page_title: Mikhail Vrubel
section_title: Fading away
hierarchical_section_title: Mikhail Vrubel / Disease. Dying (1903–1910) / Fading away
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Портрет художника М. А. Врубеля.
context_page_description: Mikhail Vrubel – a 19th–20th century Russian painter who worked in all genres of art, including painting, graphics, decorative sculpture, and theatrical art. In 1896, Vrubel married the famous singer Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel whom he regularly painted.
  Soviet historian Nina Dmitrieva compared Vrubel's artistic biography to a three-act drama with prologue and epilogue, while the transition between acts was rapid and unexpected. The "Prologue" refers to his earlier years of studying and choosing a career path. The "first act" peaked in the 1880s when Vrubel was studying at the Imperial Academy of Arts and then moved to Kiev to study Byzantine and Christian art. The "second act" corresponded to the so-called "Moscow period" that started in 1890 with the painting "The Demon Seated" and ended in 1902 with "The Demon Downcast" and the subsequent hospitalization of the artist. The "third act" lasted from 1903 to 1906 when Vrubel was suffering from his mental illness that gradually undermined his physical and intellectual capabilities. For the last four years of his life, already being blind, Vrubel lived only physically.
context_section_description: At the beginning of February 1906, Anna Vrubel visited her brother Mikhail. Later she became his nurse and also a guide. After consulting with Usoltsev, it was decided to bring Vrubel back to Saint Petersburg since he did need any medical treatment only support from relatives and loved ones. Anna and Nadezhda settled in one apartment while Mikhail Vrubel was put in the excellent clinic run by doctor Konasevich where the painter celebrated his 50 years anniversary. However, the clinic was far away from home and had strict orders regarding the regime. Hence it was decided to transfer Vrubel to a hospital of Adolf Bari that was located on the 4–5 line of Vasilyevsky Island nearby the Academy of Arts and had a completely free regime. Serov addressed the Academy of Arts with a request to pay Vrubel a monthly allowance that would cover some hospital expenses. The request was approved, and Vrubel started receiving 75 rubles in summer and 100 rubles in winter months.
  After Vrubel lost his sight, his violent seizures occurred much rarer. Nadezhda visited him regularly and sometimes even organized home concerts. Anna Vrubel visited brother daily, walked with him and read to him. Especially often they re-read Ivan Turgenev 's prose poetry and Anton Chekhov 's novella The Steppe on the grounds of which Vrubel once created a painting. Ekaterina Ge later recalled:
  ... Mikhail Alexandrovich was very much engaged into reading and could not stand only sad endings, and always composed a new one instead, a more happy one … sometimes he was so got into himself that could listen to neither reading nor songs and was telling something like fairytales of his emerald eyes, life in the ancient world and how he made all the famous Renaissance works.
  In his last years of life, Vrubel was almost constantly hallucinating and often retold his envisionings to others. Some days he experienced enlightening and then complained about the misfortune that befell him. Besides, he followed the ascetic practices that promised to bring back his lost sight – refused to eat, stood the whole night before the bed. Vrubel could not even recognize his old friends, for example, Polenov. Later Anna Vrubel recalled that in the last year her brother was saying that he is tired of living. In severe February 1910, he deliberately stood idle near with an open window and provoked pneumonia, which turned into a transient tuberculosis. At the same time, he retained his inherent aesthetics until the very last minute. Ekaterina Ge remembered that he "took quinine almost with pleasure, and when he saw a sodium salicylate, he said: "This is so ugly". Even before that the doctor Usoltsev wrote that "It was different with him than with any other patients that usually lose the most thin or aesthetic sense first because for them they come the last; Vrubel's aesthetic sense died last because it was the first for him".
  On the eve of his death on 1 (14) April 1910, Vrubel put himself in order, washed with cologne, and at night said to the nurse who was caring of him: “Nikolay, it’s enough for me to lie here – we will go to the Academy.” Indeed, the next day the coffin with Vrubel was put in the Academy of Arts. The death record states that Vrubel "died from progressive paralysis".
  Ekaterina Ge took care of the funeral and ordered to make the death mask. On April 3, the funeral took place in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. Alexander Block made a speech, calling the painter the "messenger of other worlds" that "left us his Demons as spellcasters against violet evil, against the night. I can only tremble before the things that Vrubel and others like him reveal to humanity once a century. We do not see the worlds that they see".
caption: The portrait of Vrubel by Valentin Serov. Started from life-modelling in 1906 and was published in 1907. Stored at the Tretyakov gallery
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