"The Heavenly Battle" by Roerich as a Premonition Nikolai Roerich was a well-known Russian painter, philosopher, traveler, public figure and mystic, passionate about the ideas of cosmism. At various periods of his work the artist was inspired by the culture of Ancient Rus and the East. Maxim Gorky called Roerich a "great intuitionist" for his gift of premonition and the special energy of his paintings. One of these visionary works is "The Heavenly Battle". The painting was executed and presented to the public in 1912 — just a few years before the outbreak of the First World War, which forever changed the history of our country. The canvas seems to foreshadow future events: it is imbued with a sense of anxious anticipation, a feeling of frozen time. E.P. Matochkin, a researcher of Roerich's work, wrote that in "The Heavenly Battle" and other works of this period the idea of the cosmos as a kind of mighty, boundless and practically animated principle — an inexhaustible reservoir of energies — manifested most vividly. For Roerich the geometry of the sky was always a source of inspiration. He perceived and depicted the celestial vault as a meeting place of the cosmic and the earthly, as a point of fusion of the elements and energies. In many of his canvases the sky occupies the greater part of the surface and astonishes with its expressiveness. So it is in "The Heavenly Battle": mighty cumulus clouds confront one another in the majestic sky as harbingers of a powerful storm. The painting powerfully conveys the state of nature before a thunderstorm, when literally everything around freezes in expectation of the element. On the ground we see shaded hills, the smooth surface of a lake, small village houses… But above this quiet land a true epic unfolds: heaps of fantastical clouds press upon one another and intermingle in an infinite and titanic struggle of darkness and light, good and evil. In the clouds one can make out the outlines of warriors and ancient Varangians, demons and knights, seafarers and ships, silhouettes of the past and the future. The living impressions from the painting are incomparable to viewing a reproduction. "The Heavenly Battle" can be seen in the collection of the Russian Museum in Hall 41, devoted to the art of the late 19th — early 20th centuries.