The Flying Demon

The Flying Demon, painted in 1899 and held at the Russian Museum, is the second major canvas in Vrubel's Demon trilogy, continuing the obsessive engagement with Lermontov's narrative poem Demon (1839) that had begun with the Demon Seated (1890) and would culminate in the Demon Downcast (1902). Lermontov's poem tells of a fallen angel — the Demon — who falls in love with a Georgian princess named Tamara, with tragic consequences. Vrubel's Demon is not a Christian devil but a being of cosmic loneliness, trapped between a human world he cannot join and a divine realm from which he is forever excluded. In the Flying Demon, the figure is shown in motion above the Caucasian landscape — a representation of the Demon's liminal state, belonging to neither earth nor heaven. Vrubel had visited the Caucasus and absorbed its mountainous landscape directly into his visual memory. The work was made during a period of deepening personal crisis for Vrubel; critics and contemporaries recognized the Demon as in some sense an autobiographical figure.

The flying figure is constructed from Vrubel's characteristic faceted crystalline planes, which transform the demon's body into something between flesh and mineral — human in form but made of a different substance. The Caucasian landscape below is built from the same faceted approach, creating visual continuity between figure and world. The color range extends from deep shadow blues to acidic greens and purples in the figure's upper illumination.