In autumn of 1901, his spouse Nadezhda Zabela wrote to her sister: Recently, delegates of the Vienna Secession had lunch with us.

Everyone requires his sketches and his advice, invite him to expositions, elect him a member of various societies; they only pay a little money, but his glory grows.

S. I. Mamontov has left jail and also requires Misha’s sketches.The Demon Downcast was finished in December 1901 and displayed for several days in Moscow as an unfinished painting.

In early 1902, The Demon Downcast was brought from Moscow to an exhibition organized by the society “Mir Iskusstva” in Saint Petersburg.

Alexandre Benois, who had observed Vrubel's attempts to change the finished painting, wrote: One can believe the Prince of the World posed for him.

His wife told her sister Ekaterina Ge about that as follows: All relatives and acquaintances noticed something was going wrong with Mikhail Aleksandrovich, but they still constantly doubted, because there was never any nonsense in his speech; he recognized all, remembered all.

The painter would imagine himself as Christ, then Pushkin, and then believed he would become the General-Governor of Moscow; then he turned into the Russian sovereign, and then he suddenly became Skobelev or Phryne.

He heard choirs of voices, claimed to have lived in the Renaissance age and painted walls in the Vatican together with Raphael and Michelangelo.