The Mistress of the Copper Mountain

Did You Know?

• The Mistress is also called the Mountain Mother, the Golden Woman, the Stone Maiden, the Malachite Maid, the Serpent Mistress, or the Lizard Queen.
• Miners often avoided naming her directly, saying 'it was she herself' (sama eto) due to her power and dread.
• The character Queen of the Copper Mountain appears in Mercedes Lackey's 2007 novel Fortune's Fool and her 2020 novel Jolene.

Characteristics

The Mistress of the Copper Mountain appears as an extremely beautiful young woman with green eyes, dark braided hair, and ribbons that tinkle like thin copper. She wears a gown made of malachite and a diadem decorated with malachite and precious stones. She can also take the form of a lizard, sometimes wearing a crown, and commands mountain lizards. As a mountain spirit, she protects underground riches and is always surrounded by small lizards of various colors. She shows kindness to good, honest, hard-working people and skilled craftsmen, helping them find jewels and gold, but if her conditions are not met, the person loses luck and skill, and may die. She can permit or prevent mining and give or take wealth. Miners considered finds of malachite as her blessing, and a streak of bad luck meant they had incurred her wrath. She was hostile to the aristocracy. Rituals and taboos surrounded her: women did not enter mines, as it was her domain, and young men seeking her patronage did not marry. Children were taught not to shout near stones and to keep quiet in mines, as she disliked loud noises. Her distinguishing attributes are lizards, copper, and malachite.

Appearances in works

The Mistress of the Copper Mountain appears in the third skaz of Pavel Bazhov's The Malachite Box, titled 'The Mistress of the Copper Mountain', first published in the 11th issue of Krasnaya Nov in 1936. She also appears in nine other tales from the collection, including 'The Malachite Casket', 'The Stone Flower', 'The Manager's Boot-Soles', 'Sochen and His Stones', 'The Master Craftsman', 'The Two Lizards', 'A Fragile Twig', 'The Grass Hideaway', and 'Tayutka's Mirror'. Bazhov stated he based the character on local legends and considered his tales an attempt to reconstruct the folklore of the Gumyoshevsky mine. In 'The Mistress of the Copper Mountain', she is described as a maid with a deep black plait, ribbons that click like thin copper leaves, and a robe made of silk malachite. The tale concludes that meeting her brings woe for a bad man and little joy for a good one. In 'The Malachite Casket', the heroine Tanyushka is black-haired and green-eyed, called a double of the Mistress, and M. A. Batin surmised she might be the daughter of the Mistress and Stepan.

Origin and development

Pavel Bazhov first heard stories about the Mistress of the Copper Mountain from a miner and storyteller named Vasily Alexeyevich Khmelinin, known to children as Grandpa Slyshko, at the Polevskoy Copper Smelting Plant. The Copper Mountain is thought to be the Gumyoshevsky mine, the oldest mine in the Urals, often called simply "The Mountain" by locals. Valerii Nikitich Demin described the Mistress as a universal mytheme, with the Copper Mountain as her specific home. Her origins are uncertain. A mother goddess figure was common among local Mansi and Khanty peoples. Ethnographer Andrei Markovich Sagalaev linked her to the goddesses Umay and Kaltes-Ekwa, noting that the Mansi-Khanti mother goddess could shrink to the size of a rock or expand to the size of a mountain. The Mistress may have taken over from an earlier figure, Azovka, who was known in the same region. Bazhov believed Azovka was the oldest creature in Ural mythology, followed by Velikiy Poloz, and then the Mistress. Like Azovka, the Malachite Maid attracts single men. Mark Lipovetsky pointed out that her black hair suggests non-Slavic ancestry, possibly from the "Old People." Bazhov noted that miners, who went long periods without seeing women, often told tales with sexual undertones, but he chose to focus on aesthetic and socialist themes instead. He felt the Mistress grew beyond her role as a treasure keeper, becoming a symbol of power, wealth, and beauty shown only to the worthy. E. V. Kulikova theorized that her place in Ural mythology stems from seeing mountains as magical spaces.

Critical analysis

The Mistress became a popular character in the Soviet Union. Folklorists from the former Ural State University, collecting tales after Bazhov's death, noted that most people knew about her from Bazhov's skazy and referred to them, with few hearing of her from oral tradition. Soviet critics commonly described her as a protector of the working class from oppressors, but Maya Nikulina disagreed, stating the Mistress tests people rather than defending workers, and social justice is of no concern to her. Lipovetsky commented she is one of the most terrifying characters in the collection, a beautiful girl and a dangerous demonic creature exhibiting features of sexuality and death, representing the struggle between Eros and Thanatos with Freudian motives of sexual drive, death drive, and castration anxiety. Zherdev pointed out that her female domain is chaos and destruction, colliding with the ordered factory world. Natalia Valentinovna Budur suggested the Mistress represents conflict between humankind and nature, comparing her to Mephistopheles because a human must wager their soul for ultimate knowledge, though she does not force abandonment of moral values. Lyudmila I. Skorino believed she represented the nature of the Urals, inspiring creative people.