Most of his life, Viktor Vasnetsov (1848 — 1926) painted pictures based on Russian fairy tales and ancient legends. The artist believed that fairy tales, epics and songs, on which generations of children were brought up, embodied ‘the whole internal and external image of the nation, with past and present, and maybe future’. He took to Old Russian literature when he was a student at the seminary. The artist built his own house-workshop according to his sketches and turned it into a fabulous Russian tower. In the same style he decorated the main facade of the Tretyakov Picture Gallery in Moscow.

The first and the greatest-scale canvas that opened the so-called epic cycle in Vasnetsov’s creative work was The Bogatyrs (The Warriors). The artist worked on this painting for more than 25 years, making the first sketches for it in the Paris workshop of Vasily Polenov in the 1870s, and presenting the final version in 1898. He claimed that he had “always lived for Russia only”.

The Gamayun presented in the permanent exhibition of the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts, was also completed in 1898. In folk legends, Gamayun is a prophetic bird, a herald of the gods. She is portrayed as a half-human half-bird with a female face and chest. However, the interpretations of the image vary: sometimes it is a bird of paradise, bringing happiness and bliss, sometimes a harbinger of misfortune. Vasnetsov settled on the second option, and this is evidenced by the apocalyptic atmosphere that pervades the work: Gamayun’s wings are black, and her face is full of anxiety. It was believed that the prophetic bird manifested itself to people at dawn along with stormy winds and a hurricane. The artist depicted her sitting on a fantastic plant.

The picture turned out to be not quite ‘Vasnetsovian’; art historians refer to the image’s being linked to the aesthetics of symbolism, which is more disturbing and complicated. Vasnetsov usually portrayed fabulous and mythological creatures in realistic manner.

This picture significantly influenced the perception of the Gamayun bird image in the Russian culture of the Silver Age. The poet Alexander Blok dedicated a poem to Vasnetsov’s Gamayun: ‘On the surface of endless waters, Wrapped in purple by the sunset, She prophesies and sings, Unable to raise her perturbed wings… She prophesies the yoke of the evil Tatars, Prophesies a number of bloody executions, And an earthquake, and famine, and fire, The Power of villains, the death of the righteous… In the embrace of the everlasting terror, The beautiful face is ablaze with love, but the blood-parched lips are uttering prophetic truths’.