Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mikhail Vrubel was a Russian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor born on the 17th of March 1856, and considered one of the most important artists in the Russian symbolist tradition and a pioneering figure of Modernist art. He worked across painting, decorative sculpture, ceramics, theatrical design, and architecture, and is particularly known for his series of paintings depicting the Demon drawn from Lermontov's poetry.
The Demon Seated, painted in 1890, depicts a half-naked, winged, young figure sitting with knees embraced against a sunset, surrounded by crystalline flowers that reproduce the fractures of rocks. Vrubel described the figure in a letter to his sister on the 22nd of May 1890, as expressing emptiness and despair. The painting uses a palette of blues and purples recalling Byzantine mosaics, and the figure is muscular but passive, with interlocked fingers and a slumping posture.
Academician Albert Nikolayevitch Benois declared the panels incompatible with the exhibition's thematic goals after arriving in Nizhny Novgorod on April 25, sending a telegram that described them as "terrifying." A committee from the Academy of Arts confirmed on May 3 that the works could not be exhibited. Savva Mamontov, who had commissioned the panels, purchased both for five thousand rubles each and built a separate pavilion outside the main exhibition to show them.
Chistyakov was Vrubel's primary teacher at the Imperial Academy of Arts, where Vrubel studied from 1880 onward. In his autobiography dated 1901, Vrubel called the years spent at the Academy "the brightest in his artistic career" because of Chistyakov. Chistyakov's method of breaking paintings into small planes that form the faces of a volume directly produced Vrubel's distinctive crystal-like technique.
Nadezhda Zabela was an opera singer whom Vrubel met at a rehearsal for the Russian premiere of "Hansel and Gretel" in early 1896. They became engaged on July 28 that year in the Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Geneva. Dmitrieva attributed the fruitfulness of Vrubel's Moscow period partly to Nadezhda and her admiration for composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov; Vrubel listened to the opera "Sadko," in which she sang, no fewer than ninety times.
Vrubel spent roughly five years in Kiev after 1884, painting murals and icons for the twelfth-century St. Cyril's Church and making one hundred and fifty drawings for the restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral. He also traveled to Venice on commission, where contact with medieval mosaics, stained glass at St. Mark's Basilica, and early Renaissance painters enriched his palette and developed his gift as a colourist. Dmitrieva wrote that his Kiev work bridged archaeological restoration to live contemporary art in a way no other nineteenth-century artist had attempted.