占卜的斯维特兰娜

Bryullov made his name on vast Italian subjects like the destruction of Pompeii, so this quiet Russian interior is the odd one out in his work; it is in fact the only painting he ever set in Russian folk life. He made it in Moscow over the winter of 1835, staying with the writer Anton Pogorelsky, whose household still kept the old Christmas customs. On the holy evenings before Epiphany, unmarried girls would try to glimpse their future husband in a mirror lit by a single candle, and Bryullov clearly watched it happen. The subject comes from a hugely popular ballad by Vasily Zhukovsky about a girl named Svetlana doing exactly this. She sits in a kokoshnik and sarafan, her back turned to us, leaning toward the dark glass, half hoping and half afraid of what the candle will show.