However the space under Itkul is viewed as the version of the pagan "Otherworld", or realm of the dead where people go after their physical death and remain there forever.[13][14] Lidiya Slobozhaninova comments that it is no accident that Golden Hair leaves that place only occasionally, and that in the end the narrator confesses that he has never seen them after. Slobozhaninova summarizes that the price of love, freedom, and wealth is death, and the story is Bazhov's adaptation of the universal storyline of "love which is stronger than death".[14]