Metal nibs for writing were used even by the ancient Romans and Greeks. At that time, bronze, copper and silver were the most popular materials for their manufacture. In the 18th century, the British and Germans, borrowing ideas from each other, came up with a steel nib, which was in widespread use until the invention of ballpoint pens. Steel nibs came to the Russian Empire in the middle of the 19th century: at first, they were imported from abroad, then they began to be produced within the country.

Pavel Petrovich Bazhov preferred to use a dip pen for writing, instead of a typewriter. It is known that in the 1930s, when his first and most famous tales were conceived and created, including “The Mistress of the Copper Mountain”, “The Malachite Casket”, “Stone Flower”, “Silver Hoof” and others, Bazhov wrote exclusively by hand. He started using a typewriter only in 1944. In addition, it was much closer to the traditional way of writing, which he often mentioned:

Pavel Petrovich worked on his writings at night, strolling along the corridor of a sleeping house. “Pavel Petrovich wrote most of the tales at his old standing desk, with a simple bamboo pen, using an ordinary non-spill inkwell, ” the Ural writer Elena Khorinskaya said in her work “Pioneer’s Tie”.

Bazhov had a great writing style, but he always worked diligently and carefully, choosing the right words. To write a short tale, he sometimes needed several months of painstaking night work.

It may seem that Pavel Petrovich wrote just as well as he spoke — using dialect words, syntax characteristic of oral folk speech, exclamations, and omissions. However, this is not correct. His tales are a kind of concentrated lexical assemblage, a complex cohesive text created by a true master of the word.

In his works, the writer tried, on the one hand, to convey to the greatest extent the features of oral speech of the ordinary Ural factory worker, on the other, to avoid using the same dialectisms from text to text. It was quite difficult to write about the same thing in different, strictly regional expressions, while ensuring the reader’s interest and understanding.