Folklore in Viktor Vasnetsov’s Art

Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov, one of the brightest artists of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, formed a new folklore trend in the national art, his works to this day continue to influence our idea of what the heroes of Russian epic bylinas and fairy tales should look like.

Viktor Mikhailovich VASNETSOV. The Flying Carpet. 1920-1923, 1925. Detail
From the cycle “The Poem of Seven Tales” (1901-1926). Oil on canvas. 260 * 187 cm.
© The Viktor Vasnetsov Memorial Museum, Scientific Department of the State Tretyakov Gallery, 2024

Vasnetsov was not the first artist to show interest in the folklore theme. Not long before him, V.G. Perov created a series of fairy-tale sketches “Ivan-Tsarevich on the Grey Wolf” and “The Snow Maiden” (all - 1879, State Tretyakov Gallery); I.E. Repin did “Sadko” (1876, State Russian Museum), a painting commissioned by Tsesarevich Alexander Alexandrovich (future Emperor Alexander III); V. P. Vereshchagin, professor of the Imperial Academy of Arts (IAA), painted a significant series of allegorical panels on folklore subjects for the palace of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, a fellow president of the IAA[1], - “Ilya Muromets at the Feast of Prince Vladimir” (1871), “Dobrynya Nikitich Rescues Captive Zabava Putyatishna from the Dragon Gorynych” (1872), “The Fight of Alyosha Popovich with Tugarin the Serpent” (1874), “Solar Deity (Ovsen)” (1874) and “Virgin Zorya") (all at the M. Gorky House of Scientists, St Petersburg).

The artists’ appeal to folklore themes cannot be considered outside the context of the development of interest in folklore in Russia. In the first half and middle of the 19th century, museums were opened in Moscow and St. Petersburg (the Dashkova Ethnographic Museum in Moscow, the Rumyantsev Museum in St. Petersburg, and later the Emperor Alexander III Imperial Russian History Museum); lectures were given on history and folklore studies (M.P. Pogodin, N.I. Kostomarov, I.E. Zabelin, F.I. Buslayev); numerous circles appeared that attracted people by discoveries in the field of archaeology and interest in collecting. Collections of folklore by P.N. Rybnikov, V.I. Dahl, A.N. Afanasyev, A.F. Gilferding, albums of national costumes and Russian domestic life by F.G. Solntsev and V.A. Prokhorov, also a fundamental edition of “The Antiquities of the Russian State” (1849-1853) were published. The tendency of science to turn to Old Russian art gradually became programme-setting.

Young artists, students of the Academy, also began to take greater heed of folk culture and even went “to look for antiquity” on their own: M.P. Klodt travelled to Old Russian towns with the architect L.V. Dal; K.F. Gun and V.P. Vereshchagin recorded folklore in the Volga region; I.E. Repin collected proverbs and sayings in the town of Chuguyev.

Russian culture of the second half of the 19th century was imbued with deep interest in folklore and folk art. Vasnetsov picked up this idea and helped it to develop into a new independent trend of Russian art.

Viktor Mikhailovich knew Russian fairy tales and songs from his childhood. A widely known quotation from his letter to V.V. Stasov reads: “...I lived in a village among peasant men and women and loved them not in a populist, narodnik, way, but simply as my friends and pals; I listened to their songs and fairy tales, lost myself in them while sitting on the stove in the light and crackling of the splinter torch.”[2]. His knowledge and understanding of folk culture were profound, he felt folklore, saw in it a reflection of the complex worldview of the Russian people.

Upon coming to St. Petersburg to enter the IAA in 1868[3], he immediately showed interest in folklore images: “during my time at the Academy in St. Petersburg I was haunted by historical and fairy-tale reveries”[4]. At that time the artist made illustrations for the “World Illustration” magazine, as well as for various publications for the people, in particular the “Russian Alphabet for Children” by V.I. Vodovozov, “People’s Alphabet” by N.P. Stolpyansky. In the late 1860s he illustrated the fairy tale “The Firebird”[5]. Later he created drawings for Pyotr Yershov’s fairy tale “The Humpbacked Horse". In the first half of the 1870s, Vasnetsov made the first graphic sketches of future paintings on folklore subjects - “The Knight at the Crossroads” (1878, Serpukhov Museum of History and Art), and “The Bogatyrs” (1881-1898, State Tretyakov Gallery).

An important event that prompted to the artist to turn to folklore and epic subjects was a trip to France in 1876-1877. His stay in Paris was for him a period of emotional and creative loneliness: “My life here is fair to middling, neither boring nor cheerful! I work more, which sometimes saves me from unexpected storms of sadness and boredom of the heaviest, most desperate kind. In the midst of a foreign life you suddenly feel that all around you is just an empty space with figures without people, with faces without souls, with speech without meaning! The heart cannot attach itself to anything. Alone, alone, and alone!”[6]. It is not surprising that Vasnetsov, feeling homesick, was increasingly attracted to national themes in painting. It was there that he painted the first sketch of “The Bogatyrs”.

Viktor Mikhailovich returned to Russia in the spring of 1877. According to the memories of the artist’s daughter, on coming to Vyatka, his birthplace, he immediately began working on “The Knight at the Crossroads”. Already in March 1878, it was exhibited at the VI exhibition of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions.

Exhibiting the work, the artist was unlikely to be afraid to remain misunderstood. Fairy-tale (and literary fairy-tale) themes, although rare, were not alien to the Peredvizhniki [Wanderers]: in 1871, I.N. Kramskoi showed his painting “Mermaids” (1871, State Tretyakov Gallery), in 1875, I.M. Pryanishnikov - “On the Bald Mountain” (1875, State Tretyakov Gallery). However, Vasnetsov’s work failed to meet the requirements of the public causing misunderstanding and regret. S.V. Flyorov wrote: “He is too real, the rider; it is too coarse, the setting”[7]. Kramskoi in a letter to Repin with annoyance noted: “No, not good! <...> I am very sorry, a thousand times sorry, but it is impossible to say anything to him. And what a motif he spoilt!”[8]

Despite ruthless criticism, Vasnetsov continued his search for an artistic language to express the folklore theme in painting. There are many publications devoted to the main folklore-epic and fairy-tale works of the artist: “Alyonushka” (1881, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Ivan-Tsarevich on the Grey Wolf” (1889), “The Flying Carpet” (1880, Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum) and, of course, “The Bogatyrs” (1881-1898, State Tretyakov Gallery), but in this article we will focus on Vasnetsov’s activity in the first quarter of the 20th century, which today is almost unknown to the general public.

Viktor Mikhailovich VASNETSOV. The Bogatyrs. 1881-1898
Oil on canvas. 295.3 х 446 cm © The State Tretyakov Gallery, 2024

Vasnetsov finished work on “The Bogatyrs” in the year of his fiftieth birthday and showed it at his first personal exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1899. Another 28 years of active creative and public life was ahead. He was engaged in decorating Orthodox cathedrals and churches (St George’s Cathedral in the town of Gus-Khrustalny, the Church of the Saviour on the Blood in St Petersburg, the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Darmstadt and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw[9]). He participated in art committees and societies (he was elected a member of the Committee for the Establishment of the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, and a full member of the Imperial Russian Museum of History, later in 1915 the artist became a founding member of the Society for the Revival of Artistic Russia), organised six personal exhibitions.

With the outbreak of the First World War and then the Civil War, work to order ceased, so Vasnetsov was able to devote himself entirely to the implementation of his old artistic ideas, one of which was a cycle of paintings “The Poem of Seven Tales” (1901-1926).

Vasnetsov worked on the paintings of the cycle mainly in 1914-1925, at a time when there were rapid changes not only in the socio-political order of Russia, but also in art. The artist did not accept those changes and said: “I am <...> a man of the old Russia, and the new Russia (rather - non-Russia) is not to my liking”[10]. Working on the fairy-tale cycle, he realised that he would not show it to the general public, the paintings would forever remain in his studio. A kind of secrecy surrounding his work allowed the artist to reveal himself to the fullest extent and, without regard for the opinion of the contemporaries, to show himself not only as a painter, but also as a profound artist-philosopher who went beyond the boundaries of fairy-tale narrative and created an inimitable pictorial mosaics of fairytale and religious images, philosophical reflections and references to contemporary events.

The cycle consists of seven works: “The Sleeping Tsarevna” (1913-1917, State Tretyakov Gallery), “The Unsmiling Tsarevna Nesmeyana” (1916, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Baba-Yaga” (1917, V.M. Vasnetsov House-Museum, branch of State Tretyakov Gallery), “The Frog Tsarevna” (1918, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Kashchey the Immortal” (1917-1919, V.M. Vasnetsov House-Museum, branch of State Tretyakov Gallery), “The Flying Carpet” (1920-1923, 1925, State Tretyakov Gallery) and “Sivka-Burka” (early 1920s, all V.M. Vasnetsov House-Museum, branch of the State Tretyakov Gallery). However, within the framework of this short paper we will focus only on one of them, “The Sleeping Tsarevna”.

This painting has become a kind of capstone of the whole cycle, it expresses not only artistic but also religious and philosophical views of the author, as well as his reflections on military events in Russia and in the world in the 1910s.

The painting is based on a “travelling” plot about a sleeping beauty, very common in Europe in the Middle Ages and in the Modern Age. A plot like that was not to be found in Russian folklore, therefore Vasnetsov, most likely, turned to the fairy tale by V.A. Zhukovsky who wrote his poetic version of it, “The Tale of the Sleeping Tsarevna”[11]. The artist, however, did not limit himself to the known content of the fairy tale. He transformed the space of a fairy-tale terem [traditional Russian tower house] placing the figures of terem inhabitants and guests on its open arcade as if it were a theatre stage.

In the centre of the composition is the tsarevna [princess] sleeping on a bed and a girl fallen asleep on a book. Around them are the rest of the characters - the maids, the nanny with a cat in her lap and the guards on the left, a skomorokh [wandering actor in Old Russia], a guslar [player on gusli, Russian version of psaltery], and an old man with a bear on the right. In the background you can see a forest, which, like a wall, protects their sleep.

The semantic centre of the painting is not the sleeping tsarevna, but the little girl who fell asleep on the pages of The Book of the Dove, a spiritual verse of the late 15th - early 16th centuries that tells about the Divine Universe. She is usually associated with the heroine of the Russian folk tale “The Seven-Year-Old Daughter”[12], a girl, wise beyond her years, who helped her father in a dispute with the Tsar. On the unfolded pages of the book is Vasnetsov’s free rendering of the verse:

The world at large is
from the judgement of God,
the red sun is
from the face of God,
the crescent moon is
from His bosom,
the hosts of stars
are the vestments of God,
dark nights are
the Lord's thoughts,
the dawns of the morning are
[the Lord's eyes].

According to the legend, no people were able to read the divine book. By placing a child in the centre of the composition Vasnetsov showed that children, sinless souls, were capable of hearing and understanding the principal Christian truths. That was his interpretation of the evangelical text: “You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (Matthew 11: 25). Before everything sank into sleep, the girl had been reading the book to those gathered around her and the music sounded in time with her reading, as evidenced by her lips slightly ajar and the guslar’s hand over the strings.

The painting done between 1913 and 1917 became a real treasure box preserving the beauty of Russian culture, and at the same time a shelter from the storms of life for the master. This is the underlying idea of the painting that suggests itself against the background of the epoch of apocalyptic moods growing and wars breaking out.

Full of anxiety, Vasnetsov wrote: “Under the pressure of what is happening, it is quite difficult to tune myself to a placid and contemplative course of thought and even seek solace in Art, so close and dear to my soul”[13]. And yet he did not stop working. He found solace in nature, which became for him a “refuge” and a visible manifestation of divine mercy and love for people. This image of a secluded and desirable shelter[14] in “The Sleeping Tsarevna” has acquired not just idyllic, but truly paradisal features. There is no room for struggle here, on the contrary, the artist has created a space filled with a sense of paradisal unity. Animals - a bear, a fox, a hare; birds - doves, bullfinches, parrots, peacocks; people, young and old, listen together to the truths written in the Book of the Dove.

There are parallels between the painting “The Sleeping Tsarevna” and Vasnetsov’s religious works. There is an obvious similarity between the images of the sleeping tsarevna and St Catherine resting in the arms of the angels from the composition “The Joy of the Righteous about the Lord. The Door of Paradise” in St Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev, where the artist worked in 1885-1896. It is not only about the resemblance in appearance - the pose of the fairytale tsarevna repeats the position of St Catherine ascending to heaven.

Similar parallels in depicting nature and wild life in “The Sleeping Tsarevna” are seen with the composition “The Bliss of Paradise” at the St Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev. The artist does not exactly repeat the religious composition - the lion, for instance is replaced with a bear, its “Russian” analogy.

It is not by chance that Vasnetsov’s painting is called “an ideal image of the motherland", an image of the city of Kitezh[15]. The motif of the fairy-tale tsardom sinking into sleep is consonant with the legend of the miraculous rescue of the entire city during the Tatar-Mongol invasion, when, through the prayers of the inhabitants, it sank to the bottom of the lake. The reference to the famous legend and the “Book of the Dove” in the centre of the composition reveal the message of the painting “The Sleeping Tsarevna”: having heard the secrets of the book, the inhabitants of the tsardom became bearers of the ““hidden” truth which is revealed to a sincere believer”[16] ; their sleep does not look like a curse, on the contrary, it is a deliverance from worries and anxieties, and the tsardom itself remained an unconquered holy city.

The motif of the fairy-tale characters’ sleep deserves special attention. The poses and gestures of the characters are extremely tense - the hand of the old man in a blue shirt on the right, the guslar’s fingers over the strings are frozen, the palm of the tsarevna’s left hand is helplessly open. The landscape seems frozen, too - nature does not disturb the inhabitants of the terem, not a whiff of wind, no bright sunlight or cool rain. The closed composition and the undisturbed sleep in the picture are felt to be enhanced by the over-crowded foreground where Vasnetsov simultaneously put images of flowers and a bear, and figures of a nanny and an old man in blue. Like the forest in the background, these figures are there as if fencing off the fairy-tale tsardom. Everything in this picture speaks of the alienation of the sleeping tsarevna and her entourage from the real world. The author himself, one would think, would be happy to remove himself from the harsh surrounding reality.

Vasnetsov was not the first to address the motif of sleep as an attempt to escape from reality. It is only at first glance that Michelangelo’s sculpture “Night” created for the tombstone of Giuliano de Medici in the Medici Chapel in Florence could be called too distant a parallel to Vasnetsov’s “The Sleeping Tsarevna”. The sculptor worked on it in 1526-1533, when Italian cities had to defend themselves from the French and Spanish invasions. The Renaissance master expressed his thoughts not only by plastic means in sculpture, but also in verse:

Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone,
While pain and guilt still linger here below,
Blindness and numbness - these please me alone;
Then do not wake me, keep your voices low[17].

The quatrain reflects the sculptor’s bitterness and pessimism, tragic discord with the world around him. Obviously, the theme of sleep for Vasnetsov also acquired a special meaning in connection with the First World War and revolutionary events, as well as the rapid changes in the artistic world of the first quarter of the 20th century. If we take into account the emotional experiences of the painter, his characters’ sleep does not just look fabulous, it looks healing, able to relieve the soul of anxiety and turbulences, giving a long-awaited rest.

Following the “Sleeping Tsarevna”, the paintings of “The Poem of Seven Tales” became a kind of the artist’s pictorial diary reflecting his ideals of goodness and beauty, reflections on Christian truths and the events of the revolution and war years.

The folklore direction became one of the most important in Vasnetsov’s oeuvre. His brush enriched the fairy tale with additional meanings and ideas, formed the basis for numerous artistic experiments, expanded the facets of the artist’s talent opening a new path for Russian art of the early 20th century.

1. The paintings were of an allegorical nature related to Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich, the saint patron of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. The works were exhibited at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873, where they were highly appreciated by the European public and honoured with a gold medal.
2. From V.M. Vasnetsov’s letter to V.V. Stasov. [Moscow], 7 October, 1898 // Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov. Letters. Diaries. Memoirs. Opinions of Contemporaries/ Compilation, introductory article and notes by N.A. Yaroslavtseva. - Moscow. 1987. P. 154 (Hereinafter: V. M. Vasnetsov. Letters...)
3. Vasnetsov studied at IAA from 1868 to 1874, non-continuously.
4. V.M. Vasnetsov to V.V. Stasov, Moscow, 20 September 1898 // V. M. Vasnetsov. Letters . P. 150
5. A version of this subject is “The Fairy-Tale about Ivan-Tsarevich and Yelena the Beautiful” from Vyatka.
6. V.M. Vasnetsov to V.M. Maksimov dated 20 August 1876, Meudon // Viktor Vasnetsov. Letters. New materials / Compiled by L. Korot- kina. St. Petersburg, 2004. P. 27. (Hereinafter: Viktor Vasnetsov. Letters. New materials.)
7. [Flyorov S.V.] Travelling Art Exhibition //Moskovskiye vedomosti newspaper. 1878. No140, 3 June.
8. I.N. Kramskoi to I. Ye. Repin dated 26 March, 1878 // Kramskoi I. N. Correspondence of I. N. Kramskoi. Moscow, 1953-1954. V. 2. P. 370.
9. For decorating the Warsaw Cathedral Vasnetsov was awarded the title of a hereditary nobleman.
10. V.M. Vasnetsov to V.V. Stasov. 16 April, 1906 // V.M. Vasnetsov. Letters... P. 207
11. First edition in “The European” magazine (1832, No 1, P. 24-37).
12. See: Russian Folk Tales / Compiled by A.N. Afanasyev: In 3 volumes, Moscow, 1984-1985. V.3. No 327-328. P. 18-20.
13. V.M. Vasnetsov to D.T Budinov. 17 March, 1918 // V.M. Vasnetsov. Letters... P. 241.
14. See: Pospelov G.G. “The Motif of Shelter” in Russian Art of Late 19th - Early 20th Centuries // Pospelov G.G. On Paintings and Drawings: Collection of articles. Moscow, 2013. P. 174-193.
15. Ibid. P. 82.
16. Urtmintseva M.G. Kitezh Chronicler in the Literary and Pictorial Interpretation (P.I. Melnikov and M.V. Nesterov) // Bulletin of the N.I. Lobachevsky University of Nizhny Novgorod. 2011. No 4 (1). P. 322.
17. Michelangelo (2017). “Sonnets of Michelangelo”, p.78, Routledge.