Elena Polenova (1850—1898) was a Russian artist, decorator, stage designer, furniture designer, and decorative wood carving artist. She was one of the first Russian female illustrators of children’s books, a member of the “Abramtsevo Circle” on the Savva Mamontov’s estate, the closest friend of his wife, Elizabeth Mamontova, and a great connoisseur and collector of Russian folk art. She was head of a carpentry workshop in Abramtsevo, where peasant children were taught woodcarving and furniture making based on her sketches, and one of the ‘pioneers’ of the Art Nouveau style in Russia. She was the sister of the famous artist Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov. She considered Pavel Petrovich Chistyakov to be her principal art teacher.

In 1886, Elena Polenova decided to publish Russian folk tales with her own illustrations. She thought it was a daring, yet important endeavour. Consequently, she used not only the traditional texts of Afanasyev’s tales, but also her personal recordings of stories told by peasants, their children, and her own grandmother.

One of the vivid memories of her childhood was travelling with her grandmother Vera Nikolaevna Voeikova (Lvova) from Moscow to the Olshanka estate in the Tambov province. Her grandmother told her grandchildren her own version of their favourite fairy tale “The War of Mushrooms”, which Elena remembered for life. She recorded, illustrated and published it in the R. Yu Tile’s Moscow printing house in 1889. According to her version, woolly milk-caps were monastery ‘familiars', while in other versions, they were old women, cookers, etc.

The plot of the tale predetermined the choice of the main decorative motif — a variety of mushrooms, very sophisticated in form: honey mushrooms, milk-caps, and boletus mushrooms. They form an ornament on two decorative frames of each sheet — the vertical one next to the main illustration and the horizontal one — above the handwritten text. Elena Polenova was a great master of unusual ornaments created using figures of the protagonists and other characters of the book. This technique — framing the sheet using decorative stripes with exquisite decor — became the trademark of Russian books of the modernist era as well as the aesthetics of the “arts and crafts” movement in England.

The text of the folk song-tale is very concise and full of deep meaning; it is not about the zeal that consumes those who go to war, but on the contrary, about reasons not to go there at all. In turn, the illustrations create a detailed and vibrant picture of the fairy-tale world of mushrooms that do not want to fight.

There are many characters, types of landscape and architectural elements, as well as decorative details. Just take, for example, a wooden-carved canopy, under which a boletus mushroom settled down, while “overlooking all the mushrooms”. It clearly depicts some kind of a pagan deity patronizing the king of mushrooms. In addition, around it we see a real mushroom kingdom. Despite all the richness of the artist’s imagination, she follows the text very closely; ‘under a little oak tree’ scene takes place exactly under an oak tree.

On the second page, there are two groups of refuseniks: ‘downy milk-caps - noble women’ and very rarely seen in this fairy tale ‘woolly milk-caps - monastery familiars’. The downy milk-caps occupy a luxurious balcony and gaze at the army from above. Meanwhile, the ‘monastery familiars’ are scattered around the hill on which the monastery towers. Here you find many buildings in the Old Russian style that convey the spirit of folk fairy tales, according to Polenova.

Military heralds and the voivode fail to draft either saffron milk-caps, because they are ‘rich men’, or honey fungi because they have ‘thin legs’. The honey fungi form a very beautiful pattern that serves as basis for the decorative frame ornament.

And in the background, there is a prosperous village, where ‘rich saffron milk-caps’ live. There they have well-built huts, and mills with barns.

In a rather gloomy forest, an army moves along a wide road, and in the centre, there are ‘milk-caps – friendly folks’ who are united as one and ready to go to war. These guys with rifles are ready to win.

Folk fairy tales about war are seldom joyful or idyllic, but rather quite the opposite. Elena Polenova, who worked in a military hospital in Kiev during the Russian-Turkish war, surely knew the price of war.

Elena Polenova’s book ‘The War of Mushrooms’ is rightfully considered one of the first Russian ‘artist’s books’ - books, where the artist is not only the author of supplementary illustrations, but also the creator of the whole book as a valuable and full-fledged work of art. In this book, the artist wrote the title page and the text.

The fact that the publication has a circulation does not affect its artistic value. However, alas, the chosen printing method - phototype - resulted in replication of the book and a certain loss of the initially conceived artistic quality of the originals. This applies to the beautiful fine watercolours created by Elena Polenova, where the vibrant design was replaced with black and white colour scheme, since not a single printing house of that time could accomplish the task of multi-colour watercolour printing. Elena Polenova later manually coloured her illustrations. Fortunately, the originals are preserved in the Museum-Reserve of V.D.Polenov. We reproduced their reproductions in this article.

The book is worthy of the “artist”s book” title. It begins with a cover created with extraordinary grace and taste. It is covered with dark blue fabric with small multi-coloured stars and trefoils. The book consists of only four sheets; each of them is a complete work of art from the decorative, compositional and artistic perspectives.