After turning 60, Pavel Petrovich Bazhov’s eyesight began to rapidly deteriorate. It was quite depressing for the writer, who received a lot of letters and was used to going on business trips, intensively reading and creating. Farsightedness and other diagnoses prevented Bazhov from working — both in the literary field and performing his duties as an elected deputy, which Pavel Petrovich took very seriously. In 1950, optometrists provided him with a complicated prescription for glasses — for +10.00 diopters. 

Bazhov found it increasingly difficult to navigate in space, and he stopped sorting through his manuscripts. It was challenging for him to read printed texts. When he used a typewriter for a story, he complained that he did not always hit the right keys. As a result, “the wildest phrases, or rather, surprising combinations of letters” came out.

Poor eyesight was one of the reasons why the writer never managed to realize many creative ideas in the last decade of his life. Bazhov had a large number of various topics for research and ideas for new works. In almost every letter of that period, he would either provide excuses for himself or apologized for the work he had not done: