The publication of The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales, released in 1978 by the American Viking Press, combined two distant plots: the fate of a Moscow graphic artist and the biography of the widow of an American president.

Boris Vasilievich Zvorikin (1872, Moscow - 1942, Paris) came from a merchant family. His father was in the first guild and traded in linen goods, and the family's roots trace back to the ancient Murom merchant lineage of the Zvorikins. The clan also included Vladimir Kozmich Zvorikin, the future inventor of electronic television and a relative of the artist. From 1892 to 1893, Zvorikin studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, then worked as a book designer, ornamentalist, and icon painter. He is considered one of the creators of the 'Russian style' in book illustration, a contemporary and like-minded individual of Bilibin.

After the revolution, Zvorikin found himself in Paris and took on commissions from émigré publishers: in 1938, a volume of the 'History of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment' was published with his design, issued by Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich.

In the late 1930s, the artist prepared a manuscript album: his own translation into French of four fairy tales, 'The Snow Maiden', 'Vasilisa the Beautiful', 'Mary Morevna', and 'The Firebird', with stylized calligraphic text, miniatures, and ornamentation. He gifted the folder to his patron, Parisian publisher Louis Fricatelly. During Zvorikin's lifetime, the work was never published and disappeared for decades.

The situation changed forty years later. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who worked as an editor at Viking Press from the mid-1970s, prepared the album for print and wrote the preface. The English edition of 1978 became one of her first publishing projects and brought Zvorikin's name back into circulation.