Russia – Series: Outstanding Personalities of Russia – Pavel Petrovich Bazhov 1994 Proof Silver 2 Roubles 33mm (15.87 grams) 0.500 Silver (0.2551 oz. ASW) Reference: Y# 342 ДВА РУБЛЯ 1994г. Ag 500 ЛМД 7,78 БАНК РОССИИ, Emblem of the Bank of Russia. П.П. БАЖОВ 1879-1950, A portrait of P.P. Bazhov with an opened book and some characters from his tales, to the left – a deer, to the right from top to bottom – swans, forest-covered mountains and a woman’s head in the traditional Russian head-dress kokoshnik (the Mistress of the Copper Mount against the background of the Ural Mountains), and a lizard.
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Pavel Petrovich Bazhov (Russian: Па́вел Петро́вич Бажо́в; 27 January 1879 – 3 December 1950) was a Russian writer.
Bazhov is best known for his collection of fairy tales The Malachite Box, based on Ural folklore and published in the Soviet Union in 1939. In 1944, the translation of the collection into English was published in New York City and London. Later Sergei Prokofiev created the ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower based on one of the tales. Bazhov was also the author of several books on the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Yegor Gaidar, who served as Prime Minister of Russia, was his grandson.
Early life
Bazhov was born in Sysert, a city in the Urals. His father Pyotr Bazhov was the master of the welding shop of the Sysertskogo Steel Plant. His family, like most in factory towns, struggled to make ends meet and had virtually no political power in Czarist Russia. From these beginnings, Bazhov found a calling in public service. Between 1889 and 1893 he studied in a religious school in Yekaterinburg. He took part in many protests, the most famous one resulting in him receiving a note of political disloyalty from his reactionary teacher on his certificate. The city made a huge impression on him, and he would return to live there many years later. In 1899, Bazhov graduated third in his class from Perm Theological Seminary, where Alexander Stepanovich Popov and D.N. Mamin previously studied. He dreamt of attending Tomsk Seminary University, but was rejected.
Instead, he worked temporarily as a Russian language teacher, first in Yekaterinburg, then later in Kamyshlov. From 1907 to 1914 Bazhov worked at the Women’s Diocesan College teaching Russian language. During this time he met and married Valentina Ivanitsky, a graduate from the Diocesan School. She was his muse for many of his poems about love and happiness.
Career
When the First World War began, Bazhov had two daughters. He was a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party until 1917. In 1918, he joined the Bolshevik Party, volunteered for the Red Army, and was deployed into military actions in the Ural frontline. In the autumn of 1920, Bazhov moved to Semipalatinsk and was elected a member of the Party Committee of that province. He was instructed to lead the provincial council of trade unions, but often served assignments that went beyond his office. From 1923 to 1929 he lived in Yekaterinburg and worked in the editorial board of the Krestianskaya (Peasants) Newspaper, as well as contributing his essays on old factory life conditions and the civil war throughout 1924. In that year, Bazhov published his first book, Urals Tales (Уральские были) on the images of life in the Urals during the 1880-1890s. It was also during this period that he wrote over forty tales on themes of Ural factory folklore that contributed to his collection, The Malachite Box. Publication of Bazhov’s most famous work – the collection of fairy tales – earned Bazhov the State Prize. Later on Bazhov supplemented the book with new tales.
Bazhov had every reason to speak with pride about his activities between 1917 and 1920. D.A. Kuhn named Bazhov in the report on the 60th anniversary of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and the Communist Party of Kazakhstan among those wonderful people, “who in the years of revolution and civil war, with a rifle, a plow, or a book, claimed a life on the Kazakh space, with high international quality, resilience, courage and heroism”. From these actions, he was decorated with an Order of Lenin and won the USSR State Prize.
During the Second World War Bazhov worked with both Yekaterinburg writers and those already evacuated from different corners of the Soviet Union. After the war his eyesight started weakening dramatically, but he went on his editing work, as well as collecting and creatively adapting local folklore.
In 1946 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet.
Bazhov died in 1950 in Moscow and was laid to rest in his home, Yekaterinburg.
Legacy
In 1968 Sverdlovsk Film Studio released a docufiction feature film Tales of the Ural Mountains (Russian: Сказы уральских гор, tr. Skazy uralskikh gor) about the work of Bazhov. The film, directed by Olgerd Vorontsov, was created for the 90th anniversary since the birth of the writer. It combined information about the conception and creation of Bazhov’s stories with acted scenes from his tales. It also had information about some popular characters such as the Fire-Fairy. The film was narrated by Yevgeny Vesnik, but also contained the unique recordings of Pavel Bazhov’s voice.
A documentary film Pavel Petrovich Bazhov. A remembrance documentary film (Russian: Павел Петрович Бажов. Фильм-воспоминание, tr. Pavel Petrovich Bazhov. Film-vospominanie) was made in 1979 by the same studio. It was directed by Liya Kozyreva.
Another documentary The Soviet skaz of Pavel Bazhov (Russian: Советский сказ Павла Бажова, tr. Sovetskij skaz Pavla Bazhova), directed by Yury Malyugin, was released by Russia-K in 2010.
Russia (Russian: Росси́я, tr. Rossiya), also officially known as the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, tr. Rossiyskaya Federatsiya), is a country in Eurasia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world by surface area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth’s inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with over 144 million people at the end of March 2016. The European western part of the country is much more populated and urbanised than the eastern; about 77% of the population live in European Russia. Russia’s capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world; other major urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Ufa and Kazan.
Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both with Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait.
The East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th century. In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus’ ultimately disintegrated into a number of smaller states; most of the Rus’ lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion and became tributaries of the nomadic Golden Horde in the 13th century. The Grand Duchy of Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities, achieved independence from the Golden Horde, and came to dominate the cultural and political legacy of Kievan Rus’. By the 18th century, the nation had greatly expanded through conquest, annexation, and exploration to become the Russian Empire, which was the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east.
Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the largest and leading constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s first constitutionally socialist state. The Soviet Union played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, and emerged as a recognized superpower and rival to the United States during the Cold War. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world’s first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the world’s second largest economy, largest standing military in the world and the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, twelve independent republics emerged from the USSR: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the Baltic states regained independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; the Russian SFSR reconstituted itself as the Russian Federation and is recognized as the continuing legal personality and sole successor state of the Soviet Union. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic.
The Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russia’s extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the leading producers of oil and natural gas globally. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. It is permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, as well as a member of the G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as being the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and one of the five members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), along with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
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