Vrubel: an Artist for the Ages

The Almighty gave us Pushkin to reveal what a poet is.
We could say the same about Vrubel - he is the embodiment of an artist.
Nikolai Ge[1]

Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) holds a unique place in the history of Russian art. On the one hand, he belonged to the legendary cohort of Russian Art Nouveau artists. According to his contemporaries, it was in his oeuvre that “we find the saddest and most beautiful artistic expression of the time”[2] In a newspaper article on the occasion of Vrubel’s funeral, the celebrated Russian artist and art historian Alexandre Benois predicted: “Future generations, should true enlightenment shine upon the Russian public, will look back at the last decades of the 19th century as ‘the era of Vrubel’.”[3] Nevertheless, there is clearly a great gap between Vrubel and his artistic milieu: he seems to be much more in touch with the future than with the world around him. “Here is what I do know: I can only stand in awe of the mysteries that Vrubel and others like him begin to reveal to mankind once in 100 years. We are unable to see the worlds that were open to them, and so all we can do is utter this feeble, indifferent word: ‘genius’.[4]

Mikhail VRUBEL. Self-portrait. 1904-1905
Charcoal, sanguine on paper. 35.5 × 29.5 cm. © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The structure of the modern exhibition

Our current digital reality makes Stepan Yaremich’s plea to “see his [Vrubel’s] original works in order to form an accurate opinion”[5] ever more urgent. The mission of the modern museum is to offer something that cannot be achieved by any other means: an authentic experience, a unique opportunity to interact with the original artwork, the source of the information, and the very substance of art.

The focal point of this exhibition is Vrubel’s creative process, his singular mind at work and the framework he created for his artistic method. We cannot rely on traditional reference points when we experience Vrubel’s art. In the words of Benois, conventional value judgements are rendered useless: “Those with a more refined taste in art may find a lot to disapprove of; there was occasional ugliness in his paintings, even banality. But he was not an angel, he was a demon - a supreme but complicated being, someone who had fallen in love with the human soul and human life, and ended up tainted by it. That’s why even Vrubel’s most disappointing and objectionable creations bear the mark of genius, and through his crooked, diabolical smile, his wide, terrified eyes and his sugary bliss shine certain sublime features - those of great beauty, which is not of this world, but in love with it.”[6]

The renowned art scholar Mikhail Alpatov advised against the traditional chronological approach to studying Vrubel’s oeuvre: “An attempt to divide the artist’s 30-year-long professional journey into clearly defined periods would feel forced. If we were to divide his works into several groups, they would not be chronological - they would, in fact, reflect the many dimensions of this deep, complex and contradictory human being.”[7]

This exhibition is organised unconventionally, neither according to artforms nor chronological periods. Its structure reflects the creative path of Vrubel, whose artistic method was a marvellous evolving organism permeated by a network of intertwined motifs. Not a single formal motif or image appears out of nowhere or vanishes without trace; none of them exists without interacting with others. As a rule, in Vrubel’s oeuvre, a formal impulse does not just serve its purpose in one work of art - form is open-ended and fluid, it lives on and manifests itself in new images. Vrubel created a world in which nothing seems to be accidental, everything is predetermined and connected through various parallels. These mysterious connections and creative impulses are just as important as Vrubel’s actual works - they constitute the non-material part of his heritage. At the core of this exhibition’s dramatic narrative lies the idea of the total metaphor. The renowned art historian Mikhail Allenov gave this brilliant definition of the most important principle of Vrubel’s thinking and provided new generations of scholars and art lovers with a valuable clue: “The poetics of metamorphoses, or the variation principle, shape the core premise for Vrubel’s imagery, from a small sketch to his entire oeuvre. Almost every motif, once it appears in Vrubel’s art, will sooner or later definitely return in a new version.”[8]

Today’s scholars expand on Allenov’s definition by using the concept of design thinking (more relatable for the digital generation), which allowed Vrubel to “continue exploring a creative idea for as long as he wanted, sometimes even throughout his creative life; consequently, every work that expresses or realises some aspect of this idea, no matter when it was created, what the terms of the commission were, what media was used, and so on, becomes a building block in a continuous artistic endeavour, in which a creative idea gradually evolves into its perfect expression.”[9] Exploring the transformations of formal formulae paves the way for understanding Vrubel’s artistic method, as well as the living and “thinking” substance of his canvases.

This exhibition is designed to structure the perception of the very form of Vrubel’s works, define the recurring motifs of his oeuvre and to visualise his creative impulses.

The route through the exhibition is laid out like a quest. This organises visitors’ impressions and visualises the finest semantic threads and impulses that connect Vrubel’s works, life and the transformations of his imagery. The visitors are confronted with seemingly paradoxical, but - in Vrubel’s frame of references – perfectly organic similarities. Thus, the modelling of Savva Mamontov’s features in his 1897 portrait (Tretyakov Gallery) is reminiscent of the animal grace of the “Lion’s Head”, the high reliefs adorning the gates of the patron’s manor house in Moscow and his ceramics factory “in Butyrki”. We can see both Vrubel’s and his wife’s features in the faces of Pushkin’s Prophet and Seraph in his paintings, and his angels and demons are “of one blood”.

The exhibition’s spacing helps its visitors experience the magical life of Vrubel’s motifs - we can see how his painting “Parting of the Sea King and Princess Volkhova” (1898, Tretyakov Gallery) coils and turns into the decorative ceramic platter “Sadko” (designed in 1899, Russian Museum). In turn, a few years later, the platter would morph into “The Pearl” (1904, Tretyakov Gallery), and the fairytale sea creatures hiding in the platter’s sinuous ornamental patterns would become three-dimensional majolica sculptures. We can feel how the swift movement of the rider in Vrubel’s illustration for Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “The Demon” (1890-1891, Tretyakov Gallery) anticipates “The Flight of Faust and Mephistopheles” (1896, Tretyakov Gallery), and another illustration (1890-1891) materialises in a plaster sculpture, “Demon’s Head” (1894, Russian Museum). Finally, “Demon Flying” (1899, Russian Museum) is turned upside down to become “Demon Downcast” (1902, Tretyakov Gallery).

Vrubel wanted to be understood. Just like Hansel and Gretel, who scattered breadcrumbs in Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera (a life-changing work of art for Vrubel), the artist used these motifs as clues for future generations of art lovers to help them find their way in the ever-changing world of his art, a world that was always balancing somewhere between reality and fantasy.

The First Circle: 19th Century

This exhibition’s semantic and compositional focus, its high point, is definitely the three paintings of the Demon, displayed in the same hall: “Demon Seated” (1890, Tretyakov Gallery), “Demon Flying” (1899, Russian Museum), and “Demon Downcast” (1902, Tretyakov Gallery.) The chance to see all three of these canvases in the same space comes maybe once in 100 years, and to be able to feel the subtle and complex connections between them is truly awe-inspiring. Already during his lifetime, Vrubel’s contemporaries looked at his “three demons” as something like a musical suite, a single work of art that took his whole life to create. This interpretation was introduced by the first students of Vrubel’s oeuvre, Alexandre Benois and Alexander Blok, as well as the artist’s biographers Stepan Yaremich and Aleksander Ivanov. Over the course of the 20th century, art scholars Sergei Durylin, Nikolai Tarabukin, and Pyotr Suzdalev formulated a broader version of this approach[10] that included all of Vrubel’s creations dedicated to “the Demon motif”: in addition to the three major paintings, there were some works that Vrubel created in Kyiv that could be considered an “overture” to this theme. Even though these works did not survive, written descriptions of them play an important role in shaping the perception of Vrubel’s later work on the subject. There are also other pieces, “intermezzi” of sorts, created between Vrubel’s bouts of extreme excitement for his Demon: a series of illustrations (1890-1891) for Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “The Demon”, a sculptural portrait (1894, Russian Museum), and graphic sketches, unfinished versions of compositions created in the time between “Demon Flying” and “Demon Downcast”. And finally, there is the “coda”, Vrubel’s last masterpiece, painted when his health was restored after illness, which brings it all to a conclusion: his Demon reborn as the “Six-Winged Seraph” (1904, Russian Museum).

It is remarkable that, although Vrubel’s three paintings of the Demon reveal different manifestations of the image and different ways of seeing it, they are simultaneously inextricably connected and in conflict with one another. The attracting and repelling forces that exist between them are almost equally strong and clearly perceptible. The orderly, familiar and entirely logical (in biographies and scholarly research) concept of the Demon’s step-by-step evolution is challenged by sensory evidence - the paintings we see do not fit into one cohesive sequence, it feels more like they contradict one other. Each painting stands apart due to its distinct plasticity, so a direct comparison creates an almost physical sensation of a very tense and dramatic dialogue. Also, every one of the three images is the result of the artist’s search for new form; it absorbs and transforms painterly impulses from a series of related works of art, not necessarily of the exact same period of time. Furthermore, each of these three paintings rises to a new level of understanding of the subject matter, which paves the way to more exploration.

The exhibition’s main space is designed to balance out the centripetal and centrifugal forces that originate between the Demon’s three incarnations. The show’s setup is intended for intense contemplation of each painting. Punctuated with caesurae, it lets the visitor feel the presence of all three paintings while only being able to see two of them at any one time. Through portals and apertures, the main hall opens up into several spaces, which are dedicated to related subjects. The first show cases Vrubel’s early drawings, including those executed during the time when he worked in Kyiv - already, they set the stage for Vrubel’s first painting of the Demon in Moscow, and a new chapter in his life.

Back then, Vrubel was still working on putting his idea of the Demon on canvas - the image, sensed as a premonition, seemed to be within his reach, and its subtle presence was often felt in his work. One example is his sketch of a woman’s head (Emilia Prakhova, the wife of the renowned art historian Adrian Prakhov, was the model) for the icon of the Virgin Mary on the iconostasis of the Church of St. Cyril in Kyiv. In the words of the art critic Aleksander Ivanov, “we can already feel in her deep and mysterious gaze Vrubel’s characteristic chilling intensity; it is especially strong in his charcoal sketch of her head with pale, round eyes, staring ahead with a flicker of private horror in them.”[11]

The second “spatial gap” takes the visitor from the hall with the “three Demons” to the space showcasing Vrubel’s illustrations to Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “The Demon”, as well as his preliminary drawings for various versions of the Demon image. The artist’s strange illustrations to Lermontov’s works, deemed “poorly timed” and unappreciated by his contemporaries, are currently viewed as definitive - thanks to Vrubel, in our collective mind, many of Lermontov’s characters will always look the way he painted them. At the same time, they belong the fantastic world of Vrubel’s art. They also constitute an important stage in his work on this theme, serving as links in the chain of the transformations Vrubel’s Demon undergoes, and recording the artist’s thought process on the path from his “Demon Seated” to “Demon Flying” and, finally, “Demon Downcast”. As he worked on illustrations to Lermontov’s poem, Vrubel followed his Demon on the journey of Lermontov’s character, but then took him even further, beyond the poem’s narrative. Indeed, we may see “Demon Flying” as Vrubel’s final take on Lermontov’s vision, but his “Demon Downcast” is already liberated from the confines of its literary source. The poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin wrote: “Vrubel has a deep, inherent spiritual connection to Lermontov. His illustrations to Lermontov’s works do not echo the poet’s ideas, but expand on them. Vrubel continued on the path that vanished under Lermontov’s feet. But he was not able to finish the journey, either. His affinity to Lermontov shows in the expression he seeks in his Demon’s eyes, and in the mournful, parched lips.”[12]

The large drawing “Demon’s Head” (1890, Tretyakov Gallery) and the plaster bust “Demon” (1894, Russian Museum), visible from the main hall, reveal in striking detail how Vrubel prepared and rethought the painting “Demon Seated” (1890, Tretyakov Gallery). “Demon’s Head” (1890, Tretyakov Gallery) is executed on the back of Vrubel’s sketch “Resurrection”; its formal expression is still inextricably linked to the conventions of monumental mural painting. The unusually large sheet is shaded to make its surface resemble a plaster wall with an image emerging on it. One can easily imagine that the artist did not create this ethereal image, but “saw” it. All the incredibly hard work that came before Vrubel created this piece was long over, done over the five years from the day when Demon first “revealed” himself to the artist. Vrubel spent those years trying many different ways to bring his vision to life, make it real - he went as far as executing a three-dimensional “model” so that he could direct the light at the face from an angle that was perfect for the painting, and use it as his “ideal sitter”.[13] Back in Moscow, Vrubel went back to working on his Demon and meticulously explored the image and its plasticity in a whole series of monochrome illustrations to Lermontov’s poem. In his quest for a visual counterpart to Lermontov’s verse, the artist made his Demon “real” through facial expressions, poses, and movement. Having achieved this new pinnacle in his awareness of the subject, Vrubel felt the need to test himself, so he created a three-dimensional sculpture. As his primary source, he took his illustration that did not make it into the anniversary edition of Lermontov’s poem, a shoulder-length “portrait” of the Demon. With that as his starting point, he created a polychrome sculpture by using watercolour, which helped him achieve the subtle effects so characteristic of this technique. This was the first time that Vrubel used his famous range of purple hues, which grew deeper in the shadows. They were to become central to the image of the Demon.

Vrubel’s preparatory drawings for his Demon series were not merely sketches in the conventional sense - they served an amazing range of innovative objectives. All the drawings included in this show are true treasures. Two of them, executed in preparation for “Demon Downcast”, stand out: a photograph, coloured by Vrubel, of the painting’s original version (over time, Vrubel made so many changes to the original that it literally disappeared under layers of paint) and a pencil sketch the artist “pleated” in the middle as he experimented with the most expressive plastic representation of the Demon’s body, supernaturally beautiful but nonetheless retaining its humanoid form.

Mikhail VRUBEL. Demon Downcast. Sketch of the initial variant of the painting.
Watercolour, whitewash, lead pencil, iron gall ink, pen on cardboard. 27.6 × 63.9 cm.
© Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

However, the most striking example of Vrubel’s method of developing motifs, the most important and unexpected link in the chain of transformations that the Demon’s image undergoes, is a large monochrome watercolour sketch from the Tretyakov Gallery collection. It helps us understand the mysterious origins of the “Demon Downcast”, whose figure is almost an exact copy of the one in “Demon Flying”, but rotated by 180°. This seems to suggest that this enormous unfinished canvas is actually the first version of “Demon Downcast”, as described by Vrubel’s biographer Aleksander Ivanov: “besides numerous watercolour sketches, two huge canvases have survived, almost finished, but abandoned by the artist - he did not think that the figures in either of them were expressive enough. In one of them, the Demon’s profile is perfectly masculine; his naked hips are belted with a chain of golden plates; the same kind of plates adorn the chest, and the outstretched wings resemble those of an eagle, or even a swan. In the other, there seems to be something feminine in him; nothing adorns his body, but his wings are alive with gleaming, colourful peacock feathers.”[14] UV light analysis shows the changes that the artist made to the painting over time - namely, in the position of the Demon’s head. The face that we see today was executed with different paints than those used for the rest of the composition; it also fits the body rather loosely, without much consideration for the human anatomy. The area of the canvas where the face was originally painted is covered with a thick layer of paint (also different in composition) and appears extraneous. Its outline resembles the shape of the Demon’s head, and the original version of the figure must have been even closer to the figure in “Demon Flying”.

Mikhail VRUBEL. Demon Downcast. 1902
Oil on canvas. 139 × 387 cm. © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The third portal leads visitors from “Demon Downcast” to Vrubel’s two definitive paintings of lilacs in bloom, executed in 1900 and 1901. It was in working on his “Lilacs” that the artist attained his signature magical colour described as “the purple blue of the world’s night.” In his review of the fifth “Mir Iskusstva” (“World of Art”) Exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1903, the philosopher and critic Vasily Rozanov captured the fine harmonies connecting the “Demons” and the 1901 “Lilac”. His succinct comments about Vrubel’s works left no doubt as to the commonality between the two works: “The Demon motif is obviously of great importance to him. Both at last year’s exhibition and this one, he showed a Demon, and both interpretations were original and new. The very attempt to leave behind the tired cliches is significant: a man in black, with wings like those of a large bat, ‘mesmerising’ if we look at him favourably, or with red eyes and a red tongue if we mock or fear him. Mr. Vrubel gives us the demon and the demonic as a manifestation of humanity in nature, or human-likeness. His Demon is not ‘flying above the world’, he ‘emerges from the world’. It would be impossible to deny that there is sense in this effort... At the current exhibition, we see him [the Demon] peeking through lilac blossoms - one almost wants to say he ‘flows out of lilac’ - and his human face crowns the mineral mass, appearing itself as if some kind of living crystal. All of this is very clever and well thought through.”[15]

The artist spent two summers captivated by lilacs in bloom, and created two versions of “Lilac” (in 1900 and 1901, both at the Tretyakov Gallery). These two compositions occupy equally important places among Vrubel’s masterpieces. Simultaneously and just as relentlessly, the image of the Swan Princess haunted the artist. He painted two entirely self-sufficient paintings, in 1900 and 1901, which were, nonetheless, seen as matching pieces even by Vrubel’s contemporaries. Aleksander Ivanov wrote about the “Swan Princess” of 1901 that “the body of a beautiful, large bird hiding in club-rushes looks like the same crystal druse as the Swan Princess’s feathers, but the approaching night has already snuffed out the pink glow of these opaque white crystals.”[16] Also, in both “pairs” of paintings the artist’s focus remains on the visual metamorphoses of Nadezhda Zabela, his wife and muse.

Both Lilac paintings, as important links in the chain of transformations that Zabela-Vrubel’s image undergoes in Vrubel’s art, also serve as an introduction to the next theme of this exhibition, which can be described - with a touch of voluntarism - as “bringing spirit into matter”. Here, the first (chronologically) and most important of Vrubel’s works is his decorative panel “Morning” (1897, Russian Museum). The panel was commissioned by Savva Morozov and his wife, Zinaida, for the small drawing room in their Moscow mansion on Ulitsa Spiridonovka, but the Morozovs disliked and rejected it. Ilya Repin’s interference prevented Vrubel from destroying this work, something the artist had done before with his first, in his view unsatisfactory, version of the decorative panel “Midday”. Instead, Vrubel showed “Morning” at the first “Mir Iskusstva” (“World of Art”) exhibition and on the very first day, the work was bought by Princess Maria Tenisheva. In spite of this - or perhaps as a result - the panel baffled the public and scandalised the press so much more than the infamous panel Vrubel showed at the trade fair in Nizhny Novgorod. Critics of all persuasions were especially outraged by the unprecedented interaction between allegorical female figures and landscape. Stasov wrote in frustration: “What are these women? Why are they here? Why are they so awful? What do they signify? And finally, why were they even painted here? Isn’t the whole point that one should not be able to see them? Who can work out and explain this incredible nonsense to us?”[17]

Armed with the knowledge of 20th century art history, a contemporary scholar takes the opposite view and marvels at Vrubel’s ability to seamlessly “put imaginary creatures into real-life surroundings and make the viewer see it as their natural habitat, and not as background landscape.”[18] Our scholar gives an astute definition of Vrubel’s method by using a poetic metaphor from a later time, which, in Vrubel’s case, is right on point and no anachronism: “The painterly and compositional story behind all Vrubel’s works is an attempt, in the words of Boris Pasternak, to reveal ‘how an image enters another image, and how an object cuts into another object’: the metaphorical fusion of images attains its plastic equivalent.”[19]

It does feel like these female figures, personifying earth and water as they awaken at dawn, “a beam of sunlight” and “fading fog”,[20] are placed as coordinate markers on all sides of the panel in order to organise, direct and restrain the incredible frenzy of ever-changing, living pictorial essence of this composition. At the same time, the female figures are its natural continuation and its inescapable creation. Vrubel often used this technique of “bringing spirit” into his painterly subject matter: in “Thirty-Three Bogatyrs” (1901, Russian Museum) the small figures of the bogatyrs, “flashing like fire”, crest seamlessly over the foamy waves, and in “The Pearl” (1904, Tretyakov Gallery), the figures of swimming sea princesses materialise in the abstract, iridescent nacre, almost against the artist’s will. And “the spirits of lilac”, emerging from the shimmering, fluid, lush mass of flowers, seem to be its natural and inevitable product, the result of the form’s evolution.

Those of Vrubel’s works that are based on motifs from theatre productions of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s fairy-tale operas provide a different example of making fantasies “fully human”, as well as balancing on the edge of the imaginary and real worlds. Vrubel’s portraits of his wife, Nadezhda Zabela, as Princess Volk- hova (1898, Tretyakov Gallery and Russian Museum) opened the door to a special genre that he explored at the intersection of his main artistic pursuits, in between the two worlds he inhabited - real life and the theatre, the real and the fantastic.

As he worked on designing stage costumes for his wife, Vrubel mastered the magic of theatrical transformations and it became a familiar part of his daily life and work. The fantastic images the artist and the opera singer created together were so expressive and powerful that, for the public, Zabela and her roles blended into one being. Zabela’s accompanist Boris Yanovsky pointed out that the singer was well aware of the unusual, “heavenly” nature of her beauty, and used it to her advantage: “I do find that there is something about my head and the way I move that works especially well for portraying other-worldly creatures.”21 Rimsky-Korsakov also made a remarkable statement in one of his letters to the Vrubels: “Of course, you [Zabela] ‘wrote’ the part of the Sea Princess by playing and singing her on stage, and it will always be you that I see when I imagine her.”[22]

The work that Vrubel did for some of Mamontov’s private opera productions grew beyond original commissions and became complex projects that enveloped all of the media and techniques that the artist employed, such as painting, drawing and applied arts (which Vrubel himself saw as a whole). Alexandre Benois aptly described this peculiarity of Vrubel’s thinking: “Vrubel was equally masterful in painting, sculpture, and in the sphere we in our country define by the unfortunate and silly term of ‘art industry’”.23 In the process of artistic evolution, the arts and techniques each enrich the plasticity of the other, creating new techniques and forms when intersecting.[24] In May 1898, while discussing his experiments in ceramic art, Vrubel admitted to Rimsky-Korsakov that work in majolica “is an artform that allows me to develop my pictorial language, which, as you know and as I feel, lacks clarity.”[25] Aleksander Ivanov writes about the unity of Vrubel’s sculptural and pictorial forms: “A vigilant researcher and an inspired poet of forms in painting, he could not help but be a natural-born sculptor too. In painting, he contemplates the forms in one motionless perspective, in sculpture he admires them seemingly from all angles, feeling the familiar bends and breaks with his hand”.[26] Conversely, when depicting the figure of the Sea Princess in one of his late watercolours (1904, Russian Museum), he reproduces his three-dimensional “figurine” of 1899 from two lines of sight, trying to capture the most advantageous angles.

In accordance with the tradition developed early in Vrubel’s lifetime, the highlight of the artist’s theatrical portrait line was a painting quite different from the rest typologically. The famous “Swan Princess” has a rather complicated relationship both with the portrait genre (in the depicted creature, many fancied the features of Zabela or Emilia Prakhova, and the sketches presented at the exhibition support both these versions), and with the staging of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”. Vrubel imagined and depicted the Swan Princess in his famous canvas long before he got a holistic impression of the opera. Zabela received her copy of the score on August 10, 1900, and the painting “The Swan Princess” was completed and sold to Mikhail Morozov by April 19 of the following year.27 “I wonder what Swan Mikhail Aleksandrovich, to whom I send my regards, will create...” wrote Rimsky-Kor- sakov to Nadezhda Zabela on April 8, intrigued by news of Vrubel working on the painting.28 The image of a woman-bird created by Vrubel ("the wonder of wonders") made a very strong impression on the composer. Later, in a letter to Zabela dated February 14, 1901, he calls Vrubel’s Princess “an apocalyptic bird”.29 Aleksander Ivanov also noticed in the work the unsettling reflections of ancient myths: “The Princess is floating along the banks, where the pines on the heights glow in the deepening twilight, like heaps of golden treasures; the gleams of dawn and blue sea shadows reflecting in the translucent crystals of her feathers and wings <...> From under the ‘kika’ (headdress), adorned with precious stones and pearls, the eyes - two transparent dark gems - gaze wide open, full of prophetic warning and lurking fright. Is she not the very Maiden Wrong herself who, according to the ancient ‘Song of Igor’s Campaign’ ‘clapped her swan wings on the blue sea’ on the eve of a great disaster?”[30]

Creating theatrical costume portraits depicting Nadezhda Zabela in various roles, or endowing his opera-inspired majolica “figurines” with portrait features, Vrubel creates a unique line of mythological, folklore creatures with their own special fairy-tale anatomy. “Bearing the guise of humans, they belong to something other, something superhuman - a trait that puts Vrubel in step with the art of antiquity.”[31]

In his review of the 1903 St. Petersburg exhibition “Mir iskusstva” (“World of Art”), Vasily Rozanov gave a very subtle definition to this area of Vrubel’s interest, of this specific facet of his talent, and a metaphorical prediction of the “shell” series that had not yet been created at the time: “He delves into nature and in the fantasy, perhaps explaining one through the other, just like a scientist explaining one order of phenomena through another. He works a lot; his soul is undoubtedly agitated and excited. Perhaps this heave might roll some pearls out on the shores.”[32]

The artist dedicated his whole life to acquiring persuasive power in fictional images, the prevalence over the form. “What makes art so great", Vrubel said, “is that it obeys neither nature nor logic. The figure may be wrong in your eyes, but it is beautiful and I like it. That is enough.”[33] The two most mysterious of Vrubel’s masterpieces, where the depicted fantastic creatures do not require any impulsive justifications, are the paintings “Pan” and “At Nightfall” (1899, 1900; Tretyakov Gallery). It is no coincidence that poets were acutely sensitive to the originality of “Pan”. Perhaps the most heartfelt lines about “Pan” belong to one of the leading figures of French Symbolism, Emile Verhaeren: “my eyesight and my mind admire Vrubel’s ‘Pan’, a wonderful creation by a poet and artist. The painting embodies fully the wild and mighty nature of Sylvanus. This is not a prong-legged man but a true emanation of the waters, forests and fields. To create such a strong, unforgettable figure, one must think and feel the way the wondrous masters of the ancient Greece Renaissance thought and felt. One must have a mind capable of guiding both a skilful hand and an excellent vision.”[34] Velimir Khlebnikov dedicated two poems to Vrubel’s painting, “Pen Pan” (1908) and “A goblin grabbles in the greeny forest...” (1912?). The second poem is almost a verbal equivalent of “Pan”.

“A goblin grabbles in the greeny forest —
Wood-willy, slurping his mouth-organ
— where a clump of aspens quivers
and benevolent spruces cascade.
A smear of pungent forest honey
licky on the tongue-tip of daylight;
Oh! His grasping arms were icy:
I was completely taken in.
I couldn’t stand his eyes’ unblinking
point-blank confrontation
—his look, full of pleading promises,
the icicle anguish in his eyes.
Lawn-rake fingers crabbing at me
from a shaky clump of catkins;
he had dark blue sighters
and a body all mush-flesh and flow.
I had missed a turn or two,
tearing along
in a juventy frenzy.
Slying, the wood-wart winked and jostled me:
“Which way where? And why?” [35]”

In his monograph “Vrubel”, the prominent Russian art historian and writer Ivan Yevdokimov gives a thorough explanation of why the painting “At Nightfall” is exceptionally significant: “It would be hard to find anything even remotely resembling Vrubel’s ‘At Nightfall’ in Russian art. There hasn’t been another Russian artist who could convey the mysterious twilight of nature, intricacy and elusiveness of the fading sunlight burning on the bright thistle tops, on the bronze horses anxiously listening for every rustle of the approaching night, on the vague faraway leaden sky with Vrubel’s ominous, penetrating truthfulness. The eerie poetry, the meaningfulness of Nature’s lively thought and mysteries, the attempt to comprehend them were emphasised by Vrubel in a very natural, almost inevitable manner. In the thickets of thistles, he places Nature’s firstborn: a strong, ‘metal’, ‘forged’ figure of a faun guarding the horses. The sky, the thistles, the evening steppe, the huge horses and the faun all merge into solemn silence of the ancient, vast, sleepy land that birthed them.”[36] The most prominent part of the exhibition are the decorative panels made by Vrubel for Moscow mansions. All the panels from museums will be exhibited together for the first time. Although the exhibition plan does not imitate the way panels were arranged in the mansions, the spatial proportions are fairly similar to the original parameters of the premises that the panels were meant for. The prominent centre of the exposition is the “Flowers” ceiling triptych (1894, Omsk Vrubel Museum of Fine Arts), created by Vrubel for the Dunkers mansion on Povarskaya Street in Moscow. Placing them horizontally, on a special pedestal, will allow the viewer the rare opportunity to enjoy the triptych up close and appreciate the powerful relief masonry of the paint layers, the rich texture, the vital rhythms of the painting, and fully perceive the “Flowers” as a work of perspective painting and appreciate the quality of composition. The triptych will be also projected onto the mirrored ceiling - at the very angle it was designed for. The sophisticated composition in which Vrubel sharpens and exaggerates the Renaissance and Baroque design techniques fades when the triptych is exposed vertically on the walls - which even leads to accusations of “ineptitude” in spatial construction. The panels are also related to the artist’s previous life, his further development of leitmotif lines. “Flowers” for the Dunkers’ mansion summarise the whole past experience of Kyiv flower studies, as if all those pencil and watercolour masterpieces were essential in helping Vrubel to master this most perfect of natural forms and become a virtuoso, and later be embodied in the floral spectacle of the triptych. The “Bogatyr” (“Knight”) panel, originally located in the house of Maria Malich on Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, is the result of Vrubel’s developing the plasticity of the horseman-Bogatyr Volga Svyatoslavich. The horseman originated in the panel “Mikula Selyaninovich and Volga” for the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition. It was later embodied with incredible decorative flair in a new material and form material - as the famous majolica fireplace of the same name. The panels for Aleksei and Sergei Morozov’s mansion in Vvedensky Lane were all part of the “game of motives”. For instance, the horses of the flying riders in “The Flight of Faust and Mephisto- pheles” (1896, Tretyakov Gallery) have two origins. One is Arnold Boklin’s painting “War” (1896, New Masters Gallery in the Albertinum, Dresden State Art Collections), and the other was a pencil drawing and watercolour “Horse Racing Faster than a Doe” (both 1890-1891, Tretyakov Gallery) from Vrubel’s series of illustrations for Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “The Demon”. The unfinished panel “Thirty-Three Bogatyrs” (1901, Russian Museum), and especially Vrubel’s sketches of it (1899, Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum of the Far East; 1901, National Pushkin Museum) illustrate how the composition of the panel evolves and is reborn with a cardinal change of theme (originally, Vrubel was working on “Playing Naiads and Tritons”)[37], and yet certain rudiments make their way even into the last version of the painting of 1901. It is for a reason that the panel “Marguerite” (1896, Tretyakov Gallery), part of the triptych decor for the Gothic study, is exhibited on the intersection of the the atrical, portrait and monumental sections. “Marguerite” is a vivid example of a theatrical portrait; it depicts Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel in her role as Marguerite from Charles Gounod’s opera “Faust”, the part she performed at the Panaevsky Theatre in St. Petersburg at the beginning of 1896. However, there is a white wedding dress: Vrubel depicts Nadezhda as his bride - the wedding took place shortly after the painting was completed, on July 28, 1896. Again, Vrubel’s real life and artistic fate are inextricable. The panel “Venice” for the Dunkers’ house could easily have become an exhibit for a portraits of Moscow patrons of art section. Both works illustrate Vrubel’s unique ways of thinking, which Vsevolod Mamontov described as follows: “He would involuntarily, without intention to, depict in his works the faces and images of people dear to him.”38 This conscious and subconscious, indiscriminate devotion to portraits in Vrubel’s heritage (when the depicted characters travel from one painting to another), along with his system of plastic leitmotifs, inspire a feeling of special unity within his artistic system and credibility of the world he created.

Along with the portraits of Moscow art patrons and Vrubel’s friends, who all supported his work, the panel creates an image of the artist’s happy earthly years. They conclude the First Stage of the exhibition, which represents the first part of the artist’s life - the period that was also called “Vrubel’s Moscow decade”, described by Vsevolod Dmitriyev: “Vrubel passes his mature period - the time when the human spirit is most subordinate to reason - in attempts to reconcile his searches with the Zeitgeist of his time... in an intense and unsuccessful battle with the instinctive demands of the soul, in attempts to reduce these demands to the level of contemporary art norms... Vrubel tries to be a peaceful decorator of life, tries to replace beauty with pleasantness, style with stylisation, his boundless spirituality with intimate soulfulness...”[39]

The Second Stage: 20th Century

The downstairs level of the exposition is the entrance to the next circle of the artist’s life. Another inner state, another century. The tragic epigraph, the “Portrait of the Artist’s Son” (1902, Russian Museum) emphasises the contrast of the transition. The portrait marks a milestone in Vrubel's creative path as much as “Demon Downcast”. Division of the exhibition into several stops corresponds to the inexorable logic of Vrubel’s legend-like life. The year 1902 divided Vrubel’s life and career into two equally significant periods. Despite his creative radicalism, all the works created before 1902 fit into the framework of their time and embody exploration in the field of artistic form quite common for the turn of the century. What Vrubel created after 1902 belongs to an entirely new age. “Surrounded by the mystery of his madness, he seemed to have distanced himself from the living, moved beyond a certain inaccessible and unattainable territory. That’s when the legend of Vrubel began to stir among us. He had since then returned to life twice, he was working again, and the farewell blossoming of his genius was truly wonderful. But the border separating him from the living remained; he was to us mysterious, an alien from another world.”[40] Even within the succession of psychiatric hospitals in 19021904, Vrubel tried to continue working. Perhaps it was his immersion in the familiar process that would occasionally “bring him to life”. Returning after a long break to painting from nature, Vrubel seemed to have entered the second stage of his life, in which he tried to find new forms of artistic expression and rebuild his relationship with reality. The once again renewed perspective of the real world was revealed to him. A mature and experienced master, he once more humbly devoted himself to the study of nature and would joyfully share with his fellow artists, “Only now am I beginning to see!”[41] But for Vrubel, the usual outlines, dimensions and landmarks of the world around him had changed. It would all fit inside the artist's hospital room or become limited to the confines of his St. Petersburg apartment. The colours of his world also completely changed: Vrubel hardly worked in oil. Having accepted the external restrictions imposed by life itself, he consciously limited himself in terms of artistic means, realising this was the path of true perfection. Focusing entirely on mastering the art of drawing, Vrubel comes to the conclusion that “paints are not at all essential for conveying the colour of an object; it is a matter of accuracy in drawing those smallest areas from which a solid form is created in our imagination”[42] Nikolai Prakhov recorded the artist's claim: “I believe that future artists will completely abandon paints. They will only draw with Italian pencil and charcoal, and the public will eventually learn to see colours in such drawings as I see them now.”[43]

The Second Circle of the exhibition leads the viewer to an understanding of how the restrictions practised by Vrubel became a source of incredible artistic discoveries, a foundation for his final triumph. It was as if all the artist's self-imposed trials - the “clean drawing”, refraining from colour - only contributed to the accumulation of “colour energy”, and were meant to deliver the iridescent and picturesque “Six-Winged Seraph” (1904, Russian Museum), enchanting in its colourful saturation. “An ingenious splash, emission, flight of spiritual expression, where everything shines and sparkles, ‘like one huge diamond of life’; where the barely incarnated forms emerging from a stream of precious smoky purple crystals and flakes, immediately dematerialise, crumble, dissolve in surface and space, making the canvas literally vibrate, roaring with tension.”[44]

Most of the works created by Vrubel after 1902 can be classified as sketches from nature, yet they are a world away from the traditional objectives of this genre. The forms depicted in the portraits of patients (1902-1903, collection of Dr. Vladimir Pomortsov) are chimeric, yet artistically convincing. Vrubel sought not to simply capture an appearance, but convey the psyche, the energy of the model. These are portraits and states, reflecting confusion in Vrubel’s own soul that is seemingly present in each of the works. In these paintings, Vrubel is free from the demands of his time, and speaks the language of the future, expanding the artistic horizons typical of his era. These works do make a tremendous impression: the weakening of the mind's control led to tyranny of the spirit, which gained unprecedented freedom. Ivan Ge wrote: “Strangely, once Vrubel went crazy, more people than ever believed he was a genius. Those who would not acknowledge him before are now admiring him.”[45] Indeed, the portraits from the Pomortsov collection make us perceive Vrubel’s madness not so much as a disease, but as artistic dissent, a manifestation of pure, creative power free of reason. “In fact, a stern and sharp viewer will notice that, starting from 1902, the lines in Vrubel’s drawings become unsteady, less flexible and clear, sometimes turning into a childish babble; indeed, perhaps, in all the works created by the master after the first fit of insanity, there is no longer the famous firm restraint, the thoroughly thought-out style that make Vrubel’s previous works so austere, clear and sound. Yet, we believe the artist has never before achieved such power of expressiveness and passion, hidden in all the confused and distraught... laconic strokes.”[46]

The portraits from the Vvedensky collection seem different at first glance, as if steadfast and impassive as a document. Several of them were shown at the Moscow Union of Artists exhibition in December 1904: “Not a trace of the illness noticeable in them”, wrote Ivan Ge.47 But this is a deception, a masterful trick. The very anatomy of the figures, the awkward broken poses of patients, their frozen aloof faces reflect the unusualness, the otherness of Vrubel’s models. When viewing this series of portraits, one acutely feels that Vrubel believed himself to be one of those depicted: it’s in the “screaming” expression of the drawing, in the nervous impulsive shading that dispassionately captures the turmoil in the artist’s soul like a seismograph.

The hospital drawings are generally dated depending on which of the two collections they belong to: Pomortsov’s (1902-1903) or Vvedensky’s (1903-1904). However, some works do intersect, and we cannot rule out that many drawings in both collections were created at the same time. Moving through the gallery of “hospital portraits” on the mezzanine floor, where light and dark periods interchange just as in Vrubel's life, the viewer can almost physically feel the intense pattern of the artist's life. The next section of the exhibition presents late sketches of hospital wards, furniture, various objects, fabrics and flowers. The series of drawings made at night, during times of insomnia, particularly stands out. It is as if Vrubel created a new level of animating the matter by making portraits of things: “Everything he touched began to glow with the unique light of life.”[48] It would seem that, through drawing the folds of the bedsheets and blankets, an abandoned robe or chair cover, Vrubel is identifying himself, psychologically, with the people who touched the objects and “is looking at them ‘as if he were a soul peering down at its abandoned shell’ <...> The bewitching one-string sound, the monotony of strokes that obey the inner voice of a ‘hearing’ hand, the endless ‘tonal embroidery’ (the development of textures for the ‘Bed’, ‘Marcella Bedspread’, ‘Decanter’ and ‘Throw on a Chair’), the meditative ‘boring whisper’, the divine inarticulate pencil touches - this is where the superrational 'trembling of the sleeping night' arises, in which Alexander Pushkin sought the meaning of life and Vrubel reaches his heaven. The sleep of reason produced a miracle.”[49]

Mikhail VRUBEL. The Pearl. 1904.
Pastel, gouache, charcoal, paper crafting on cardboard. 35 × 43.7 cm.
© Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The logical culmination of this sketch series, the “matter coming to life”, is a series of shells (late 1904 to early 1905). Vrubel was inspired by a gift, a large nacre serving as an ashtray, that, miraculously, has been preserved to this day.[50] The technique in which the “Pearl” (1904, Tretyakov Gallery), the first and major work of this graphic series, was executed, is truly unique. While imitating nature enveloping the shell with nacre layers, Vrubel lined his paper and pasted onto the shell pieces of various forms, creating a three-dimensional relief. Artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky happened to witness Vrubel’s work and recorded the most valuable memories of the creative process: “The windows of his apartment overlooked a dark, narrow alley near the conservatoire, and I wondered how he managed to create that wonderful colour in works like ‘Shells’. I caught him once working on one of them. A small desk near the window, lit with the feeble St. Petersburg light, was littered with pieces of pastel, watercolour tubes and cigarette butts - he smoked incessantly. He worked from a corner of the table, mixing both pastels and watercolours painstakingly, like a jeweller, and pasting pieces of paper to achieve the desired effect of bright paint.”[51]

“There, in the ‘secret scrolls’ of shimmering forms, in the ‘semi-intelligible revelation’, he was creating self-sufficient, independently developing matter. And, in the words of Nicholas Roerich, this ‘most intimate song of the tones... [was] a wonderful tale of colours and lines that goes beyond matters of ‘what’ and ‘how’.”[52] Vrubel approaches the limits of representational art; perhaps it is the absence of any outside impressions (the artist almost never left his apartment) that allowed Vrubel to experience the entire world in all its cosmic scale inside one shell, to embody the process of the birth of life, the birth of a form - from the fragment to the whole, from the empty sheet to the pearl, the masterpiece. It is no coincidence that, in his only ceremonial self-portrait (1904, Russian Museum), executed in classical iconography, instead of a traditional artist's attribute - a palette - Vrubel is holding a shell, which, for him, was the symbol of the energy of creation. In the portrait, the shell, the mother of pearl, symbolises the omnipotence of the artist, a creator of man-made masterpieces. In the series of sketches from nature, for which the shell served as a model, Vrubel daringly challenges Nature, abandoning colour when depicting the colouristic splendour of mother-of-pearl.

The final part of the exhibition is imbued with the theme that occupied Vrubel’s mind, particularly in his last years: the theme of divine revelation, the artist's mission. In 1896, searching for an artistic theme while working on a panel for the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition, Vrubel turned to the images of Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet” for the first time. He was later commissioned to illustrate “The Prophet” for the 1899 anniversary edition of Pushkin’s poems. This work would become an inspiration for Vrubel to create a large pictorial panel, which he later cut into two parts. Each now exists on its own in two different museum collections. The upper part is the painting “The Prophet” (1898) that belongs to the Tretyakov Gallery. In the lower part of the panel, covering Seraph’s sparkling plumage, Vrubel began to paint a portrait of his wife sitting in a rocking chair by the fireplace (1904-1905, the unfinished portrait “Lady in Violet Dress” now kept in the Russian Museum). The two separated parts of the panel are reunited in the Tretyakov Gallery exhibition. Perhaps it was this portrait of Nadezhda Zabela “against the background of Seraphim’s wings” that made Vrubel return both to the theme of Pushkin’s “Prophet” and to the active work on the composition of his early-1898 painting. Vrubel shows a very personal interpretation of the Prophet, who acquired features of a self-portrait, and Seraph, who, from then on, became Nadezhda’s new role.

“The Six-Winged Seraph” (1904, Russian Museum) - the closing work of the exhibition, and the significant ending of Vrubel’s artistic life - brings together many lines and leitmotifs of the artist’s oeuvre. In the face of the formidable Seraph, one can recognise Nadezhda’s features. Such a sublime interpretation of the artist’s wife and muse is a culmination of a long chain of transformations in her portraits by Vrubel, created throughout their life together. In terms of composition, the “Six-Winged Seraph” is a sort of paraphrase of the Byzantine mosaic Archangels on the dome of St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv. Vrubel painted the three oil figures of Archangels (now lost) in the image of the only one that survived. The technique in which the “Six-Winged Seraph” was executed also stems from Vrubel's Kyiv experience: the artist had used paint to create the effect of iridescent smalt. In his last painting, Vrubel no longer imitates mosaics, but masterfully reinterprets it. The image of the avenging angel with a sword and censer (contemporaries called the painting “Azrael” and “The Angel of Death”) is simultaneously angelic and demonic. “In it, we recognise the six-winged Seraph, who once appeared before us in the painting “The Prophet”. His image has changed, but the same sword and censer with a flaming coal are in his hands, and the same wise snake with a burning sting wraps around his hand. A golden crown that adorned the last Demon shines on his forehead and his features are similar to the “Demon Downcast”.[53]

In the eyes of Vrubel's contemporaries, this work by Vrubel was not only a variation of the “Demon Downcast”, but also a symbol of the artist's revival. Completing his artistic journey with the perfect rhyming of its begi nning and end, and closing the circle of his life, Vrubel turned it into “a perfect form of artistic being”.[54]

1. N. Ge, “Vrubel” in World of Art [Mir iskusstva], nos. 10-11 (1903), p. 183.
2. Quoted from: A. Benois, “Letters on Art. 1908-1917” [“Khudozhest- vennyye pis’ma. 1908-1917”] in Rech newspaper, vol. 1 (1908-1910; Saint Petersburg, 2006), p. 410.
3. Ibid.
4. A. Blok, “In Memory of Vrubel” [“Pamyati Vrubelya”], 1st edition in A. Blok: Collected Works, 8 vols., vol. 5 (Leningrad, 1960-1963), p. 689.
5. S. Yaremich, “Vrubel” in World of Art [Mir iskusstva], nos. 10-11 (1903), p. 189.
6. A. Benois, “Vrubel” in Letters on Art. 1908-1917 [Khudozhestven- nyye pis’ma. 1908-1917], vol. 1, (St. Petersburg, 2006), p. 411.
7. M. Alpatov, “Once again on Vrubel” [“Snova o Vrubele”] in Sketches of the Russian Art History [Etyudypo istorii russkogo iskusstva], vol. 2 (Moscow, 1967), p. 161.
8. M. Allenov, Vrubel (Moscow, 2000), p. 29.
9. A. Merezhnikov, “M. Vrubel’s Creative Method: Composition and Artistic Metaphor” (PhD Thesis History of Art) [“Tvorcheskiy metod M. Vrubelya: problem kom- pozitsii I izobrazitel’noy metafory: dis. kand. iskusstvovedeniya”] (St. Petersburg, 2018), p. 232.
10. S. Durylin, “Vrubel and Lermontov” in Mikhail Lermontov, articles and materials in 2 books, prepared to print by I. Sergiyevsky and B. Eichenbaum. Book2 (Moscow, 1948), pp. 541-622. (Literaturnoye Nasledstvo, USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House); vol. 45/46). N. Tarabukin, Mikhail Vrubel (Moscow, 1974). P. Suzdalev, Vrubel. Personality. World View. Method [Vrubel. Lichnost’. Mirovozzreniye. Metod] (Moscow, 1984).
11. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), p. 12.
12. M. Voloshin, “Exhibition of Children Drawings: Viktor Borisov-Musatov. Vrubel” [“Vystavka detskikh risunkov. V.E. Bor- isov-Musatov. Vrubel”] in Rus, no. 76 (1908, March 1), p. 2.
13. Vrubel: Correspondence; Memories of the Artist [Vrubel. Perepiska. Vospominaniya o khudozhnike], 2nd ed. (Leningrad, 1976), p. 51.
14. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 47-48.
15. V. Rozanov, “At the Exhibition of the ‘World of Art” Magazine” [“Na vystavke zhurnala ‘Mir iskusstva’”] in World of Art [Mir iskusstva], no. 6 (1903), pp. 54-55.
16. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), p. 38.
17. V. Stasov, “Exhibitions” [“Vy- stavki”] in News and Stock Exchange Paper [Novosti i birzhevaya gazeta] (January 27, 1898).
18. Quoted from: A. Benois, "Artistic Letters. 1908-1917" ["Khudozhest- venniye pisma. 1908-1917"] in Rech newspaper. Vol. 1. 1908-1910 (St. Petersburg, 2006). P. 102
19. Quoted from: A. Benois, "Vrubel" in Rech. No. 91. April 3, 1910. - See: A. Benois, "Artistic Letters. 19081917" ["Khudozhestvenniye pisma. 1908-1917"] in Rech newspaper. Vol. 1. 1908-1910 (St. Petersburg, 2006). P. 410
20. Vrubel (1976), p. 268.
21. L. Barsova, Vrubel: No Comments (Saint Petersburg, 2012), p. 65.
22. Ibid., p. 94.
23. A. Benois, Vrubel. World of Art [Vrubel. Mir iskusstva], nos. 10-11 (1903), p. 177.
24. More on this: I. Shumanova, “The Fullest Form of Artistic Being” [“Polneishaya forma khudozhest- vennogo bytiya”] in Mikhail Vrubel (Moscow, 2021), pp. 37, 40, 52.
25. L. Barsova. Quoted work, p. 76.
26. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), p. 25.
27. L. Barsova, Vrubel: No Comments (Saint Petersburg, 2012), pp. 156, 164.
28. Ibid., p. 161.
29. Ibid., p. 190.
30. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), p. 38.
31. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), p. 7.
32. V. Rozanov, “At the Exhibition of the ‘World of Art’ Magazine” [“Na vystavke zhurnala ‘Mir iskusstva’”] in World of Art [Mir iskusstva], no. 6 (1903), p. 55.
33. A. Ivanov. Quoted work, p. 6.
34. E. Verhaeren, “Moscow Memories” [“Moskovskiye vospominaniya”] in Russkiye Vedomosti, no. 5 (January 8, 1914).
35. Velimir Khlebnikov’s “A goblin grabbles in the greeny forest...” translated from Russian by Paul Schmidt https://ruverses.com/velimir-khlebnikov/a-goblin-grabbles-in-the-greeny-forest
36. I. Yevdokimov, M. Vrubel (Moscow, 1925), p. 54.
37. Watercolour sketches-variations (1896-1899), Tretyakov Gallery, Vasnetsov Brothers Art Museum, private collections; painting 1899, Ivanovo Art Museum.
38. V. Mamontov, Memories of Russian Artists: Abramtsevo Artistic Circle [Vospominaniya o russlikh khudozhnikakh: Abramtsevskiy khudozhestvennyy kruzhok], 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1951), p. 77.
39. V. Dmitriyev, “Vrubel’s Legacy” [“Zavety Vrubelya”] in Apollon, no. 5 (1913), p. 16.
40. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 1-2.
41. Ibid., p. 55.
42. N. Prakhov, “Mikhail Vrubel” [“Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel”] in Vrubel (1976), p. 222.
43. Ibid.
44. V. Lenyashin, “Vrubel: Ineffable Thought; On the Matter of the Plastic Foundations of Poetic Symbolism” [“Vrubel — mysl’ neizrechyonnaya: (k voprosu o plasticheskikh osnovaniyakh poeticheskogo simvolizma)”] in Saint Petersburg Art History Notebooks [Peterburgskiye iskusstvovedcheskiye tetradi], periodical collection of works on the history of art, issue 16 (St. Petersburg, 2009), p. 119.
45. Vrubel (1976), p. 278.
46. N. Punin, “On the Drawings of M. Vrubel” [“K risunkam M.A. Vrubelya”] in Apollon, no. 5 (1913, May), p. 12.
47. Vrubel (1976), p. 281.
48. N. Punin, “On the Drawings of M. Vrubel” [“K risunkam M.A. Vrubelya”] in Apollon, no. 5 (1913, May), p. 10.
49. V. Lenyashin. “Vrubel: Ineffable Thought; On the Matter of the Plastic Foundations of Poetic Symbolism” [“Vrubel — mysl’ neizrechyonnaya: (k voprosu o plasticheskikh osnovaniyakh poeticheskogo simvolizma)”] in Saint Petersburg Art History Notebooks [Peterburgskiye iskusstvovedches- kiye tetradi], periodical collection of works on the history of art, issue 16 (St. Petersburg, 2009), pp. 121-122.
50. Manuscript Department of the Russian Museum, folio 34, inventory 1, item 370.
51. M. Dobuzhinsky, Memories [Vospominaniya] (Moscow, 1987), p. 214.
52. N. Roerich, “Vrubel: The Artist’s Notebooks” [“Vrubel. Zapisnyye listki khudozhnika”] in Vesy, no. 2 (1905, February), p. 29.
53. A. Ivanov, Vrubel, 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 51-52.
54. A. Benois, “Vrubel: Obituary” [“Vrubel: [nekrolog]”] in Rech, April 3 (16). Quoted from: A. Benois, Letters on Art. 1908-1917 [Khudozhestvennyye pis’ma. 1908-1917} in Rech, vol. 1 (1908-1910; St. Petersburg, 2006), p. 410.