a literary scholar who has been studying Bazhov’s works from a completely new perspective, offers a story told by the writer’s grandson, the eminent economist and reformer Yegor Gaidar:

In 1938 he was expelled from the party and fired from his job. He received a summons from the NKVD to appear at such-and-such an office. Clearly, nothing good could be expected from this summons. My grandmother prepared Pavel Petrovich an “arrest suitcase.” They hugged, bid one another farewell, and he left. He sat himself outside the office. An hour passed, and then another. The day was coming to an end and he still had not been called inside. Some might have started to thrash about, stick their head into a neighboring office. But grandfather was a wise man. He quietly took his little suitcase and went home to 11 Chapayev Street, closed the gate, and didn’t go outside for more than a year. He dug around in the garden and spent his evenings going over his papers: since the twenties he had been gathering folklore from the Urals. My grandmother didn’t leave the house either. Grandmother’s sister also lived there, Natalya Alexandrovna, a teacher – she became their “connection to the world.” They hunkered down, living on their garden and Natalya Alexandrovna’s tiny salary. Later it turned out that this had been the right decision. That was when the repressors began to turn on themselves, and the agents who carried out 1937 began to be arrested. Bazhov was lost in the shuffle and wasn’t about to point out the oversight. The papers that grandfather had been working on were put together into the famous Malachite Box. Bazhov essentially wrote it during the year and a half he was waiting to be arrested.

After The Malachite Box was published, Bazhov’s life changed dramatically. Like most people in the Soviet Union at the time, he probably still worried about being arrested, but just a year later, in 1940, he found himself serving as head of the Sverdlovsk writers organization, and later he was elected to the Supreme Soviet, twice. Better yet, in 1944, toward the end of the war, Skazy, based on his Malachite Box, was staged at one of Moscow’s premier theaters, the Maly. Right after the war, in 1946, the renowned director and storyteller Alexander Ptushko, turned The Stone Flower into a film, with Danila the Master played by the heartthrob Vladimir Druzhnikov and the Mistress of the Copper Mountain by Tamara Makarova. It even won an award for Best Color at Cannes.

Bazhov, of course, never got to Cannes, but at least the Soviet people now all knew about Danila the Master and The Stone Flower, and Bazhov’s tales began to be studied in schools, read to children, and praised to the skies. Kirill Molchanov turned The Stone Flower into an opera. When Bazhov died in 1950, an object of universal affection, statues of him were erected. Unlike many Stalin-era writers, his popularity continued after the dictator’s death and persists to this day. Why?

It is easy to understand how Bazhov first became popular: he was fortunate to be producing something that fit into a niche the authorities wanted to fill. What they wanted was an art of the people, folklore. But the problem with folklore was that it consisted of rural tales, peasant songs, and traditions grounded in superstition. Where was the folklore of the working class, hegemon of the revolution? Out of nowhere came the skazy being told by workers in the Urals.

Later Bazhov explained that skaz was a literary technique and claimed that he never hid the fact that he wrote The Malachite Box himself rather than recording folk tales – but it was too late. The Malachite Box had already been turned into what Mark Lipovetsky wittily dubbed “fakelore” – manufactured folk stories that happened to be perfectly crafted to serve both the public’s reading pleasure and the official agenda.

The sinister and intriguing Copper Mountain, over which the Mistress reigned from her stone palace, and the magical beings encountered by anyone who wandered too far into its depths, the faithful wives and sweethearts brave enough to fight for their beloveds after they fell under the Mistress’s spell, love, devotion, and the struggle for happiness – all this gave The Malachite Box something that was missing from the Stalin era’s other pseudo-folk works, which felt cold and lifeless. Bazhov’s narratives radiated warmth.

For decades, Bazhov’s skazy were treated as nothing more than children’s tales worthy of a footnote in any discussion of folk literature, but then suddenly literary scholars began to see his works in a completely new light. In his remarkable The Sinister in Bazhov’s Skazy («Зловещее в сказах Бажова»), Mark Lipovetsky not only categorized The Malachite Box as work of “Soviet Gothic” (even comparing it with Harry Potter), he argued that the atmosphere of fear reigning in many of the tales reflected the horror Bazhov himself – and many of his readers – felt during the Stalinist Terror. The mysterious and infernal forces that swept up anyone who wandered into the Copper Mountain felt very familiar to people in the thirties and forties, so they could easily identify with the plights Bazhov’s characters endured. Lipovetsky also found sexual undertones in The Malachite Box, something taboo in Stalinist culture, as well as a Freudian fear of death and antipathy toward the powers-that-be. In short, he found the false bottom in a box that had seemed like a clunky old antique.

Who knows? Perhaps we can look forward to some completely new cinematic and stage productions, where The Stone Flower will once again glow with a whole new fire.