Boyan

Boyan, completed in 1910 and held in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, depicts the legendary Slavic bard mentioned in the twelfth-century epic poem The Tale of Igor's Campaign, one of the foundational texts of Russian literature. In the poem's prologue, Boyan is described as a prophetic singer whose fingers run across the strings like wolves across the steppe, whose songs soar like eagles. Vasnetsov had long been drawn to the figure, and the painting represents his mature synthesis of historical reconstruction and Romantic idealization. The choice of subject in 1910 was not casual: the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw intense scholarly debate about the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign, which had been discovered in 1795 and published in 1800 only for the original manuscript to be destroyed in the Moscow fire of 1812. By making Boyan the subject of a monumental canvas, Vasnetsov implicitly endorsed the text's authenticity and the antiquity of the Russian poetic tradition. The Russian Museum acquisition signaled the painting's status as a national cultural monument.

Vasnetsov stages Boyan on an elevated position before a retinue of warriors, using the compositional hierarchy of the altarpiece to elevate the poet to a quasi-sacred status. The gusli (psaltery) he plays is rendered with archaeological care, based on Vasnetsov's research into early Slavic instruments.