A young woman in a long white smock, a blue skirt and strings of beads walks through a dark forest, her long braid over her shoulder, carrying a skull on a stick with light blazing from its eyes. Behind her a hut with glowing windows stands inside a fence hung with skulls, and the scene is framed by a border of toadstools and mushrooms. The artist's signature is at lower left. Ivan Bilibin drew it for Vasilisa the Beautiful, one of his fairy-tale booklets for Russia's state printing house, the Expedition for the Preparation of State Papers, with text from A.

N. Afanasyev's collection of Russian folk tales. In the tale the witch Baba Yaga pushes Vasilisa out of her gate, takes a skull with burning eyes from her fence, sticks it on a stick and gives it to her, and Vasilisa runs home by its light. Bilibin designed whole books, drawing the headpieces, ornamental frames and lettering modeled on Old Russian chronicles.

Stunned by Viktor Vasnetsov's exhibition of folk-epic paintings in 1899, he spent that summer in a village in Tver province, where his fairy-tale books were born. Between 1899 and 1902 he illustrated six tales, and the books made the Bilibin style famous. The booklet was first published in St.

Petersburg in 1902.