Many scenes of popular prints had primordially been of foreign origin, but firmly entrenched in Russian folklore, becoming folk poems or fairy tales, and even turning into fixed allegorical expressions. The poem of Anika the Brave Warrior refers to such folk ‘spiritual poetry’.

Anika the Brave Warrior is a popular print made by lithographic method.

Anika the Warrior became a character of fairground farcical performances and puppet shows, which were once beloved in Russia. The whole plot of this folk play was concentrated on the fact that Anika endlessly boasted of bravery, and in the final saw Death, certainly with a scythe, and got frightened and asked for mercy. Sometimes Petrushka came to the aid of Anika, chasing Death away with his stick.

Being a collective image, Anika the Warrior is a narrow-minded, cocky soldier, a braggart who cowards at the first fight with a serious opponent. Anika the Warrior is included into the saying ‘Anika the Warrior is sitting and howling’.

Interestingly, this story is a kind of reflection of the Byzantine myth about the hero Digenes, who was nicknamed anikitos (“unbeatable”) for his exploits. Moreover, the name Nikita comes from there as well.

Popular prints are folk pictures printed on cheap paper from wooden or copper plates prior to the 1850’s, and afterwards mostly using the lithographic and chromolithographic technique.

Popular prints were a very popular decoration of peasant, merchant and petty-bourgeois houses.

Lithography (engraving on stone) is a cheaper and more advanced technology of making popular prints than xylography (engraving on wood) or engraving on copper.

Popular prints were often coloured. Some villages had special teams of women and children who unpretentiously painted black-and-white pictures in four colours. It was an important source of income for many people.

Popular fairy-tale prints were always divided into two parts: the upper one had an image; the lower one included some text in the frame. Both the parts had been engraved on the same plate.

Popular prints were of religious and secular content. Since 1850, they started to be censored. Unprintable and vulgar vocabulary had been used in the pictures far too often.

The text narrated as briefly as possible about the particular episode or conveyed in brief the meaning of the fairy tale or parable. There were few literate people among the commoners, so the picture had to be as clear as possible.