Rusaloch’i skazki

The collection of fairy tales written by the young Alexey Tolstoy in the 1910s based on Slavic folklore is not particularly well known: it is perhaps a bit scary for children, and adults have not long ago made it a rule to read all sorts of fairy tales. The author masterfully uses folk songs, and bases the plots on common motifs of folk tales and fairy tales, such as stories about a love affair between a widow and a fairy-tale snake or a careless curse.

Muted, slightly smoky illustrations, dominated by gray-blue and blue-green shades, demonstrate a strange, mystical world. The expectation of a miracle breaks through the layers of recognizable images. This manual skill, masterful mastery of technology brings the flow of water and the texture of paper into resonance … and here before us is a miraculously formed evening sky with dots of stars or a snow whirlwind. And the images are the keys that allow the unprepared viewer to enter this world of wonders.

The artist does not flirt with antiquity, the illustrations look very modern and could form a visual series for a completely different, not at all archaic text – behind the young illustrator there is a long tradition, started by the surrealists and successfully developed in world and domestic illustration in the following years.

The artist names Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Andrew Wyeth, the Flemish painter Memling, the German painter and draftsman Holbein, modern Russian illustrators Andrei Dugin, Nikolai Popov, Gennady Spirin and her teacher Alexander Koshkin as reference points. As for the readers, they will certainly compare the artist’s works with the work of Yulia Gukova.