Candidate of Art History Galina Tuluzakova called it a stage of Fechin's work,[Notes 1][3] where he "for the first time and fully" manifested the peculiarities of the artist's compositional thinking, characterized by his principles of genre painting and color.

In 2011, the painting returned to the Russian Federation from the United States, where it had been for a century, but it is part of a private collection and is currently unavailable to a wide audience of art amateurs.

[11][12] Art historian Marina Yashina suggested that the event depicted by the artist takes place in autumn, as weddings were usually held after the completion of agricultural work.

[19][18] Timofey Semyonov, a researcher of the everyday life of the Mari people, wrote at the end of the 19th century: "The most sullen Cheremis at a wedding becomes unrecognizably cheerful: he wiggles in all sorts of ways, claps his hands to the beat of the music, dances with passion, sings, sometimes makes furious shouts.

[23] Galina Tuluzakova believes that in Bearing Away the Bride the artist defined the theme that fascinated him at that time — "customs, rituals, holidays of the Russian and foreign village".

From the age of 12, he accompanied his father on trips to the villages of Kazan province to fulfill church orders for the production of wooden iconostases for altars.

I settled in an empty house that belonged to my uncle and began to work on my first large composition, thee Abduction of a Young Woman, which was based on the marriage customs of the Mari people.

[27][28] A part of these travels took place during the First Russian Revolution, and Ivanov-Orkov assumed that, although nothing is known about the unrest and riots of the local population at that time, the very appearance and way of life could inspire fear in the artist, which was aggravated by strange rituals and sometimes bloody sacrifices.

Fechin did not even talk about a specific rite, but "tried to express in the language of painting the emotional feeling of these people, whose wildness more closely approximates the essence of human nature".

Kudryavtsev drew attention to the fact that the artist practically did not turn to religious and mythological subjects in his work, but actively used folklore motifs — traditional holiday rituals and customs.

[26] Tuluzakova also mentioned among the sketches related to the work on Bearing Away the Bride and the Portrait of an Unknown Woman, kept in the Kozmodemyansk Museum of Art and History named after A.

[38] Alexander Grigoriev, the founder of the Kozmodemyansk museum, stated: "It seems that ... (name illegible) mistakenly considers [the sketch Chuvash Woman]; it is a bride for a Mari wedding.

[30] Dmitry Seryakov wrote about two sketches of the general composition of the painting, which are kept in the Kozmodemyansk Museum of Fine Arts (the first — 1908, canvas, oil, 79x102 cm, inv.

[13] Sergei Voronkov noted that in these sketches, the person is part of the surrounding space, where figures and objects merge to preserve the pictorial unity.

[46][45]Bearing Away the Bride was presented at the spring exhibition of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1908 in St. Petersburg, was praised and received the first prize of the Artists' Society named after A. I. Kuindzhi in the amount of 1000 rubles.

[9] The National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City exhibited the canvas at the Masterpieces of Russian Art auction held by Sotheby's in New York on November 1, 2011.

[51][52] Chuck Schroeder, president of the Oklahoma City museum, argued that such a significant painting needed a place where it could be presented "to a public interested in Russian art, in Fechin, and in the period in question".

[9] The Chuvash national poet Pyotr Khuzangai claimed in one of his letters that Nicolai Fechin took the painting Bearing Away the Bride to the United States during his emigration in 1923, and added that the artist also took his large collection of folk embroideries, which he had collected for free during the famine of the Civil War, and which allegedly became the basis for an album of national ornaments he published in the United States.

[4][55] Gennady Ivanov-Orkov, head of the department of the Chuvash State Museum of Art, wrote that for a long time in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia there were rather vague ideas about the image in the painting, based on the most widespread black-and-white illustration of poor quality in the book by Peter Dulsky, published in 1921.

Wrote the art critic Yevseev:[57]"It is simply annoying that this artist, in spite of all his virtues as a painter, seems to have deliberately distorted the drawing and reached the ridiculous in exaggeration.

The respectable German families were understandably horrified to see an animal-like man standing by a cart, a woman painted with cinnabar, a boy with a pumpkin for a head, the face of an old orangutan, and a belly that almost reached the ground.

The observer noted the undeniable realism of Fechinov's picture in depicting "the sad life, eternal slavery, hard work, degeneration" of the foreign village, the richness of ethnographic details, some humor of the author.

[57] A German art critic remarked:"A piece of truely deep Russia is represented by this gray, deserted village, this scene immersed in mud and wine fumes!

Bright, screaming colors of some clothes and a light spring breeze over the huts, slightly appearing on the general background, emphasize even more the miserable desert of the rest, and the peculiarly dry and rigid writing fits perfectly the character of the whole picture".

[71][72] Bearing Away the Bride is briefly mentioned in the article The Return of Varenka by Anatoly Novitsky, Honored Worker of Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan, published in 1994.

[75] The chief curator of the Chuvash State Museum of Art, Georgy Isayev, believed that Fechin, by emphasizing the grotesque and "individual-physiognomic" features of the characters, did not allow the canvas to "descend into folklore".

[76] In the wedding ritual Nicolai Fechin, according to Isaev, attracted primarily theatrical and musical action, so he endowed his canvas with "sound".

[77] The art historian believes that Fechin's contemporary Alexander Savinov tried to solve a similar problem in his diploma picture Bathing horses on Volga (canvas, oil, 250 x 600 cm, State Russian Museum), also created in 1908.

[38][81][83] Dmitry Seryakov, a student of art history, considered Bearing Away the Bride to be characteristic of the so-called ethnographic theme in the artist's work, which was later reflected in such genre paintings as Pouring and Kapustnitsa.

[87] In the researcher's opinion, Sergei Voronkov was right when he claimed that the artist not only demonstrated darkness and ignorance, but also wanted to show in Bearing Away the Bride "the poetic substance of folk ritual".