Abramtsevo stimulated many of Vrubel's artistic searchings. Here he developed an interest in national traditions and folk art. In a letter to his sister, he says: 'I am at Abramtsevo at the moment and again I can feel, or rather, hear that intimate a national note which I would so love to capture on canvas or in an ornament. It is the music of an integrated man, not fractured by the abstractions of the regulated differentiated pale West.'
Vrubel found the 'music of an integrated man' in Russian folklore, which he treated again and again in his work of the Nineties. It was not a case of illustrating particular epic tales and fairy stories, however; the artist strove to understand the conception which his forefathers had of man and nature, to look at the world through their eyes.
Vrubel's Bogatyr (1898) is born of surrounding nature, which gives the Herculean figure grandeur and might.
In the picture Pan (1899) the Greek god is transformed into a Russian wood-demon. Old and wrinkled, with fathomless blue eyes and gnarled fingers, he almost seems to grow out of the moss-grown tree-stump. Fantastic bewitching shades are used for the typical Russian landscape—expansive wet meadows, a winding stream, slender birches caught in the silence of the falling twilight and tinged by the glow of the horned moon.
