This illustration by Ivan Bilibin from his 1900 edition of the Russian fairy tale Vasilisa the Beautiful shows the heroine approaching the hut of Baba Yaga on its three chicken legs, the skull-topped fence glowing around the clearing. Bilibin's illustrations for Vasilisa the Beautiful, the Frog Princess, Tsarevich Ivan and the Firebird, and Maria Morevna, commissioned by the Imperial Department for the Production of State Documents and published between 1899 and 1903, are the canonical visual interpretation of the Russian folktale tradition.

Baba Yaga is the most distinctive figure of Slavic folklore: an ambiguous witch-figure who lives in a hut that walks on chicken legs deep in the forest, flies in a giant mortar steered with a pestle, and either devours or aids those who come seeking her. She appears across hundreds of recorded East Slavic folktales as both adversary and helper, sometimes appearing in triple form as three sisters. Her ambiguity (alternately devouring mother, wise initiator, and gatekeeper between worlds) has made her a central figure in twentieth-century folkloristic, psychoanalytic, and feminist readings of the Slavic mythological tradition.

Ivan Bilibin (1876 to 1942) trained under Ilya Repin and was the principal illustrator of the Russian fairytale revival of the early twentieth century. His distinctive style fused Old Russian manuscript illumination, Japanese ukiyo-e composition, and Art Nouveau ornament into a visual language that defined the look of Russian fairy tale illustration for the entire twentieth century. His designs for the 1909 Paris production of Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel established the iconography of Russian folk subjects in the Ballets Russes era. The Vasilisa illustrations are held at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.