For the first time Sergey Aksakov heard the fairy-tale "The Scarlet Flower" in the estate of his grandfather from the housekeeper Pelagheya. He recalled: "The housekeeper Pelagheya was a notable woman: in her youth she fled with her father from her previous owners Alakaevs and settled in Astrakhan, where she lived for more than 20 years; her father died soon and she got married there then became a widow and got a job in the merchants` houses including Persian ones, then she began to miss her homeland, found out that she had another owner, notably my grandfather who was strict but fair and kind, and came back to Aksakovo from her place of concealment one year before he died.

My grandfather approved such a voluntary return, received her with favour and she, being agile and skillful, soon became a housekeeper. Pelagheya besides her occupations with the household brought together with her an extraordinary gift of telling stories, she knew a lot: In a wide collection of tales Pelagheya had Russian and Oriental ones, some of them were from 'The Arabian Nights': It was her who told me so many stories during long winter evenings".

The fairy tale with the plot similar to "The Scarlet Flower" existed in European folklore long before Aksakov and its literary versions appeared in France at the late 17th – early 18th century and were translated into Russian. The Russian version was recorded by the writer and lexicographer Vladimir Dal in the first half of the 19th century. It was included in the collection "Russian Fairy Tales" published in 1855–1864 by the folklorist Alexander Afanasiev. Probably, the Russian folklore text or the translation of the French story (or may be both) was adorned by Pelagheya with national locutions, took the Oriental colour in the Astrakhan merchant world and this variant she told to young Aksakov.

In a letter to his son Ivan dated November 23, 1856 Aksakov wrote: "Now I am busy with an episode of my book: I am writing a fairy tale that I learned by heart in my childhood and which I told to everybody`s fun with all Pelagheya`s humorous catchphrases. I almost forgot it, of course, but now digging in the larder of children reminiscences I have found in a pile of different trash many fragments of this tale, and as it will enter into the composition of 'Grandfather`s Stories' I have started its restoration. Seven sheets are ready now and it seems there will be seven more". Today we cannot define what in the text of the tale was told by Pelagheya and what was written by Aksakov.

But there is no doubt that the book is a special literary work. First published in 1858 as an attachment to the Aksakov`s novel "Childhood Years of Bargov the Grandson" the story about the Scarlet Flower was repeatedly reissued, staged in Russian theatres, translated into many languages, became a plot for an animation (1952) and a movie (1978). A new edition of the book is to mark the 150th anniversary of its first publication.

Yelena Polenova "The War of Mushrooms"

Elena Polenova (1850–1898) was a graphic artist, designer and illustrator, a participant of the Abramtsevo Colony. She began illustrating fairy tales in the late 1880s. Firstly working with "Russian Fairy Tales" of Alexander Afanasiev she started to collect stories by herself.

In the villages around Abramtsevo and during her travels she wrote down fairy tales told by peasants making numerous illustrations from which she chose the best ones and wrote texts for them by hand. Thus appeared "The White Duck", "The War of Mushrooms", "A Wolf and a Fox", "Ivan the Fool", "The Son Filliphko", "Morozko", "The Hut on Chicken Legs" and others handmade tales that nowadays are kept in the Museum of Vasily Polenov, the Abramtsevo Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery. Her dream was to publish them but during her life only "The War of Mushrooms" was printed in 1889. Yelena Polenova wrote about it in a letter to the critic and historian of art Vladimir Stasov: "You ask me how I got the idea to illustrate 'the mushrooms march'.

I began not with this plot but with other fairy tales borrowed from the stories collected by Afanasiev. To tell the truth I painted them without clear purpose, I simply liked the motives of Russian fairy tales (I always liked the Russian life in its past).

These drawings saw some of my friends and they began talking about publishing them – the idea seemed interesting for me – and I started illustrating the Afanasiev`s 'White Duck'. When the scenes with people became monotonous I got the idea to draw something new and then I remembered 'a mushrooms war' as it was told by my grandmother when I was small, the plot with a mushrooms convent which I never heard later. As the story was written for children I tried to go back to that time in my imagination and remember how I fancied about small forest villages, monasteries and cities built in so-to-say mushroom scale, where lived and acted these wonderful creatures, as in a child`s world a mushroom is an attractive creature, absolutely alive.

To draw these four pictures I worked a lot, I enjoyed this work, loved it.When I finished it seemed to me that they were not bad, original and interesting – that happened rarely concerning my other works, especially pictures. I felt that they will be liked. I set to publishing but at this time I had to face so many misfortunes that are not worth recalling.

I made a number of mistakes, had some naïve dreams and hasty ideas and as a result I got a very bad edition, half of which: I had to destroy, a small part of it lies with no results at the bookshops and fifty books I keep in my house. Here is a very uninteresting but it seems full story of my publication". Only in 1906 the publishing house of Joseph Knebel (1854–1926) issued "Russian fairy tales and humorous catchphrases, paraphrased and illustrated by Yelena Polenova" in three volumes. "The War of Mushrooms" is the second tale illustrated by Polenova and published by the Abramtsevo Museum (the first one was "The Tale of Masha and Vanya").