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A vrubel princess swan description. Description of the artwork «The Swan Princess

Vrubel Mikhail Alexandrovich is one of the famous Russian artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
On his canvases he brings Russian folk tales, epics and legends to life.
Having once visited the private opera of S. Mamontov, Mikhail Vrubel was inspired to write the painting “The Swan Princess”.
It is dedicated to the character of the opera N.A.
Rimsky-Korsakov based on the well-known fairy tale by A.S.
Pushkin "The Tale of Tsar Sultan".

The fabric is just amazing.
In the picture, the author depicted the moment when the princess turns into a swan.
A very beautiful girl, turned to face us and mysteriously looks from behind.
On her head is an expensive jeweled crown.
A long veil falls from it to the floor, sparkling with jewels along the edge.
Under the veil you can see a dark thick braid.
On the face you can read sadness and loneliness.
The eyes are very expressive and you can see goodbye in them.
She must again become a lonely bird and swim sadly on the waves.
We can't see her clothes, as her whole body is already covered with feathers, only her face and hands remain.
Large wings spread out on both sides of the girl, as if they want to hide her from our eyes as soon as possible.

In the distance of the picture one can see the castle of Tsar Sultan.
This is the only brown spot in the picture.
All other colors are white and blue.
The sky in the background is dark, dark and you can see how the sea is raging, how the waves beat against the shore and foam with anger.
No one wants to part with such a beauty.
And only the fact that the Swan Princess is very bright against the whole dark background tells us that she will return to us in the form of a beauty.

Mikhail Vrubel, with his reproduction of the Swan Princess, wants to show us how beautiful our women are and despite the fact that they are fragile and defenseless, without their support and support, not a single king would have such power.

Passionate love for nature helps the artist to convey its beauty. The lush clusters of Vrubel's "Lilacs" (1900, State Tretyakov Gallery), flashing with purple fire, live, breathe, and smell fragrant in the radiance of a starry night. One of Vrubel's contemporaries wrote: "Nature blinded him ... because he peered too closely into her secrets."

Along with epic themes, Vrubel has been working on the image of the Demon throughout the 90s. In one of the letters to his father, the artist's idea of the Demon is expressed: " The demon is not so much an evil spirit as a suffering and mournful one, with all this a domineering, majestic spirit". The first attempt to solve this topic dates back to 1885, but the work was destroyed by Vrubel.

In the painting "Seated Demon" (1890, State Tretyakov Gallery), a young titan is depicted in the rays of sunset on top of a rock. The powerful beautiful body does not seem to fit in the frame, the hands are wrinkled, the face is touchingly beautiful, inhuman sorrow in the eyes. Vrubel's "Demon" is a combination of contradictions: beauty, grandeur, strength and at the same time stiffness, helplessness, melancholy; it is surrounded by a fabulously beautiful, but petrified, cold world. There are contrasts in the coloring of the picture. Cold lilac color "fights" with warm orange-gold. Rocks, flowers, the figure are painted in a special way, in Vrubel's way: the artist, as it were, cuts the form into separate facets and it seems that the world is woven from blocks of jewels. There is a feeling of originality.

Thinking in fantastic images, Vrubel is closely connected with the surrounding life, his Demon is deeply modern, it reflected not only the artist’s personal emotional experiences, but the era itself with its contrasts and contradictions. As wrote A. Blok : "Vrubel's demon is a symbol of our time, neither night nor day, neither darkness nor light".

In 1891, for the anniversary edition of his works Lermontov under the editorship of Konchalovsky, Vrubel completed the illustrations, of the thirty - half belonged to the "Demon". These illustrations, in essence, represent independent works, significant in the history of Russian book graphics, and testify to Vrubel's deep understanding of Lermontov's poetry. Especially noteworthy is the watercolor "Demon's Head". She is truly monumental. Against the background of stony snow-capped peaks - a head with a hat of black curls. A pale face, parched, as if scorched by internal fire, lips, burning eyes with a piercing gaze, with an expression of unbearable torment. In this look - the thirst for "knowledge and freedom", the rebellious spirit of doubt.

A few years later, Vrubel wrote The Flying Demon (1899, Russian Museum). The image is permeated with a premonition of death, doom. The color of the picture is gloomy.

And, finally, the last painting, "The Downcast Demon", belongs to the years 1901-1902, Vrubel worked hard and painfully on it. A. Benois recalls that the picture was already at the World of Art exhibition, and Vrubel still continued to rewrite the face of the Demon, changing color.

The broken, deformed body of the Demon with broken wings is stretched out in the gorge, eyes burn with anger. The world plunges into dusk, the last ray flashes on the crown of the Demon, on the tops of the mountains. The rebellious spirit is overthrown, but not broken.

Contemporaries saw in this image a protesting beginning, a beautiful unsubdued person. Words come to mind A. Blok : "What instant impotence! Time is a light smoke! We will spread our wings again! We will fly away again! .." and said a little later Chaliapin : "And he wrote his Demons! Strong, scary, creepy and irresistible ... My Demon is from Vrubel."

Finishing the defeated Demon, Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel fell seriously ill and was placed in a hospital. With short breaks, the disease lasts until 1904, then a short recovery occurs.

In 1904 he goes to Petersburg. The last period of creativity begins.

In 1904, Vrubel wrote "Six-winged Seraphim", according to the plan associated with Pushkin's poem "Prophet". A mighty angel in a sparkling iridescent plumage to a certain extent continues the theme of the Demon, but this image is notable for its integrity and harmony.

In the last years of his life, Vrubel created one of the most delicate, fragile images - "Portrait of N. I. Zabela against the backdrop of birch trees" (1904, Russian Museum). Interesting self-portraits belong to the same period. Since 1905, the artist has been in the hospital constantly, but continues to work, showing himself as a brilliant draftsman. He paints scenes of hospital life, portraits of doctors, landscapes. Drawings made in a different manner are distinguished by accurate observation, great emotionality. Dr. Usoltsev, who treated Vrubel, writes: " He was a creative artist with all his being, down to the deepest recesses of his psychic personality. He always created, one might say, continuously, and creativity was for him as "easy and as necessary as breathing. While a person is alive, he breathes everything, while Vrubel breathed - he created everything".

A few years before his death, Vrubel began to work on a portrait V. Bryusova (1906, Russian Museum). Some time later, Bryusov wrote that all his life he tried to be like this portrait. Vrubel did not have time to complete this work, in 1906 the artist went blind. He tragically experiences a terrible blow, in a difficult hospital situation he dreams of the blue of the sky above the dark fields, of the mother-of-pearl colors of spring. Music was the only consolation. Vrubel died on April 1, 1910.

Creating tragic images, the artist embodied in them a bright noble beginning. The struggle between light and darkness is the content of most of Vrubel's works. A. Blok poetically said this over the artist's grave: " Vrubel came to us as a messenger that the gold of a clear evening is interspersed in the lilac night. He left us his Demons as spellcasters against purple evil, against the night. Before Vrubel and his ilk reveal to humanity once a century, I can only tremble"

Materials of the article by Fedorova N.A. from the book: Dmitrienko A.F., Kuznetsova E.V., Petrova O.F., Fedorova N.A. 50 short biographies of masters of Russian art. Leningrad, 1971

Monograph about Vrubel. Unnoticed Masterpieces

Girl on the background
persian carpet,
1886

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A trip to Venice was undertaken to paint commissioned iconostasis images - Christ, the Mother of God and saints - Cyril and Athanasius. Prakhov decided that it would be better for Vrubel to work on them not in Kyiv, but in Venice, a museum city, where the Cathedral of St. Mark with its famous mosaics, the 12th-century mosaics at Torcello and paintings by renowned Venetian colorists.
Vrubel spent about six months in Venice. From there he wrote to his sister: “I leaf through my Venice (in which I sit all the time, because the order is on heavy zinc boards that you can’t roll with) as a useful special book, and not as poetic fiction. What I find in it is interesting only to my palette.” Most of all, his palette was not luminaries of the High Renaissance - Titian, Veronese - but their predecessors, the Quattrocento masters (XV century), more closely associated with the medieval tradition - Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano and, especially, Giovanni Bellini. The influence of the Venetian Quattrocento was reflected in Vrubel's monumental icons with full-length figures. The first biographer of Vrubel A.P. Ivanov wrote about them: “The plastic music of these icons is built in the majestic and clear modes of G. Bellini and Carpaccio, and in the depths of it, as a dominant in the organ point, the colorful magic of the San Marco mosaics sounds.”
Venice gave Vrubel a lot and became an important milestone in his creative development: if the meeting with Byzantine art enriched his understanding of form and elevated his expression, then Venetian painting awakened a coloristic gift. Yet he eagerly waited for the return. What happened to him was what often happens to people who find themselves outside their homeland for a long time: only then do they feel all the power of its attraction. A letter from the artist from Venice to his comrade at the Academy, V.E. Savinsky, has been preserved, where he, with obvious tension of thought, is trying to present new and important conclusions for him, which he came to in Italy. He says that here, that is, in Italy, one can study, and create - only on native soil; that to create is to feel, and to feel is to “forget that you are an artist and rejoice in the fact that you are, first of all, a person.” "... How much beauty we have in Rus'!" - such an exclamation breaks out from Vrubel for the first time. Previously, he seemed to be rather indifferent to the “native soil”: it was something taken for granted, unnoticed, plans were scooped from world sources: antiquity, Hamlet, Faust ... And only now, abroad, does his mood arise and thoughts that later led to a poetic interpretation of Russian fairy tales and Russian nature.

There was another reason why Vrubel wanted to return to Kyiv as soon as possible. He was in love with Prakhov's wife Emilia Lvovna, about which several times, without naming a name, he mysteriously hinted in letters to his sister: this was his secret "spiritual affair."
Even before leaving abroad, he painted E. L. Prakhova several times - her face served him as a prototype for the face of the Mother of God. The portrait resemblance is also preserved in the icon itself, but it is muted there; more clearly - in two pencil sketches of the head of the Mother of God. An amazing face looks from these drawings: rather ugly than beautiful, the infinitely touching face of the wanderer - the brows up to the eyebrows, a swollen mouth, as it were, wide round bright eyes, as if contemplating something unknown to others.
Of the four iconostasis images of the Mother of God, the artist especially succeeded. This is one of his undoubted masterpieces. It is written on a golden background, dressed in deep, velvety dark red tones, the pillow on the throne is embroidered with pearls, and at the foot are delicate white roses. The Mother of God holds the baby on her knees, but does not lean towards him, but sits upright and looks in front of her with a sad prophetic look. Some resemblance to the type of Russian peasant woman flashes in the features and expression of her face, like those long-suffering female faces that are found in Surikov's paintings.
For the first time felt love for the motherland, the first sublime love for a woman spiritualized this image, brought it closer to the human heart.
Returning from Venice, Vrubel rushed about. It was as if he could not find a place for himself - either he made a decision to leave Kyiv (and indeed he left for Odessa for several months), then he returned again; he was drawn to the drunken “cup of life”, he was violently fond of some visiting dancer, drank a lot, lived unsettled, feverishly, and besides, he was severely in poverty, since there was no money, while relations with Prakhov became colder and more distant .
The artist's father was in alarm: his son was already thirty years old, university education, art education, "an abyss of talent", and meanwhile no name, no secure position - no stake, no court. On insistent invitations to come and live at home (the family lived then in Kharkov) does not answer anything. In the autumn of 1886, A.M. Vrubel himself came to Kyiv to visit his son, and his fears were confirmed: “Misha is healthy (according to him), but he looks thin and pale. From the station I went straight to him and was saddened by his room and furnishings. Imagine, not a single table, not a single chair. All furnishings are two simple stools and a bed. I didn’t see a warm blanket, a warm coat, or a dress, except for the one he was wearing (a greasy frock coat and worn trousers). Maybe in a mortgage ... It hurts, bitterly to tears ... I was to see all this. There are so many brilliant hopes!”

There is no direct evidence of the artist's state of mind at that time - he did not like to be frank - but it is quite obvious that he was going through not only a financial crisis. He endured poverty carelessly, the lack of fame too: he knew that sooner or later she would come, and if she didn’t come, so what? Love, deadlocked - that was serious. But not only that. He was visited by deep turmoil, which he shared with his era, although the immediate causes may have been intimate and personal. Vrubel experienced early what two decades later Blok called "an influx of purple worlds," purple darkness overcoming the golden light. An atheistic rebellion arose in him. For two years, Vrubel worked for the church, in an atmosphere of religiosity, which was as little in agreement with those around him, as the secular lady Emilia Prakhova was so little in line with the ideal of the Mother of God. And for the first time, the gloomy image of the God-fighter - the Demon - began to tempt Vrubel and capture his imagination.
He was just working on The Demon when his father unexpectedly arrived. The father described the unfinished painting in the same letter, saying that the Demon seemed to him "an evil, sensual, repulsive old woman." No traces of the Kyiv "Demon" have come down to us - the artist destroyed it, all the now known "Demons" were made much later. But the idea and the beginning belong to the Kyiv period.
At the same time, Vrubel worked on other things then, commissioned by the Kyiv philanthropist I.N. Tereshchenko. They discover a craving for the east - flowery, magical, spicy. For Tereshchenko, Vrubel undertook to paint the painting "Oriental Tale", but he only made a sketch in watercolor, and he tore it up when E.L. Prakhova refused to accept it as a gift. Then, however, he glued the torn sheet, which to this day is the pride of the Kyiv Museum of Russian Art. This large watercolor is amazing. At first glance, it is difficult to make out what is depicted: the eye is blinded by an iridescent mosaic of precious particles, illuminated by flashes of bluish phosphoric light, as if we really entered the cave, the treasures from the Thousand and One Nights. But now the eye gets used to it and begins to distinguish the inside of the tent of the Persian prince, the carpets covering it, the prince himself and his odalisques. The figures are full of feeling and poetry: the prince, having risen on the couch, with a thoughtful and heavy gaze, looks at the beautiful girl standing in front of him with lowered eyes.

continuation .....

Monograph about Vrubel. Kyiv. Encounter with antiquity

Girl on the background
persian carpet,
1886

The artist L. Kovalsky, at that time a student of the Kyiv drawing school, later told how he first met Vrubel shortly after his arrival in Kyiv. Kovalsky settled down to write a sketch on a high hill overlooking the Dnieper and distant meadows. “The silence of the evening, the complete absence of anyone, except for the swallows, which circled and chirped in the air. In calm contemplation, I depicted, as best I could, my 30-verst landscape, but quiet steps, and then a fixed look made me turn around. The spectacle was more than extraordinary: against the backdrop of the primitive hills of Kirillovsky, behind me stood a blond, almost white, blond, young, with a very characteristic head, a small mustache, also almost white. Short in stature, very well-proportioned, dressed ... it was this that at that time could strike me most of all ... all in a black velvet suit, in stockings, short trousers and boots. No one dressed like that in Kyiv, and this made a proper impression on me. In general, it was a young Venetian from a painting by Tintoretto or Titian, but I learned this many years later, when I was in Venice. Now, against the background of the Kirillov hills and the colossal dome of the blue of the Kiev sky, the appearance of this contrasting figure, with blond hair, dressed in black velvet, was more than an incomprehensible anachronism.
... The stranger leaned closer, looked intently and in a serious tone, as if a thing of unknown importance, said: “Where is your first plan? Is it these bales of hay? Why, they are several miles away! You can’t write like that, you are doing nonsense - you need to start studying nature from a sheet, from details, and not, like you, take all sorts of things and stuff them on an insignificant piece - this is some kind of encyclopedia, not painting. Don't be angry, I said that because I see your mistake." Looked a little more and disappeared; I didn’t even turn around to look, I was hurt by insulting words, which seemed to me a lot in his remark, but I was still interested that he spoke so sincerely and seriously about my work, which I looked at as a thing not worthy of attention - I was taught to do this at school, there no one seriously looked at either their own or other people's work.

Excited, Kovalsky did not continue the study and went to the St. Cyril's Church to see his comrades who were working on the restoration of frescoes. In the choir stalls, he noticed a stranger he had just met; the comrades said that this was the artist Vrubel, and showed the “Descent of the Holy Spirit” he had begun, as well as two angels: “Vrubel said that here he came closest to Byzantium.”
So, Vrubel in Kyiv had to supervise the restoration of Byzantine frescoes of the XII century in the St. Cyril's Church, in addition, write several new figures and compositions on its walls to replace the lost ones, and also paint images for the iconostasis. The overall management of the work belonged to Prakhov.
A.V. Prakhov, in close contact with whom (and with his family) Vrubel spent five years in Kyiv, was known in artistic circles. An art historian, archaeologist, professor at St. Petersburg University, in the 1970s he also actively acted as an art critic in the Bee magazine. In articles under the pseudonym "Profan", Prakhov, with great literary brilliance and temperament, promoted the art of the Wanderers. One of his most interesting articles, dedicated to the Sixth Traveling Exhibition of 1878 (in fact, two exhibits - Yaroshenko's "Stoker" and Repin's "Protodeacon") was not passed by censorship. The article was preserved in proofs, and later, even today, its authorship was at one time erroneously attributed to I.N. Kramskoy. Then Prakhov completely withdrew from critical activity, ceased to engage in contemporary art (a characteristic symptom of the 80s!) and returned to the study of antiquities. However, he did not lose touch with the artists, and his house in Kyiv was almost as open to them as the houses of Polenov and Mamontov in Moscow. Energetic, active, not yet forty years old, Prakhov stirred up the artistic life of Kyiv, undertaking the study and restoration of unique monuments of Kievan Rus. He also supervised the interior decoration of the new temple - Vladimir, founded in the 1860s. At that time, Russian artists had rather rough ideas about the Byzantine style, as well as about the restoration technique. The Kirillov frescoes were in poor condition, and an artel of students from the Kyiv drawing school, led by the artist N.I. Murashko (Vrubel later became close friends with him), worked on their “renovation”. With their little skillful hands, the frescoes were painted from above along the preserved contours (according to the “counts”); now such a method would be considered barbaric. Information has been preserved that Vrubel objected to him, offering to simply clear the frescoes and leave them intact, but they did not agree to this: the temple was active, and the half-erased figures of the saints could confuse the parishioners. It was necessary to finish them, keeping, if possible, the style of the XII century. How was it to be saved? Not only Murashko's students, but also Vrubel himself first encountered Byzantine art in Kyiv. For several months he plunged headlong into the study of antiquities, using, in addition to the originals of St. Cyril's Church and the Cathedral of St. Sophia, books, color tables and photographs from the rich library of Prakhov. He treated the restoration of old frescoes from surviving fragments with great care; as N. A. Prakhov (son of A.V. Prakhov), “did not invent anything from himself, but studied the setting of figures and the folds of clothes based on materials preserved in other places.”
Now, in the middle of the 20th rather than the 19th century, the Kirillov frescoes have been restored according to all the rules of modern science, although most of them have been irretrievably lost, and only a few pieces of the ancient painting have been preserved intact. But now St. Cyril's Church has also gone down in history as a monument depicted by Vrubel's genius. Vrubel painted several figures of angels on the walls, the head of Christ, the head of Moses and, finally, two independent compositions - a huge “Descent of the Holy Spirit” in the choirs and “Lamentation” in the porch. In working on them, the artist no longer copied old samples. He had an inner right not to follow the letter of the ancient style - he penetrated into its spirit.

The noble and restrained expression of ancient mosaics and frescoes clarified Vrubel's own searches. Expression was characteristic of his talent from the beginning, but in his early works he strayed into exaggeration and romantic clichés. So, in the drawing "Anna Karenina's Appointment with her son", made in the early 80s, Anna, with exaggerated ardor, almost strangles a child in her arms. In the drawings for "Mozart and Salieri" (1884), Salieri looks like a melodramatic villain. And only after joining the monumental Byzantine and Old Russian art, Vrubel's expression becomes majestic - psychological pressure disappears, a characteristically Vrubel expression of spiritual tension appears in the concentrated gaze of huge eyes (big eyes are also a feature of Byzantine painting), with postures as if numb, a mean gesture, in atmosphere of deep silence. This is already in the "Descent of the Holy Spirit", written on the box vault of St. Cyril's Church. According to the gospel tradition, the holy spirit appeared to the apostles in the form of a dove, the flames emanating from it "rested on each of them." After that, the apostles acquired the gift of speaking in all languages and preaching the teachings of Christ to all nations. Like other gospel tales, the plot of the "Descent" had its own iconographic scheme in church art, fixed by a centuries-old tradition. Vrubel followed the scheme quite closely, apparently using miniatures of the old gospels. But in the interpretation of figures and faces, he showed himself as a modern artist, as a psychologist. His apostles had living prototypes. It used to be thought that the artist made preparatory sketches from the mentally ill (the St. Cyril's Church was located on the territory of a psychiatric hospital), but this is not true: the son of A.V. Prakhov N.A. , priests, archaeologists, among them Adrian Viktorovich Prakhov himself.
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Mikhail Vrubel. Gallery of pictures. Painting

The grandiosity and truly titanic greatness of Vrubel manifested itself in the amazing polyphony of creativity, the universalism of skill and originality of thinking. He was one of the most prominent artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his life and work, the highest skill and bright individualism, deep knowledge of nature and fantasy, the deepest knowledge of the traditions of world art and the innate gift of an experimenter were combined. With his work, he refuted the doubts of the "left" and "right" skeptics about the need for both a school and a conscious experiment in art. Love for art completely owned Vrubel from his academic years. At the Academy, he worked twelve hours a day. The first completely independent works of Vrubel belong to 1884-1885. Thus, the period of Vrubel's creative activity is relatively short - just over twenty years. Vrubel for a long time seemed to have appeared from nowhere. It seemed difficult to determine the origin of his style, his individual manner. On the surface, this individual style is easily recognizable: it is a manner of interpreting visible forms in the form of a mosaic of strokes, a cubized ornamentation of a three-dimensional form. Subsequently, after Vrubel's death, Russian critics liked to say that it was Vrubel who was the forerunner of cubism.

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Demon defeated. 1901	Seated Demon, 1890. Sketch	Demon defeated. 1902	Flying Demon. 1899
Lady in purple. Portrait of the artist N.I. Zabela-Vrubel. 1904	Red flowers and leaves of begonias in a basket. 1886-1887	Peacock. Early 1900s	East Dance. 1887
Demon defeated. 1902. Sketch in watercolor	Portrait of K.D. Artsybushev. 1897	Six-winged seraph. 1905	Night in Italy. 1891
Bogatyr. 1898	Hamlet and Ophelia. 1884	Snow Maiden. 1890s	Rose hip. 1884
Games of naiads and newts	Farewell of the king of the sea with the princess Volkhova. 1899	Catania. Sicily. 1894	Porto Fino. Italy. 1894

Probably, the "Demon" was not the cause of Vrubel's illness, but became a catalyst, an accelerator: the coincidence of the end of the picture with the beginning of the illness is hardly accidental. The last frenzied surge of energy, the last super-effort - and then exhaustion, breakdown. Imagine an artist at the limit of his strength, stubbornly remaining eye to eye with the "spirit of evil", created by him, but already separated from him, living a life separate from him; let us imagine how every morning he enters into a fight with him with a brush, trying to subdue him to his will - is this not the material for a tragic legend! That version of the "Demon Defeated", on which a desperate duel broke off and the artist's spirit was exhausted, does not belong - it must be admitted - to the heights of Vrubel's work. It is terribly effective, of course, and was even more effective until its colors faded, withered, but S. Yaremich rightly noted that here "the highest artistic restraint is close to violation." The demon is cast down into a gorge among the rocks. The once mighty arms became whips, pathetically broken, the body was deformed, the wings were scattered. Around the fallen lilac gloom and splashed blue jets. They flood it, a little more - and close it completely, leaving a blue expanse, a pre-temporal body of water in which the mountains are reflected. Wild and pitiful is the face of the fallen one with a painfully contorted mouth, although a pink glow still burns in his crown. Gold, gloomy blue, milky blue, smoky purple and pink - all Vrubel's favorite colors - form an enchanting spectacle here. The canvas just painted did not look like it does now: the crown sparkled, the peaks of the mountains shone pink, the feathers of broken wings, like peacocks, sparkled and flickered. As always, Vrubel did not care about the safety of the paints - he added bronze powder to the paints to make them shine, but over time this powder began to act destructively, the picture darkened unrecognizably. But from the very beginning, her color scheme was openly decorative - it lacked the depth and saturation of color, the variety of transitions and shades, which is in the best things of Vrubel. "Demon Defeated" captivates not so much with its painting, but with the visible embodiment of the artist's tragedy: we feel - "here a man burned down."

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Six-winged seraphim (Azrael). 1904

Before meeting the eminent opera singer Nadezhda Zabela at Vrubel there were affairs, but none of them led to marriage. Hope became his muse, wife and guardian angel, protecting him until the last days of his life. She inspired him to create many works, including the most mysterious one - "The Swan Princess", and tried to do the impossible - to save him from madness.

They met at Savva Mamontov's Russian Private Opera, at the rehearsal of the play. When he first heard Zabela sing, he approached her backstage, kissed her hands and repeated: “What a lovely voice!”. It was love at first sight, he offered her a hand and a heart two days after they met. “Other singers sing like birds, but Nadia sings like a person,” said the artist. “The voice is even-even, light, soft-pipe and full of colors. And how much love was in this singing! The soul of the fairy tale merged in it with the soul of man. And what a look! A miracle, a miracle, a miracle!” - the composer M. Gnesin spoke about Zabela. In the summer of 1896, Zabela and Vrubel got married in Geneva.

Nadezhda Zabela was N. Rimsky-Korsakov's favorite performer: especially for her, he wrote the part of Martha in the opera The Tsar's Bride, she performed the main roles in the operas Sadko, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Demon and Eugene Onegin . Vrubel accompanied her at all rehearsals and performances, prompted the nuances of interpreting images, and created sketches of theatrical costumes. “The only thing he lived for was music,” wrote the artist S. Sudeikin. “Nadezhda Ivanovna remained a symbol, an ideal exponent of beauty for him.”

The artist often painted portraits of his wife, she inspired him to create the famous painting "The Swan Princess", although there is no portrait resemblance in this case. N. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote an opera based on the plot of "The Tale of Tsar Saltan" by A. Pushkin, in which Nadezhda Zabela performed the main part. Inspired by her performance, Vrubel wrote one of his most enigmatic works. The huge eyes of the Swan Princess are full of sadness, anxiety and, as it were, a premonition of trouble.

The stage appearance of Zabela in this role was the same as in the picture: “Her Swan Princess, also captured by Vrubel on the canvas, is a vision created by folk fantasy. Spiritualize these crystal-clear sounds with a bright feeling and spring girlish tenderness - and you, perhaps, will hear and see that Swan Princess, which Zabela was and which subsequently this Princess was not any of the performers, ”wrote after the performance.

In 1901, their son Savva was born, but happiness was overshadowed by the presence of a congenital defect in him - a cleft lip. Because of this, the artist began a deep protracted depression, which became the impetus for the development of mental illness. Her symptoms had appeared before, but the child's illness made them worse. At the age of 3, the baby died of pneumonia, which finally undermined Vrubel's mental health.

Since then, Vrubel spent a long time in psychiatric clinics, but his wife did not lose hope and tried to alleviate his condition in every possible way. Knowing how her singing affects him, she brought an accompanist to the hospital and sang for her husband. She tried not to betray her anxiety and supported the artist until the last days. That is why Nadezhda Zabela was called Vrubel's guardian angel. The woman showed extraordinary stamina, although she had to endure a lot: the death of a child, the illness of her mother, the death of her father, the madness and death of her husband. She survived Vrubel by only three years and passed away at the age of 45.

Inspired by the stage image of his wife, who played the beautiful Swan Princess in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Vrubel decided to devote himself not only to the scenery for this stage production of Pushkin's fairy tale of the same name, but also to the portrait of the sorceress at the moment of her reincarnation.

The character depicted on the canvas has not the slightest resemblance to an opera diva who, with the help of rare vocal abilities, managed to convey the mysterious and incredibly feminine image of the princess. Rather, it is a mystical and fabulous image that arose in the mind of Vrubel, and skillfully embodied thanks to the incredible ability to work with color.

The magical princess from the canvas of a talented Russian painter is mysterious and mysterious and coldly beautiful. Her thin regal face with large dark eyes is translucent with incomprehensible sadness. A thin graceful nose, narrow lips, a thin graceful hand and pale aristocratic skin emphasize the fragility and femininity of the girl.

A huge golden kokoshnik with huge sparkling stones crowns the fragile head of a fairy-tale princess, and a weightless white fabric with a wide silver border covers her long dark hair, braided into a tight braid.

The folds of the sorceress's dress have the same color and structure as her huge snow-white swan wings, and it is impossible to guess where this transition from the feathers of a beautiful bird to the hem of a royal robe is located.

The Swan Princess is depicted on the seashore against the backdrop of the sunset sky and a distant city on a steep rock during the gloomy evening twilight descending on the sea. The coldish tones of the picture and its subtle bluish pearlescent shades give rise to a feeling of illusory and elusive vision of the transformation of a proud graceful swan into a beautiful girl.

The pose of the sorceress is natural and unconstrained - she goes into the distance towards the city and only briefly glanced at the viewer.

The symbol of the swan for many artists personified creative inspiration, which elevates the soul and imagination, and also lead to the knowledge of the other world - dark demonic forces. Involuntarily, the Swan Princess is a creature of a dual nature, personifying two elements at the same time.

The first is cold-dark, watery and demonic power, and the second is airy, heavenly and inspiring. The charm of this character is given not only by feminine beauty and subtle demonic features.

Vrubel decided to portray her at the moment of a wonderful metamorphosis of forms, melting in the cold light of a sea sunset. This picture is about the secret of the manifestation of the highest beauty that is born in our everyday world.

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