"The Stone Flower" (Russian: Каменный цветок, romanized: Kamennyj tsvetok, IPA: [ˈkamʲɪnːɨj tsvʲɪˈtok]), also known as "The Flower of Stone", is a folk tale (also known as skaz) of the Ural region of Russia collected and reworked by Pavel Bazhov, and published in Literaturnaya Gazeta on 10 May 1938 and in Uralsky Sovremennik.

Pavel Bazhov indicated that all his stories can be divided into two groups based on tone: "child-toned" (e.g. "Silver Hoof") with simple plots, children as the main characters, and a happy ending,[2] and "adult-toned".

[4] The Moscow critic Viktor Pertsov [ru] read the manuscript of "The Stone Flower" in the spring of 1938, when he traveled across the Urals with his literary lectures.

[5] His complimenting review The fairy tales of the Old Urals (Russian: Сказки старого Урала, romanized: Skazki starogo Urala) accompanied the publication.

[9] In 1944 the story was translated from Russian into English by Alan Moray Williams and published by Hutchinson as a part of the collection The Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals.

[11] In the 1950s a translation of The Malachite Casket was published by Eve Manning[12][13] and the story was called "The Flower of Stone".

[14] The story was again published in the collection Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov by Penguin Books in 2012.

[15] The main character of the story, Danilo, is a weakling and a scatterbrain, and people from the village find him strange.

Danila Zverev and Danilo the Craftsman share many common traits, e.g. both lost their parents early, both tended cattle and were punished for their dreaminess, both suffered from poor health since childhood.

Danila Zverev was so short and thin that the villagers gave him the nickname "Lyogonkiy" (Russian: Лёгонький, lit. '"Lightweight"').

[17] During Soviet times, every edition of The Malachite Box was usually prefaced by an essay by a famous writer or scholar, commenting on the creativity of the Ural miners, cruel landlords, social oppression and the "great workers unbroken by the centuries of slavery".

[20] Maya Nikulina comments that Danilo is the creator who is absolutely free from all ideological, social and political contexts.

[26] All sexual references in Pavel Bazhov's stories are very subtle, owing to Soviet puritanism.

[28] The author of The Fairy Tale Encyclopedia suggests that the Mistress represents the conflict between human kind and nature.

She compares the character with Mephistopheles, because a human needs to wager his soul with the Mistress in order to get the ultimate knowledge.

[30] Lyudmila Skorino believed that she represented the nature of the Urals, which inspires a creative person with its beauty.

Direct contact with the female power is a violation of the world order and therefore brings destruction or chaos.

The Soviet critics' point of view was that the drama of Danilo came from the fact that he was a serf, and therefore did not receive the necessary training to complete the task.

Just like in the Russian poem The Sylph, written by Vladimir Odoyevsky, Bazhov raises the issue that the artist can reach his ideal only when he comes in with the otherworldly.

[34][35] In 1944 the story was translated from Russian into English by Alan Moray Williams and published by Hutchinson as a part of the collection The Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals.

[36] In the 1950s translation of The Malachite Casket, made by Eve Manning, the story was published as "The Mountain Craftsman".

For several years Danilo's betrothed Katyenka (Katya) waits for him and stays unmarried despite the fact that everyone laughs at her.

When both of her parents die, she moves away from her family and goes to Danilo's house and takes care of his old teacher Prokopich, although she knows that living with a man can ruin her reputation.

Her strange behaviour, her refusal to marry someone and lead a normal life, cause people at the village to think that she is insane or even a witch, but Katya firmly believes that Danilo will "learn all he wants to know, there in the mountain, and then he'll come".

The Mistress is pleased with Katya's bravery and rewards her by letting Danilo remember everything that he had learned in the Mountain.

In the interview to a Soviet newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva the writer said: "I am going to finish "The Stone Flower" story.