This past week I've been working on-and-off on a personal project to make some illustrations for the Russian fairy tale 'Morozko'. A while ago, my lovely Russian friend brought me a book of Fairy Tales illustrated with Palekh paintings. Flipping through it for inspiration, I found a great fairy tale about 'Morozko', the Russian Jack Frost.
The general gist of the story is that a girl is being persecuted by her (of course) evil step-mother, who (of course) favours her own daughter. The step-mother is sick of the girl, so she manages to nag her husband, the girl's father, into taking her out into the woods and leaving her to die. While the girl sits shivering under a fir tree, Morozko comes down the branches and repeatedly asks if she is warm enough. The girl responds each time that she is warm, and Morozko takes pity on her and wraps her in a fur coat and blankets. Meanwhile, the step-mother is making pancakes for the girl's wake, and the dog says, 'Woof, woof! The old man's daughter will come in silver and gold; the old woman's daughter will leave suitors cold.' The step-mother tries to correct the dog, but he keeps repeating the rhyme, even when bribed with a pancake and then beaten. When the old man is sent out to retrieve his daughter's body, he instead finds her warm, decked out in gold, silver and furs, with a chest of treasures sitting next to her. They triumphantly return, and the jealous step-mother decides to send her own daughter out to the woods to reap the same rewards from Morozko. Morozko comes down from his tree like before, but when he asks if the girl is warm, she chides him for making her freeze and shoos him away. He loses his temper and turns her into ice. While she is away, the dog says 'Woof, woof! The old man's daughter will have suitors by the score; the old woman's daughter lives no more.' The step-mother tries to correct him, but a moment later, her husband returns with her dead daughter. The moral, I suppose, is to be nice to strangers. I'll over-look the typical misogyny of it all, Morozko's strange love of women who are so polite they will say they are warm whilst freezing to death, the rhyming, future-telling, pancake-eating dog, and the father quite easily being nagged into murdering his own daughter.
Looking this up online, it turns out that 'Morozko' (along with an amalgam of other Russian fairy tales, including Baba Yaga) was made into a Soviet film of the same name in 1964. The film itself looks more than a little ridiculous, and it was even featured in a Mystery Science Theatre 3000. However, it provided some good reference for me in terms of clothing, as well as the following samples of Russian scarves. As pointed out in MST3K, the character of the girl, who is called Nastenka in the film and goes on to marry a Prince, looks to be about 9 years old. I hope my depiction is a little more age-appropriate.
Here is my own interpretation of the moment when Morozko comes down the tree to question the girl. I was working on adding a crown, sceptre, fir tree and snow to the image, but I seem to have hit a bit of a creative block. So I'll post what I'm happy with so far, which is just the simple original image with muted colours and blue-grey lines.
I had some trouble drawing symmetrical snowflakes, so I cheated by reflecting and rotating a drawing of a 30 degree section of snowflake in Photoshop. I'm going to incorporate them into the finished image.
In researching 'Morozko' and all things traditionally Russian, I came across this unrelated, but beautiful image by turn-of-the-century British illustrator, Charles Robinson.
The next page, which I've done some sketches for, will show a framed copy of the photo the Dad Polar Bear took just as Eli's Dad moves and scares the Little Polar Bear. The rest of the page will show pastiches of famous portraits with Eli's Mum as the sitter.
