The chained oak where the cat walks and the sea gives up its knights

The front cover of Pushkin's Fairy Tales, and a compendium of Russian folklore in a single sheet. The great oak of Lukomorye stands at the centre with a gold chain wound about it and the learned black cat walking the bough; a rusalka sits in the branches with her hair loose, Baba Yaga leans out beside her hut on its scaled bird's legs, a crowned rider crosses on a grey wolf, and horned and feathered creatures move through the acorns. Below, green and white waves break open and helmeted warriors rise out of them with drawn swords. A grey tablet carries the title and the imprint of the Expedition for the Preparation of State Papers; signed И. Билибинъ and dated 1904.

Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942) studied under Ilya Repin and joined the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) circle in St Petersburg, building a graphic language out of Russian peasant embroidery, lubok broadsheets and the ornament of seventeenth-century manuscripts. From 1899 he drew a celebrated series of fairy-tale books for the Expedition for the Preparation of State Papers, working in firm black outline and flat colour so that every page could be reproduced exactly in chromolithography. He designed for the opera stage, spent the 1920s and early 1930s in Cairo and Paris, and returned to Leningrad in 1936, where he died during the wartime siege in 1942. His plates remain the images through which most readers picture Baba Yaga, the Firebird and the Tsar Saltan, and the original drawings are held by the Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum.

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