"the hopping fire girl") is a fairy tale short story written by Pavel Bazhov, based on the folklore of the Ural region of Siberia.
[2] In this fairy tale, the characters meet the female creature from the Ural folklore called Poskakushka (lit.
Pavel Bazhov indicated that all his stories can be divided into two groups based on tone: "child-toned" (e.g. "Silver Hoof") and "adult-toned" (e.g. "The Stone Flower").
Bazhov replied that he had an idea about the character Poskakushka, but he needed to go back to the factory and "relive old memories" by talking to some story-tellers.
[7] In 1944 the story was translated from Russian into English by Alan Moray Williams and published by Hutchinson as a part of The Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals collection.
[9] In the 1950s another translation of The Malachite Casket was made by Eve Manning[10][11] The story was published as "The Dancing Fire Maid".
[16] The help of such mythical creature would explain why some miners were luckier than others,[17] and unexplained natural phenomena such as the location of gold.
[18] The folklorists believed that the character is connected with the river Poskakukha next to the Polevskoy Copper Smelting Plant in the old Sysert Mining District.
[19] Nataliya Shvabauer believed that this character did not no exist in the original Ural folk tradition, although the author constructed it according to the "mythological canon".
[21] The 1968 docufiction feature film Tales of the Ural Mountains (Russian: Сказы уральских гор, romanized: Skazy uralskikh gor) claimed that Bazhov had heard about the Poskakushkinsky mine, and created the character from scratch.
[16] A group of gold prospectors, including an old man Yefim (alternative translation: Grandpa Efim[23]) and an 8-year-old boy Fedyunka, called "Tyunka" by his father, sit around a fire in the woods.
[25] Next morning the prospectors start digging in the area, but cannot seem to remember the exact place where the maid had danced.
Children at the factory give him a nickname "Dancing Tyunka" (Russian: Тюнька Поскакушка, romanized: Tjunka Poskakushka).
They cannot keep the secret for long, and eventually the landlord takes hold of the place, but Fedyunka and Yefim live in wealth for many years.
[28] He is a metaphor for a young gold prospector moved by his insatiable thirst of knowledge, which had been recently awakened in him by old experienced miners.