Konstantin Makovsky was undoubtedly lucky in life. He spent a happy childhood in a loving family, with parents who were passionate about art and passed their enthusiasm on to their children. He then received a successful education and had a career as a sought-after artist. His paintings were valued by the public and fetched very high prices—many times more than the works of other, equally talented and well-known masters. The artist enjoyed a comfortable existence, and his all-consuming love of life played no small part in the creation of "Mermaids", so different from the pale and suffering folkloric heroines of other Russian masters and the creepy undead of Gogol and Kramskoi. And although this positive vision of drowned women was met with disapproval by some viewers and critics, many were delighted with the painting. Such a striking response to "Mermaids" and such a strong reaction even interested Alexander II. Wanting to form his own opinion, the emperor visited the exhibition. He liked the painting so much that the ruler invited Makovsky to paint portraits of members of his family, henceforth becoming an admirer of his talent.
The artist was inspired to create the painting by Russian folklore and Nikolai Gogol's "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka." It is a masterpiece saturated with pagan mysticism, reflected not only in the plot but in every detail of the canvas. A misty haze covers the sleeping trees, the water, and the houses. Fantastic moonlight, breaking through the clouds, brightly illuminates the bodies of the mermaids. It only lightly touches the grass, bushes, and buildings. An endless round dance of young, loose‑haired girls, dressed only in moonbeams, rises into the sky, symbolically circling the domes of a sleeping Orthodox church.
In Slavic mythology, rusalki are unmarried drowned women who committed suicide. Of course, they had their reasons for becoming undead. The typical image of a drowned woman resembles Gogol's description—a pale, suffering maiden. That's how they appear in Ivan Kramskoi's painting: a sad girl with a lifeless face, dressed in a long shroud‑like shirt, with a wreath on her loose hair. But in Makovsky's paintings the heroines are completely different. His rusalki are beautiful nude witches, whirling in a strange dance. They do not suffer from earthly life. It seems that, on the contrary, they are glad to be rid of it. Finally they can shed their heavy clothes, let down hair that used to be braided into stiff plaits, and dance merrily, spinning in the moonlight. Every movement of the rusalki contains energy, overt eroticism, and an all‑embracing joy of life, strange as that may sound.
