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Painting as text: Developments in Russian art during the second half of the nineteenth century

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Painting as text: Developments in Russian art during the second half of the nineteenth century

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PAINTING AS TEXT
DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN ART
DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
by
Ljiljana Grubisic
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Slavic Languages and Literatures)
December 1996
Copyright 1996 Ljiljana Grubisic
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UMI Number: 9720230
Copyright 1996 by
Grubisic, Ljiljana
All rights reserved.
UMI Microform 9720230
Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
Ljiljana Grubisic
under the direction of h .fZ F . Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMIT
O tait
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Ljiljana Grubisic
Painting as Text:
Developments in Russian Art
During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
This study is a critical examination of Russian
cultural assumptions about literature and their impact upon
Russian painting during the second half of the nineteenth
century. A particular attention is placed on explicating
the crucial role of Vladimir Stasov in re-shaping attitudes
toward Russian painting. Working independently from the
Academy-bound art establishment, he was instrumental in
building the ideological construct that eventually become
known as Russian Realism from a number of vague concepts
originally labeled the "new" Russian art.
This study is organized around three distinct yet
closely related themes. First, there is the institutional
history of Russian art. It, so to speak, forms the frame in
which developments in the second half of the nineteenth
century are illustrated. Second, there is the analysis of
the critical assertions of Stasov and his contemporaries
which have been greatly abridged to eliminate conceptual
vagueness. Finally, there is the close analysis of three
works: The Major's Courtship by Pavel Fedotov, Volga Barge
Haulers and The Unexpected Return by II'ia Repin. These
paintings have been selected for their historical and
1
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critical significance. They stand as milestones in the
development of what would become known as Russian Realism
illustrative of the power and limitations of that concept.
The title of this study--"Painting as Text"--alludes to
two specific aspects of the subject: first, the cosmopolitan
orientation and literary-bound practice of the Imperial
Academy which encouraged its preferred genre of history
painting to be viewed as a visual explication of a text--a
sort of reverse ekhprasis; and second, the literary bias of
Russian culture which tended to reduce developments in
Russian painting to literary analogies. This literary bias,
invoked by Stasov as well as his critical opponents, insured
that the boundary between Russian literature and painting
has remained ill defined. An attempt will be made here to
bring clarification into this relationship by casting a
critical eye upon the notion of the painting as text upon
which the ideological construct known as Russian Realism
ultimately rested.
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Acknowledgements
Several institutions and persons have provided generous
support during the research and writing of this study. An
exchange program between the Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures at the University of Southern California
(Los Angeles) and the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) as
well as a travel grant provided by the Getty Research
Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities (Santa
Monica, California), enabled me to conduct the preliminary
research in the Russian archival and museum collections
during the Fall of 1991. A number of librarians,
archivists, curators and administrators at the Russian State
Library, Russian State Archives of Literature and Arts in
Moscow (RGALI), the Russian National Library and the Russian
State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg have
offered their professional and personal assistance. Special
thanks go to Mariia Astaf'eva, Aleksandra Bolotova, Galina
Churak, Tat'iana Gubanova, Lidiia Iovleva, the late Mirra
Nemirovskaia, Evgeniia Plotnikova, Natal' ia Priimak,
Natal'ia Okurenkova, Liudmila Smirnova, Larisa Tishkova and
Elena Zhukova of the Tret'iakov Gallery in Moscow; Grigorii
Goldovskii, Elena Ivanova, Evgeniia Petrova and Irina
Shuvalova of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg; Nina
Iaroslavtseva of the Vasnetsov Museum in Moscow; and
ii
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Natal' ia Vatenina of the Repin Museum in Penaty. I have
also benefitted greatly from conversations with Alison
Hilton, mikhail Kiselev, Elena Nesterova, Mikhail Sokolov,
Andrei Tolstoi, Elizabeth Valkenier and Alla Vereshchagina.
I extend my sincerely gratitude to the Professors John
E. Bowlt, Marcus Levitt and Moshe Lazar of the University of
Southern California and Wendy Salmond of the Chapman
University for their intellectual guidance and
encouragement. I had the benefit of their scholarly advice
which was both formative and inspiring.
Finally, I wish to thank my husband Michael B. Whalen
whose assistance and support were invaluable.
iii
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
45
Fedor Bruni: Death of Camilla
1824. Oil on canvas, 350 x 526.5 cm.
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
49
Karl Briullov: The Last Day of Pompeii
1830-1833. Oil on canvas, 456.5 x 651 cm.
Russian Museum
55
Pavel Fedotov: The Major's Courtship
1848. Oil on canvas, 58.3 x 75.4 cm.
Tret'iakov Gallery, Moscow
130
Vasilii Pukirev: An Unequal Marriage
1862. Oil on canvas, 173 x 136.5 cm.
Tret'iakov Gallery
150
Vasilii Perov: Troika
1866. Oil on canvas, 123 x 167.5 cm.
Tret'iakov Gallery
188
II'ia Repin: Volga Barge Haulers
1870-1873. Oil on canvas, 131.5 x 281
Russian Museum
191
II'ia Repin: Volga Barge Haulers Wading
1872. Oil on canvas, 62 x 97 cm.
Tret'iakov Gallery
iv
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Figure 8 229
Konstantin Makovskii: Water Nymphs
1879. Oil on canvas, 261.5 x 347 cm.
Russian Museum
Figure 9
II'ia Repin: The Unexpected Return
1883. Oil on canvas, 44.5 x 37 cm.
Tret'iakov Gallery
Figure 10
II'ia Repin: The Unexpected Return
1884-1888. Oil on canvas, 160.5 x 167.5 cm.
Tret'iakov Gallery
Figure 11
Ivan Kramskoi: Nikolai Nekrasov in
the Period of 'Last Songs'
1877. Oil on canvas, 105 x 89 cm.
Tret'iakov Gallery
264
265
270
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
List of figures iv
Introduction 1
Chapter One:
Painting and Russian national consciousness 24
Chapter Two:
1859-1869: New role of the "new" Russian painting 95
Chapter Three:
1870-1878: "New," national and realist art 160
Chapter Four:
1878-1893: Realism, nationalism and the Wanderers 225
Conclusion 293
Bibliography 3 03
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Introduction
In a major book-length treatise titled "Twenty Five
Years of Russian Art" published in 1882 and 1883, Vladimir
Stasov, one of the most influential cultural commentators of
the era, proclaimed "realism" and "nationalism" to be the
distinguishing features of Russian painting ("Dvadtsats'
piat' let" 521) .1 According to Stasov, the emergence of
"realism" in painting during the 1860s signaled a decisive
and complete break from the cosmopolitan, Neoclassical
tradition of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. This
"realism," he argued, was firmly grounded in Russian
national culture and had nothing to do with, for example,
the artistic efforts of Gustave Courbet in France (523) . In
fact, developments in Russian painting, Stasov concluded,
"literally repeated" those in Russian literature of some
twenty years prior (521).
One of the most intriguing things about these bold
proclamations, which later became integrated into the
official Russian and Soviet history of nineteenth century
painting, is that they were written by a man who had no
formal training in the visual arts. Nevertheless, Stasov,
who was an attorney by profession, became not only one of
the most informed art critics of his time, but also the most
l
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passionate one, intensely involved in all matters related to
the stature of Russian painting within the native culture.
Even so, his proclamations reveal more about the man, his
ideological convictions and prevalent cultural assumptions
than they do about actual developments in Russian painting.
A close analysis of Stasov's formula of the 1880s exposes at
least two major terminological distortions. First,
contemporary critics, Stasov included, rarely if ever used
the term "realism" to describe the art which emerged during
the 1860s. Rather, they referred to it, at least up to the
mid 1870s, as the "new Russian school" (novaia russkaia
shkola), or simply the "new trend" (novoe napravlenie) in
art. Second, the word "nationalism" (natsional'nost') as
used by Stasov in the 1880s was not completely
interchangeable with narodnost' or "national character," the
more common and older term utilized by the critics of the
1860s.
Yet, in all this the critic displayed a remarkable
ideological consistency. What informed Stasov's position in
"Twenty Five Years of Russian Art" were the same basic
principles which guided him throughout his entire
professional career. His critical agenda consisted of five
distinct yet closely related goals--to legitimatize the
"new" Russian painting as an intellectual activity equal to
Russian literature, to push it closer to the center of
2
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country's cultural life by making it reflective of
distinctly Russian, national strivings and aspirations, to
provide the historical account and the most complete,
textual record of the developments in Russian painting, to
promote and protect those painters who opted to work
independently of the traditional Academy-bound art
establishment or those he deemed capable of expressing in
their works the essence of Russian na.rodn.ost', and, finally,
to foster the unity and cohesion among such painters.
In many respects, the situation at the Academy during
the early 1860s, when Stasov started his critical career,
justified his supreme conviction that Russian painting
needed to be rescued from its marginal status within the
cultural hierarchy if it was to become a viable intellectual
activity on par with Russian literature. The Academy was
under the direct control of the Ministry of the Imperial
Household, having been transferred there in 182 9 from the
Ministry of Education, and, as such, was legally part of the
Tsar's personal domain. Since the Academic counter-reform
of 1840, Nicholas I was quite content to relegate Russian
painting to the margins of national life in order to isolate
it from the kinds of social and ideological trends shaping
Russian literature.
The Academy, a product of the Westernizing, cultural
reforms of Catherine the Great, was patterned after the
3
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French Academy of Fine Arts and, consistent with its model,
embraced the aesthetic doctrine of Neoclassicism. Premised
on the 'classical' notions of the ideal beauty,
Neoclassicism found only in the 'classic' art of antiquity
exemplars worthy of imitation. In 1808 A. Pisarev asserted
that "the ancient depictions," by which he meant Greek and
Roman art, were the only models to be followed because they
were "closest to the perfection" (qtd. in Kovalenskaia
Russkii klassitsizm 442). For him and other academicians,
art, either plastic or textual, became the mimetic object
for history painting, a pictorial genre which occupied the
most prominent position in the Neoclassical hierarchy. Its
supremacy was guaranteed by the Academy's statutes, signed
by none other than Catherine the Great. Urvanov, one of the
Academy's first theoreticians, proclaimed in his seminal
treatise of 1793 titled "Short Instruction For the
Understanding of Drawing and Painting of the Historical
Kind" that "history painting is the most perfect mirror of
vices and passions" and as such worked to "remind the rulers
and the ruled of their duties" (qtd. in Kovalenskaia,
Russkii klassitsizm 64). The Academy's normative pedagogy,
more than that of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture
and Architecture,2 or, for that matter, any other Russian
art institution of the time, was most clearly biased toward
the subordination of the visual image to the text. The
4
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implementation of the Neoclassical hierarchy in matters of
pedagogy resulted in its students progressing from the
imitation of antique sculpture to depicting scenes drawn
from 'classic' literature such as the Bible and Greek and
Roman mythology as they advanced through the curriculum.
All this worked to Stasov's advantage in formulating and
defending the argument that Russian painting needed to be
rescued from subservience to the cosmopolitan models imposed
by the Academy and perpetuated through its preference for
the 'classical' text.
The Academy dominated the Russian art world until it
was successfully challenged by the Wanderers Association in
the 1870s. Until then, it acted as the sole arbiter in
almost all matters related to the production of art, its
reception and dissemination. Yet, despite its overpowering
presence, it was the Academy and its bureaucratic confusion
about the Neoclassical hierarchy of genres that created the
favorable conditions in which the new artistic trends were
to be advanced during the late 1850s and early 1860s.
However, these trends which gained immediate support from
Stasov and his colleagues, came to be known not as Realism
but simply as the "new" Russian art, or more specifically
the Russian "thinking genre"--an artistic phenomenon
perceived to be distinctly Russian and organically connected
to the native culture at large.
5
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The terminological distortions detected in Stasov's
seminal writing of the 1880s, in which he attempted to
explicate, as best as he could, his aesthetic views,
illuminate one of the major problems with his interpretation
of the developments which took place in the Russian visual
arts. His notion of Realism was both too broad and too
narrow. It included everything, yet described almost
nothing. It was, to a large degree, an abstract ideological
construct imposed retrospectively and selectively upon a
very complicated set of circumstances encountered in the
Russian art world during the second half of nineteenth
century. The following study is a history of this
construct, not an attempt to redefine it philosophically.
No effort will be made either to provide a comprehensive
examination of what was, for whatever ideological or
aesthetic reason, excluded from this construct, such as, for
example, the works of Aleksei Venetsianov who played a
crucial role in establishing a rich rural tradition of
Russian genre painting. Similarly, no attempt will be made
to link Russian Realism to an analogous concept in French
art. Rather, the critical attention will focus here on the
nominal grounding of this construct in the intellectual
model found in the native culture--in the aesthetic
proclamations of Vissarion Belinsky and his radical
followers who assigned a greatly expanded role to the
6
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critic. This was a role which Stasov successfully exploited
to his own advantage and which allowed him to emerge as the
dominant cultural figure with the power to set the tone and
ultimately reshape the intellectual debate over what
constituted a uniquely Russian, national school of painting
which would be distinct from those found in the West or from
the cosmopolitan art practiced at the Imperial Academy of
Fine Arts.
This study is organized around three distinct yet
closely related themes. First, there is the institutional
history of Russian art. It, so to speak, forms the frame in
which developments in the second half of the nineteenth
century are illustrated. Second, there is the analysis of
the critical assertions of Stasov and his contemporaries
which have been abridged to eliminate conceptual vagueness
while retaining some of their force of expression. Finally,
there is the close analysis of three works: The Major's
Courtship by Pavel Fedotov, Volga Barge Haulers and The
Unexpected Return by II'ia Repin. These paintings have been
selected for their historical and critical significance.
They s^and as milestones in the development of what would
become known as Russian Realism illustrative of the power
and limitations of that concept. The association of Fedotov
and Repin is completely new to this study as are two other
elements--the explication of the crucial role of the
7
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independent art critic in re-shaping critical thinking and
public attitudes toward Russian painting as well as his role
in building the ideological construct that eventually become
known as Russian Realism from a number of vague concepts
originally labeled the "new" Russian art. This is not to
say, however, that Stasov is the subject of this study.3
Rather, his widely accepted proclamations on art will be
used here only to provide a certain unifying focus that
encompasses two major conceptual oppositions which were at
work at the time--the ideological link between Russian
literature and Russian painting and their respective
positions within native culture as well as the conflict
between cosmopolitan and national currents in Russian art.4
The title of this study--"Painting as Text"--alludes to
two specific aspects of the subject: first, the cosmopolitan
orientation and literary-bound practice of the Imperial
Academy which encouraged its preferred genre of history
painting to be viewed as a visual explication of a text--a
sort of reverse ekhprasis; and second, the literary bias of
Russian culture which tended to reduce developments in
Russian painting to literary analogies. This literary bias,
invoked by Stasov as well as his critical opponents, insured
that the boundary between Russian literature and painting
has remained ill defined. An attempt will be made here to
bring clarification into this relationship by casting a
8
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critical eye upon the notion of the painting as text upon
which the ideological construct known as Russian Realism
ultimately rested.
This ideological construct would not have been
successful were it was not for the greatly expanded role of
the critic advanced by Vissarion Belinsky and further
developed by his radical followers. Belinsky's aesthetic
notions placed the critic at the organic nexus between
culture and nation. His pronouncements about the aesthetic
merits of a literary text had a resonance that could, and
did, reach beyond the confines of the realm of literature.
They had the power to establish artistic careers and
reputations as well as to shape public opinion. Belinsky
was the single most important cultural model which inspired
and guided Stasov during his sixty-year career as an art and
music critic.
In keeping with his intellectual indebtedness to
Belinsky, Stasov spent much effort attempting to identify
the Gogol of Russian painting. The importance of this is
not to be underestimated. Like Belinsky, who proclaimed
Gogol to be the first Russian writer in tune with the spirit
of the nation and its time and whose Dead Souls allowed him
to state that Russia had indigenous literature, so too
Stasov set out to find the first truly Russian national
painter. Finding the Gogol of Russian painting would prove
9
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that a Russian school of art did indeed exist and that it
was grounded in the native culture, not in some foreign
models such as international Neoclassicism or Realism of
Courbet. It would also allow Stasov to claim the title of
the Belinsky of Russian art criticism (if not publicly, then
at least subconsciously). In fact, his career as an art
critic will be viewed here as a testimony to the success of
the efforts of Belinsky and the radicals to place literature
squarely at the center of Russian national life. Stasov's
seminal assumption that Russian painting had organically
grown from a single institutional archetype found in the
native culture--that is literature--stands as the most
obvious example of a deeply rooted predisposition among
educated Russians to view literature as the dominant art
form.
Literature enjoyed an elevated status within Russian
culture due to a peculiar mix of indigenous exigencies and
imported philosophy. Since the writings of Russian Romantic
thinkers early in the century, whose fascination with German
Idealism challenged the predominantly French notions of
literary Neoclassicism, literature had been considered not
only the clearest expression but also the most suitable
repository of national genius. In German Idealism, the
early Russian Romantic thinkers, and later Belinsky, found a
metaphysical scheme which could subsume all cultural
10
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activities under notions like Volkgsist and Zeitgeist
allowing them to be considered organic parts of the nation
and the age. Eventually, literature emerged as the dominant
cultural institution intimately linked with Russian national
identity.
A major shift in the Russians' understanding of the
role of literature in the life of their nation came after a
series of oppressive policies were put into place by
Nicholas I in the wake of the revolutions that swept through
Europe in 1848. They muzzled the press with aggressive
censorship. With philosophical, political and social
commentary suppressed during the 1850s and early 1860s, the
liberal and radical intelligentsia turned their critical
efforts to literature. In it, they found a vehicle through
which these forbidden subjects could be presented in the
guise of artistic expression. This strategy ultimately
solidified the perception that Russian literature was not
only an active, but also the most viable social force
invested with the power to shape the entire culture to
which, at least from the radicals' point of view, the visual
arts were decidedly inferior.5 "Among the Russians," wrote
Nikolai Chernyshevsky in 1855, "literature still possesses a
certain encyclopedic importance which has already been lost
by that of more enlightened nations" ("Ocherki" 304).
Chernyshevsky's double-edged praise for what he called
11
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elsewhere the "highest and the fullest of the arts"
("Esteticheskie otnosheniia" 63) underscores the central
role Russian literature came to play in Russian culture by
mid-century. These cultural assumptions became the point of
departure for the new generation of independent art critics
of the 1860s among whom Stasov would emerge toward the end
of the decade as the dominant figure.
Both personally and professionally Stasov was
predisposed to succeed in this endeavor. He was sincerely
passionate about Russian national art and possessed a
seemingly inexhaustible passion for polemics and advocacy.
He also had an encyclopedic knowledge, gained through a
life-long interest in and study of Russian painting, which
he expanded through his position as the head librarian of
the art section at the Imperial Public Library in St.
Petersburg where he worked from 1872 until his death in
1906. His office there, Repin later reminisced, functioned
as a unique and invaluable "information bureau" for an
entire generation of Russian creative talents (qtd. in
Repin, "Vospominaniia" 12; see also Karenin 605). In that
he took the best from his disciplinary training in law and
combined it with the best from his professional career as a
librarian, Stasov was more than an art critic--he was the
advokat for and the bibliographer of Russian art.
12
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Stasov, contrary to the claims made by the majority of
Soviet art historians who for their own ideological reasons
elevated him to a position of supreme authority in matters
relating to Russian painting, particularly during the period
1930-1980, was hardly an original much less a systematic
thinker. He simply lacked the philosophical sophistication
of Belinsky to whom he was most obviously indebted. He
never formulated a coherent aesthetic program. His critical
approach remained, for the most part, topical and anecdotal.
The question arises, then: how did he succeed in his
critical endeavors? He did so not because he was
perspicacious or innovative but, rather, because he was able
and quite willing to exploit the inherent literary bias of
Russian culture and because he fastidiously followed
developments in both Russian and European art. While not a
systematic thinker, Stasov was certainly a systematic
bibliographer. In a sense, there was no cultural event
related to Russian painting and its stature within the
European context which was too unimportant for him not to
comment upon. He substituted his lack of innovation with a
constant presence in the popular press and 'thick' journals.
The formidable body of his critical pronouncements--in
excess of seven hundred published entries6--was destined to
fill a certain vacuum in Russian art criticism created by
the dominance of the Academy-bound art establishment and its
13
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traditional criticism. This is not to say, however, that
Stasov did not encounter challenging critical opponents or
equally vigorous polemicists. This group included not only
commentators like himself who possessed no formal training
in the visual arts, the writers Vasilii Avseenko and Fedor
Dostoevsky and the publisher and journalist Aleksei Suvorin,
for example, but also professional art historians and
artists like Adrian Prakhov, Nikolai Ramazanov and Fedor
Bruni. Stasov viewed all of these men as "obstacles"7 in
the process of pushing the "new" Russian painting closer to
the very center of Russian culture identified almost
exclusively with that country's literature.
Deeply and most sincerely involved with all the
significant issues related to Russian national culture--
including painting, archaeology, architecture, decorative
arts, literature, sculpture and particularly music, where he
championed a group of musicians called "The Mighty Five,"8
Stasov almost singlehandedly catapulted himself into a
position of cultural prominence. One of the goals of this
study is to show how in arriving at this position of
authority, he alienated, even hindered some of the painters
he professed to protect from the hostile critical camp.
Singlemindedly intent on advancing his ideological agenda
which--and this is crucial for understanding his role in
shaping the attitudes toward Russian painting--he sincerely
14
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believed was or should be identical with the interests of
the painters he wished to promote, Stasov sacrificed some of
his most cherished personal and professional relationships.
After all, to Stasov, as he confessed in a letter to his
brother at the beginning of his career, "it did not matter
how" his critical goals were to be achieved but only that
they be achieved (qtd, in Pis'ma k rodnym 1.1: 273-74) .
Toward that end, he was willing to use even private letters
sent to him by his friends to advance his critical agenda.
Stasov's long and complicated relationship with II'ia Repin,
the most prominent member of the Wanderers Association, whom
he identified as the Gogol of Russian painting, epitomizes
the best and the worst about his role as advokat for Russian
art. In Repin, Stasov found the single most important
artist of his generation, one destined, at least in his
view, to move Russian painting to the very center of the
country's cultural life. Their relationship was of an
intense nature. As Stasov's niece and biographer V.D.
Komarova-Stasova notes, no other Russian painter was as
close to the critic as was Repin (Karenin 513).9 They not
only saw each other almost daily while the artist lived in
St. Petersburg, but they also corresponded continuously.1 0
In 1883 they even travelled together to Western Europe in
order to familiarize themselves with the major museums and
the artistic trends being advanced there (514). However,
15
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less than a decade later, they would find themselves at
opposite ends of the ideological and the aesthetic spectrum.
Their relationship deteriorated to the point where Stasov
called his "Gogol of Russian painting" a "renegade" and a
"traitor" (Perepiska Tret'iakova i Stasova 181).1 1 This is
indicative of a peculiar conflation of the professional and
the personal agendas which marred Stasov's entire career.
Chronologically, this study is roughly bounded by two
events which are equally important for understanding of
developments in Russian art during the second half of the
nineteenth century as well as Stasov's ideological
construct. The first is the appearance in 1849 of an
amateur poet and self-taught painter Pavel Fedotov who burst
upon Russian art scene with his genre painting The Major's
Courtship. This work was heralded by art critics in the
1860s, Stasov included, as the undisputable beginning of a
"new" Russian school of painting, one that was to be an
equal partner with Russian literature. The second is
Repin's open revolt in 1894 against the institutional
constraints of the Wanderers, the ideological appropriations
of Stasov (who by that time had positioned himself as the
Association's rightful and only spokesman), and the critic's
efforts to justify what he perceived to be the vital link
between Russian painting and Russian literature.
16
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Chapter one, "Painting and Russian national
consciousness," traces the origin of the ideological
construct known as Russian Realism to the Fedotov-Gogol
analogy. The analysis here centers on the search conducted
by the new generation of art critics of the 1860s to find
'progressive content', grounded in the concept of jbyt, in
Russian painting. In their search for the justification c*T
the "new" Russian art, these critics looked back to Pavel
Fedotov. In his seminal work The Major's Courtship, they
found an example of a supposed progression Russian painting
made away from the cosmopolitan art of the Academy to what
they considered to be the center of Russian culture. Two
important issues associated with Fedotov's The Major's
Courtship are to be examined here: the visual vocabulary
employed in the painting, and, the original poetic text upon
which it was based. Fedotov's experiments with two media
will provide a background for analyzing the Neoclassical
theory and its practical reliance upon the 'classic' texts--
intellectual and artistic models against which the new
generation of painters reacted. Like Fedotov's painting,
two major examples of the Russian academic history painting-
-Fedor Bruni's The Death of Camilla (1824) and Karl
Briullov's The Last Day of Pompeii (1833)--are closely
related to textual sources. Yet, as this chapter
illustrates, the artistic results are radically different.
17
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Chapter two, "1859-1869: The new role of the 'new'
Russian painting," examines some of the initial attempts
made by the art students of the 1860s--among them Aleksei
Korzhukhin, Valerii Iakobii, Nikolai Petrov and Vasilii
Pukirev--to undermine the Neoclassical hierarchy of genres,
to break with the literary-bound, cosmopolitan practice of
the Academy and how they did so by invoking the new,
'progressive content'. Their critical contemporaries had
already identified this 'content' in Fedotov's genre
painting(s) and the themes depicted in Russian Realist
literature. Originally labeled the Russian "thinking
genre," this art is analyzed not simply as a new trend
shaped by the efforts of art critics working independently
of the Academy but also as a manifestation of the
bureaucratic confusion at that very same institution. The
artists' efforts in this regard are linked to the critical
endeavors of Pavel Kovalevskii, Nikolai Petrov, Lev
Zhemchuzhnikov, Ivan Dmitriev, and Vladimir Stasov. This
was a mixed group of commentators who, operating under a
number of ideological and aesthetic assumptions, attempted
to formulate, as best as they could with the limited
critical vocabulary they had at their disposal, a coherent
doctrine that would bring painting closer to, if not even
into, the center of Russian cultural life, that is, away
from the cosmopolitan models of the Imperial Academy.
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Chapter three, "1870-1878: 'New,' national and realist
art," discusses the ideological struggles of Stasov and the
Academy to assert control over the Wanderers Association and
its most prominent member II'ia Repin. The artistic
activity of Repin and the organization which the artist
joined in 1878 were of paramount importance in evaluating
Stasov's role in shaping developments in Russian painting
during this period. It was in Repin that Stasov found his
Gogol, and it was through the Wanderers Association that he
could further advance his critical agenda which centered
around the attempts to legitimize the "new" Russian
painting. The institutional history of the Wanderers which
details the group's organizational structure, artistic
diversity, relationship with collectors as well as the
inherent conflict between its idealistic and pragmatic
goals, illustrates how in formulating his ideological
construct Stasov often had to conveniently ignore the
complicated reality which constituted the Russian art world.
Chapter four, "1879-1893: Realism, nationalism and the
Wanderers," summarizes how under Stasov's critical guidance,
earlier notions about the Russian "thinking genre" and the
"new" Russian national art gradually became the "realist"
art of the Wanderers and how, finally, during the 1880s,
this lead to the almost complete identification of Realism
with the Wanderers Association. Of particular interest here
19
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is the juxtaposition of the real forces pulling the
Wanderers Association apart aesthetically and
organizationally and Stasov's increasingly aggressive
attempts to construct a critical gloss stressing its unity.
Stasov's ideological narrowing of the term Realism, best
summarized in his treatise "Twenty Five Years of Russian
Art," is contrasted here to the actual growth of the art
market during the 1880s. This contrast, in turn, shows how
the diversification of the art market encouraged the
development and proliferation of various trends simply not
countenanced by Stasov's critical construct. This chapter
also provides a close analysis of Repin's painting The
Unexpected Return which is examined here as one of the most
successful, unsuccessful examples of Stasov's Russian
Realism. Finally, Repin's open and very public disagreement
in 18 94 with Stasov's aesthetic prescriptions, which led to
the temporary break in their personal relationship, is
viewed as a failed attempt to free Russian art, at least
within the confines of the Wanderers Association, from the
supreme value the critic attached to the ideological link
between the arts of painting and literature.
20
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Notes
1. Most references to Stasov's articles and reviews have been
taken from Sobranie sochinenii published in three volumes in
1894 (they include articles from 1847 until 1886), which was
supplemented in 1906 by a small volume titled Iskusstvo XIX
veka (it includes seven articles originally published in
1857, 1887 and 1901 respectively). For the purpose of
clarity, references to the 1894 edition in the Bibliography
include volume, part and column number (first two volumes),
and volume and column number (third volume).
Stasov's own comments provided in the first three volumes as
well as the archival materials now held at the Pushkin House
in St. Petersburg indicate that the critic took active part
in this publication (see Stasov, materialy v bibliografii
128) .
Two other collections of Stasov's works were also used
throughout this study--a two-volume edition titled
Izbrannoe. Zhivopis' skul'ptura, grafika v dvukh tomakh
(Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1950-1951; referred to in
the Bibliography as Izbrannoe) and a two-volume set titled
Stat'i i zametki of which the first volume is qualified as
Stat'i i zametki, publikovavshiesia v gazetakh i ne
voshedshie v knizhnye izdaniia (Moscow: Akademiia
Khudozhestv SSSR, 1952) and the second as Stat'i i zametki,
ne voshedshie v sobraniia sochinenii (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1954; both volumes are referred to in the Bibliography as
Stat'i i zametki) .
2. Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture was
founded in 1843 as a educational facility associated with
the Moscow Art Society, itself established in 1833. For
more information see Dmitrieva, N.A., Moskovskoe uchilishche
zhivopisi, vaianiia i zodchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1951).
3 . A comprehensive biographical information on Stasov is
provided elsewhere. For details, see Michael Curran,
"Vladimir Stasov and the Development of Russian National
Art: 1850-1906" (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin,
1965); Vlad. Karenin, Vladimir Stasov. Ocherk ego zhizni i
deiatel'nosti (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1927); A.K. Lebedev,
and A.V. Solodovnikov, Vladimir Vasil'evich Stasov. Zhizn' i
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tvorchestvo (Moscow: Mysl', 1976); Yuri Olkhovsky, Vladimir
Stasov and Russian National Culture (Ann Arbor, Michigan:
UMI Research Press, 1983).
4. The following study will amplify the existing interpretation
of events provided by a number of Soviet scholars as well as
by Elizabeth Valkenier in her preeminent study in English
titled Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The
Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989). However, the emphasis in this
study is shifted toward explicating the importance of these
events for the above mentioned cultural oppositions--
literature/painting and cosmopolitanism/nationalism.
5. This predisposition ultimately resulted in, what Boris
Gasparov calls, the "sanctification of literature" allowing
it to be regarded as a social force "containing the
solutions to moral problems and the answer to cardinal
philosophical questions." Literature was a conscious
element of the nineteenth century thinking in Russia, and,
as such, was considered a "political program for the
transformation of society, a codex of individual behavior, a
way of understanding national past, and a source of prophecy
about the future" (13).
6. The still most definitive bibliography of Stasov's published
works issued under the title Vladimir Vasil'evich Stasov.
Materialy k bibliografii i opisanie rukopisei (Moscow: Gos.
izd-vo kul'turno prosv. lit-ry, 1956) lists 719 separate
books, articles and reviews (excluding his published and
unpublished letters).
7. "Obstacles of New Russian Art" is the title of an article
Stasov published in 1885 in which he attempted to provide a
definitive history of Russian art criticism.
8. On Stasov's role in shaping developments in Russian music,
see Olkhovsky.
9. Vlad. Karenin is a pseudonym of Stasov's niece V.D.
Komarova-Stasova. Her memoirs recount some of the major
points of Stasov's life.
10. Three volumes of Repin's and Stasov's letters were published
at the height of Stalinist era (referred to in the text as
Repin and Stasov, Perepiska).
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11. This is not to say, however, that Repin was the only Russian
artist to provoke Stasov's criticism. As Michael Curran
points out, "the list of friends Stasov broke with on one
occasion or another is long, including A. Serov, Repin,
Balakirev, Antokol'skii, Kramskoi, Perov and many others."
"Each break," according to Curran, was "occasioned by the
acceptance of a new approach, a new attitude, a new idea or
a new method by one of his fiends" (305) .
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Chapter One
Painting and Russian national consciousness
In 1849, Pavel Fedotov, a retired army officer, little-
known amateur poet and self-taught painter, burst upon the
Russian art scene when three of his genre paintings were
exhibited at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. The most
notable among them was The Major's Courtship, also known as
The Improvement of One's Affairs or the Major's
Courtship."1 The source for this painting was an 1846 poem
composed by the artist and reproduced variously under the
titles "Thoughts of the Major or the Improvement of One's
Affairs" and "Improvement of One's Affairs or the Major's
Marriage." Completed in the Spring of 1848, the painting
depicts a merchant's daughter being groomed for the approval
of a major seen standing in an open doorway. The moment
captured by Fedotov is that of the comic confusion created
by the match-maker's announcement of the major's arrival to
the merchant's house. The merchant is seen hastily
buttoning his caftan, his daughter as rushing away all the
while his wife unceremoniously attempts to stop the daughter
by pulling on her dress.
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Fedotov's work was such a success that he was awarded
the title of academician, one of the Academy's highest
honors, usually conferred upon a painter who excelled in the
preferred Neoclassical genre of history painting.2 The
Major's Courtship was a success with the viewing public as
well. It generated an unprecedented acclaim not seen in
Russia since 1834 when Karl Briullov's history painting The
Last Day of Pompeii was shown there for the first time after
a successful tour of major European cities. Apollon Maikov,
writing anonymously for the liberal journal Contemporary,3
enthusiastically wrote that The Major's Courtship was
significant because "its creator found his subject in byt,"
or everyday Russian life (80). Fedotov's emphasis on byt,
in the critic's view, marked a decisive break with the
dominant Neoclassical practice of the Academy, which he
denounced as "the old-fashioned understanding of art" intent
only on the "idealization" of reality (80).
Most importantly, Maikov also compared Fedotov's
painting to the prose of Nikolai Gogol. Prior to Gogol,
argued the critic, "art had nothing in common with life and
reality" (80). The move toward reality, he asserted
following Belinsky's line of analysis, began with Pushkin
and culminated in Gogol who "struck a final blow to the
outdated principles of the old school" (81-82) . Fedotov,
according to Maikov, found his subjects like Gogol in
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Russian byt--in "a sphere more or less familiar to us" (82).
This, concluded the critic, accounted for "the almost
universal enthusiasm generated by Fedotov's paintings"
(82).4 An argument will be made here that this literary
juxtaposition--in which a little-known painter5 was placed
prominently next to a well-known writer--would, due to the
overarching influence of literature in cultural affairs,
shape critical attitudes and artistic developments in
Russian painting well after the 1850s.
Fedotov's participation in the Academy's triennial
exhibition was unusual for other reasons as well. First,
these events were generally open primarily to students and
members of the Academy. Unknown amateurs such as Fedotov
were not usually invited to participate. Second, the
Academy helped Fedotov to cover the cost of producing his
painting (see Fedotov's autobiography reproduced in
Leshchinskii 100). Third, the Academy, through its pedagogy
and programs, advocated the Neoclassical hierarchy wherein
genre painting, in which Fedotov worked exclusively, was
deemed decidedly inferior. Although he attended evening
classes at the Academy studying under the battle painter
Aleksandr Zauerveid (see Fedotov's autobiography reproduced
in Leshchinskii 99; see also Iakovlev 57), Fedotov's
artistic formation was molded by his frequent visits to the
Hermitage where he studied genre scenes of the Dutch
26
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seventeenth century painters including Adrian van Ostade,
Piter de Hooch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu and David Teniers
the Younger.6 The works of these artists, regarded by the
academic establishment as aesthetically inferior, also had a
negative reputation among literary critics who used them to
justify their opposition to Realism in Russian literature.
As Ronald D. Leblanc points out in his article on the debate
around the natural school, the name of Teniers in particular
came to be associated in certain literary circles in the
1840s with "crude realism--with images of peasants drinking,
smoking, and playing cards in taverns" (577) . The term
ten'erstvo was invoked pejoratively by literary critics to
denote "a low art that depicts only poshlost' [banality] in
man, life and nature" (585).
If his admiration of seventeenth century Dutch
paintings was something of an aesthetic liability,7 two
things augured well for Fedotov. First, he was an
acquaintance of Karl Briullov, one of the most celebrated
artists then living in Russia and a professor at the
Academy, who, in turn, recommended Fedotov to the organizers
of the exhibition. Second, and more significantly, despite
its bureaucratic embrace of Neoclassicism, the Academy was
hardly insistent on this point. Academy members and
students could and did deviate from its strict hierarchy of
pictorial genres. To understand this deviation and its
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impact upon further developments in Russian visual arts, a
summary will be provided here explaining the general
principles of Neoclassicism, both in its European and
Russian contexts, with the special emphasis given to
academic practice as manifest in its preferred genre of
history painting.
The Neoclassical standard
Neoclassicism emerged in Europe during the mid
eighteenth century partially in reaction to the aesthetic
excesses of the Rococo. It sought to manifest in the arts
the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment with its belief
in natural law, universal order and, above all, confidence
in human reason.8 In general, Neoclassicism adopted the
classical notion of mimesis, which, as formulated by
Aristotle, was perceived as the imitation of nature, not
necessarily as it is but as it ought to be. Art, thus
understood, is an idealized interpretation of the real world
in so far as it comports with the conventions of artistic
expression. Neoclassicism, however, shifted the balance
toward the ideal advancing the notion that art was the
manifestation of the ideal in the reality of the artwork.
Centered in Paris, the Neoclassical movement spread
across Europe through the organization and reorganization of
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academies of fine arts which embraced and advocated its
principles and practice. These institutions functioned as
centers for art education and official patronage. With
certain modifications, Neoclassical doctrine continued to be
applied until the end of the nineteenth century becoming the
preferred style within the academies.9
As institutions of higher learning, the academies had
two main goals. First, to teach their students how to apply
rational methods to art and, second, to realize the ideal in
artistic expression. These goals were met by imposing a
strict set of rules upon the artistic processes and by using
other works of art as sources for inspiration, specifically
the art of classical antiquity, mainly Greco-Roman
sculpture, and 'classic' texts such as the Bible and those
of Greek and Roman literature, history or mythology.
These sources embodied three basic artistic principles-
-simplicity, loftiness and universality. Simplicity, which
was associated with loftiness, was considered one of the
outstanding aspects of the art of antiquity. The pursuit of
simplicity distinguished Neoclassicism from the Rococo and,
in practice, lead to a certain clarity of narrative, a
purity of color, austerity of line and composition as well
as a recognizable set of gestures, situations and plots.
These pictorial conventions also called for powerful, yet
tightly controlled emotions to be depicted so as to create a
29
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sense of arrested action, a sort of tense calmness.
Compositionally this was heightened by stereotypical
grouping of human figures, sculptural poses and exaggerated
gestures usually captured in a friezelike setting.
Illumination was dramatic with well delineated areas of
light and shadow. The brushwork was smooth while the colors
were clean and pure.
From simplicity and loftiness followed universality
which imparted a certain timelessness to art. The
particular and accidental were to be eliminated so as to
approach this ideal. By definition, the concept of perfect
beauty precluded the depiction of contemporary social
reality. What could be depicted, on the other hand, were
significant, universal and lofty human actions, typified in
what Moshe Barasch calls "passions of the soul and movements
of the body" (326). Suitable themes were stoicism, self-
sacrifice, civic duty, heroic patriotism, courage and
generosity. These were to be presented in a manner both
pleasurable and instructive to the viewer. Because the
ultimate purpose of art was to embody the love of virtue and
hatred of vice, the artist, according to the Neoclassical
doctrine, was to serve as an enlightened and highly moral
spokesman inspiring his viewer to equally virtuous actions.
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The academic practice
The founding in 175710 of the Imperial Academy of Fine
Arts in St. Petersburg have traditionally been considered
the beginning of Russia's participation in Western European
culture. After centuries of isolation, which had left it
unaffected by the intellectual experience of Renaissance and
Reformation, Russia adopted its first international style.
Like the other academies which proliferated in Europe during
the period 1740-1790, the Russian Academy embraced all the
basic principles of Neoclassicism--from reliance upon other
works of art taken as models to a normative and highly
structured pedagogy.
Basic principles of Neoclassicism were clearly evident
in the treatise titled Reflections On Free Arts With the
Description of Some Works of Russian Painters written and
published in 1792 by Petr Chekalevskii, one of the Academy's
early theoreticians. This text, as Janet Kennedy points out
in her article on the Neoclassical ideal in Russian
sculpture, was "simply a digest of foreign writings on the
nature and function of art" (197). With extensive
quotations from Winckelmann,11 Chekalevskii argued that
there were only two ways for the artist to achieve "good
taste"--either by using "reason" to select "the most useful
and pleasant" phenomenon or by imitating "those works of art
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in which the said selection has already been made" (qtd. in
Kovalenskaia, Russkii klassitsizm 265).
The highly structured curriculum adopted by the Russian
Academy sought to instill in its students the basic notions
of Neoclassicism through rote imitation of classical
artifacts and guided interpretation of 'classic' texts. All
this was to prepare the student to work in the loftiest of
pictorial genres--history painting. Following his European
counterparts, I.F. Urvanov argued in 1793 that history
painting was "lofty because it contained the most important
events" and, as such, "demanded more knowledge" from the
artist "than other genres." Those specializing in history
painting, Urvanov concluded, "ought to possess excellent
intellectual sophistication" which was needed to "depict
lofty and significant [human] actions" (qtd. in
Kovalenskaia, Russkii klassitsizm 64-65).
At the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg, the
curriculum, based upon the assumption that ideal beauty is
singular and absolute, was devoid of any individual
instruction. In order to reach that beauty, the students
were expected to follow not only a rigorous set of pictorial
conventions but also to comply with all sorts of
bureaucratic regulations. In the introductory drawing
courses, they were allowed to copy only two-dimensional
examples, usually engravings, of acknowledged masterworks
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(see Kovalenskaia, Russkii klassitsizm 82) . Only after
mastering this could they copy originals or cast models of
Greco-Roman sculpture (82-83).1 2 Finally, in the upper-
level classes, the students were allowed to copy live models
posed so as to resemble the sculpture copied at the
intermediate level (83) . The ultimate goal here was to
teach the students how to represent the ideal human
figure.13 Painting courses, which could only be taken after
completing the drawing courses, were similarly organized.
First level courses concentrated on copying the works of old
masters, most notably Claude Lorrain, Poussin and Raphael,
while in the more advanced courses the students were allowed
to produce original sketches based on the appropriate
sources (see Kondakov 193).
The Academy's rigorous, highly structured and normative
training culminated in the Big Gold Medal competitions in
which the most advanced students were expected to produce
history paintings based upon 'classic' texts assigned by the
Academy's Council. The winners of the Big Gold medal were
awarded a stipend and a trip to Rome which, with its
monuments of antiquity, typified the ideals of classical
culture upon which international Neoclassicism was
founded.14 In a fashion similar to the "annual envois" of
the winners of the Prix-de-Rome in France (see Boime 20) ,
the Russians were expected to produce examples of works
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after classical models while visiting the Roman capital (see
Sbomik postanovlenli 325-26) .
Several striking things marked this and other aspects
of the academic curriculum. In that it rigidly focused on
other works of art as the object of mimesis, the academic
educational philosophy had a profound impact on the value
assigned to painting within the Russian cultural hierarchy
during the mid-1800s. While the influential literary
critics such as Belinsky and Chemyshevsky argued that
contemporary social reality and the exigencies of the native
culture were the only objects worthy of artistic mimesis,
the Imperial Academy, at least through its curriculum,
continued to focus on what these critics considered the
useless, ideal beauty of eras long past. The cosmopolitan
orientation of the Academy, with its subordination of the
visual image to the 'classic' text fully manifested in
history painting, also served to further isolate Russian
visual arts from the emerging national culture. This only
reenforced the liberals' and radicals' argument that
painting was indeed inferior to literature--a perception
underscored by the deliberate intellectual stultification of
the Imperial Academy by the Tsar Nicholas I in an effort to
quash political opposition among the intelligentsia.
Because most of the Academy's students were drawn from the
lower social classes,15 their intellectual activity was
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regarded, at least during the early part of the nineteenth
century, as a manual craft whose practitioners were capable
only of manipulating material. As a result, painting was
yet to gain the cultural respectability and status accorded
to literature. This inferiority status was compounded by
the fact that, as S.F. Starr notes, the Russian painters
lacked any "tradition of middle-class independence from the
state," and as such "were less inclined to view autonomy as
a prerequisite for an artist" (103) . The combined effect of
all these factors solidified the perception that the painter
in Russia still lacked the intellectual sophistication of a
man of ideas such as a prose writer or a poet.1 6
Painting, 'classic texts' and the 'sister arts'
Within the academies, history painting was regarded as
the epitome of high art to which the landscape and genre
painting, which depicted scenes taken from prosaic reality,
were deemed decidedly inferior.17 The Neoclassical ideals
of loftiness, timelessness and universality could not be
found in works crowded with the particulars and the
imperfections of everyday life. These truths were
attainable only in history painting inspired as it was by
the timeless and ideal beauty of classical art. At the
Imperial Academy, the texts of the Bible, classical
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literature, epics, romances and mythology were all drawn
upon for suitable subjects for this loftiest of pictorial
genres.
This practice, which presumes a fundamental parity or
unity between the visual image and text, is grounded in an
old philosophical position which predates the development of
Neoclassicism and has had a long and rather complicated
history in the West. Its classical reading is often
summarized by Simonides' analogy of poems as "speaking
pictures" and pictures as "mute poems"18 or by Horace's
formula ut pictura poesis, that is "as in painting so in
poetry." This latter assertion, in turn, has often been
reformulated to read 'as in poetry so in painting'
indicating an extended analogy if not a complete identity
between the two media.19 In Europe, the belief in a
fundamental parity between the arts gained wide currency
during the Renaissance when, as Rensselaer W. Lee notes in
his study Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of
Painting, Horace's classical dictum was invoked to promote
painting, the younger of the two 'sister arts,' to a status
equal to that of literature (6; see also Markiewicz 537) .
Poetry and painting, the so-called 'sister arts,' came to be
considered, according to Lee, "identical in fundamental
nature, in content, and in purpose" despite the differences
in their means and manners of expression (3). However, it
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was in the post-Renaissance period when Horatian formula
gained particularly wide currency. During the Age of
Enlightenment the academies of art institutionalized the
concept of the fundamental link between the arts through
their reliance upon the Neoclassical hierarchy of genres in
which the supreme attention was given to history painting
whose narratives were invariably drawn from literary
sources. In fact, after the publication in 1757 of Comte de
Caylus' exhaustive compendium titled Paintings Drawn from
Homer's Illiad and Odysseey and Virgil's Aeneid, this
practice became especially dominant.
However, in 1766, at about the time Neoclassical
enthusiasm for history painting as well as literary
pictorialism--an artistic practice based on the assumption
that verbal texts possess the capacity to create vivid
pictorial effects20--was reaching its peak, Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing published his Laocoon: An Essay Upon the
Limits of Painting and Poetry. Because it sought to delimit
the boundaries between the arts, this essay marked a turning
point in post-Renaissance aesthetic thought.21 Although,
for the most part, Lessing accepted the basic tenets of
classical aesthetic theory which held that art should
instruct and give pleasure and that poetry and painting
share essentially the same mimetic function, he also saw the
art forms as fundamentally dissimilar in their means of
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expression. Using space and time as analytical measures,
Lessing concluded that poetry is the art of time while
painting is that of space. According to Lessing, poetry
represents motion and action in time, while painting seizes
and fixes action devoid of motion in time (91). Implying
that chronology was manifest only in literature, he placed a
significant limitation upon pictorial representation. A
painting could be successful, he argued, only if it depicted
a single "pregnant moment" (fruchtbarer Moment, 92) ,
allowing the viewer to infer what went before and what was
yet to come and, thus, imparting a sense of chronology or
narrative to this otherwise static art form.22 In so
arguing, Lessing contrasted the primarily static nature of
the visual image to the relatively temporal progression of
literary narrative.23
The 'sister arts' in the Russian context
Although seldom explicitly invoked in the original
Horatian form, the concept of ut pictura poesis runs like a
leitmotif throughout Russian aesthetic thought. Robert
Maguire points out that Vasilii Tretiakovskii, one of the
most important eighteenth century writers on Russian
versification, began his 1752 article titled "An Opinion on
the Beginning of Poetry and Verses Generally" with a
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paraphrase of this formula--"like a picturesque painting,
such is Poetry: it is a verbal depiction” (qtd. in Maguire
100) . Aleksandr Pisarev, one of the Academy's early
theoreticians whose treatise titled "Objects for the
Painters" (published in the journal Northern Herald in 1804
and 1805) evidences a strong influence of Winckelmann,
stated that "literature and the free arts [fine arts] have
great similarities." This similarity, according to Pisarev,
comes from the arts' shared aesthetic purpose--"to imitate
nature and morality" (qtd. in Kovalenskaia, Russkii
klassitsizm 260) .
As Maguire notes, the link between painting and poetry
"remained an ideal among Russians well into the nineteenth
century" (101) . This is not to say, however, that the
differences between them were completely ignored. Following
Lessing, whose Laocoon had been known among educated
Russians at least since the late eighteenth century in its
original German version24 and was available in an
abbreviated translation since 1823 ,25 Aleksandr Pisarev
also emphasized the difference between the two media. He
argued that "in literature all objects are depicted
gradually one after another," while the visual arts, "depict
one moment of an object" (qtd. in Kovalenskaia, Russkii
klassitsizm 261) .26
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However, the difference between the artistic media were
not fully acknowledged or consistently recognized in Russia
until much later in the nineteenth century when a new
generation of post-Realist art critics including Petr
Boborykin, Vasilii Avseenko, Nikolai Dosekin and Alexander
Benois resurrected it in order to justify the intrinsic
elements of painting which, they argued, were neglected
under the influence of the Wanderers. These critics
rejected the 'sister arts' theory, because, they believed,
it necessarily entailed the subordination of painting to
literature. It was Nikolai Dosekin more than anybody else
in this group who elaborated on the dissimilarity between
painting and text. In an 1894 article titled "On Story-
Telling in Painting," he argued, clearly echoing Lessing,
that literary narrative "develops" over time, while
painting, by its nature, can only depict one single moment
(106). Although hardly satisfactory in his application of
Lessing's theory or in advancing an intrinsic aesthetic
program of his own, Dosekin nevertheless challenged the
presumed link between the arts, whether ideological, as
Stasov and his colleagues argued, or practical, as the
Academy advocated. Dosekin's main target were the Wanderers
whose works he criticized for being overtly literary in
nature. Operating under the assumption that somehow the
nominal and the actual relations between the arts were one
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and the same, Dosekin concluded that the narrative component
of a painting necessarily implied its practical subservience
to literature.
Paintings and textual sources
It was the Academy's preference for history painting
that encouraged the close association between the visual
image and the text. Two of the most celebrated examples of
this genre created in Russia27--Fedor Bruni's The Death of
Camilla and Karl Briullov's The Last Day of Pompeii--will
form the framework for examining the changes international
Neoclassicism underwent during the 1820s and 1830s and will
function as the background against which Fedotov's The
Major's Courtship--the major point of departure in the
undermining of the Academy's pictorial hierarchy, at least
from the liberals' point of view--appeared. All three works
were inspired by textual sources. Yet, Fedotov's result is
radically different.
Bruni produced his The Death of Camilla in 1824 while
living in Rome and completely immersed in the classical
milieu appropriate to the Roman legend he was to illustrate.
Consistent with Neoclassical practice, the source for this
monumental history painting (measuring 350 x 526.5 cm) was a
Roman legend first recounted by Livy and later popularized
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in Europe by Pierre Corneille's tragedy Horace (1640).
Jacques-Louis David, perhaps the greatest painter of this
period, had already visited this narrative for his Oath of
the Horatii (1784-1785) . The legend tells the story of
three brothers, the Horatii triplets, who defended Rome in
single combat against Alba, represented by the Curiatii
brothers, also triplets. After two of the Horatii have been
killed, the surviving brother kills the Curiatii and secures
victory for Rome. Upon his return, he finds his sister
Camilla mourning the death of one of the Curiatii to whom
she had been betrothed. The surviving Horatius dispatches
her, is condemned to death and granted a reprieve after his
father pleads publicly for leniency. Livy suggested that
the Horatius was spared not so much out of a sense of
justice, but out of admiration for his martial
accomplishments. Corneille's retelling endorses this
verdict stressing the supremacy of patriotic duty over all
other values.
After basing a preliminary sketch on the segment of the
tale where the Horatius is absolved of his crime, David
settled on depicting a moment not even presented in the
narrative (Roberts 22; see also Crow 213) but which
displayed patriotism and loyalty in a most powerful and
lofty manner.28 In essence, David idealized the already
ideal classical source for his work. However, he had done
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so in a style and language that was nevertheless "highly
personal" (Roberts 28) . In David's Oath of the Horatii, the
brothers are depicted giving oath to their father before
they set out for battle. This solemn ritual is carried out
in an idealized interior reminiscent of a stage setting.
This space is notable for its doric columns which divide the
background into three austere arched voids of shadow. The
figure of the father, Horatius, holding forth three swords
stands just to the right of center. To the left, in taught,
sculptural poses, stand the brothers saluting him and
displaying their readiness to fight for Rome against the
enemy. To the right sit three women, two of the Horatii
sisters, among them Camilla to the far right, and the nurse
dressed in black consoling two children. "Compositionally,"
Roberts writes in his study on David, "Horatius and Camilla
define the outer side of the spaces occupied by the male and
female figures" framing the painting at the opposite ends.
According to him, the male figures form "a triangle within a
square" while the female space is defined as oval (25) .
Dramatic early morning light streams in through an unseen
window from the upper left of the canvas. "The sculptural
grouping of the figures and their rigid rectilinear
alignment across the elementary box space, exactly parallel
with the picture plane, " notes Hugh Honour in his study of
Neoclassicism, "inevitably suggests a direct borrowing from
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Roman low reliefs" (36) . This tendency to flatten the
perspective, as Honour observes, was already a pictorial
cliche by the 1780s. Through his depiction of this scene,
Honour adds, "David was able to extract and isolate the
essence of the story and reveal its inner meaning, the
nobility of Roman stoicism, with a correspondingly stoic
directness and economy of visual means" (35). Moreover, he
notes, the solemnity of the oath-taking adds "an extra
dimension to the moral, universalizing it and generalizing
its human relevance" (35). David's painting, which Roberts
considers "the culmination of the anti-Rococo reaction"
(27), was an exemplar of Neoclassical simplicity, loftiness
and universality. Yet, as Roberts argues, Oath of the
Horatii also represents a purely individual understanding of
civic virtues (28) which infused David's work with an unique
"creative drive" (17). David, defying the conditions of the
royal commission as well as academic rules and procedures,
created a painting not for the king but for himself (16).
Despite its very public appeal, the work possessed
"intensely private quality" (22) which, in the final
analysis, affirmed David's autonomy as an artist.
While hewing close to the pictorial conventions of
academic history painting, Bruni's The Death of Camilla
(figure 1) was also notable for its subtle but significant
departures. This is particularly apparent when analyzed
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Figure 1: The Death of Camilla (Fedor Bruni)
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with David's exemplar in mind, an ideal that hardly any
European artist could maintain. Originally titled The
Triumph of Horatius (Vereshchagina, Khudozhnik i vremia 35) ,
Bruni's canvas depicts the narrative segment where the
surviving brother kills his sister. The setting is out of
doors in a street notable for its irregular paving stones
which replace the perfectly symmetrical marble and brick
floor in David's painting. The surviving Horatius stands
defiantly just to the left of center pointing accusingly at
his dying sister. Their father, whose visage is nearly
identical to that in David's work, kneels beside holding her
limp arm looking in shock at his son. Bruni's canvas
depicts the narrative segment most at odds with the
Neoclassical ethos--the moment where the Horatius is
behaving most ignobly. On the other hand, this moment does
have a vaguely Romantic resonance. The Horatius, like the
Romantic hero, stands above and apart from a society which
can but is not qualified to pass judgement of his actions.
It is only in this sense that Bruni's painting approaches
the austere universality required of Neoclassicism.
As for simplicity, even here Bruni's painting taxes the
Neoclassical convention. While the grouping of the human
figures parallel to the picture plane works to flatten the
sense of perspective, this is to a great degree vitiated by
the strong one-point perspective conveyed by the converging
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roof lines of the buildings which define the street. This
may, in turn, account for the large number of figures
depicted in the canvas, almost twice as many as in David's,
serving to counter this effect. The result, however, is a
painting that appears cluttered, filled with too many
particulars, when compared to David's exemplar. Regardless,
Bruni's work in Russia was considered a fine example of
Neoclassicism which for the most part it was particularly in
terms of the artist's approach to his subject and his
reliance on textual sources.
While Bruni, who would later emerge as one of the most
ardent supporters of Neoclassicism within the Academy,2 9
worked for the most part within its confines, Karl Briullov
essentially abandoned it in his masterwork The Last Day
of Pompeii. This massive history painting (measuring 456.5
x 651 cm) was completed in 1833 and awarded the prestigious
Grand Prix at the Paris Salon one year later. Soon
thereafter it was taken on a tour of European cities where
it was met with unprecedented acclaim. Subsequently,
Briullov was offered memberships in major European academies
while in Russia his painting became a source of immense
national pride. The Last Day of Pompeii was hailed by his
contemporaries as "the first day of Russian painting" (qtd.
in Kovalenskaia, Istoriia russkogo iskusstva 144).3 0
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Briullov's painting (figure 2) was based on the
artist's knowledge of the destruction of Pompeii by the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD from three sources:
letters written by Pliny the Younger to the Roman historian
Cornelius Tacitus recording the event for posterity, -
contemporary texts written by antiquarians exploring the
ruin which was discovered in 1748; and extended visits the
artist paid to the site in the period 1828-1831. While
there, Briullov carefully studied the layout of the city and
the artifacts unearthed. In his correspondence, the artist
wrote that for the setting of his painting he sought a
specific public area "making no changes and adding nothing"
(qtd. in Mashkovets 57). As Honour notes, archeological
accuracy was "the sine qua non for any 'true' depiction" of
Roman themes within the Neoclassical aesthetic (36; see also
Barasch 312). All this reflected the academic emphasis on
rote imitation of classical artifacts.
Briullov's painting depicts the moment at which the
city is being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The setting is the Strada dei sepolcri or Street of the
Tombs which is cast in a receding perspective. The canvas
is literally crowded with human figures, at least twenty
five in various poses of distress, strewn, quite contrary to
the Neoclassical ideal, along the converging perspective
lines. This chaotic scene hardly conveys sense of tense
48
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Figure 2: The Last Day of Pompeii (Karl Bruillov)
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calmness associated with the Neoclassical ideal particularly
as exemplified in David's Oath of the Horatii. Moreover,
this acclaimed example of academic Neoclassicism grows even
more interesting when one examines its particulars.
While the human forms are reproduced in the typical
Neoclassical manner with special attention lavished on
archeological accuracy--for example, Briullov noted that the
pose of a mother and her two daughters in the painting
faithfully reproduced that of skeletal remains at Pompeii
(qtd. in Mashkovets 57) - -there are striking anachronisms and
anachorisms. First, among the characters is a Christian
identified by a cross pendant worn around his neck. At the
time of the destruction of Pompeii, Christianity was still a
relatively obscure sect which had yet to make inroads on the
Italian peninsula. As one contemporary scholar writing
about Pompeii notes, the Christians "left no tangible trace"
of their presence (Ward-Perking 86). This character,
located in the foreground in the lower left corner of the
canvas, is set in opposition to a pagan temple located in
the middle ground in the upper right comer which is being
destroyed by what appears to be lighting or more likely
falling debris. The Christian is the only character whose
face is squarely turned toward the source of Pompeii's
destruction. He appears to be walking deliberately parallel
to the picture plane toward the right hand side of the
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canvas. As if the symbolism were not already obvious,
Briullov also includes a pagan priest with a scowling visage
in the middle ground who, according to the painter, is
"running in confusion in no particular direction" (qtd. in
Mashkovets 57). Moreover, these two characters and the
temple are linked by the receding lines of the one point
perspective--a technique decidedly at odds with the simple,
low relief identified with high Neoclassicism.
More striking, however, is the appearance in Briullov's
painting of Pliny the Younger. He is depicted in the
foreground of the right hand comer of the painting
assisting his elderly mother who has fallen down. However,
Pliny was some twenty miles away in Misenum when Pompeii was
destroyed. This element goes far beyond any of the
idealizing principles encountered in high Neoclassicism.
Even more extraordinary was Briullov's justification. If
the artist through the use of perspective could "place
Pompeii next to Vesuvius" which was actually some five miles
distant, Briullov asserted, then he was certainly allowed to
"carry the example of the love between the mother and the
child over twenty miles" (qtd. in Mashkovets 57). This
theme, he argued, was "very important" to his painting (57) .
This almost maudlin sentiment, particularly as manifest in
The Last Day of Pompeii, was far removed from the sublime or
lofty ideal encountered, for example, in Schick's Roman
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Charity much less David's Brutus. Finally, in an another
nod toward Romantic distortions and chronological
displacements, Briullov incorporated his self-portrait into
the composition (see Leont'eva 36). In conflating the
present tense with the past, Briullov, according to Sterain,
"theatricalized" his lyrical persona (Khud. zhizn' Rossii
serediny veka 33) . In so doing, Briullov, as Joshua Taylor
points out, "steered carefully between an art of self-
expression and vivid documentation" leaving his most
enthusiastic viewers with an impression "that he had indeed
bridged the gap between the past and the present, rendering
in a direct, vivid terms what otherwise might be a lifeless
record" (146) .
The success of Briullov's painting in Russia indicated
just how far artistic practice had moved from the ideal of
European Neoclassicism set up by David and how by the 1830s
it took on a very different connotations. To a great
degree, this change was obscured by the identification, now
almost complete, of academic practice with the Neoclassical
aesthetic. As long as a painting was based on a classical
source following the academic technique of imitation, it was
deemed an example of high art.
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"The Major's Courtship:" Painting as performance
Although by the 1850s Briullov's novel treatment of
classical history had lost its original appeal to the
viewing public, to the Academy, his masterwork still stood
as the fine example of 'high' art. In this context--in
which the preference was still given to the study of ideal
beauty found in the art of antiquity--Fedotov's genre
painting The Major's Courtship marked a decided break with
the dominant practice of the Academy. Most obviously,
unlike Bruni and Briullov, Fedotov choose a contemporary
subject for his painting depicting a prosaic episode taken
from the Russian byt or everyday life. Additionally,
contrary to the conventions of the monumental history
painting, his canvas measured only 58.3 x 75.4 cm. This was
entirely consistent with the 'low' genre painting which was
already an accepted although not highly regarded part of the
aesthetic hierarchy of the Academy. However, the most
interesting aspect of Fedotov's approach, particularly when
analyzed within the confines of academic practice, was the
role of the text in The Major's Courtship. It was in this
particular aspect that Fedotov, more than any artist of the
time, both within and outside of the Academy, confronted the
art establishment on his own terms.
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As previously mentioned, the source for Fedotov's
painting was a poem the artist had composed two years
earlier. Although published only after his death, it was
widely distributed and recited among the Russian reading
public before then.3 1 The poem centers on the major's
evaluation of his not so prosperous state of affairs.
Despite ten years of military service, it has become obvious
to him that he has no chance of advancing to a higher rank.
Thus, the major concludes that the only way to improve his
lot is to marry the daughter of a rich merchant named
Kul'kov, hence the consistent title fragment "The
Improvement of One's Affairs." The poem ends with the major
instructing his servant to go to the match-maker and
exaggerate his master's supposed virtues in order to
expedite the marriage.
The painting picks up the narrative at the point just
after the conclusion of the poem (figure 3) . It depicts the
commotion created by the major's appearance in the Kul'kov
house, that is after the match-maker has accomplished her
mission. In short, the climax of Fedotov's poem is deferred
to the canvas of his painting and, as such, functions as a
pictorial continuation of the text of the poem. Hence the
poem's descriptive subtitle "A Preface to the Painting." By
depicting the moment where his discourse reached its climax,
Fedotov's painting stands as a explicit manifestation of
54
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Figure 3: The Major's Courtship (Pavel Fedotov)
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Lessing's fruchtbarer Moment. However, Fedotov had no
desire to delimit the boundary between painting and poetry.
Rather, he sought to achieve an organic conflation of the
two.
At first glance, it might seem that in his use of the
text as the source for the painting, Fedotov's approach was
close to that of the Academy merely substituting the
'classic' text with one of his own. However, this gesture
owes more to Romanticism than it does to Neoclassicism in
that the artist considered the painting and the poem
companion pieces which together formed an inseparable
artistic whole. To further emphasize this unity, Fedotov
composed an accompanying performance piece, called ratseia--
a verbal explanation of both the visual and literary
narratives, which he recited aloud as part of the exhibition
of his painting. Just how far Fedotov strayed from the
Neoclassical ideal can only be appreciated when this
particular aspect of his artistic approach is closely
examined.
In his performance piece or ratseia, Fedotov
satirically told the story of those who "masticate other
people's bread," "marry the rich" and are too "lazy to work
for themselves" (Fedotov 750) . He presented this story in a
playful manner reminiscent of the raek,3 2 a type of
nineteenth century Russian popular entertainment in which
56
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pictures were viewed through a magnifying lens as a
comedian, the raeshnik, provided a running narrative. The
use of this 'low' genre served to further distance Fedotov's
work from the high culture associated with the Academy.
Fedotov's performance/painting was premised upon the
novel concept of the audience as interactive partner,
someone who was to be addressed, amused and emotionally
involved. To engage his audience, Fedotov fully exploited
the rhythm of the raeshnyi stikh, a type of spoken verse
found in Russian folklore which relies upon rudimentary
sound repetitions. He repeated the energetic rhythm of the
remark, "and now, please, look at this," (i vot izvol'te
posmotret') fourteen times in order to separate his
narrative into an equal number of distinct frames. The
viewer/narratee was asked to look at the painting's
characters not merely as images on a canvas but also as
characters within the narrative being recited. There was
the match-maker who brought the maj or to the merchant's
home,- the confused and unprepared bride-to-be who wanted to
run away; her mother who attempted to stop her by pulling on
her dress; her father who bustled to button himself up; the
cook who carried the kulebiaka into the room. Additionally,
Fedotov asked his viewer/narratee to pay close attention to
the detailed depiction of the merchant's home--from the
pictures decorating the wall to the Siberian cat lying on
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the floor (750-53) . Here Fedotov used the textual source to
underscore the prosaic nature of the scene depicted in the
painting, that is to draw attention to the very particulars
eschewed by Neoclassicism. Fedotov's textual and verbal
components to the painting had a double function. They
underlined the break with the 'high' art of academic history
painting and, more importantly, they made the social
criticism 'encoded' in the painting explicit.
Pictures within the painting
In Fedotov's painting, all the characters except the
major are placed in a sitting room whose vanishing point is
located somewhat in front of and below the head of the
bride. Most of the physical characteristics of the main
protagonists are depicted here in a deliberately grotesque
way. The major is seen through an open doorway on the
right. He is a dark figure cast against a bright green
background. His pose is rakish, left hand on hip, right
hand twirling his moustache. The bride, wearing a flowing
white gown, is cast as a bright figure against a darker
background. She is seen pulling away toward a doorway on
the left, her delicate hands and neck straining. Her
mother, standing nearly in the center of the room, tugs on
the wedding gown, pulling her daughter backward. The
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father, a merchant, stands in the right-hand corner of the
room in shadow. His portrait--in which he is holding a book
in his hands to underline his supposed cultural
sophistication--hangs on the wall separating him from the
major. Although the use of the melodramatic gesture and
some of the poses in Fedotov's painting is fairy typical of
Neoclassical composition, the overall effect of his work
most certainly is not academic.3 3
What additionally distinguishes Fedotov's painting from
the dominant practice of the Academy is the use of the
picture within the painting device which was almost never
used by the academics and is utterly foreign to
Neoclassicism. However, this device became popular in
Europe during the sixteenth century when, as Theodore Reff
notes, it began appearing in self-portraits and so-called
"painted galleries" serving to identify one's profession or
avocation, to characterize one's taste and interest, and "to
symbolize the relation of art and nature in general" (94).
This device was particularly favored by the seventeenth
century Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer and
Teniers whom, as already mentioned, Fedotov admired, studied
and copied during his frequent visits to the Hermitage.
Together with mirrors and maps, Reff observes, these
painters used this device to heighten verisimilitude, to
deepen "visual resonance" as well as to establish various
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symbolic associations (94). This was precisely the purpose
to which Fedotov put the picture within the painting device
in his work--to particularize his painting, ground it in the
contemporary reality and sharpen the social commentary it
conveyed.
In his performance or ratseia, Fedotov provided a
detailed list of the pictures prominently displayed on the
walls in The Major's Courtship. The central and largest
picture located in the middle of the back wall, directly
above and behind the bride, is that of the Moscow
Metropolitan. His gaze is seemingly fixed upon her, an
association reenforced by its coincident placement along the
perspective line running from the top right-hand comer of
the painting to the vanishing point just in front of the
bride's head. The Metropolitan's portrait is surrounded by
four smaller pictures. To the left are a landscape
depicting a monastery and a portrait of Mikhail Kutuzov,
commander of the Russian armies that defended Moscow during
the Napoleonic War of 1812. The landscape, it should be
noted, is the larger of the two. To the right are portraits
of two more heros from the Napoleonic War, A.V. Ilovaiskii,
commander of a cossack detachment, and Iakov Kul'nev.34 On
the wall to the right, next to the doorway through which the
major is seen, hangs the portrait of the bride's father, the
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merchant who is depicted as holding a book in his hands (see
Fedotov 753).
These pictures within Fedotov's painting fall into two
distinct categories: those which are emblematic of
patriarchal and religious order--the images of Metropolitan,
the monastery and the bride's father which, it should be
noted, stands distinctly apart from the other two,- and those
which are emblematic of military and state order--the images
of the three war heroes. The merchant and the major stand
as intermediaries between them.
Both series of pictures symbolically cast doubt on the
motives of these two men who seek association with one and
other not for patriotic or spiritual benefit but, rather,
merely to improve one's affairs. This pecuniary motive
casts both in a dark light figuratively and literally. The
portrait of the merchant is located on one of the darkest
walls of the room which is, of course, next to the doorway
in which stands the dark figure of the major.35 With this
formal element Fedotov further accentuated the social
commentary of his painting.
The Gogol-Fedotov analogy
While Fedotov's contemporaries understood social
critique in The Major's Courtship, they completely missed
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the significance of his artistic experiments with two media.
Perhaps because the comparison between the 'sister arts' of
painting and literature had by that time become a critical
commonplace, it never occurred to them to inquire into the
curious status of The Major's Courtship as conclusion to a
poem.3 6 Instead, they linked Fedotov's painting with the
prose of Gogol. The ultimate question is: what specifically
was driving these comparisons between a little-known Fedotov
and a well-known Gogol which began almost immediately after
the debut of the painting?
The origin of this analogy, significant for the later
developments in Russian visual arts, is to be found in the
dominant cultural assumption which placed literature at the
center of Russian national life. Pavel Kovalevskii, one of
the first cultural commentators of the 1860s to voice such
an opinion, proclaimed that Fedotov was the "Gogol of
Russian painting" (372) . Fedotov, the critic argued,
paraphrasing the lyrical digression from Dead Souls,
depicted the "unseen tears of Russian life seen through the
laughter by the world" (372) . Placing a special emphasis on
content, Kovalevskii argued that in the works of Fedotov the
Russian "brush" became "engrossed in thought" for the first
time in its history. The presence of such thought in a work
of art would, according to him, force the viewer to become
equally thoughtful (372) . Fedotov's work, like Gogol's
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prose, concluded Kovalevskii, marked the emergence of new
era in Russian art dominated by what he called the "Russian
thinking genre1 1 (372) .
Two years after Kovalevskii, Vladimir Stasov picked up
on the Gogol-Fedotov analogy in an article about the
Academy's annual exhibition of 1862. There he argued that
truly Russian national art was established only after it
began to follow the lead of "Gogol and Fedotov" ("Zametki o
vystavke v AKh" 83) . In yet another article of the same
year, Stasov invoked a similar Gogol-Fedotov comparison.
Writing about the Russian participation at the London
International Exhibition, Stasov claimed that those in
charge of the selection for the Russian pavilion were
reluctant to show Fedotov's The Major's Courtship because of
the "Gogolian truth" depicted in it ("Nasha
khudozhestvennaia proviziia" 76).
Both Kovalevskii and Stasov linked Fedotov to Gogol
despite the fact that the painter, according to his friend
and biographer Aleksandr Druzhinin, had little appreciation
for author of Dead Souls (699) . This personal detail, known
since the 1853 publication of Druzhinin's The Reminiscences
of the Russian Artist Pavel Andreevich Fedotov, rarely
stopped either Fedotov's contemporaries or subsequent
commentators from emphasizing the purported link between him
and Gogol.37 The salient question is why? Two
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interrelated cultural forces allowed this analogy to be
advanced. First, there was the increased authority of the
art critic who worked independently from the academic
establishment and who advocated associations between the
arts on the level of 'progressive content' . Second, by the
1860s, the intellectual and social forces placing literature
at the center of Russian culture, the utilitarian aesthetic
laid down by Belinsky and later expanded by the radicals, as
well as the cosmopolitan orientation of the Imperial Academy
seemed to have relegated the visual arts to the margins of
national culture. The question now was whether a peculiarly
Russian school of painting, independent from foreign
influences, actually existed? The model for resolving this
issue, both philosophically and practically, was Belinsky.
The art critic who answered this question in the affirmative
would both rescue Russian painting from the margins of
culture and possibly catapult himself into a position of
prominence. However, any critic attempting to become the
Belinsky of art criticism was faced with an immediate
problem of finding the Gogol of Russian painting. Once that
link had been established, the art critic could proceed to
inscribe Russian painting within a larger debate over what
constituted an indigenous and distinctly Russian culture.
To fully understand the importance of this particular
literary analogy and how it affected further developments in
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Russian visual arts, a short summary will be provided here
explaining how and why literature came to be elevated to a
position of superiority within the cultural hierarchy and
what role specifically Belinsky and Chemyshevsky--Stasov's
immediate sources of inspiration--played in shaping the
society's attitudes toward it.
Painting, literature and national consciousness
The strategy used by the new generation of independent
art critics in establishing associations between the 'sister
arts' rested upon the notion that certain aspects of Russian
literature could and should be replicated in or grafted onto
other cultural activities including painting. Among them
were literature's supposed progression from subservience to
foreign models to a state of national independence, its
orientation toward 'progressive content', its organic link
with the nation, its capacity to reflect the country's
social and political reality as well as its ability to shape
the development of society toward a better, more progressive
model.
However, all these characteristics of Russian
literature were far from being fully recognized let alone
revered only a quarter of a century earlier. In fact,
during the 1820s a number of leading Russian Romantics such
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as Prince Petr Viazemskii, Orest Somov, Wilhelm
Kuchelbecker, Dmitrii Venevitinov and Aleksandr Bestuzhev-
Marlinskii questioned whether there even was such a thing as
Russian culture much less a peculiarly Russian form of
literature. Viazemskii, for example, in an 1822 essay on
Pushkin's poem "The Captive of the Caucaus", lamented the
absence of a truly Russian national literature even while
extolling the virtues of his mother tongue. Russian culture
was "rich with the names of poets, " he stated, but was "poor
in works" (73) . Similarly, in 1825, Bestuzhev-Marlinskii
argued that the Russians had criticism but not literature
(549) . On the extreme end of this cultural pessimism was
Dmitrii Venevitinov. In an essay titled "On the State of
Enlightenment in Russia" (written in 1826, published in
1831), he maintained that Russia had obtained everything
from external sources and, as a result, its literature was
"without foundation, without any exertion of its own inner
power" (210) . In short, according to Venevitinov, Russian
literature was a pale imitation of European originals. This
was essentially the same charge that would later be leveled
against Russian painting.
Two specific historical and intellectual developments
led to this harsh cultural Selbskritik. After their
traumatic experience in the war with Napoleon in 1812, the
Russians began to reevaluate the Western, particularly
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French., ideas and concepts which had been in vogue since the
time of Peter the Great and his westernizing reforms.3 8
Increasingly, questions of national identity were being
framed in terms of an opposition between indigenous versus
exogenous cultural influences. Ironically, such questions
took on a particularly new urgency under the influence of
imported intellectual ideas found in German Romanticism and
Idealism. The German Idealist philosophers of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--most notably
Herder, Fichte, and Schelling--assigned an unusually high if
not supreme importance to art.39 They saw in it the
realization of the absolute, the spirit of the times
(Zeitgeist) and/or the spirit of the people (Volkgeist) .
Art was considered an organic part of the age and the
nation. Literature, as the art form of language--itself a
defining element of a people, according to the Romantics--
was regarded as one of the most obvious manifestations of
Volkgeist.
Under the influence of these ideas which had a
catalyzing effect upon Russian national aspirations, the
Russian intellectuals became increasingly concerned with
defining the genius or spirit of their own people,
specifically as manifest in its literature. Echoing
sentiments expressed earlier by Herder, Orest Somov wrote in
1823 that the "literature of a people is a picture in words
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of its mores, customs and ways of life" (80) . However,
literature, he added, must be "independent of foreign
traditions" rather than "imitative" of them (102) . From
this point on, literature was to be identified almost
exclusively with the spirit of the people or Volkgeist and
was expected to reflect the indigenous culture. This link,
in fact, had been advanced in Russia as early as 1819 by
Peter Viazemskii under the rubric of narodnost', a concept
roughly analogous to Volkgeist. Narodnost', according to
Viazemskii, was that peculiar to or representative of a
people40 and, of course, was most apparent in literature.
All these ideas were to be fully developed in the
writings of Vissarion Belinsky, the first professional and
perhaps one of the most influential Russian critics of the
nineteenth century. Three aspects of his aesthetics had a
strongest impact upon the new generation of art critics who
emerged during the 1860s and advanced views independent from
those of the academic establishment. First, it was under
Belinsky's critical guidance that literature was firmly
placed at the center of Russian culture. Second, Belinsky's
organic notions of art and culture engendered a dramatic
shift in the relationship among the arts within the cultural
hierarchy with the visual arts, at least under the direction
of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, being assigned a
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position decidedly subordinate to that of literature.
Third, after the publication in 1842 of Dead Souls, Belinsky
was able to proclaim Gogol to be the expression of truly
Russian national genius and, in so doing, to make him the
measure of Russian artistic achievement.
Belinsky started his critical career under the
influence of German Idealism and Romanticism. In his first
published article of 1834 titled "Literary Reveries,"
proclaiming that Russian literature does not exist
("Literatumye mechtaniia" 22), he expressed a cultural
pessimism similar to that of his Romantics contemporaries
and predecessors. Nevertheless, Belinsky, like other
Romantics, considered literature a repository for and a
manifestation of the nation's spirit. Although Belinsky
changed his opinion often,41 this notion remained central
to his critical thought. Throughout his career, he asserted
vigorously that literature was an "expression" and a
"symbol" of the inner life of the nation ("Literatumye
mechtaniia" 29; "Nichto o nichem" 50), that it was the
"only" repository for the "nation's intellectual life"
("Mysli i zametki o russkoi literature" 430) as well as "the
expression of the spirit and the direction of social life
during a given epoch" ("Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1847
goda" 303).
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This notion was significant for two reasons. First, by
consistently placing literature squarely at the center of
Russian culture, Belinsky implicitly subordinated the other
arts to it. Typical of his pronouncements was the assertion
that to define poetry was to define art in general (see his
"Opyt istorii russkoi literatury" 158) ,4 2 However, as it
will be shown later, it was not so much Belinsky but his
radicals followers who shaped the cultural terrain on this
point.4 3 Second, Belinsky's view of literature also
implied a greatly expanded role for both the writer and the
critic by placing them at the organic nexus between culture
and nation. By virtue of the critic's ability to divine the
narodnost' or Volkgeist manifest in given work of art and
adjudge its relevance to the spirit of the times or
Zeitgeist, his pronouncements could potentially have a
resonance beyond the already expanding cultural boundaries
of literature.44 In fact, the literary critic could become
both social critic and opinion maker. This role, implicit
in Belinsky's notions, was essentially thrust upon the
literary critic during the 1840s and 1850s when press
censorship effectively blocked nearly all other avenues for
social and political discourse. Subsequently, the new
generation of art critics of the 1860s used it to advance
their socially active views of art.
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The Gogol problem
The elevated position literature enjoyed in the
cultural affairs of Russia was, however, only partially due
to the influence of German Idealist philosophy and
Romanticism. Several other exigencies of Russian culture
also played an important role in solidifying the view that
literature was indeed the dominant cultural institution
intimately linked with Russian national identity. There was
the expansion of an educated, reading public, the growth and
subsequent commercialization of journalism as well as the
achievements of leading writers of the day such as Pushkin,
Lermontov and others.45 However, the appearance of Gogol
on the Russian literary scene was pivotal in this regard.
In fact, as previously indicated, it was only after the
publication in 1842 of Gogol's Dead Souls that Belinsky was
able to resolve in the positive the cultural Selbskritik of
his critical predecessors as well as his own earlier
misgivings about the existence of distinctly Russian
national school of literature. This, in turn, allowed him
to state that Russians possessed their own literature.46
Although he regarded Pushkin as the first truly Russian
national poet (4: 427; 5: 318, 357-58; 7: 34-36, 333), it
was Gogol, Belinsky argued in 1842, who was singularly "in
tune with the spirit of the times" ("Neskol'ko slov o poeme
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Gogolia" 259) .47 It was the element of Zeitgeist--most
fully embodied in Dead Souls-- which, according to Belinsky,
made Gogol "more important for the development of Russian
society than Pushkin" (259) . Dead Souls, he argued,
signaled the full realization of the organic connection
between author, nation and era.48 In fact, in a letter to
Gogol of April 20, 1842, Belinsky explicated this link by
stating that: "Now you are the only one we have, and my
moral existence and love for creative literature are closely
bound up with your fate,* if you did not exist I would have
to bid farewell to both the present and the future of our
country's creative life. I would live only in the past" (9:
515). Thus, it was with Gogol that Russian literature,
according to the critic, "took root" in the soil of the
nation and became part of the "life of society" ("Russkaia
literatura v 1842 godu" 514) .49 All this made Gogol, in
the mind of the critic, an "indisputable authority" on
Russian reality (see Terras 86) which followed from the
author's intimate, organic link to social reality.5 0 As
Paul Debreczeny also points out, Belinsky's assessment of
Gogol made him the "poet of reality, from whom a portrayal
of, and comments on, society could be expected" (13) in the
minds of many Russian intellectuals.s x
Elevating Gogol to this position of prominence in
Russian cultural affairs was consistent with Belinsky's
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efforts, particularly after 1842, to ascribe to literature
social and moral functions entirely alien to the views of
the German Idealists, particularly Schelling, who viewed art
as an expression of the absolute, the noumenal reality
beyond rational knowledge. Belinsky, on the other hand,
argued that literature's role was, as he summarized in 1846,
to reflect, build and educate society, to provide "closer
interaction between social groups," to "elevate social
awareness" and, ultimately, to shape a public opinion
("Mysli i zametki o russkoi literature" 432, 434-36) .
Russian literature, he maintained, achieved its national
originality by moving "closer to life," closer to social
"reality" ("Russkaia literatura v 1842 godu" 526, "Vzgliad
na russkuiu literaturu 1846 goda" 10).
The notion of Gogol as the measure of peculiarly
Russian artistic creativity was taken to its logical
conclusion in 1855 by Chernyshevsky. Placing his own
peculiarly utilitarian spin on Belinsky's organicist point
of view, he proclaimed that Gogol was the founder of a
socially progressive, that is civic trend in Russian
literature. It was Gogol, according to Chernyshevsky, who
awakened Russian national self-awareness and established a
peculiarly Russian school of literature ("Ocherki" 20).
Furthermore, it was Gogol who first gave a "definitive
orientation toward content in Russian literature, more
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specifically an orientation in such a useful trend as the
critical" (19). This critical or civic-minded "content,"
according to Chernyshevsky, distinguished Gogol's work from
authors like Pushkin who, the critic argued, still labored
under the influence of foreign models (20) . Because of this
subservience to foreign influences, he maintained, Pushkin's
works lacked any "deep meaning" ("Sochineniia Pushkina"
475). In so arguing, Chernyshevsky linked Belinsky's
earlier interpretation of Volkgeist and Zeitgeist with his
utilitarian concept of civic-minded literature which, in his
aesthetic scheme, was most fully embodied in the works of
Gogol.
Chernyshevsky and the literary masterplot
Although under Belinsky's intellectual guidance
literature came to be viewed as an active force shaping
Russian culture, it was the radicals, most notably Nikolai
Chernyshevsky, who actively advocated an expansive and
active social role for literature and, in so doing,
explicitly subordinated the visual arts to it. This was
part of the radicals' response to the oppressive policies
instituted by Nicholas I to stop the spread of the political
revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. In that year, the
Tsar ordered restriction on travel abroad, abolished
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philosophy as a university subject, intensified police
activity and, most notably, muzzled the press with
aggressive censorship which would be eased only in 1855.
These restrictive policies not only dramatically altered the
intellectual landscape of Russia but also worked to
transform literature into the preeminent social and cultural
institution. Increasingly, after 1850, literature served as
the de facto forum for philosophical, political and social
debate. Writer and social critic Alexander Herzen
accurately described the situation when he asserted in 1850
that for a nation without political freedom, literature had
become the "only tribune from the height of which it can
hear the scream of its own indignation and its self-
consciousness" (198) .S 2
This notion of an expanded role of literature was
particularly important in Chernyshevsky's aesthetic program.
His views on art and literature, explicated most fully in
his master's thesis "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to
Reality" (1855) and in his lengthy article "Sketches of the
Gogolian Period of Russian Literature" (1856), were
simultaneously utilitarian and idealistic (in the generic
sense) . All art, he argued, was subordinate to reality and
should play specific social and moral functions. Art should
depict important aspects of contemporary life, explain these
to the reader, and denounce social ills by pronouncing "a
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verdict on life" ("Esteticheskie otnosheniia" 77, 85, 86) .
This last function, according to Chernyshevsky, elevated art
to a higher status, to what he called the "moral activities"
of the man (86) .S3 Art should be judged, he argued, only
on how well its content fulfilled these goals. In
contradistinction to the German idealists, particularly
Schelling who saw art as beyond utilitarian concerns,
Chernyshevsky asserted that "what is useless does not have a
right to be respected" or represented in art (79) . Art
cannot simply depict beauty, but, he argued, must include
"everything that is interesting in life" (81, 82). The
"truest and the highest beauty," Chernyshevsky concluded,
"is precisely the beauty encountered by man in the world of
reality and not the beauty created by art" (14) .
Literature held a place of supreme importance in
Chernyshevsky7s aesthetic scheme because it "represents the
fullest opportunity to express a particular idea" (86),54
that is to convey a progressive content. It was on this
point that the utilitarian and the idealistic components
combined in a most curious manner. Advancing a utilitarian
line, Chernyshevsky's indicated that press censorship
induced literature to play a "much more important role" in
Russia than elsewhere in Europe because "nearly all of the
nation's intellectual life" was focussed in it ("Ocherki"
303). In Russia, he observed, literature was "concerned
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with interests which in other countries had already been
transformed into specialized areas" (303). This,
Chernyshevsky added, striking an idealistic stance, imparted
Russian literature with a certain "encyclopedic importance"
(304) . Advancing this line of reasoning, he asserted that
Pushkin and Gogol were "irreplaceable" not merely as
artists, but as social critics and ideological spokesmen as
well (304).
Echoing Belinsky, Chernyshevsky asserted that questions
raised in or about literature contained in themselves "all
the theory of art" ("Esteticheskie otnosheniia" 63) . In so
arguing, Chernyshevsky, as Terras observed, sought "to
destroy all the barriers separating art from science, from
politics, from publicism, and from ordinary, practical
activity" (237) . Literature was not merely at the center of
Russian culture from this idealistic perspective, it was
very nearly synonymous with it, eclipsing or subsuming all
other aspects including the visual arts.
Literature's elevated status, according to
Chernyshevsky, emerged from its ability to respond to the
"healthy aspirations" of the time ("Ocherki" 302) which in
the terminology of the time implied socially progressive
ideas. This made lasting imprint upon the critical thinking
about the state of Russian painting, at least as practiced
at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. Its "alienation" from
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"contemporary strivings," according to Chernyshevsky,
accounted for its "pitiful state" ("Esteticheskie
otnosheniia" 85) . This alienation, asserted Chernyshevsky,
insured that the colors in painting were merely "crude and
sad imitations" of those found in reality (57). Moreover,
and more deeply troubling, in its concept (ideia) and
execution (ispolnenie) the painting, he argued, was always
decidedly inferior to reality (60).
Chernyshevsky's observations on literature and painting
were essentially a utilitarian re-reading of Belinsky's
proto-Realist interpretation of German Idealism and
Romanticism with social reality replacing Volkgeist and
ideological imperatives standing in for Zeitgeist. Their
significance lies in the fact that while the subordination
of painting to literature was implicit and relative in
Belinsky's aesthetic scheme, it was explicit and absolute in
Chernyshevsky's. The art critics of the 1860s took issue
and advantage of this position.
Russian literature and "new" painting as the 'sister arts'
Invoking Belinsky's notion of Gogol as the poet of
Russian reality and the measure of national genius as
filtered through Chernyshevsky's aesthetic pronouncements,
the new generation of the art critics of the 1860s proceeded
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to proclaim Fedotov the Gogol of Russian painting, that is
the founder of specifically Russian school of realist art.
The question is why Fedotov?
To a certain degree, this was an arbitrary choice.
Fedotov was, most certainly, not the only alternative to the
Academy during the first half of the nineteenth century.
His predecessor Aleksei Venetsianov, for example, also
eschewed the uplifting moral themes favored by Neoclassicism
and choose instead to depict the prosaic everyday reality of
the Russian peasants. Venetsianov even established a
parochial school in which he exerted immediate influence
upon a number of artists who almost exclusively worked in
genre painting including Aleksandr Alekseev, Aleksei
Tyranov, Grigorii Soroka and others.55
In a sense, and entirely unintended by the art critics
of the 1860s, Fedotov was the Gogol of Russian painting.
For just as Gogol was not the founder of Russian Realism
because, in part, his aesthetic sensibility was too
idiosyncratic,56 so too Fedotov was not the founder of
Realism in Russian painting. Fedotov's painterly approach
rested upon an organicist view of the text and the
painting57 as parts of a whole and, as such, was not only
unique--among Russian artists only he supplied his own
textual explications to his own paintings--but was too
eccentric to be properly understood, particularly by
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contemporary critics who were almost invariably concerned
with content of a work of art.5 8
The new generation of art critics who emerged during
the early 1860s found the importance of Fedotov somewhere
else. In his genre paintings they saw a critical and a
satirical depiction of Russian byt,59 not an idealized
picture of reality or the useless beauty of an era long
past. They believed that Fedotov, like Gogol, was in a
unique position to pronounce social criticism upon that
reality. Finally, it was Fedotov who they perceived as the
only alternative to the cosmopolitan art still practiced at
the Academy--a model to be followed by the new generation of
Russian painters.
Crucial in Kovalevskii's and Stasov7s strategy in
proclaiming Fedotov the Gogol of Russian painting, was again
their unconditional acceptance of the assumption which
viewed literature as an institutional archetype capable of
reflecting and embodying all of native culture. The
perceived encyclopedic and all-encompassing nature of
literature allowed them to readily apply ideas encoded in
its texts to other artistic media. From this point of view,
if painting was to become a legitimate intellectual activity
on par with Russian literature--that is a form of art
independent from foreign influences--it needed to be
conceptually linked with the dominant literary tradition., in
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other words with literary Realism. This link between
painting and literature was possible because of the emphasis
these critics placed on 'content'. It was the distinction
between form and content, invoked by Belinsky but made
explicit and mandatory by his radical followers,60 that
allowed them to link literature and painting because, they
argued, progressive examples of both shared the same
'content'. The particular nature of the artistic media
could be ignored. It was on this abstract essentially
ideological level that the art critics of the time conducted
a critical exercise which all but recapitulated that in
literature earlier in the century over the existence of an
indigenous and distinctly Russian national form of
literature. Of course, their critical strategy also
invoked, at least tacitly, the notion of ut pictura poesis
which in the mid-century Russia was built upon and
creatively expanded by Belinsky's organic notions of art and
culture.
Considering the Russians' pronounced cultural bias
toward literature and the Academy's preference for history
painting which relied heavily upon literary sources, it may
appear at first glance that Kovalevskii and Stasov merely
replaced one literary masterplot with another--Horace with
the author of Dead Souls, the 'poet of reality'. However,
they in fact advocated no such thing. This goes to the
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heart of the difference between their understanding of the
link between the arts and that of the academics. It was on
this point that the new generation of art critics broke most
decisively with the Academy in rejecting its approach to
mimesis. They argued that only in Russian national culture,
most fully embodied in Realist literature, could the
appropriate artistic inspiration be found. While painting
for these critics was ideologically subordinate to
literature, it most certainly was not in any practical
sense. They did not, despite charges to the contrary by
their opponents, advocate that paintings be drawn directly
from poems or novels. This, they understood, was precisely
the problem with the Neoclassical application of ut pictura
poesis. Rather, for the new generation of art critics who
worked independent of the Academy-bound establishment, the
link between the 'sister arts' of literature and painting
was first and foremost on the abstract level of ideology or
what they called 'content' . It was here that both
literature and painting, at least what was deemed
progressive by the radicals and liberals, shared the common
goal of restructuring Russian society. In that literature
under the Realists (writers and critics) had been at this
longer, painting remained the junior partner.
The importance of this argument is not to be
underestimated. With it, the new generation of independent
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art critics of the early 1860s attempted to bring Russian
national painting directly into contact with the broader
intellectual debates shaping the country. Under their
critical guidance, painting was now taking on a social and
cultural relevance previously enjoyed only by literature.
No longer was Russian painting to be completely isolated
behind the walls of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. On
the level of 'content', as explicated by the art critic, it
was now becoming, like literature before, a forum for the
healthy aspirations of the day, an expression of truly
Russian national strivings. The literary juxtaposition
which proclaimed Fedotov the Gogol of Russian painting only
made the art critic's argument that much more convincing and
culturally relevant.
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Notes
1. Fedotov also exhibited two other genre paintings--The New
Suitor and The Fastidious Bride.
2. As S.F. Starr points out, "only historical painters could
receive the title of Rector or Professor, while portraitists
could not advance beyond the level of Academician or
Counselor" (105) .
3 . The question over the authorship of this review is still
being debated. In an 1946 monograph on Fedotov, Iakov
Leshchinskii, following the assertions made by most
nineteenth century biographers, argued that the poet and
literary critic Apollon Maikov was its author (257). This
point of view was repudiated in 1959, when in his history of
the journal Contemporary, V. Bograd advanced a hypothesis
that it was the literary critic Viktor P. Gaevskii who stood
behind this article. This particular position was later
adopted by Rafail Kaufman in his history of Russian art
criticism (83) . Grigorii Sternin, on the other hand,
supported both interpretations. In an 1988 collection of
articles devoted to the Russian artistic life of the second
half of the nineteenth century, he agreed with Bograd
("Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo" 268) while in 1991, in a study
titled Khudozhesvennaia zhizn' Rossii serediny XIX veka, he
endorsed Leshchinskii's point of view (158).
4. This enthusiasm carried well after Fedotov's death in 1852.
In an 1878 biography of the painter, Andrei Somov described
Fedotov as "the honor and the pride of the Russian school
[of painting]" (qtd. in Iakovlev 59).
5. Fedotov's artistic career was unusually short--it lasted
less then eight years, from 1844, when he retired as an
officer of the Imperial Guard in order to study and devote
himself to art full time, until 1852, the year- of his death
from mental-health problems.
6. On the seventeenth century Dutch art in general, see
Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the
Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
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1983); on the Hermitage collection of the seventeenth
century Dutch genres see E.Iu. Fekhner, Gollandskaia
zhanrovaia zhivopis' XVII veka (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, 1979).
7. Fedotov's painting received a negative criticism from the
Professor of the Moscow University, P.M. Leon'tev in an
article titled "Aesthetic Little Something on Paintings and
Sketches of Mr. Fedotov" which was published in the journal
Muscovite in 1850 (10: 21-32).
8. Of particular value for general European context are Lorenz
Eitner's two-volume annotated anthology titled Neoclassicism
and Romanticism, 1750-1850. Sources and Documents
(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970)
which provides an introduction to the period and its ideas;
Robert Rosenblum's Transformations in Late Eighteenth
Century Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)
and Hugh Honour's Neo-classicism (London: Penguin Books,
1977). The best account of Russian version of Neoclassicism
is provided by Natal' ia Kovalenskaia in her historical
survey Russkii klassitsizm. Zhivopis', skul'ptura, grafika
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964).
9. For a fuller discussion of European academic system see
Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art. Past and Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) ; The French
Academy. Classicism and Its Antagonist, Ed. June Hargrove
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990) ; Moshe
Barasch, Theories of Art. From Plato to Winckelmann (New
York & London: New York University Press, 1991/ especially
chapter six "Classicism and Academy").
10. Although established under Empress Elizabeth in 1757, the
Academy officially opened in 1758. The Academy's final
organizational structure was approved by Catherine the Great
who signed its statutes in 1764 (see Kovalenskaia, Russkii
klassitsizm 75).
11. According to Janet Kennedy, the sculptor Dominique Rachette
"has been credited with bringing the teachings of
Winckelmann to Russia" (197).
12. On the subject of Neoclassicism in the Russian context, see
Janet Kennedy, "The Neoclassical Ideal in Russian
Sculpture," Stavrou 194-210.
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13. In his instructions to the painters, Urvanov called for such
depiction of the human figure--considered to be the main
focus of history painting--which would form the shape of the
"pyramid" (qtd. in Kovalenskaia, Russkii klassitsizm 67) .
14. According to John E. Bowlt, "Russia's artistic allegiance to
Italy became very strong” during the period 1820s-1840s
("Russian Painting" 117).
15. S.F. Starr notes that "Venetsianov was the son of a poor
Moscow merchant, Borovikovsky and Chernetsov the sons of
icon painters, Khrutsky the son of a poor priest, Platshov
and Matveev the sons of soldiers, and Fedotov the son of a
low bureaucrat" (103).
16. This was precisely the reason why, as Natal'ia Kovalenskaia
points out in her historical survey of Russian
Neoclassicism, Count Fedor Tolstoy's decision to fully
devote himself to art led to sharp criticism from members of
the nobility (77) . Despite the objections raised by the
aristocracy, Tolstoy ultimately became a distinguished
sculptor, medalist, painter, engraver and illustrator.
17. The placement of history painting at the apex of all
artistic endeavor originated in fifteenth century
Renaissance Italy. Leon Battista Alberti, an architect by
profession and a pioneering theoretician encouraged the
pursuit of history painting in his guide to artists called
Della pittura (published in 1436) . History painting was
elevated to new height of critical estimation in 1668 by the
French theoretician Andre Felibien.
18. This formula has been attributed to Simonides of Ceos in
Plutarch's Moralia (346. f of the Loeb edition, 4: 501).
19. The history of the problem is discussed in Irving Babbit,
The New Laokoon. An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910);
Mario Praz, Mnemosyne. The Parallel Between Literature and
the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1970); Larry Silver, "Step-Sister of the Muses: Painting as
Liberal Art and Sister Art." (Articulate Images. The
Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson. Ed. Richard Wendorf.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 36-69);
Henryk Markiewicz, "Ut pictura poesis...A History of the
Topos and the Problem" (New Literary History 18.3 (Spring
1987): 535-58.
The notion of ut pictura poesis has been invoked, somewhat
indiscriminately, by contemporary scholars and commentators
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to describe phenomena as diverse as ekphrasis and the role
of the artist as critic. See, for example, James A.W.
Heffernan, Museum of Words. The Poetics of Ekphrasis from
Homer to Ashbery (London and Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1993); David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics.
Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Murray
Krieger, Ekphrasis. The Illusion of the Natural Sign
(Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press,
1992) ; Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric. Problem in
Relationship Between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982) .
For the discussion of the links between the arts in the
Russian context, see Russian Narrative & Visual Art.
Varieties of Seeing. Ed. Roger Anderson and Paul Debreczeny
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).
20. On pictorialism, see Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The
Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from
Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
21. On Lessing's essay see Babbitt, 35-58; Michael Cohen,
"Lessing on Time and Space in the Sister Arts: The Artist's
Refutation" (Lessing and the Enlightenment. Ed. Alexej
Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. 13-25); Gwen
Raaberg, "Laokoon Considered and Reconsidered: Lessing and
the Comparative Criticism of Literature and Art" (Lessing
and the Enlightenment 59-67) .
22. This is not to say, however, that Lessing's efforts in
separating the arts stopped the subsequent artists from
continuing to search for deliberate as well as accidental
admixtures of the arts. The Romantics, seeking a new
organic synthesis, sought to blur the boundaries not only
between painting and literature but between the other arts
as well. Focusing on artistic imagination and spontaneity,
they endeavored to expand ut pictura poesis to include a
union between music and poetry (see Abrams 50).
23. It might be worth noting that Lessing's notions presume that
painting is there to tell a story. Only with Impressionism
would this position be abandoned and the space of the canvas
begin to be explored for what it is--an optical illusion.
24. Kovalenskaia argues, for example, that D.A. Golitsyn's
theoretical writing titled "Pis'mo...o pol'ze, slave i
proch. zhudozhestv" (written in 1766 but never published,
now held at RGIA, f. Akademii Khudozhestv, 789, op. l, 1766,
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d. 25) shows molding influence of Lessing's Laocoon (Russkii
klassitsizm 56, 390).
25. Abridged Russian translation of Laocoon appeared in the
Journal of Fine Arts and its full version was published in
1859.
26. Stasov, for example, claimed in his autobiography that he
read all theoretical works by Lessing while in his teens
(see Karenin 139).
27. On the Russian history painting see M. Rakova, Russkaia
istoricheskaia zhivopis' serediny XIX veka (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1979) .
28. On David, see Thomas E. Crow, "Jacques-Louis David's Oath of
the Horatii: Painting and Prerevolutionary Radicalism in
France." PhD Dissertation, UCLA, 1978; Warren Roberts,
Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist. Art, Politics,
and the French Revolution (Chapel Hill & London: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
29. Repin remembered how Bruni proclaimed that the "painter
ought to be a poet and, more specifically, classical poet"
(Dalekoe hlizkoe 165).
30. A standard monograph on Briullov is provided in E.
Atsarkina, Karl Pavlovich Briullov. Zhizn' i tvorchestvo
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963).
31. Both Fedotov's poem and ratseia were banned from publication
by the censors. They first appeared in 1872 in the journal
Russkaia starina (5: 734-53) in connection with the
twentieth anniversary of Fedotov's death. The censored
versions of the poem were later reproduced in Is toriia
leibgvardii Finliandskogo polka (1881), in Bulgakov's Pavel
Andreevich Fedotov i ego proizvedeniia khudozhestvennye i
literatumye (1893), and in Suvorin's P.A. Fedotov i ego
stikhotvoreniia (1901). The first uncensored version of the
poem was published in 1946 in a monograph prepared by
Leshchinskii (see Bibliography) .
32. Raek is also a satirical monologue in verse concerning the
current events; as a theater of movable pictures, raek is
similar to the nineteenth century English peep show.
On raek, see Russkaia narodnaia drama XVII-XX vekov (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1953; especially pp. 19-20, 124-28); A.M.
Konechnyi, "Peterbugskie balagany," Panorama iskusstv 8
(1985): 383-95.
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33 .
34.
35.
36 .
37.
On the spacial organization of Fedotov's paintings, see M.M.
Allenov, "Evoliutsiia inter'era v zhivopisnykh
proizvedeniiakh P.A. Fedotova." Russkoe iskusstvo XVII-
pervoi poloviny XIX veka. Materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1971. 116-32).
The main character of Pushkin's Dubovskii was based on
Kul'nev. A monument, with Zhukovskii's poem engraved on it,
was erected at the place of Kul'nev's death in 183 0.
Three years after the successful display of The Major's
Courtship, Fedotov produced a second version of this
painting. The ceiling decorations and large chandelier
which appear in the first version diverting the viewer's
attention from the perspective line connecting the image of
the Metropolitan with the bride are eliminated further
underscoring this symbolic relationship. Perhaps to
attenuate for this stark use of geometry, Fedotov shifts the
vanishing point to a position somewhat lower than in the
first version, pushing the bride's head and the image of the
Metropolitan slightly off and above the line of perspective.
This positions the Metropolitan's portrait closer to the
bride and higher on the wall so that in the second version
he is literally looking down upon her from a more elevated
position. The symbolic role of the Metropolitan's image in
the second version is further underscored by the elimination
of the other portraits and the landscape. They are replaced
by indistinctly rendered kupecheskie gramoty, framed
merchant certificates and credentials. As for the figure of
the father, it has become an obscure muddle virtually
disappearing into the shadowy right-hand corner of the room.
This symbolic use of light and shadow is reenforced by a
preternatural illumination which shines on the bride from
above casting a distinct penumbra on the floor around her.
Only in 1893 did the painter, graphic artist and critic Lev
Zhemchuzhnikov note about The Major's Courtship: "The
painting without the verse and verse without the painting
are incomplete. Taken together, they form an inseparable
unity" (Moi vospominaniia 110) . He added, paraphrasing
Gogol's lyrical digression from Dead Souls that "having
thoughtfully read the verse and looked at the painting, the
viewer with a mind and heart won't be satisfied with
laughter alone. He will see the tears behind the author's
laughter" (110).
Kramskoi regarded Fedotov as "the reflection of Gogol's
literature" in painting (Pis'ma 2: 347). On the modern
interpretation of Gogol-Fedotov analogy, see Sarab'ianov,
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P. A. Fedotov i russkaia khudozhestvermaia kul'tura 40-kh
godov XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973/ especially pp. 81-
128, 182-97) .
38. This line of reasoning had its roots in an earlier
controversy over the merit of reform versus tradition in
literary affairs. The reform-minded Nikolai Karamzin and
his intellectual circle, for example, advocated innovation
and modernization through linguistic borrowings from
contemporary French sources. The conservative Aleksandr
Shishkov and those who formed the Society of Lovers of the
Russian Word, on the other hand, argued for the preservation
of the neo-classical hierarchy of "three styles" introduced
by Mikhail Lomonosov in the eighteenth century, following
the French model formulated by Boileau, and vigorously
defended the "purity" of Old Church Slavonic against
contemporary French linguistic influences. For the
discussion of Romanticism in Russia, see Lauren G. Leighton,
Russian Romanticism: Two Essays (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1975) .
39. These notions, in turn, were embraced by German writers like
Schiller, Goethe and the Schlegel brothers who popularized
them throughout Europe.
40. For the discussion of the concept of narodnost', see Peter
K. Christoff, The Third Heart. Intellectual-Ideological
Currents and Cross Currents in Russia 1800-1830 (The Hague
and Paris: Mouton, 1970; especially pp. 20-41); Lauren G.
Leighton, Russian Romanticism: Two Essays (The Hague and
Paris: Mouton, 1975; especially pp. 41-107) .
41. As Victor Terras points out the change in Belinsky's
opinions were "less so regrading the aesthetic value of any
particular work than regarding the merit of certain school
of philosophical and critical thought" (33).
42. Terras also notes that "Belinsky--along with German
objective idealism and romantics elsewhere--saw all art as
one" (77) .
43. Belinsky actually wrote little on painting. In his
"Reminiscence of Belinsky," Ivan Turgenev wrote that
Belinsky did not consider himself to be competent enough to
comment upon visual arts (see Kaufman 60). This, however,
rarely stopped his disciples to indiscriminately apply
aesthetic notions grounded in his analysis of literature to
the analysis of painting. If this was not necessarily
justified by Belinsky's own aesthetic proclamations, it was
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certainly justified by the organicist point of view which
considered all art forms part of a unified whole.
44. Robert Maguire notes the close link between belles-lettres
and criticism which in the Russian culture were, according
to him, "brought together under the larger heading of
'literature'" (12).
45. For a detailed analysis of Russian literary institutions
during the period, see William Todd, Fiction and Society in
the Age of Pushkin. Ideology, Institutions and Narrative
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
46. As Robert Maguire notes, "it was only with the appearance,
in 1835, of two new volumes of stories--Arabesques and
Mirgorod--and the production, a year later, of the play The
Inspector General, that he [Gogol] was established as a
major writer who marked a decisive turn in the direction of
Russian literature." According to Maguire, "The death of
Pushkin in 1837 made it seem that Gogol was now the greatest
living Russian writer; the death of Lermontov and the
publication of Dead Souls in 1842 made it a certainty" (3-
4) .
47. In his first published article of 1834 "Literary Reveries,"
Belinsky clearly expressed his preference for Gogol and, in
so doing, catapulted the young author from obscurity into
the position of sudden prominence. As Paul Debreczeny
writes in his study on the critical reception of Gogol
during the 1840s, Belinsky identified the significance of
Gogol's prose with "simplicity of plot, accuracy in the
representation of national traits, and originality" (13).
48. The emergence of Gogol as the great national writer, argued
Belinsky in 1840, marked the maturation of Russian reality
("Gore ot uma" 441). Invoking the German Idealist notion of
an organic link between nation and culture, Belinsky
asserted that the lack of truly national literature before
the age of Gogol merely reflected the historical immaturity
of the society at large.
49. On the organic tradition in Russian critical thought see
Terras' study on Belinsky (see Bibliography) .
50. This was a reversal of Belinsky's earlier emphasis on the
writer's subjective point of view and his status as one set
apart from the social milieu.
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51. This is not to say, however, that the radicals went
unchallenged. Critics like Pavel Annen'kov, Aleksandr
Druzhinin and Vasilii Botkin countered during the 1850s and
early 1860s with a purely aesthetic position in which
Pushkin was placed at the pinnacle of artistic endeavor.
They championed Pushkin as a symbol of artistic freedom and
intellectual integrity. In Pushkin they found an example of
the supremacy of art over reality,- of the artist over the
ordinary man. For the debate surrounding the opposition
between Pushkinian and Gogolian trends in Russian
literature, see Charles Moser, Esthetics as Nightmare
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) ; Russian
Views of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin". Trans. Sonia Hoisington
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) .
52. Nikolai Dobroliubov went so far as to equate literary mode
of expression with propaganda. In an article titled "A Ray
of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness" (1860), Dobroliubov
proclaimed that "generally speaking" literature is an
"ancillary force whose significance lies in propaganda, and
whose worth is determined by what it propagandizes and how"
("Luch sveta v temnom tsarstve" 309-10).
53. Elsewhere, Chernyshevsky also argued that literature, "while
remaining in the sphere of art," could even "acquire a
scientific importance" ("Esteticheskie otnosheniia" 86). In
fact, he maintained, it could and should function as a
"Handbuch of life" (87; Chernyshevsky's emphasis).
54. According to Terras, "the notion that a work of art should
express an idea is perhaps the central position of German
idealist aesthetics just as it is of Belinsky's thought"
(14) .
55. On Venetsianov, see A.N. Savinov, Aleksei Gavrilovich
Venetsianov. Zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1955); G.K. Leont'eva, Venetsianov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik
RSFSR, 1980). On Venetsianov's school, see T.V. Alekseeva,
Khudozhniki shkoly Venetsianova (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982).
56. Essentially misread by his contemporary readers and critics,
Gogol became the target of several later re-readings and the
"subject of a sustained reinterpretive effort that turned
him into a modernist avant la lettre" (Zholkovsky 17) . For
a more detailed survey of the critical attitudes toward
Gogol, see Robert A. Maguire, ed. "The Legacy of Criticism."
Introduction. Gogol from the Twentieth Century (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974. 3-54).
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57. A comparison of Fedotov with his English contemporaries is
an interesting line of analysis but falls outside of scope
of this study. While Fedotov composed his text to stand as
independent but associated piece, his Western European
counterparts such as the Pre-Raphaelites and the Victorian
narrative painters in England sought to link the arts in a
very literal sense. They attached extensive descriptions,
poetic quotations or companion verse to the frames of their
pictures. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the foremost proponent of
the 'sister arts' theory among the Pre-Raphaelites, used the
term "poetic painting" to describe his own creations (qtd.
in Bass 220) and proclaimed that "if a man has any poetry in
him he should paint" (223). Rossetti like other painters in
his artistic circle was known to literally affix the texts
of his sonnets to the frames of his paintings, a practice
which prompted Oscar Wilde to saygest: "Why not take out the
picture and frame the sonnet" (q d. in Altick 195) .
58. Stasov, as will be shown later, intuitively grasped
Fedotov's artistic idiosyncrasy and the paradox of his place
in the developments of Russian visual art of the nineteenth
century only in the 1880s. Reevaluating his earlier stance
on Fedotov, Stasov associated the emergence of realism in
Russian painting not directly with the self-taught painter
and an amateur poet but with Russian literature (see chapter
four for details).
59. The vital importance these critics placed on Fedotov's study
of the Russian byt was precisely the reason why during the
1860s the other major artistic figure of the time, Aleksandr
Ivanov, could not be considered the founder of the "new"
Russian school of painting. Although he was "guided by a
fervent belief in Russia" (Bowlt, "Russian Painting" 126) in
creating his history painting The Appearance of Christ to
the People (1837-1857) , Ivanov spent most of his adult life
away from Russia in classical Italy. Upon his return to St.
Petersburg in 1858, Ivanov's religious epic proved to be
ill-prepared to respond to the nationalistic demands of the
new Russian viewing public which emerged during the late
1850s and early 1860s. The new wave of nationalistic
sentiments forced the art critics of the time to look back
to Fedotov, at least for the moment, as the beginning of a
distinctly Russian school of painting.
60. German Idealism considered 'form' and 'content' of a work of
art organic and inseparable parts of the whole with neither
privileged over the other. In general, Belinsky followed
this line of reasoning. Thus, "When form is the expression
of content," he asserted in 1846, "it is so tightly
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connected with it, that to separate it from the content
means to destroy the content itself; conversely, to separate
the content from its form means to destroy the form" ("0
zhizni i sochineniiakh Kol'tsova" 535). However, Belinsky
was not entirely consistent on this point. "Form belongs to
the poet," he stated in 1841 following up on a suggestion
made to him by the German Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel,
"while content belongs to history and the reality of the
poet's nation" ("Russkaia literatura v 1841 godu" 558).
Such statements became the point of departure for Belinsky's
radical followers who, according to Terras, "converted
Belinsky's occasional lapses into a system" wherein form was
entirely subordinate to content which, in turn, became the
main focus of critical discourse (Terras 145) .
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Chapter Two
1859-1869: The new role of the 'new' Russian painting
Despite or perhaps because of the enthusiasm generated
by Fedotov's genre paintings in the late 1840s, the debate
over the existence and further direction of a peculiarly
Russian school of painting--one that would be distinct from
those of the West and the cosmopolitan model favored by the
Imperial Academy--intensified only toward the end of the
1850s. This turn of events was engendered by a number of
factors including: an increase in the number of art
journals,1 a growing interest in the visual arts among
Russian public, a rise in nationalist sentiment among
collectors of art,2 a waning of the Neoclassical hierarchy
of genres, the relatively liberal reign of Alexander II, and
the influence of the liberal and radical intelligentsia.
This led to a revitalization of Russian artistic life which
was encouraged and exploited by a new generation of art
critics who emerged during the late 1850s and early 1860s.
Working independent of the traditional, Academy-bound art
establishment, these critics sought to change the native
attitude toward painting and elevate its status within the
cultural hierarchy. Pavel Kovalevskii, Lev Zhemchuzhnikov
and Petr Petrov were among the first to attempt this during
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the period 1860 to 1862. Their criticism was marked by
liberal and nationalist sentiments expressed in equal
measure. Later, in 1863, Ivan Dmitriev struck a more
radical posture advancing an ultra-utilitarian reading of
developments in Russian art. Finally, Vladimir Stasov
gained the status of an authority by subtending liberal
sentiments within a nationalist perspective which avoided,
at least initially, bold ideological pronouncements.
Despite differences in their disciplinary interests,
ideology, style and persuasiveness, these critics shared
several things in common. Their critical discourse was
marked by the frequent use of organicist metaphors. They
invariably made demands for the display in Russian painting
of Russian narodnost'. They saw a "new" Russian art
emerging as the content of Russian painting moved inexorably
closer toward Russian national life (narodnaia zhizn') and
social reality. Nearly all of them considered Pavel Fedotov
the founder of the "new" trend in Russian art. They
invariably drew analogies between Russian painting and
literature to describe and legitimize the former by
reference to the later. They actively sought to cultivate a
new type of the viewer with whom they identified. They
rarely, if ever, discussed the painterly aspects of the
works of arts. Last, in their polemics with the art
establishment, these critics often obscured more than they
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clarified. Due to censorship, political considerations or
simply a lack of critical sophistication, they often
resorted to a rather convoluted rhetoric which operated on
the level of implication, allusion and allegory. This, in
turn, accounted for a certain vagueness in some of their
critical pronouncements. Often, these statements revealed
more about the critics' ideological biases, disciplinary-
training and artistic interests than the complicated reality
of the art world they endeavored to describe.
Several developments in the institutional history of
the Imperial Academy also affected the visual arts in Russia
during the 1860s. Most obvious was the secession from the
Academy of fourteen graduating students in November of 1863
and their formation a month later of the St. Petersburg
Artel of Artists. The Artel stands as one of the first
attempts by the Russian painters to establish institutional
and professional independence from the Imperial Academy of
Art. Modelled upon a sewing cooperative described in
Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel and radical manifesto What Is To
Be Done?, the Artel's organization also evinced the
pervasive influence of literature upon Russian culture in
general and the visual arts in particular. While dramatic,
the impact of the secession and its aftermath was more
symbolic than substantive. The Artel, for the most part,
had little direct influence upon the development of Russian
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painting. Instead, it was within the Academy, where
cosmopolitan and national tendencies had an impact upon
visual representation, that trends which would shape Russian
art emerged and were, in turn, encouraged by the independent
art critics and the expectations of the public.
A key event in this regard was the Russian
participation in the 1862 London International Exhibition
which elicited embarrassing criticism from Western
commentators who charged that Russian art was detached from
its native roots and relied too heavily upon Western models,
that is the cosmopolitan Neoclassicism still favored by the
Academy which, not coincidentally, was, and remained
throughout the nineteenth century, the official organizer of
the Russian fine arts pavilion. This criticism not only
drew attention to the absence of an authentically Russian
school of painting but also energized the critical debate at
home over what should constitute a native form of art.
Vladimir Stasov, in particular, latched onto this issue and
used it to catapult himself into a position of influence and
prominence. Stasov aggressively argued that only works
based on national subjects should represent the Russian
school abroad.3 Thanks in part to his efforts, Russian
participation in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris
received more favorable notice from Western critics. This,
in turn, encouraged Stasov to continue to agitate for a
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uniquely Russian school of art even though just what exactly
distinguished it visually always remained supremely vague
for him. Although a commonplace in the numerous,
particularly Soviet, studies of the period,* these events
and their participants will be discussed here only as they
relate to the evolution of a certain way of thinking about
the visual arts that eventually came to be identified as
Realism.
The nation in a search for a national school of art
Although the search for a national school of art
originated with the cultural commentators of the 1840s
implying that Pavel Fedotov was the Gogol of Russian
painting--the founder of a uniquely native artistic form--by
the late 1850s, this notion was challenged by the fact that
no heirs to Fedotov's legacy had emerged in his immediate
wake. The question was: If Fedotov was the Gogol of Russian
painting, where were the Dostoevskys and the Turgenevs? No
clear artistic trend had surfaced which would combine the
disparate elements of Russian painting into a meaningful and
organic whole, at least from the liberal and radical
perspective.
The poet and literary critic Appolon Maikov, captured
the essence of this problem when he categorically declared
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in a review of the Academy's annual exhibition of 1857 that
a "Russian school of painting did not exist" because it had
"no common, unanimous direction" (qtd. in Bespalova and
Vereshchagina 19). Indeed, the Academy's offerings that
year were anything but an organically interrelated whole.
Rather, they were an eclectic mix of the possibilities
available within the Academy's artistic practice. Works
ranged from history paintings based on Biblical plots such
as Theodore Moller's The Preaching of John the Baptist on
the Island of Patmos and Nikolai Ge's The Aendorian
Sorceress Calls for Saul's Shadow to genre paintings such as
Andrei Popov's Demian's Fish-Soup based upon a plot borrowed
from Ivan Krylov's eponymous literary fable (Sbornik
materialov 3: 282). This aesthetic diversity led Maikov to
proclaim that the works presented by the Academy lacked
"thought," were devoid of "purpose" and, most importantly,
were bereft of aesthetic "unity" (qtd. in Bespalova and
Vereshchagina 19). The question here is why was aesthetic
unity so important to Maikov in 1857?
The answer here points to the role of literature in
Russian culture. Maikov's critique of the Academy and
Russian art was essentially an extrapolation of Belinsky's
assertions on literature in the domain of the visual arts.
The young poet's reliance on Belinsky reflected not only the
general preeminence of literature in Russian culture but
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also his practical interest in literature as well as a
deeper and more personal 'cult of Belinsky' which, according
to some biographers, was notable in the Maikovs' home (qtd.
in Kaufman 74).5 Belinsky argued that valid artistic
phenomena ought to be organically interrelated in such a
manner that "each particular phenomenon is the necessary
result of a preceding phenomenon and is explained in terms
of the latter." For example, a particular literature would
have no history, Belinsky argued, if "from time to time some
admirable works appear, which are, however, in no way
connected with one another." This, he concluded, would
represent a "mere bibliography" rather than an history of
that literature ("Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1847 goda"
283). This sense of historical and artistic continuity,
notes Terras in his study on Russian literary criticism of
organic aesthetics, was "central to Belinsky's whole
thinking" (110). Applying Belinsky's pronouncements
regarding literature to painting, Maikov implied that the
eclectism of the works presented at the Academy in 1857 was
a sign of aesthetic weakness. According to him, Russian
painting needed to reach a level of aesthetic unity which
would put it on a par with Russian literature. Without this
unity, Russian painting could not gain the cultural stature
enjoyed by its literary counterpart.
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Two years later, Mikhail Mikhailov, an author and
publicist with close ties to the radical cause of
Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, not only reiterated Maikov's
critical conclusion about the state of Russian art but took
it a step further. Mikhailov, who published his article in
the Contemporary, dismissed the paintings produced for the
1859 annual exhibition of the Academy as having no organic
connection with "either the past or the present." Instead,
he argued, echoing Maikov, these works were "accidental
phenomena without any purpose" and, thus, had no "organic
link to the general development of the arts" (qtd. in
Vanslov, Russkaia progressivnaia kritika 150). Mikhailov,
however, reserved his most serious criticism for the
intellectual content of Russian painting or what he called
its "thought" (mysl') . He argued that the paintings
exhibited were nothing more than mere "efforts of the hand"
(rabota ruki) rather than "efforts of the mind" (rabota
mysli, 150). In the terminology of the day, this implied
that they lacked progressive, that is, socially relevant
content. This could have been avoided, Mikhailov argued,
had the Russian artists decided to become "citizens of their
own country and their own time rather than some idealistic
cosmopolitans" (152). He demanded that "life, rather than a
fairy-tale world" should be the artist's only concern (152).
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Mikhailov's statement about the lack in contemporary
Russian painting of "thought" was notable for two reasons.
First, it evidenced the belief, widely held by the radical
and liberal intelligentsia, that Russian painting was cut
off from the life of the nation and, thus, occupied an
inferior status within the cultural hierarchy. Second, it
introduced a critical distinction between technical mastery
and intellectual sophistication in the pictorial work.
Subsequent commentators who advanced and defended the "new"
trend in Russian painting during the early 1860s would have
to countenance these issues in their critical assertions if
they were to carry any weight with the intelligentsia and,
most notably, literary critics who were making these
charges.
Pavel Kovalevskii and the Russian "thinking genre"
One of the first commentators to identify and champion
a "new" trend in Russian art was the poet, prose essayist
and literary critic Pavel Kovalevskii. Author of the
reminiscences dedicated to Ivanov and Kramskoi,
Kovalevskii's published his criticism in a number of "thick"
journals of the time including the National Annals and
Contemporary, in which his article titled "About Painters
and Painting in Russia" appeared. In sharp contrast to the
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pessimism of Maikov and Mikhailov, Kovalevskii identified in
it several "praiseworthy" examples of a "Fedotovian type of
painting" displayed at the Academy's annual exhibition in
1860. Notable were Valerii Iakobii's The Beggar's Bright
Holiday, Adrian Volkov's Broken Engagement, Nikolai
Shil'der's The Betrothal and Vasilii Perov's A Petty Clerk's
Son (372), all produced in 1859 and 1860.
All these works were examples of what Kovalevskii had
identified as the "Russian thinking genre" ("mysliashchii
russkii zhanr") and were evidence of a "new" trend in
Russian painting (372) . According to Kovalevskii, this
"thinking genre," which was distinct from the cosmopolitan
genre painting of the Neoclassical hierarchy, originated
with Fedotov and was distinguished by its "ability to find
[depict] the painful aspects of the social life of the
nation" (379) . Moreover, like literature, it evinced "an
orientation toward Russian narodnost' (379) . Taking this
literary analogy further, Kovalevskii observed that the
works of the painter Konstantin Trutovskii resembled the
literary efforts of Pisemskii and that the artist Ivan
Sokolov was something of a Turgenev (379) . Kovalevskii
chided those critics, like Maikov, who possessed an
"aesthetic education" and yet looked "down upon Russian
painters" and their efforts (367).
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Thus did Kovalevskii rescue Russian painting from the
oblivion to which it had been assigned by the likes of
Maikov and Mikhailov--first, by linking it with the native
tradition of Fedotov and, second, by grounding it in the
cultural well-spring of narodnost'. In so doing, he
answered Maikov's call for aesthetic unity and Mikhailov's
charge that Russian painting was cut off from social reality
and devoid of "thought."
Although his optimistic conclusions would be challenged
by the radical ideologist Ivan Dmitriev only two years
later, Kovalevskii's assertions established two important
points in the debate over Russian art. First, he introduced
a distinction between the cosmopolitan art of the
Academy--in this case genre painting of the Neoclassical
pictorial hierarchy--and that which sought to be something
different, that is, connected with the life of the nation.
Because of the emphasis on 'content' of a work of art which
marked the criticism of the era, the visual component of
this "new" art remained ill-defined for Kovalevskii and
those who followed him. Additionally, although Dmitriev and
others would vehemently disagree, many critics, including
Kovalevskii and, at least initially, Stasov, did not see the
Academy as inimicable to the development of the "new" art.
Second, by introducing the notion of narodnost '--previously
used exclusively to describe literary phenomenon--into the
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critical discourse of Russian art criticism, Kovalevskii
established a powerful rhetorical and ideological link
between art, literature and society. This would have a
significant impact upon subsequent developments in Russian
art.
Narodnost' became the rhetorical lever used by art
critics to elevate Russian painting to a cultural position
equal to that of literature. It was the ideological link
between art and social reality which validated the former in
their minds. Moreover, by virtue of his ability to detect
narodnost' in a given work of art, the critic could became
an integral part of the artistic endeavor. What had already
happened in literature was now happening in the visual arts.
This development had several important consequences. First,
the new and greatly expanded role of the art critic allowed
the formulation of aesthetic ideas to shift from the
cosmopolitan confines of the Academy to the world of the
liberal and radical intelligentsia. Second, within the
socially conscious, content-oriented ideology of the
intelligentsia, the critic became the mediator between the
demands of society and the intentions of the artist,
supplanting yet another role traditionally reserved for the
Academy. Third, the critic was encouraged not only to
cultivate a new type of viewing public but also to instruct
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the painter on how to embody the spirit of the time and the
essence of Russian national character in his artwork.
Lev Zhemchuzhnikov and the conflict between the "old" and
"new" Russian art
Before Kovalevskii could work out the details of the
"new" art and the "Russian thinking genre," Lev
Zhemchuzhnikov--a painter and a graphic artist who studied
at the Academy under Aleksei Egorov and Karl Briullov--
subtly and significantly altered the terms of the
discussion. Shortly after returning from an Academy-
sponsored pension in Paris,6 Zhemchuzhnikov produced a
review of the 1861 annual exhibition of the Imperial Academy
which appeared in the liberal journal Foundation. While
generally accepting Kovalevskii's optimistic conclusion
regarding the emergence of a "new" trend in Russian art,
Zhemchuzhnikov was less sanguine about the role played by
the Academy. Casting his analysis in terms of generational
and institutional conflict, Zhemchuzhnikov identified the
Academy as a positive impediment to progress.
Pitting the "new" "youthful" art of his generation--an
"expression" of Russian national life--against the "old"
"dead" art of the Academy--understood as cosmopolitan
Neoclassicism--Zhemchuzhnikov, echoing Chernyshevsky,
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asserted that the Academy had isolated art from the life of
the nation and reduced it to a "sickly state" ("boleznennoe
sostoianie”) ("Neskol'ko zamechanii" 136, 148). However,
thanks to the new generation of artists, he continued,
Russian painting was now starting to recover by "listening
to its own heart" and fusing "into one single body with
society" (13 6). This healing process, according to
Zhemchuzhnikov, began with Fedotov, whom he identified as
the "founder" of a new, native trend in Russian painting
(143) .
By identifying the Academy as an impediment to
progress, Zhemchuzhnikov not only sharpened the distinction
introduced by Kovalevskii between the cosmopolitan and the
national but also laid the groundwork for a re-evaluation of
the legacy of those associated with the former. This was
most clearly evident in his assessment of the heretofore
unassailable Karl Briullov. While Kovalevskii in his
article argued that Briullov was a great artist who "infused
Russian painting with life" (369), Zhemchuzhnikov considered
him a carrier of that contagion which had disabled Russian
art. Thus, he asserted, Briullov's death in 1852 marked a
period a liberation in Russian painting because it exposed
the sickly detachment of the Academy's cosmopolitan art from
national life (147-48). This, in turn, heightened the
contrast between Pavel Fedotov and the cosmopolitan
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tradition. Thus, for Zhemchuzhnikov, the emergence of
Fedotov marked a break with tradition and the birth of a
"new" trend. The appeal of this notion was such that by
1862 one critic would remark that the "new" Russian art
"emerged, more or less, from Fedotov like Minerva from
Jupiter's head" (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 40) .
Years later, in his memoirs, Zhemchuzhnikov asserted
that his 1861 review was significant because it "undemined
the authority of the Academy in the minds of the students"
and encouraged them to frame aesthetic debates in terms of
progress and society set in opposition to the status quo and
the Academy (Moi vospominaniia 353) . Indeed, among the more
radical students there was a rising sense of dissatisfaction
with the Academy's continued cosmopolitan orientation which
inevitably isolated Russian painting from the intellectual
and nationalist trends coursing through Russian society. In
1862, Pavel Dzhogin, for example, in a letter to a fellow
student Ivan Shishkin--at that point residing in the West on
an Academy pension--argued that no power could be found to
"move the Academy forward." Echoing Zhemchuzhnikov, Dzhogin
added, the "old men" ("starichki") in charge of the Academy
"wanted to prove to the rest of the world that art was
supposed to lag behind society" (qtd. in Shuvalova 75) .
Invoking hyperbole bordering on synecdoche, Dzhogin
concluded that the "gray heads" (sedye golovy) of the "high
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priests of art" (zhretsy iskusstva) were profoundly troubled
by "base progress" (podlyi progress) (75) . Dzhogin's
comments indicated that the rising generational tensions
were keenly felt within the Academy, at least among its more
radical students who sympathized with the social agenda of
the intelligentsia.
Petr Petrov and the theory of zhanr natsional' nyi
In 1862 art historian, writer and art critic Petr
Petrov who received his professional training at the Academy
(see Bespalova and Vereshchagina 16), in an article titled
"P.A. Fedotov and the Contemporary Meaning of the Painting
of Everyday Scenes (Genre) , " heralded the ascendence of the
"new" art and sought to define the particular nature of what
he called the zhivopis' hytovykh stsen. Like Kovalevskii
and Zhemchuzhnikov, Petrov considered Fedotov the founder of
this "new" trend and saw it as distinct from the
cosmopolitan art of the Academy. Like Zhemchuzhnikov, he
also sought to heighten this distinction. However, where
Zhemchuzhnikov did so by emphasizing generational
differences, Petrov endeavored to elaborate the national
element. This was most apparent in the terminology he chose
to describe what Kovalevskii had earlier identified as the
"thinking genre" (mysliashchii zhanr) . In 1861 Mikhail
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Rozengeim suggested that the French word genre be discarded
in favor of the Russian word byt or everyday life. Genre
painting, according to Rozengeim, should be identified as
zhivopis' byta or kartina byta (painting or picture of
everyday life) to mark the shift toward Russian reality
(qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 16) .7 Subsequently,
Petrov introduced the terminology zhivopis' bytovykh stsen
(painting of everyday scenes). Later critics shortened this
terminology to bytovaia zhivopis' which gained wide currency
and is still used today in Russia.8
According to Petrov, Russian painting was enjoying the
"first manifestations of an independent life," by which he
meant freedom from foreign influences, because it finally
responded to the aspirations of the Russian people (189).
Echoing and answering Chernyshevsky's organicist metaphors,
he wrote that like a "turning point in an illness"
developments in Russian painting would bring on a "complete
recovery" as a "beneficial reaction" to the "uplifting of
national character" coursed through it. Neoclassicism,
which he labeled "cosmopolitanism in art," had "lost its
allure." The preeminent Neoclassical genre of history
painting had been usurped, he argued, because it was based
on "faulty principles" (189-90). Petrov asserted that a new
zhanr natsional'nyi or national genre, a peculiarly Russian
kind of zhivopis' bytovykh stsen was to replace history
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painting in the traditional pictorial hierarchy (189). This
national genre which, the critic argued, "followed after
literature in every respect," would depict "the ordinary
phenomena of national life, its adversities and joys"
elevating "ordinary scenes to the pathos of drama" (189) but
always with a measure of humor, satire or sarcasm. Echoing
Mikhailov and Kovalevskii, Petrov argued that the national
genre must possess a "living thought (zhyvaia mysl') at its
foundation" (195). It could not, like its academic
counterpart--history painting--be satisfied with mere
"beautiful execution," because the new Russian viewer
demanded more than that (195). The essence of this new
genre painting was, he concluded, a successful combination
of "deep thought," "living humor" and the rejection of
"imaginary events in fairy-tale situations" (196) .
Petrov then proceeded to make a bold statement that
this new genre painting had the capacity to "fuse" into
itself the outdated and lifeless history painting and thus
to "transform it [history painting] into a new form called
historical genre" (190; Petrov's emphasis). However, before
this fusion could take place, Petrov argued, the history
painter needed to "passionately study the past life of the
fatherland" and to "fall in love with the historical
homeland for its own sake" (190). Pavel Fedotov, the "first
and the most talented genre painter and humorist {zhanrist-
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iumorist), according to Petrov, possessed precisely such a
passion and was thus the founder and finest symbol of a
distinctly Russian national school of painting (190) .
The Academy and the "new" Russian art
The critical reviews summarized above appeared during a
short and crucial period of liberalization in Russian
political and social life. After seven years of severe
political repression, the nation was undergoing a top-down
reform under the relatively liberal reign of Alexander II
who succeeded Nicholas I upon his death in 1855. This
period of liberalization culminated early in 1861 when
Alexander II abolished serfdom, set about reforming the
legal, school and local government systems, and eased press
censorship. However, the Tsar's reforms were deemed
inadequate by both the Russian intelligentsia and the
peasantry. As a result, student disturbances swept the
universities later in 1861, and arson fires broke out in St.
Petersburg in 1862. Alexander II reacted swiftly and
sternly. Censorship and police activity increased
dramatically. Pisarev and Chernyshevsky were arrested. The
Contemporary, one of the most important journals of the
radical intelligentsia was closed for eight months. The
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mood, of the nation went from incipient optimism to
radicalized pessimism.9
Perhaps as a harbinger of things to come, the Imperial
Academy of Fine Arts had already undergone its own top-down
reform in 1859. The centerpiece of this effort was a new
charter which re-introduced general education courses--
literature, art history, anatomy, archaeology, esthetics,
and world and Russian history--into the curriculum (Academy
Protocol of September 28, 1859, Sbomik materialov 3: 341;
see also Kondakov 193). These areas of study had been
eliminated by Nicholas I as part of a counter-reform in 184 0
designed to lower the cultural and intellectual
sophistication of the Academy's students. With the example
of the University in mind, the Tsar's goal was to eliminate
the Academy as a source of potential political opposition.
The art students were to be exposed only to courses which
enhanced their technical skills as artists and nothing more
(see Kondakov 184)10. Later, as part of this effort,
Nicholas I in 1848 also severely restricted the ability of
the students to travel abroad on Academy-sponsored
fellowships.
In that the Academy reform of 1859 raised but did not
fulfill expectations, it only mirrored the imperfect and
hesitant nature of Alexandrian reforms in general. From the
point of view of the artists and the intelligentsia, the
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Academy's effort was found wanting on two counts. First,
despite the new charter, the courses in general education
were never re-introduced and the Academy's pedagogy remained
strictly normative. This was only accentuated by the
radicals' "emphasis on the importance of science,
rationality and education" (Papemo 8) . Second, and more
importantly, the reform failed to address the marginal
status assigned to the visual arts within Russian culture.
In other words, it did not deal with what critics, both
within and outside the Academy such as Zhemchuzhnikov or
Chemyshevsky, called the "sickly" isolation of Russian art
from society. Coupled with the radicals' advancement of
their view of art as linked to the life of the nation
through progressive 'content', the Academy's educational and
philosophical approach engendered among the students, as
Elizabeth Valkenier notes, a certain "inferiority complex"--
a palpable sense of isolation from the Russian society at
large (Valkenier, Russian Realist Art 10-17; see also
Repin's memoirs Dalekoe blizkoe 133).
The students themselves were keenly aware of why and
how the limitations of their academic curriculum kept them
in an inferior position with regard to the university-
educated intelligentsia. Ivan Kramskoi, who attended the
Academy from 1857 to 1863, recalled in an article titled
"The Fate of Russian Art,"11 how as a student his own
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"fantasy of the Academy" foundered on the "dead and pedantic
mechanism" of its pedagogy (Pis'ma. i stat'i 2: 311) . He and
his colleagues, he remarked, encountered a scholastic
"Areopagus" of instructors who paid attention only to
irrelevant technical details such as lines being "too long"
or "too short" (312, 314) . In keeping with the Academy's
emphasis on the development of technical skills only, the
professors' role, he added, amounted to little more than
advising the students as to which models to emulate and
which rules to apply. "From the very beginning of my
study, 1 1 he remembered, "I encountered insignificant, naked,
dry comments instead of communications and lectures on art"
(311) . Kramskoi ruefully noted that this left the students
with a tenuous grasp on even the most basic of artistic
concepts such as the distinction between "painting"
(zhivopis') and "colors" (kraski) (311-12).12 The
landscapist Ivan Shishkin, who attended the Academy from
1856 to 1869, confirmed Kramskoi's dissatisfaction with the
Academy's educational approach by complaining that "the
inadequacy of the instructors and art guides inevitably
resulted in the need to understand everything on one's own,
groping and guessing" (qtd. in Shuvalova 8).
The difficulty of the students' situation was further
exacerbated by a notable decline in the quality of the
Academy's instructors. Even in the immediate wake of the
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counter-reform of 1840, the best artists working in Russia
were also instructors at the Academy (see Moleva and
Beliutin 31) . However, in the late 1850s and throughout the
1860s teaching posts were often assigned to less prominent,
less gifted painters such as Petr Basin, Aleksei Markov,
Petr Shamshin, and Bogdan Villeval'de--13men remembered
more for wielding the bureaucrat' s pen than the brush of an
artist.
The academic practice and the Neoclassical ideal
The students' situation was further complicated by an
academic bureaucracy which increasingly advanced
inconsistent positions on both artistic practice and theory.
For example, in 1861 the Academy Council stated that
subjects drawn from Russian national history were
inappropriate for presentation in history painting, the
highest and the most ideal genre in the Neoclassical
hierarchy. Only "historical episodes"--plots borrowed from
the Bible, mythology and classical history--were
sufficiently vaunted for this purpose. The preeminence of
history painting was further underscored by its exclusive
use in the prestigious Big Gold Medal competitions where
themes were assigned by the Academy. However, only a year
later, the Council rescinded this stipulation and stated
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that in subsequent competitions each student was to express
in painting "some feeling or general action such as war,
sorrow, love for one's homeland, joy and so forth ... in
that genre of painting toward which he feels the strongest
inclination" (Sbomik ma.teria.lov 3: 406) .
This action, although inconsistent with Neoclassical
theory as implemented in academic pedagogy, represented the
culmination of a trend already evident in academic practice.
During the early 1860s, the Academy had shown a decided
preference for the ostensibly inferior genre painting in the
Silver Medal competitions where history painting was not
compulsory but had traditionally been preferred. In 1860
this prize was awarded to Vasilii Perov for his genre
painting A Petty Clerk's Son and Valerii Iakobii for his The
Beggar's Bright Holiday (see Academy Protocol of September
2, 1860, Sbomik materialov 3: 356) . In 1861 it went to
Grigorii Miasoedov for Congratulations of the Newlyweds at
the Landowner's Home, Aleksei Korzukhin for Drunken
Paterfamilias and Aleksandr Morozov for A Rest at Hay-Mowing
(see Academy Protocol of August 27 and 28, 1862, 3: 384).
In 1862 it was awarded to Nikolai Petrov for his genre
painting Engagement of a Bureaucrat with a Tailor's Daughter
(see also Vereshchagina, Istoricheskaia kartina 23; Punina
8) .
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If this left the students a bit confused over just
where the Academy stood on matters of theory, pedagogy and
practice, then 1861 marked the apex of bureaucratic
inscrutability. That year, before it changed the rules
governing the Big Gold Medal competitions, the Academy
presented its highest award to Mikhail Petrovich Klodt for
his genre painting The Last Spring, Vasilii Perov for his
Village Sermon, and Valerii Iakobii for his Prisoners' Stop-
Over. All three works were typical examples of what
Kovalevskii called the "thinking genre" and were, of course,
by definition ineligible for the Big Gold Medal.
Subsequently, after the rule change of 1862, the Academy
seemingly confirmed the overthrow of the Neoclassical
hierarchy by presenting its highest award and a six-year
pension to study abroad to Grigorii Miasoedov for his genre
painting The Flight of Grigorii Otrep'ev from the Tavern on
Lithuanian Border--a work which depicts the arrest of
Otrep'ev, the so-called false Dmitrii, who usurped Boris
Godunov as ruler of Muscovy in 1605 at the height of the
Time of Troubles.
The Russian art historian Alla Vereshchagina rightfully
notes that these developments represented the "culmination
of a liberal trend" in academic policy and a certain
flexibility in its application of the Neoclassical hierarchy
(Istoricheskaia kartina 13, 24). They also indicate just
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how far academic practice had departed from the Neoclassical
ideal, to which it was only nominally related by 1862.
Genre painting had in practice supplanted history painting,
and the Neoclassical hierarchy was all but ignored. Even
the Academy's normative approach to painting seemed to be
easing. To a certain degree this was merely the logical
conclusion of artistic trends always present within the
Academy as well as a response to developments in Russian
society which could no longer be ignored. This, in effect,
was the positive conclusion to which Kovalevskii had come,
and even Zhemchuzhnikov allowed that in this regard the
Academy had made a step forward.
Genre painting, the aesthetics of ugliness and literature
What was perceived as progress by the critics like
Kovalevskii and Zhemchuzhnikov, however, was viewed with
disdain by those who defended the existing order. From
their point of view, a conspicuous reaction to the
Neoclassical emphasis on beauty and the sublime was creating
an aesthetic of ugliness. For Nikolai Ramazanov, one of
Academy's most sophisticated and knowledgeable critics (see
Kaufman 109),1 4 "marketplaces, food stands, street scenes
and back rooms of taverns" were, he charged in 1862,
entirely unsuitable subjects for painting (qtd. in
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Gol'dshtein, Kommentarii 37). Manifestations of such
unsuitable subjects, at least from the academic point of
view, were becoming commonplace in the Russian genre
painting as evident in the depiction of the marketplace in
Adrian Volkov's Food Stands in St. Petersburg (1858), public
fetes in Volkov's Hay-Market Square in St. Petersburg (early
1860s), the less fortunate or virtuous in Konstantin
Przhetslavskii's The Family of a Poor Artist and a Buyer of
Pictures (1857), Firs Zhuravlev's A Creditor Makes An
Inventory of A Widow's Property (1862) and Andrei Popov's
Eating House (1859) . Casting a critical eye upon the
implicit social critique of such works, Ramazanov denounced
"the intrusion into art of moral slime and the dregs of
every-day life" (37). He complained that "the historical
and the religious kinds of painting have almost completely
disappeared from the Academy" (37). The ideal beauty of
academic history painting, considered to be the highest
purpose of art, Ramazanov objected, was being displaced by
prosaic ugliness of every-day reality.
Similarly, in 1865 an anonymous critic for the liberal
newspaper Voice condemned the Russian genre painters for
producing "incorrect" and "perverted" depictions of "drunken
men, interiors of taverns and so forth" (qtd. in Bespalova
and Vereshchagina 68). This critic argued that the Russian
genre painters had "read that the visual arts, like
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literature, were supposed to contribute to the development
of society and the nation" and, in turn, had "decided that
they also were called to educate" (68). Just as "literature
was pursuing a negative path exposing all sorts of
ugliness," so too was painting, he concluded (68).
Ignoring a long artistic tradition of depicting the
prosaic and sometimes unflattering in the visual arts such
was, for example, seventeenth century Dutch painting, this
critic endeavored to link the Russian genre painting to a
relatively new literary form known as the physiological
sketch (fiziologicheskii ocherk) .15 This was not an
arbitrary choice. This short literary form, popular
throughout the 1840s and 1850s, was devoted to the depiction
of the mundane and unflattering aspects of mid century
life.1 6 Several illustrated collections were produced in
Russia17 in which stories set in marketplaces, garrets and
streets described poor artists, prostitutes, petty clerks,
water carriers, organ grinders and coffin-makers who
populated these places. This narrative was distinguished by
a preponderance of the so called physiological elements--the
prosaic, ugly, bleak and often tragically terrifying details
of nineteenth century life as lived by the less fortunate.
Eating, drinking, poor clothing, unpleasant smells, drab and
depressing landscape, squalor and, most importantly, scenes
of domestic cruelty, verbal abuse and vulgarity were often
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described in great detail. The characters caught up in all
this were portrayed as socially, physically or
psychologically degraded if not completely humiliated or
despondent.
Thus, for the anonymous critic in Voice, genre
painting, particularly in its urban variety, by accentuating
the negative or what Kovalevskii called the "painful aspects
of the social life of the nation, " not only wallowed in an
ugliness and cruelty peculiar to the 19th century but
engaged in something far more troubling--a critique which
implicitly called for social and political change. This led
Ramazanov in 1866 to complain that Russian painting had
become "contaminated with a tendentiousness" which was
"common to all genre painters" forcing them "like the
detective to reveal to society scandalous scenes which
disturb the soul" (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 62) .
Making his case for a restoration of the Neoclassical ideal,
Ramazanov argued, "Isn't it better for a painter to work in
the name of pure art leaving behind the incorrect path of
tendentiousness, spicy plots and twisted effects" (62) .
Tendentiousness--Kovalevskii's and Petrov's "thinking"
element and the radicals' 'content'--were considered
deleterious to art by those who felt obliged to defend
Neoclassicism against the encroachment of the "new" artistic
tendencies.
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In this context, drunkenness emerged as one of the
seminal subjects associated with the aesthetic of ugliness
and its implicit social critique, particularly in its urban
variety. Emblematic of all the painful aspects of Russian
social reality, this woeful theme was dealt with in a series
of paintings produced during the early 1860s, for example,
Aleksei Korzukhin's Drunken Paterfamilias (1860), Shil'der's
Drunken Husband (1861) and Nikolai Koshelev's First of the
Month (1862) .
Shil'der's Drunken Husband, currently lost and known
only from a photograph, depicts a drunken paterfamilias, his
wife and two children in a dark, low ceilinged room
illuminated by an unseen window located on the upper left-
hand corner of the canvas. His wife, neatly attired in a
carefully rendered dress, sits in a chair next to a table
cradling an infant in her lap. To her right, in front of
the table and on the floor, sits her young son clutching the
family dog, looking up at his intoxicated father. This
drunken husband, a tall, dark figure wearing a rumpled top
hat and long coat, stands in the background pouring himself
a glass of vodka. Koshelev's First of the Month, also
currently lost and known only from a photograph, visits this
same theme depicting a wife sitting in front of a table,
hands clasped, eyes gazing upward, as if in prayer, coping
with the reality of a dissolute husband, resting unconscious
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on a low bench to her left, who has squandered on alcohol
his wages, symbolized by an empty wallet, which, in mid
nineteenth century Russia, were usually issued on the first
of the month--hence the descriptive title. The characters
and settings in these two paintings are clearly types
emblematic of a condition not individuals drawn from a
specific place and time. The symbolic nature of the mother
is underscored by the presence of a young child in her
immediate vicinity. In Koshelev's painting, however, the
Madonna illusion is less apparent as the mother is not
cradling the child. Rather, the child rests its head and
shoulders against her lap while standing next to her.
Korzukhin's Drunken Paterfamilias became one of the
most notable examples of this theme.18 It depicts a
drunken, shabbily dressed, shoeless man bursting through a
darkened doorway into a cluttered, decrepit hovel while his
barefoot wife, cradling an infant on her lap, sits on the
floor. A young son, also shoeless, sits to her left wile an
older daughter, behind and to the left of the mother,
recoils from the entrance of this drunken paterfamilias.
Another child hides in the shadows on the far-left side of
the image. The mother stares directly and plaintively at
the viewer. The situation is one of despair and degradation
which in its ugly and tragically terrifying detail is
clearly evocative of the literary tradition of the
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physiological sketch. Indicative of the shift in the
Academy's attitude toward the Neoclassical hierarchy in the
early 1860s, Korzhukhin's Drunken Paterfamilias and
Shil'der's Drunken Husband were both awarded Small Gold
Medals in 1860 and 1862 respectively.
Ivan Dmitriev and the radical critique
What made Korzukhin's Drunken Paterfamilias
particularly notable was the fact that it became the subject
of a heated critical debate over the nature of a native
Russian school of art and its image in the West. Despite
its unflattering depiction of Russian reality, Drunken
Paterfamilias was initially included among the works to
represent Russia at the International Exhibition in London
in 1862. However, apparently having second thoughts about
its suitability to serve as an example of Russian national
life for audiences abroad, the Academy, to the dismay of
critics such as Stasov, Dmitriev and others, hastily
withdrew Korzukhin's Drunken Paterfamilias just before the
exhibition opened, leaving no time for the Authority of Her
Majesty's Commissioners to remove this entry from the
official catalogue.19
The radical ideologist Ivan Dmitriev, a close friend of
Dobroliubov,20 vehemently objected to the exclusion of
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Korzukhin's painting from the 1862 International Exhibition.
He considered this painting, with all its "nastiness and
sores," not only more representative of Russian national
life but also more "beautiful" than the refined images
usually produced by Russian academics, for example
Borovikovskii's Portrait of Mohamed, Shah of Persia or
Sverchkov's Painting of an English Horse (510) which were
included in the works presented at the Russian pavilion in
London.
Dmitriev defended Korzukhin's painting in a scathing
attack on Russian art in general and the Imperial Academy in
particular in a three part essay titled "The Obsequious Art"
which appeared in 18 63 in Spark, a satirical journal with an
openly radical orientation. Ostensibly a review of the
Academy's annual exhibition and the preparations for its
centennial celebration in 1864, Dmitriev's essay advanced
and expanded upon Zhemchuzhnikov's argument that it was an
impediment to the development of Russian art. In fact,
according to Dmitriev, the Academy was the impediment to
progress. Additionally, striking an openly radical posture,
Dmitriev saw a class component at work keeping Russian art
isolated from society.
"It is only the artist in Russia," wrote Dmitriev,
"who exists without purpose" (506). "The majority of
artists continue to accept the old view" wherein art is "to
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give the highest aesthetic pleasure to distinguished and
rich people who have the means to purchase it," he argued
(508). This produced art which was "not purposive" (eto ne
delo), "not a vital necessity" but, rather, "only a less
harmless dalliance" (510). Devoid of "content" and of "any
life-educating element," such art, Dmitriev continued, "did
not bring anything useful to the people" (510) . Instead, he
concluded, it remained mere "entertainment" for the "rich"
(510). "You artists," Dmitriev admonished, "should give
purpose to the people, teach useful thoughts, direct them to
a truthful path" (511). Art, according to Dmitriev, should
be openly tendentious and clearly critical of the
established social and political order.
Standing in the way of progress was the Imperial
Academy and its aesthetic doctrine which accounted for the
"extreme emptiness and positive futility of the activity of
our Russian artists" (506) . "What has society, the people
gained from the fact that our Academy of Fine Arts has
existed for a hundred years; what would happen if we didn't
have it at all?" Dmitriev asked rhetorically (506) . Under
its aegis, he asserted, art had become an empty exercise cut
off from Russian society.
Dmitriev dismissed the 1863 annual exhibition of the
Academy as a collection of "useless and unnecessary work,"
"so poor and pitiful" that it belied "any illusions to
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progressive development" (526). He found even the genre
painting lacking, taking special note of Vasilii Pukirev's
An Unequal Marriage21 (figure 4) which debuted at the 1863
annual exhibition garnering for the artist the Academy's
highest title, that of Professor.22
Pukirev's genre painting was essentially a reworking of
the theme found in Fedotov's The Major's Courtship.23 It
depicts the marriage of a pensive, young bride to a balding,
older patrician at the moment the ring is to be placed on
her finger sealing her fate. The bride and groom are
surrounded by a group of seven people, six men and one
woman, all cast against a background of dimly illuminated
icons. Three of the figures, including the groom, look
askance at the bride. Two of the figures, including the
older woman standing behind the groom and a bearded young
man standing behind the bride, apparently the best man, look
at the groom. A man whose head is located directly above
the bride stares directly at the viewer. The painting
conveys a sense of anticipation that is not particularly
convivial.
Dmitriev found An Unequal Marriage entirely
unsatisfactory. He complained that had Pukirev "looked
deeply into the matter and decided to depict an unequal
marriage without sentimentality" he would have painted the
wedding of "a young girl and a young man" and "simply titled
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Figure 4: An Unequal Marriage (Vasilii Pukirev)
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it "marriage" not "an unequal marriage" (527; Dmitriev's
emphasis) . Had the artist "simply drawn the portraits of
the bride and the groom in such a way that anybody looking
at the painting would conclude yes, this is an unhappy and
unequal marriage!," he argued, "there would be no need to
resort to all these allusions and labels, there would be no
need to draw for purpose of contrast the trivial, banal
figure of the best man" who "in a melodramatic pose" stands
disapprovingly behind the bride (527; Dmitriev's emphasis).
Dmitriev's point, beyond the fact that from the radical
perspective all marriages were unequal, even unnecessary,
was that art should be the unmediated depiction of social
reality, even if ugly. Such depictions would necessarily be
progressive, he assumed, because they would force the viewer
to cast a critical eye upon the painful aspects of Russian
life.
1863: The "new era" of Russian national art
Dmitriev's review appeared only few weeks before the
student secession from the Imperial Academy in November
1863. Ironically, this momentous event, contrary to the
myth which grew up around it, was not only a deliberate
rejection of the Academy as an impediment to progress but
also the product of bureaucratic bungling. In September of
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1863, the senior students led by Kramskoi wrote a letter to
the Academy Council requesting that the Big Gold Medal
competition be based upon "freely chosen plots" (qtd. in
Kramskoi, Pis'ma. 1: 12) in a manner entirely consistent with
recent academic practice. This was followed by one-on-one
efforts by the students designed to insure that the Council
would follow this course of action. In light of Miasoedov's
success in 1862 with his genre painting The Flight of
Grigorii Otrep'ev, the students, so it seemed, could expect
a positive response.
The Academy, however, was already under increasing
pressure from the Tsar to re-evaluate its seemingly
permissive attitude toward the students and their
experiments with the "Russian thinking genre." The Council
had spent most of the winter and spring of 18 62-63 debating
how to administer the next Big Gold Medal competition. Two
interrelated issues commanded its attention: first, should
the theme be assigned by the Council; and second, should
history painting be compulsory. In other words, should the
Council rely upon the September 1862 regulation which, in
effect, toppled the Neoclassical hierarchy and replaced
history with genre painting which was becoming increasingly
suspect, at least from the perspective of its more
conservative elements? The conservative members of the
Council, including Nikolai Pimenov, Petr Basin and
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Konstantin Ton, argued that the regulation of 1862 should be
ignored and that history painting restored to a position of
preeminence consistent with the Neoclassical hierarchy. The
more liberal members, including Fedor Bruni, then rector of
painting and sculpture, Grigorii Gagarin, Vice-president of
the Council, and Fedor L'vov, argued that to ignore the
September 1862 regulation might prompt the kind of situation
which had resulted in the scandalous Salon des Refuses in
Paris that same spring (see Academy Protocols, September 22,
1862 through March 21, 1863, Sbomik materialov 3: 405-27;
see also Vereshchagina, Istoricheskaia kartina 33) .
Ultimately, the Council struck a compromise and decided
to assign not one but two compulsory themes. The first, for
those students inclined toward history painting, was derived
from Scandinavian mythology, specifically Valhalla (see
Academy Protocol of November 9, 1863, Sbomik materialov 3:
434). The second theme, for those students inclined toward
genre painting, was remarkable for its topical immediacy--
the liberation of the serfs. This subject was perfectly
suited to the "thinking genre" (434). However, in typical
fashion, the Council never conveyed its intentions to the
students. Having received no response to their initial
request and, no doubt, inspired by the exhortations of
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Zhemchuzhnikov and Dmitriev, they resolved to resign en
masse when presented with the first compulsory theme.
On November 9, 1863, the fourteen senior students
participating in the Big Gold Medal competition were
summoned to the Catherine Hall of the Academy's building.
They had resolved, as a sign of solidarity and protest
against the "high priests of art," to enter as a group,
declare themselves history painters, and, then, resign en
masse. Unaware of any of this, Fedor L'vov dutifully
presented the first compulsory theme, Valhalla. Before
L'vov could present the second theme, Kramskoi rose and
asked to speak. "We no longer want to persist," he stated,
"and not daring to think about changing the Academy's
regulations, we humbly request to be excused from this
competition and to be issued diplomas for the title of
artist" (Kramskoi, Pis'ma 1: 12). With this the students
rose, submitted their prepared letters of resignation and
exited the hall. Thus, out of bureaucratic equivocation and
miscommunication was born one of the most momentous events
of nineteenth century Russian art--the secession of the
students from the Academy.
The consequences of the secession for these artists--
thirteen painters and one sculptor24--were not
insignificant. They gave up diplomas, studios, career
prospects and Academy-sponsored fellowships abroad.
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Furthermore, in the context of the era, their action was
viewed as bordering on political dissent. In fact, some of
the secessionists were placed under police surveillance (see
Roginskaia, "K voprosu" 159-82). The subject of the
secession was so sensitive that Prince Grigorii Gagarin, the
Vice President of the Academy, even prohibited the press
from commenting on it (see Punina 31).
"New" Russian painting and the Russian literary model
Within a few weeks of their departure, the fourteen ex
students organized the St. Petersburg Artel of Artists
(Sankt-Peterburgskaia Artel' khudozhnikov) . Its statutes,
officially adopted only in June of 1865,25 stipulated that
the Artel's goals were to "secure the financial position" of
its members, to provide a forum for marketing their works,
and to encourage commissions in all genres (qtd. in
Gol'dshtein, Introduction 1: 5). Commissions, in fact, were
the main source of financial support for the secessionists.
They painted icons, portraits, retouched photographs and
gave private art classes (see Valkenier, Russian Realist Art
34; Gol'dshtein, Kramskoi 45, 332-33).
The Artel was notable for two things--first, its
limited impact upon developments in Russian art, and second,
its organizational structure which was borrowed directly
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from a literary text, specifically, Chemyshevsky's radical-
utopian novel What Is To Be Done? Published in early 1863
and subtitled From the Tales About the New People, this work
had an enormous impact upon the Russian intelligentsia.26
Chemyshevsky' s novel called for a fundamental restructuring
of Russian society including social, personal and economic
relationships. Its main character, Vera Pavlovna, was a
"rational egoist"27 whose heightened social consciousness
led her to enter into new kinds of relationships which
reflected Chemyshevsky's own radical ideology. To escape
parental despotism, particularly the tyranny of her mother,
Vera Pavlovna agreed to a marriage of convenience to a
progressive medical student named Dmitrii Lopukhov. Their
relationship was to be one of equals based upon an explicit
code of personal conduct insuring independence, equality and
privacy. To that end, each partner had separate living
quarters joined by a common room. This restructuring of
personal relationships, however, was only part of Vera
Pavlovna's journey into freedom. To establish financial
independence, she set up a sewing cooperative based upon
shared responsibility, equal distribution of profits and
solidarity among members. It was this restructuring of
economic relations which freed Vera Pavlovna from the
oppressive conventions of society and pointed toward a
better future. To build that future, Vera Pavlovna assigned
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members of the cooperative selected readings from
progressive literature so as to raise their social-
consciousness.
What Is To Be Done? had a profound and immediate impact
upon the radical and liberal intelligentsia. Vera
Pavlovna's fictional artel served as the prototype for the
organization of real ones including the St. Petersburg Artel
of Artists.28 As in Chemyshevsky's novel, the members of
the St. Petersburg Artel contributed a portion of their
income to a common fund, sought to achieve their goals
through cooperative effort, and lived and worked in separate
studios joined by a common room (see Gol'dshtein, Kramskoi
41). Similarly, they sought to expand their intellectual
horizons by reading suitably progressive texts gathering on
Thursday evenings with other artists to do so. Repin, who
attended some of these gatherings while a student at the
Imperial Academy, recalled that Robert Owen's "Essays on the
Formation of Character,"29 Chemyshevsky's master thesis
"The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality," and a series of
articles by Pisarev--among them "Destruction of Esthetics,"
"Pushkin and Belinsky" and "Bread-And-Butter Miss "--were
examples of the kind of progressive texts which inspired the
young artists (Dalekoe blizkoe 171). Those Artel members
who were particularly taken with radical ideology, he
remembered, adorned their desks with photographs of role
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models like Chernyshevsky, Lassalle and Proudhon (171), the
latter, according to the historian Charles Moser, being
particularly revered by the Russian radicals (62-63, 154).
Proudhon's treatise On the Principle of Art and Its
Social Role {Du principe de l'art et sa destination sociale)
was of special interest to the members of the Artel.
Dedicated solely to the visual arts, it went beyond the
mostly vague generalities concerning the social function of
painting provided so far by the Russian critics. A subject
of heated debate in Paris artistic circles when it first
appeared in 1865, Proudhon's work was immediately translated
into Russian under the title Art: Its Foundation and Social
Significance (Iskusstvo, ego osnovanie i obshchestvennoe
znachenie) . In this book-length treatise,30 Proudhon
asserted that art's main function was not to give pleasure
but, rather, to improve society, and that the artist's role
was to serve society, not some ideal notion of beauty.3 1
Nikolai Kurochkin32, in a brief introduction to the
translation, remarked that "not much was new" to the Russian
reader in all of this, noting that most of Proudhon's basic
assertions had already been advanced in the works of
Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov (ii). Nevertheless,
Kurochkin invited the Russian reader to consider "certain
passages" in Proudhon's treatise as "the latest word in our
debates and polemics" (iii) , advice the secessionists took
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to heart. Kramskoi, for example, claimed that he re-read
certain passages of Proudhon's book up to ten times and
urged his fellow artists to memorize certain sections
(Pis'ma 1: 48) . The sculptor Mark Antokol'skii composed and
read aloud at one of the Thursday-evening gatherings an
article titled "A Critical View on Contemporary Art" which
he proudly admitted evinced "the influence of Proudhon
(Stasov, Antokol'skii 926; see also Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe
173) ,3 3
That the secessionists chose to structure their world
on a model found in Russian fiction, rather that one found
in reality--for example, the artistic Salons of Paris--was
indicative of two things: first, just how deeply rooted the
literary bias was in Russian culture by mid-century--the
secessionists were hardly alone in using Chemyshevsky's
fictional world as a model for the real one; and second, how
the stultifying intellectual atmosphere of the Academy left
them ill-prepared to formulate and advance an aesthetic
doctrine of their own which would rescue art from the
margins of culture.
By the close of the 1860s the Artel was on the verge of
collapse. The end would come abruptly in 1870. That year,
Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgskii, one of the Artel's founding
members, wrote a confidential letter to the Academy
requesting a pension to study abroad (see Gol'dshtein,
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Kramskoi 56) . When Kramskoi found out, he responded harshly
addressing a letter of protest both to Dmitriev-Orenburgskii
and to the Artel's board. Kramskoi denounced Dmitriev-
Orenburgskii' s actions as unethical and accused him of
undermining the Artel's ideological and financial
independence from the Academy. Much to his surprise,
Kramskoi found that the Artel considered Dmitriev-
Orenburgskii ' s request a private matter beyond its purview.
Moreover, they saw little difference between Kramskoi's
decision to use the Academy's studios for a portraiture
commission from the Rumiantsev Museum in 1866 and Dmitriev-
Orenburgskii' s actions in 1870. They concluded that
Dmitriev-Orenburgskii was no more culpable of accommodation
with the Academy than Kramskoi. When Kramskoi failed to
persuade them otherwise, he resigned in protest on November
24, 1870, a date which effectively marked the demise of the
Artel (see also Kramskoi, Pis'ma 1: 74-76, 2: 440). As for
Dmitriev-Orenburgskii, the Academy awarded him a pension,
and he studied in Dusseldorf from 1871 until 1873 under the
famous genre painters Ludwig Knaus and Marc Vautier. After
the Academy refused to extend his fellowship, he moved to
Paris in 1875 where he remained until 1884, often
participating in the Paris Salons and never sending his
works back to Russia.
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Ultimately, the Artel never managed to develop into a
viable artistic organization. It advanced no aesthetic
program of its own and was hobbled from the beginning by an
organizational structure more suited to sewing cooperatives
and radical cliques than artistic salons, which, of course
was appropriate considering the source of the painters'
inspiration. Although the Artel organized its own
exhibitions featuring members' works (see Punina 55), these
events were closed to the public due to a lack of resources
and organizational skills. This was one of the main reasons
why the Artel's impact upon Russian artis ic life remained
limited. Kramskoi's sole attempt to publicly display Artel
works at a fair in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1865 ended in
failure. Associated expenses erased any profits.
Furthermore, it was ignored by the critics and the public
alike. As a result, Artel members continued to show most of
their paintings at the Academy's annual exhibitions.34 The
failure to secure and develop public exhibition space meant
that even if the members of the Artel developed a new
artistic approach, which they did not, there would be no way
to present it to the public. This only encouraged the more
ambitious among them to depart, as did Konstantin Makovskii
in 1864, when he set up his own studio and embarked upon a
lucrative career producing portraits. Finally, despite the
painters' attempts to break out of their isolation from the
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intelligentsia, that is to catch up and become au courant by
reading the appropriate progressive texts, their position
within the native culture remained unchanged. Because the
young artists were drawn mostly from the lower classes,35
they lacked the social entree required to push their art
into the center of Russian cultural life. This situation
was only exacerbated by their rather awkward embrace of
Radical ideology. In short, in organizing their
professional life, they took the literary model too
literally. A more abstracted understanding of the link
between the arts of painting and literature was required if
the former was to be rescued from its subordinate position
within the cultural hierarchy. This is where the role of
the critic fully asserted itself. Vladimir Stasov
intuitively grasped the potential of literature not as a
concrete example but as an abstract cultural reference. He
would successfully and consistently exploit this potential
to elevate the status of Russian painting and, not
coincidentally, advance his own career.
Vladimir Stasov: A critic in a search of a national school
of painting
By the late 1860s most of the critics who shaped the
debate over Russian art earlier in the decade had either
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abandoned the field or been arrested36 as the Tsar's
government began pursuing a policy of administrative reform
and cultural reaction. In this atmosphere Vladimir Stasov
emerged as one of the most influential art critics shaping
what eventually became known as Russian Realism. Trained as
an attorney with a full-time position as the head of the
Fine Arts section of the St. Petersburg Public Library since
1872 (see Karenin 605), he began his critical career in 1847
as a reviewer of French, German and English historical,
philosophical and literary works.37 Soon thereafter, he
switched to reviewing music and in 1856 began his career as
an art critic writing an article on Dutch genre painting
which appeared in the Contemporary. His next published
piece of art criticism would not appear until 1861, 38 that
is after the outline of the discussion over the nature of
Russian national art had already been worked out by other
commentators.
Although extremely influential in art circles,
particularly in the 1870s and 1880s, Stasov was not an
original thinker. In fact, his initial critical
pronouncements merely echoed sentiments already expressed by
Kovalevskii, Zhemchuzhnikov and Petrov. For example, in a
review of the Academy's 1861 annual exhibition, Stasov
identified genre paintings Prisoners' Stop-Over by Iakobii,
Last Spring by Klodt and Congratulation of the Newlyweds by
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Miasoedov as noteworthy examples of a "new trend" in Russian
art. ("Po povodu vystavki" 60-61). Echoing Zhemchuzhnikov,
he stated, "The Briullovian melodramatic time has passed,
our art has finally got down to its own plots, its own
content, its own goals" (55) . "Instead of trifles and
aping, " he added, "our art has begun to get back to real
purpose" (58) . Interestingly, less than five years
previously, writing from Italy, Stasov had praised Briullov
for being superior to his European contemporaries
("Poslednie proizvedeniia Briullova" 42).
Elsewhere, Stasov argued that art should be a "vessel
designed not for itself but for a deep and beautiful
content" ("G. advokatu" 66) .39 Like Petrov and
Kovalevskii, he indicated that genre painting was best
suited to this task. "The entire future of our school [of
art] lies in the current so-called genre painting and genre
painters," he stated in 1862 ("Nasha khudozhestvennia
proviziia" 74). Later, in a review of the Academy's 1862
annual exhibition, he cited Koshelev's Fist of the Month as
a victory over "the untruthfulness, the primness, the
dryness and the facelessness" which prevailed in Russian art
prior to the 1860s ("Zametki o vystavke v Akademii" 84). In
1864 he praised Pukirev's An Unequal Marriage for being
"full of native, delicate and accurate observation," and,
invoking the literary analogy, deemed Koshelev's First of
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the Month to be the product of a generation of artists
"touched and pushed forward by Fedotov and Gogol"
("Akademicheskaia vystavka 1863 g." 160) .
Stasov's criticism was not only unoriginal, it was also
unsystematic. When he remarked in 1862 that "a new,
original school is beginning" it was not necessarily clear
if this was to be identified with genre painting ("Zametki o
vystavke v Akademii" 85). Stasov, more interested in
schools, movements and trends which reflected historical
imperatives, was sufficiently vague on this point to make it
difficult to determine just where he stood. His critical
technique was to illustrate by example rather then to
describe through explication. By way of his examples, it
would seem that genre painting was synonymous with the "new"
art. Moreover, Stasov's choices indicate that his
understanding of genre painting was closer to that of
Kovalevskii and Petrov than to that of the young radicals
like Dmitriev who railed against the Academy. It should be
noted that during the later part of the 1860s, Stasov rarely
argued that the Academy was an impediment to progress in the
arts.
Stasov's critical approach was anecdotal and topical
rather than reasoned and philosophical. This was, after
all, expected from someone who envisioned his role to
provide the most complete, textual record of the
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developments in Russian art. Additionally, this also
stemmed from his reverent admiration of Belinsky. "Belinsky
was definitely our real teacher," he asserted recalling his
days as a student at the School of Jurisprudence. "No other
classes, courses, writing of essays, exams etc. have done so
much for our education and development as did Belinsky with
his monthly articles," he added. Waxing rhapsodic, he
continued, "The tremendous influence of Belinsky did not
confine itself, of course, to the literary sphere, he made
everything luminously clear to our eyes, he trained
character, and with a bold hand slashed the patriarchal
prejudices with which all Russia had lived before him." In
conclusion, he asserted, the power of Belinsky's thought was
such that "he prepared from a distance the healthy and
mighty intellectual movement" in which Stasov participated
some twenty fives years after the great critic's death.
("Uchilishche pravovedeniia" 1681). In short, almost for
the entirety of his career, or at least during the 1860s,
Stasov felt no need to elaborate an aesthetic theory of his
own since Belinsky was already the sine qua non in this
regard. Instead, he focused his critical energies almost
exclusively upon identifying and agitating for visual
exemplars which conformed to his understanding of Belinsky's
aesthetic program. As will be discussed later, this placed
a premium upon identifying the Gogol of Russian painting if
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Stasov was to become the Belinsky of Russian art criticism--
a role he no doubt saw himself playing.
As would be expected, this led Stasov to insist on the
national character of the "new" Russian art. Picking up on
Petrov's notion of a national art, he stressed the
"originality, peculiarity and national character" of Russian
painting ("Vystavka v Akademii Khudozhestv 1867 g." 208).
Commenting on the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867,
Stasov wrote that Russian art would "appear before all of
Europe for the first time with dignity thanks to the new
school of Russian painters" who "are taking plots from
national Russian life" (208, 214). In 1869, echoing
Belinsky, he argued that if art "does not follow from the
roots of national life" it is "useless, worthless" and
"powerless" ("Nashi khudozhestvennye dela" 149) . The
Russian painters should follow the "example of the [Russian]
writers, " he asserted, and "ally themselves with their
homeland and its needs" (134) . In fact, as the decade came
to a close, Stasov saw a distinct "national trend" emerging
in the "new" Russian art which was most evident in the genre
painting, at least for now. This trend was distinguished by
its intimate link to Russian national life, its independence
from foreign models, and its ability to produce paintings
"full of the silent sadness which closely mirrors the verse
of Nekrasov" ("Vystavka v Akademii Khudozhestv 1867 g."
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215) . This was a fairly safe critical position to stake out
in the late 1860s, falling ideologically somewhere between
conservative nationalism and radical populism. It also said
almost nothing about the pictorial components which
identified the "new" art. This, of course, was not a
problem from Stasov's point of view in which only the
content mattered. Significantly, throughout the decade,
Stasov never found any artist he deemed equivalent to Gogol.
That would have to wait until the next decade when finally
an example worthy of this accolade would appear.
Russian, national art in the West
In the meantime, Stasov dedicated his professional and
personal energies to identifying and advancing a national
school of painting. World fairs and international
exhibitions became for him "world exams" where Russian art
competed with that of other nations ("Posle vsemimoi
vystavki" 91) . The failure of the Russian section at the
1862 International Exhibition in London was a seminal event
in Stasov's critical career. It underscored the inadequacy
of the Academy's cosmopolitan orientation which produced
works that were "imitations and copies" rather than original
products of a native culture (114).
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Partly in response to Stasov's subsequent efforts to
advance a national art and, no doubt, the embarrassment
visited upon it by the Western critics in London in 1862,
the Academy included more examples of Russian genre painting
in its submission to the 1867 Exposition Universelle in
Paris.40 Stasov's critical stature and influence were
enhanced when one of these works, Vasilii Perov's Troika
(1866), was singled out for praise by the Parisian art
critics.
Perov produced Troika (figure 5) upon his return from
an Academy- sponsored fellowship abroad where he spent most
of his time in Paris. A large, nearly life-sized work
(123.5 x 167.5 cm), Troika, originally titled Apprentices
Carry the Water, depicts three children pulling a barrel of
water on a sledge through the snow-covered streets of
Moscow. The social critique is made explicit by the title
which clearly indicates that these children are treated
little better than stock animals. With pale faces, tattered
clothing and buffeted by a winter wind, they strain against
the weight of their burden. They are accompanied by a dog
and two other human figures--a man pushing the water barrel
and a passerby disappearing into the haze of the background.
The difficulty of the children's task is underscored by
Perov's use of a receding perspective which heightens the
sense of arduous forward movement.41
149
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Figure 5: Troika (Vasilii Perov)
150
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That the Parisian art critics even mentioned the
Russian pavilion, much less Perov's Troika, was astonishing
in light of the pronounced cultural chauvinism of the Second
Empire and the prevailing consensus regarding the authority
and superiority of French art (see Fink 89; Sloane, 43) .
However, this lent additional weight to their
pronouncements. The conservative critic Paul Mantz, one of
the most influential of the Second Empire, asserted in his
review published in the Gazette des Beaixx-Arts that from his
"Parisian point of view" Perov appeared to be the most
Russian among his contemporaries (28) . Mantz, noting that
Perov's muted palette stood in stark contrast to that of the
French, praised Troika for "being a Russian painting par
excellence" (29) . A similarly positive response came from
Wilhelm Burger (also known as Theophile Thore), an
influential Parisian art critic, friend of Baudelaire and
supporter of Courbet, who claimed that Perov was "Russian in
his choice of subjects" as well as in his "style" (437) .
This praise seemed to confirm both Stasov's earlier
statements about Troika (he congratulated Perov for
presenting new "motifs not tackled by anyone before" but
"close and understandable to all" ["Vystavka v Akademii
Khudozhestv 18S7 g." 215]) and his general pronouncements
regarding the "new school of Russian painters" and the
"national trend" in art. Even the Academy seemed to be
151
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impressed by the success of Perov's work and the Russian
school of art in general. History painter and pavilion
organizer Viacheslav Shvarts proudly proclaimed that
"civilized France was surprised" to discover that the
"barbaric" Russians had their "own style" which, he
proclaimed, was "original" (qtd. in Nesterova 49) . This was
a decided blow to those critics who argued, as Ramazanov had
only a year earlier, that genre painting and its depiction
of "scandalous scenes which disturb the soul" had
"contaminated" Russian art with "tendentiousness" and that
the Russian painters should abandon this "incorrect
path" (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 62) . The
"thinking genre" under the rubric of the "new" art which, in
turn, was linked with nationalism through its "originality,
peculiarity and national character," was taking on a
legitimacy which could not be ignored.
However, the demand to capture narodnost' or the
national character in Russian art was starting to have a
negative effect upon some of the artists active in the
1860s, among them Perov, engendering a certain ambivalence
toward the West that would never be fully resolved. While
in Paris on his Academy-sponsored fellowship, Perov produced
five genre paintings notable for their depictions of
Parisian popular types--An Organ-Grinder, A Paris Organ-
Grinder, Paris Chiffonniers (also known as The Paris
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Ragpickers) , The Orphans and Savoyard. These paintings were
based upon Perov's studies of actual street scenes and
evidence a chromatic intensity absent from his Russian work.
Perov, however, was unhappy in Paris and in July of 1864
requested that he be allowed to return home before his
fellowship expired. He found "studying a foreign country"
unsatisfying and, without the knowledge of the "popular
types," wished to devote himself to "studying and working
out the unlimited wealth of plots based on both the urban
and rural life" of Russia (qtd. in Fedorov-Davydov, Perov
95). The strictures of cosmopolitan Neoclassicism were
being replaced by an equally restrictive set of aesthetic
assumptions being advanced by Stasov and others under the
name of a national art. The full scope of what this meant
wouldn't become apparent until the 1870s.
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Notes
1. Among the journals dedicated specifically to the visual arts
were Photography (Svetopis') which lasted from 1858 until
1859, and Illustration which was published from 1858 until
1863 (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 17). For more
information, see also Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat'
(1702-1894) (Moscow: Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury,
1959).
2. During the mid 1850s, the Moscow merchant elite emerged as a
real economic and cultural power. By adopting the policy of
"buying Russian" and by showing an almost exclusive interest
in the works of contemporary Russian artists during the
following decade, the Moscow merchants played a decisive
role in defining the nature of national school of art (see
Norman 93-4).
3. A similar argument is advanced by Valkenier who contends
that Western criticism of the Russian pavilion inspired
Stasov to become an "ardent proponent of nationalism in art"
(Russian Realist Art 57) .
4. On the secession, see I.N. Punina, Peterhurgskaia artel'
khudozhnikov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1966).
5. The son of the academic painter Nikolai Maikov, Apollon
Maikov studied art independently and at one point even
planned to transfer from the University to the Academy of
Fine Arts (see Kaufman 75) .
6. Zhemchuzhnikov lived in Paris from 1857 until 1860 where he
became intimately familiar with the French art. Later in
his memoirs, he admitted that it was the art of Eugene
Delacroix which exerted the strongest impression upon him
(Moi vospominaniia 256) .
7. Rozengeim's review appeared in the journal National Annals
in 1861 (10: 38) .
8. A critic writing in 1862 for the journal Illustration
suggested the term nravoopisatel'naia zhivopis'--literary
'painting depicting customs and mores' (qtd. in Bespalova
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and Vereshchagina 41) . This term, however, never gained
currency.
9. On the general cultural climate of the time, including the
emancipation, ideology and historical events, see Terence
Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant
Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University
Press, 1967); Abbot Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of
Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (New York: Viking Press,
1980); Eugene Lampert, Sons Against Fathers. Studies in
Russian Radicalism and Revolution (Oxford: Claredon Press,
1965; on the peasant revolts in particular, see 37-48) .
10. The 1840 reform also included significant budgetary cuts
which resulted in an elimination of some teaching and
administrative posts (see Moleva and Beliutin 12).
11. Kramskoi published the first three parts of his article
"Sud'by russkogo iskusstva" in the December 1877 issues of
the newspaper New Time (Nos. 645-647) . The entire article
appeared in an 1888 monograph titled Ivan Nikolaevich
Kramskoi, ego zhizn', perepiska i khudozhestvenno-
kriticheskie stat'i, 1837-1887) which was initiated one year
after the painter's death by Stasov and published and edited
by Stasov's critical opponent at the time Suvorin.
12. In 1880 Kramskoi confessed: "My story would have not been
complete unless I add that I have never envied anybody so
much as an educated person. I even used to panic like a
lackey in front of every university graduate" (Kramskoi,
Pis'ma i stat'i 2: 46).
13. Basin taught at the Academy from 1831 until 1869; Markov
from 1841 until 1872; Shamshin from 1853 until his death in
1895 (he became the rector of the Department of Painting and
Sculpture in 1883); Villeval'de taught there from 1848 until
1894 .
14. Although Ramazanov was in charge of the sculpture class at
the Moscow School of Art and Sculpture, he is remembered
more as a critic than a sculptor. He is the author of a
collection of essays titled Materialy dlia istorii
khudozhestv v Rossii, published in 1863. With the exception
of Rafail Kaufman, most Soviet critics characterize
Ramazanov as a "reactionary" because of his critique of the
Russian "thinking genre" (109-11).
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15. On the physiological sketch, see J.T. Baer, "The
'Physiological Sketch' in Russian Literature" (Studia
Litteraria Russica in Honorem Vsevolod Setchkarev, 1974: 1-
12); Aleksandr Tseitlin, Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi
literature. Russkii fiziologicheskii ocherk (Moscow: Nauka,
1965).
16. Its very name carried the connotation of actuality and truth
accurately observed and scientifically recorded from the
'raw' nature, that is 'life as it is.'
17. These collections appeared under the titles Us, Drawn from
Nature by Russians (Nashi, spisannye s natury irusskimi) ,
published in 1841 and 1842 by Aleksandr Bashutskii, Pictures
of Russian Characters (Kartinki russkikh nravov) , published
in 6 volumes in 1842-1843 and illustrated by Vasilii Timm,
Physiology of St. Petersburg (Fiziologiia Peterburga) and
St. Petersburg Miscellany (Peterburgskii sbomik) , published
by Belinsky and Nekrasov in 1845 and 1846 respectively.
Foreign prototypes for these collections included Heads of
the People, or Portraits of the English, illustrated by
Kenny Meadows, edited by Robert Tyas and published in London
in 1840 and The French Described by Themselves. Moral
Encyclopedia of the 19th Century (Les Frangais peints par
eux-memes. EncyclopSdie morale du XIX siecle) , a nine-
volume work illustrated by Gavarni, Ernest Messonier,
Philippe August Jeanron and others and published and edited
by L. Curmer in Paris in 1839-1842.
18. The location of Korzukhin's painting Drunken Paterfamilias
is unknown. M.D. Faktorovich argued that the work with the
same title, currently at the Kiev Museum of Russian Art, is
most likely "one of the early studies" (qtd. in M.N.
Shumova, Russkaia zhivopis' serediny XIX veka, n. pag.,
entry on Korzukhin). Biographical information on Korzukhin
is provided by K. Zaitsev in his semi-fictional book
Khudozhnik Korzukhin (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural'skoe knizhnoe
izd., 1971).
19. The painting was listed under entry no. 1660 of
International Exhibition 1862. Official Catalogue of the
Fine Art Department (London: Truscott, Son, & Simmons, 1862,
229) .
20. Dmitriev published his articles in the leading literary
journals of the time including Contemporary, Russian Word,
Alarm Clock and others. The review "The Obsequious Art" was
published anonymously. Dmitriev's authorship was
established in the obituary published in the November 1867
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issue of the journal Iskra (see Iampol'skii 576). For more
information on Dmitriev, see E. Kovtun, "Zabytyi kritik-
shestidesiatnik" (Iskusstvo 6 [1955]: 66-69).
21. Pukirev produced a second version of this painting in 1875
(qtd. in Gorina 111) .
22. This was the first time in the Academy's history that the
highest award, that of the Professor, was granted to a genre
painter (see Gol'dshtein, Kommentarii 45).
23. The painting is discussed by V. Zimenko in Neravnyi brak,
kartina V.V. Pukireva (Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo,
1947).
24. The secessionist group included Nikolai Dmitriev-
Orenburgskii, Aleksandr Grigor'ev, Aleksei Korzukhin, Ivan
Kramskoi, Karl Lemokh, Aleksandr Litovchenko, Konstantin
Makovskii, Aleksandr Morozov, Mikhail Peskov, Nikolai
Petrov, Nikolai Shustov, Bogdan Venig, and Firs Zhuravlev
(see Academy Protocol of November 9, 1863, Sbomik
materialov 3: 434). Some historians call this event the
"revolt of the thirteen", while yet others call it the
"revolt of the fourteen." P. Zabolotskii decided not to
participate in the revolt at the very last moment, at which
point the sculptor V. Kreitan joined the group (see
Roginskaia, "K voprosu" 164) .
25. By 1865 Konstantin Makovskii and Aleksandr Litovchenko were
no longer members. Mikhail Peskov, an original member of
the Artel, died in August of 1864.
26. The critic Aleksandr Skabichevskii summarized the impact of
What Is To Be Done? upon his generation: "We read the novel
almost like worshippers, with the kind of piety with which
we read religious books, and without the slightest trace of
a smile on our lips. The influence of the novel on our
society was colossal" (qtd. in Stites 98).
27. On "rational egoism," see Chemyshevsky "Anthropological
Principle in Philosophy."
28. The St. Petersburg Artel was one of several communes
organized during the 1860s. Writer Vasilii Sleptsov, for
example, organized a similar commune in 1863. The composer
Modest Moussorgsky also belonged to one such group. In
1864, the portrait painter Petr Krestonostsev organized a
similar artistic commune which was attended by Vladimir
Maksimov, A.N. Shuigin, Viktor Bobrov, A.K. Damberg, A.F.
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Kalmykov, A.A. Kiselev and N.A. Koshelev. Kramskoi became
rather concerned about the possible competition that might
come from this second artistic commune. His fears were,
however, unfounded. For, this second artistic commune
existed not more than one year (see Gol'dshtein, Kramskoi
43, 45) . Interest in communal life subsided after the onset
of political reaction in 1866 at which point the communes
"became almost the exclusive preserve of radical circles"
(Stites 111).
29. Owen's Essays on the Formation of Character was published in
three volumes in 1813-1814. The work was translated into
Russian in 1865 and appeared in St. Petersburg under the
title Ohrazovanie kharaktera.
30. Initially intended to be a brief defense of Courbet's Return
from the Conference, a painting which was rejected by both
the official Salon and the Salon des Refuses in 1863 for its
pronounced anti-clericalism, Proudhon's work grew into a
full length treatise published in Paris shortly after his
death in 1865.
31. On Proudhon and his theory of art, see Sloane 65-68; Max
Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso. Three Studies in the
Sociology of Art. Translated by Inge Marcuse (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980) ; Edward
Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His Revolutionary Life, Mind
and Works (London: John Murray Ltd., 1979).
32. Together with his brother Vasilii, the journalist and poet
Nikolai Kurochkin also published progressive satirical
journal Spark in which Dmitriev's article appeared.
33. Beyond this, as Richard L. Brown points out, "it was via
Proudhon's book that Courbet's ideas--or Proudhon's reading
of them--became known to the Russian artists" (34). In
Toll's Reference Dictionary of 1864 Courbet is listed as the
leader of the French Realist school of painting (Nastol'nyi
slovar' 3: 276) .
34. In 1864 Morozov displayed his Exit from a Provincial Church.
The other paintings exhibited at the Academy's shows by the
present or past Artel members were: in 1865 Korzukhin's Wake
at the Cemetery, Shustov's Portrait of Karsakov and
Koshelev's Music Lesson; in 1867 Petrov's Peasant in
Poverty, Two Hungry Ones, Preparation for Church,
Makovskii's Poor Children, Harring Seller, Portrait of O.N.
Boronin, Portrait of Kaufman, Portrait of General
Rokossovskii; Korzukhin's Parting of a Son with His Mother
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and Zhuravlev's A Mother with Her Child; in 1868 Grigor'ev's
Portrait of G. Voroponov, Dmitriev-Orenburgskii' s A Drowned
Man in the Countryside, Zhuravlev's Return from a Ball and
his Cabman's Return Home, Korzukhin's Return from a Village
Fair and his Return of a Solder to his Motherland,
Kramskoi's Portrait of N.I. Vorotov and Portrait of M-me
Shperer, Lemokh's Family Grief, Makovskii's A Day in a Life
of the Russian Boyars, and Morozov's Cruxifiction; in 1869
Kramskoi's Portrait of Countess E.A. Vasil'chikova and
Portrait of M.B. Tulinova, drawings by Morozov and
Makovskii's Show-Booths at Admiral Square.
35. Kramskoi was a native of town called Ostrogozhsk in the
Voronezh province; Peskov was a petty clerk from the
Siberian town of Irkutsk; Zhuravlev was petty bourgeois from
Saratov, Dmitriev was a son of an officer from Nizhnii
Novgorod (see Punina 17) . Morozov was a raznochinets, a son
of a provincial artist (62).
36. In 1866 Dmitriev was imprisoned for his political views and
shortly thereafter expelled from St. Petersburg. He died in
1867.
37. Also published in that year was Stasov's article titled
"Living Pictures and Other Artistic Object in St. Peterburg
in 1847" which discussed Briullov's The Last Day of Pompeii,
recreated by the theater designer A. Roller in the form of
the so-called "living pictures"--the raek (see Kaufman 93).
38. In 1861, Stasov wrote and published "On the significance of
Briullov and Ivanov in Russian art." Stasov's conspicuous
absence from the early critical debates has been noted only
recently by Rafail Kaufman in his survey of Russian art
criticism (102).
39. The article was not published at the time but appeared only
in the 1894 edition of Stasov's collected works (see
Gol'dshtein, Kommentarii 37).
40. In his memoirs, Nikolai Ge wrote that the "Paris exhibition
of 1867 was for us, the Russians artists, a striking
boundary which separated the old from the new art. Such art
could be called Russian for the first time" (qtd. in Zograf,
Ge 220).
41. "Troika" had a literary antecedent in Bashutskii's
physiological sketch "Water-Carrier" ("Vodovoz") published
in Us, Drawn From Nature by Russians.
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Chapter Three
1870-1878: "New," national and realist art
Although a critical success abroad and at home, the
"new" Russian art had essentially reached an aesthetic,
ideological and institutional cul-de-sac by the late 1860s.
Despite Stasov's bold proclamation in 1869 that the
secession marked the beginning of a "second century in
Russian art" ("Nashi khudozhestvennye dela" 132), the
reality was that little had changed since the beginning of
the decade. The Imperial Academy remained preeminent in
matters of art, and Russian painting was still relegated to
an inferior status within the cultural hierarchy. However,
this situation was soon to change.
In 1870 the Association of Travelling Art Exhibits
(Tovarishches tvo peredvizhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystavok)
or the Wanderers Association1 was formed and, for the first
time, the Academy was being challenged by an economically
viable, independent artists' organization. Then, in 1873,
II'ia Repin, a promising young student at the Imperial
Academy, produced Volga Barge Haulers, a work which went
beyond the conventions of Russian "thinking" genre and
became the touchstone for aesthetic positions advanced by
both liberals and conservatives. It was cited as one of the
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first examples of a "Realist" trend which, like the "new"
art and the Russian "thinking genre," was linked by both its
supporters and detractors to Russian literature. While
these events are routinely cited in histories of the era as
milestones significant in and of themselves, which they
were, in the following discussion they will serve as
starting points for an examination of two less obvious but
equally significant developments: first, the crucial role
played by Vladimir Stasov in shaping the critical construct
which became known as Russian Realism; and, second, the
struggle for control over the new, realist and national art
which came to be identified with the work of the Wanderers.
During the 1870s, Stasov worked diligently to establish
himself as the preeminent critical voice shaping the
developments in a national school of art, and in the
Wanderers Association he found an institutional vehicle
ideologically suited to advancing his goals. However, as
might be expected from someone so intent upon promoting his
ideological goals, Stasov's interest in the Wanderers at
times bordered on the proprietary. Similarly, in II'ia
Repin Stasov found his Gogol, or so he argued, and
subsequently positioned himself as the Belinsky of Russian
art criticism. Stasov's professional success confirmed in
his mind the validity of his Romantic assumptions about art,
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its social role and its importance to the life of the
nation.
Often overlooked in all of this was the impact of the
emergence of an art market and a new collector class during
the 1870s. Instrumental in bringing about these
developments through its organizational structure and
institutional goals, which have been virtually ignored in
scholarly studies, the Wanderers Association was ultimately
undone by its own success. There was an inherent conflict
between its practical, that is financial, and ideological
goals which greatly complicated relations among artists,
collectors, critics, and the Academy.2 Stasov's personal
involvement and published statements merely exacerbated this
conflict. By virtue of his critical authority and the
Association's lack of a clearly defined aesthetic program,
he began emerging as the Wanderers' de facto chief
aesthetician. Unfortunately, Stasov simply wasn't up to the
task. The distinction between ideology and aesthetics was
and remained hopelessly confused within his essentially
Romantic understanding of art. In advancing the critical
construct of Russian Realism, he conflated institutional
principles with individual concerns and subordinated the
Association's practical purpose to its ideological
intentions ultimately vitiating its effectiveness as an
artists' organization.
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Travelling salons: Institutional organization and financial
arrangemen ts
Although a practical failure in attaining a new status
for the Russian painting within the cultural hierarchy, the
Artel was a symbolic success inspiring a group of Moscow
painters led by Grigorii Miasoedov to organize what became
known as the Wanderers Association. Hoping to consolidate
the efforts of all artists seeking "complete independence"
from the "bureaucratic routine" imposed by the Imperial
Academy, this group sent a letter to the St. Petersburg
Artel in November of 1869 presenting for its consideration
"an outline of a project for a travelling exhibit" which
included a set of proposed statutes for a new artists'
organization. This proposal, according to Miasoedov, was
"received coldly" (qtd. in Gol'dshtein, Kramskoi 76).
However, four key members of the Artel--Ivan Kramskoi, Karl
Lemokh, Aleksei Korzukhin and Konstantin Makovskii--were
interested enough to become involved individually.
Two different but inter-related goals were articulated
in the Association's statutes which were officially approved
by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in November of
1870. The first, grounded in the organicist, Romantic
notions of Belinsky and his radical followers, was to
integrate the "new" art emerging in St. Petersburg and
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Moscow with Russian society at large. To this end, the
travelling exhibits would go to the provinces and cultivate
society's appreciation for it (see Document 8,
Tovarishchestvo 1: 57). The second goal, which complimented
the first and reflected a pragmatic assessment of the
situation confronting artists attempting to work
independently from the Academy, was to develop a viable
commercial forum for the sale of art (1: 57-58) . By
bringing the "new" art to the provinces and cultivating
society's appreciation for it, the Wanderers could expand
their market, increase their chances for financial success
and insure their independence from the Academy. The
realization that ideology was not enough to sustain and
insure the success of their Association, no doubt, reflected
a lesson learned from the demise of the Artel.
The Association's orientation toward the provinces,
which the Academy all but ignored, proved to be highly
successful and not merely because most of its members came
from there. In some years, the travelling art exhibits
visited up to ten cities, among them Kiev, Khar'kov, Odessa,
Saratov and Tambov.3 Attendance rates as measured against
local populations were nearly three times higher in these
and other provincial cities than in St. Petersburg or Moscow
(see Mikhailov 105). The emerging provincial bourgeoisie
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and nouveau riches turned out to be not just a receptive
audience but also a reliable source of patronage.
The Wanderers Association achieved, to a considerable
degree, what had eluded the St. Petersburg Artel--a measure
of financial and institutional independence for itself and
its membership. This was due, in large measure, to the
financial arrangements detailed in its charter. Entrance
fees and a five percent commission on each work sold or
reproduced went to the Association--the commissions into a
loan fund available to active members and the entrance fees
less expenses distributed as a dividend to all exhibition
participants according to an evaluation of their works by
the Executive Board. The dividend encouraged all artists to
participate in the travelling shows while the loan fund
insured the independence and the loyalty of those who became
active members. Pursuant to the charter, the Executive
Board, consisting initially of Ge, Miasoedov, Perov,
Kramskoi, Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt and Illarion
Prianishnikov (see Document 9, Tovarishchestvo 1: 59), and
later expanded to include Aleksei Savrasov and Lev Kamenev
(see Document 12, 1: 68), possessed the exclusive right to
grant membership in the Association of which there were two
kinds--active and contributing.*
Painters who became active members ceded to the
Association the right to display paintings submitted for
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inclusion, in the travelling exhibitions. These works could
not be presented or sold elsewhere. Additionally, they
could not exhibit independently un-submitted works in cities
where a travelling exhibit was on display (see Document 9,
1: 59). These restrictions were designed to insure the
commercial success of the travelling shows, deprive the
Academy of works produced by active members and encourage
ideological cohesion among the Association's membership.
Contributing members, who initially enjoyed nearly all of
the benefits of active members--the most notable exception
being their ineligibility for loans--were not subject to
these exhibiting restrictions.
During the early 1870s, when exhibiting and patronage
options were still relatively few, this situation was not
particularly controversial. However, in later years, as the
Russian art market matured and diversified due, in large
measure, to the success of the Wanderers' travelling
exhibitions, it would become a source of friction within the
Association.
The possibility of advancing one's financial position
and professional independence, no doubt, encouraged some of
the most talented Russian painters to join the Wanderers
Association. Fifteen artists signed its statutes and became
active members upon its founding. In addition to the
members of the Executive Board and the four former Artel
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participants, this group included Ivan Shishkin, Nikolai
Makovskii, and genre painters Mikhail Petrovich Klodt and
Valerii Iakobii, both Small Gold Medal winners at the
Academy in the early 1860s. The critical and financial
success of the Wanderers' first travelling exhibit, which
opened in St. Petersburg in 1871, brought with it a wave of
new members. In 1872 Sergei Ammosov, Vladimir Ammon,
Aleksei Bogoliubov, Karl Gun, Vladimir Makovskii, and
Vasilii Maksimov joined. Most of these artists had
participated in the previous year's exhibition as
contributors. This influx of active members was accompanied
by the expulsion of Korzukhin and Iakobii, both associated
with the "thinking genre" in the early 1860s. Flexing its
organizational muscle, the Executive Board dismissed them
for not submitting works for inclusion in the 1871
exhibition as stipulated by the Association's statutes (see
Document 12, 1: 68) . A second wave of expansion occurred in
1878 when former Artel member Aleksandr Litovchenko and
recent Academy graduates Vasilii Polenov, Viktor Vasnetsov,
and II'ia Repin became active members. These gains offset
the departure of Nikolai Ge and Vasilii Perov who left for
reasons grounded in the conflict between the Association's
idealistic and pragmatic goals.
Nikolai Ge, an Academy student from 1850 to 1856 and a
pensioner studying abroad from 1857 to 1869, arrived in St.
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Petersburg shortly before the formation of the Wanderers
Association. He immediately joined and became a member of
the Executive Board. His contribution to the first
travelling exhibit--the famous painting from Russian history
Peter the Great Interrogates the Tsarevich Aleksei--was the
subject of considerable critical acclaim. His submissions
to the second travelling exhibit included portraits of the
liberal writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and the radical
poet Nikolai Nekrasov.
Despite his success as an artist, financial security
eluded Ge. In 1876, uncomfortable with the increasingly
pecuniary nature of the Russian art world, he retreated from
St. Petersburg to his ancestral estate of Ivanovskii. There
life would be "easier," "less expensive" and, most
importantly, he believed, his art would be completely "free"
(qtd. in Zograf, Ge 101). In fact, until his death in 1894,
Ge lived in relative isolation on his estate, eventually
becoming a follower of the aesthetic/religious teachings of
Lev Tolstoy, only sporadically participating in the
travelling exhibitions.5 By 1890 Ge's uneasiness about the
influence of money in the art world led him to denounce it
as "a hydra destroying the artist, society and the
[Wanderers] Association" (151) . He considered the notion of
purchasing art completely "absurd" arguing that "appraisal"
based upon money was utterly inappropriate in a realm where
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"tears, joy, delight" and "tender feelings" were the only
true measure of artistic value (151). Art, from his point
of view, had become a "spiritual activity" not to be sullied
by pecuniary concerns (151). For Ge the pragmatic goal of
the Wanderers Association, the development of a market, had
tainted the Russian art world from which, in effect, he
seceded.
Perov was also troubled by the practical aspect of the
Wanderers' mission. However, he was concerned that it was
being unjustly neglected. In his letter of resignation
submitted to Kramskoi in the Spring of 1877, Perov
complained that the development of an art market was being
held hostage to the goal of inculcating in society an
appreciation for the "new" art. Perov believed that the
Association's primary job should be to improve the material
condition of the artist, not to instill some "humane
illusions" and "patriotic sentiments" which, he argued, was
inappropriate in a country where the financial standing of
many artists was far from satisfactory (Document 117,
Tovarishchestvo 1: 142). Perov broke decisively with the
Association, never participating in a travelling exhibition
again. His departure, lamented Stasov in 1879, was an
"enormous and irreplaceable loss for Russian art"
("Khudozhestvennye vystavki 1879 g." 114).
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Ge and Perov responded, albeit in completely different
manners, to the inherent conflict between the Association's
twin goals. Where Ge saw ideals suborned by pragmatism,
Perov saw pragmatism held hostage to ideals. The tension
between the Association's competing goals--between
cultivating an appreciation for progressive art and the
development of an art market--would never be fully resolved.
In the end, it would contribute to the decline of the
Association in the 1880s and the 1890s.
Wanderers and their patrons
As the travelling exhibits met with success, it became
increasingly clear that the interests of the collectors, the
artists and the Association were not always coincidental. A
travelling exhibit could take as long as fourteen months to
complete.6 Patrons who purchased works early in a tour
were understandably reluctant to let them remain in the
travelling collection. These concerns were compounded by
Russia's treacherous transportation system. Works could be
damaged or lost during shipping. If patrons took possession
upon purchase, the Association faced the possibility of
reaching the final cities on a tour with little or no art to
display. The Association's statutes were mute on how to
resolve this problem.
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In 1874, keenly aware of this divergence of interests
and intent upon solving the problem, the Executive Board
turned for help to the writer Dmitrii Grigorovich who at the
time served as secretary of the Imperial Society for the
Encouragement of the Arts.7 In a letter to Grigorovich,
Executive Board members Kramskoi, Ge and Pavel Briullov
outlined the problem. The viability of the Wanderers
Association, they argued, was being undermined by artists
who presented their works directly to prospective buyers
instead of submitting them for inclusion in the travelling
exhibits, and if the Association insisted that works sold
early in a tour remain in the travelling collection, this
situation would only grow worse.
To address this problem, the Executive Board proposed
that the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts act as a
broker, buying a work when a private collector intended to
withdraw it from a travelling exhibit. The Association
would hold in escrow any sums thus obtained, and, if at a
later point in the tour another buyer was found, it would
return this money to the Society. The Executive Board
argued that such a complicated scheme was necessary because
the Wanderers Association was not in a financial position to
act on its own behalf (see Document 75, Tovarishchestvo 1:
107). However, the finances of the Society, despite its
close links with the Academy and the Imperial family, were
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no better than the Association's, and this proposal was
rejected. The conflict between the interests of the
Association, its membership and their patrons was never
fully resolved. However, during most of the 1870s, because
exhibition options remained limited and the art market
relatively small, the Association maintained the upper hand
in this affair over both its membership and the patrons.
Pavel Tret'iakov: The curator of national art
In addition to the Wanderers Association and the
liberal critics, there was a third pillar of support upon
which the success of the "new," national art rested. This
was the powerful and influential Moscow-based collector
Pavel Tret'iakov, heir to the fortune of a wealthy merchant
family.8 He began collecting seventeenth century Dutch art
and old European masters in 1854, but soon became interested
in the "new" Russian painting emerging under the critical
guidance of the liberally-minded commentators.9 As early
as 1860 Tret'iakov had resolved to donate his collection to
the city of Moscow so as to establish a "national gallery"
consisting exclusively of the works of Russian artists (qtd.
in Botkina 55).10 In 1868 the Imperial Academy
acknowledged Tret'iakov's contribution to Russian art by
awarding him the rank of honorary member (see Gol'dshtein,
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"Tret'iakov" 75) . By the mid 1870s, he was the preeminent
patron of the Wanderers. His power and influence were such
that in his memoirs Repin recalled, "The survival of an
entire Russian school [of art] rested upon Tret'iakov's
shoulders" (Dalekoe blizkoe 161) . Like the independent art
critic, the collector now was in a position to serve as
mediator between the demands of society and the intentions
of the artist, a role which led Ge to describe the
collectors in Russia as "teachers" (qtd. in Zograf, Ge 214) .
Tret'iakov was ideologically predisposed to play and
successfully fulfill this role. Looking back upon his
career in 18 93, he explained that his intention was "to make
money so that what had been accumulated by society should be
returned to society (to the people), in some sort of
beneficial institution" (qtd. in Botkina 270). This he
accomplished with the opening of the Tret'iakov Gallery in
1881 which he donated to the city of Moscow in 1892.11 At
the same time Tret'iakov remained a shrewd merchant who was
notorious for extracting what John Norman calls "concessions
in price" from the artists with whom he dealt (99) . In a
letter to Kramskoi of June 1882 Tret'iakov plainly admitted
that he intentionally "never played the role of patron of
the arts," but, rather, "always endeavored to obtain things
as cheaply as possible" (qtd. in Kramskoi, Perepiska 287).
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Tret'iakov's power during the early and mid-1870s was
magnified by the same factors which assisted the Wanderers
Association--a dearth of exhibition options, the appeal of
the collector's ideological mission as well as the limited
nature of the Russian art market which lacked an effective
dealer network or even a central auction house. Although
many artists, including members of the Wanderers
Association, deeply resented collector's demands for
concessions in price, particularly because Kramskoi, acting
as Tret'iakov's agent, was the one to impose them (Norman
144), it was flattering and, in the long run, potentially
lucrative to have one's work included in what promised to be
the authoritative collection of Russian national art. Some
painters realized or were led to believe that in assenting
to Tret'iakov's demands, they were ultimately participating
in something much bigger and more important than their
individual artistic careers--the building of national
culture.1 2
This is not to say, however, that Tret'iakov was always
successful in exacting these discounts. Increasingly in the
1880s, as his dominance waned with the expansion of the
independent collector class and as the public tastes
shifted, Tret'iakov's frugality was resisted. This is
perhaps most apparent in the career of Vasilii
Vereshchagin.13 From a wealthy family, Vereshchagin
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studied briefly at the Imperial Academy from 1860 until
1863, leaving for Paris to study under the famous history
painter and Orientalist Jean-Leon Gerome. By the late
1870s, Vereshchagin had become a success with his own kind
of Orientalist work produced during extended trips to
Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent where he documented
modern warfare.1 4 His works commanded large sums both in
Russia and in the West. He held frequent and successful
one-man shows not only in Europe, where they were the norm,
but also in Russia,15 where they were extremely rare until
the mid-1880s (Sternin, Khud. zhizn' Rossii na rubezhe XIX-
XX vekov 53) . As John Norman notes, Vereshchagin's "frame
of reference was the European not the Russian art market"
(270). Thus, highly individualistic, he was predisposed to
reject Tret'iakov's demands for concessions in price based
upon ideological appeals which centered around the building
of national culture. In 1887, for example, Vereshchagin
argued that it "cost" him "two years of labor" to produce
his painting Dressing Station (completed in 1881) which
Tret'iakov wanted "to get virtually as a gift." He scoffed
at Tret'iakov's low bids asserting "let other artists make
even more concessions, but I cannot" (Perepiska
Vereshchagina i Stasova 76) .
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The critic and the collector
Needless to say, Tret'iakov's patriotic mission nicely
complimented Stasov's critical aspirations. Stasov praised
the collector as someone solely absorbed in the idealistic
mission of building national culture, and, in an article
commemorating the Wanderers' first travelling exhibit,
proclaimed that Tret'iakov was singular in his concern for
the welfare and the "needs" of the Russian artist
("Peredvizhnaia vystavka" 334). He alone, asserted Stasov,
had done more to foster the national trend in art than any
"public institution" and had done so with extraordinary
"passion, ardor, enthusiasm" and "intelligence" (334) . All
this made the Moscow-based nationalist the "toughest enemy"
the cosmopolitan Imperial Academy had ever encountered
(333). Stasov's fawning here stands as testimony not only
to the power and influence of Tret'iakov but, also, to
Stasov's ability to ingratiate himself with those who could
further his own critical goals.
As for Tret'iakov's understanding of the "new,"
national art, it was even more vague than Stasov's.
Throughout most of the 1870s he saw the portraiture of
significant cultural figures as one of the most obvious ways
to celebrate national culture. To this end, he set out to
create a collection of portraits of notable Russian cultural
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figures including leading writers, journalists, historians,
artists and scientists. He systematically purchased or
commissioned these portraits from Ge, Perov, Kramskoi and
others. The sheer number of these works16 turned the
portrait, always popular pictorial genre, into one of the
favorite, though least innovative, manifestations of the
"new" or national trend in Russian painting during the
1870s.
Travelling salons: Artistic diversity vs. critical
uniformity
The Wanderers' first travelling exhibit, which ran for
eleven months visiting Moscow, Kiev and Khar'kov, presented
a total of forty seven works by fourteen artists and one
sculptor (qtd. in Burova, Gaponova and Rumiantseva 7) .1 7
There were twenty four landscapes, twelve portraits, seven
genre paintings, three sporting scenes and one sculpture.
None of these works stood as an example of the "new" art
understood as the "thinking genre" championed in the 1860s
by the new generation of art critics. Rather, they were
fairly typical examples of the artistic possibilities
available within the confines of traditional academic
practice. This merely reflected the fact that most of the
participants had been trained at the Academy. Moreover, it
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confirmed, contrary to Stasov's comments otherwise, that the
Association lacked a clearly defined aesthetic; that it was,
in effect, a travelling salon.
The eventual dominance of the landscape1 8 and the
portrait, which was typical of the Association's exhibits,
indicated that if it had an aesthetic program, which again
it did not, this program would have been closer to the vague
notions of Tret'iakov than to the critical assertions of
Kovalevskii, Petrov, Dmitriev and Stasov. Again, this
reflected not only the academic background of the
Association's members but also the realities of the emerging
art market. As it turned out, the provincial bourgeoisie
and nouveau riches had little use for the "thinking genre"
and its aesthetic of ugliness. They seemed to agree with
Ramazanov who argued in 1866 that the "intrusion into art of
moral slime" was something not particularly suitable for
parlor walls. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie was also
less than impressed by the vaunted history painting still
presented in great numbers at the Academy's annual
exhibitions. Thus, in the absence of new artistic
developments, the portrait and the landscape became the most
popular expressions of the "new" art as understood by the
emergent collector class.
As for Stasov, whose rhetoric remained for the most
part utterly obscure, he rarely discussed just what
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distinguished the Wanderers' works visually, that is on the
formal level. After all, form, according to Stasov, was
merely a "vessel for content." Therefore, he felt no
compelling need to address this issue. Moreover, if the
"new" art was most evident in the form of genre painting,
then it was virtually absent in the disparate works
displayed by the Wanderers.19 Thus, in his reviews, Stasov
simply praised everything and analyzed nothing. In addition
to a certain vague and congratulatory tone, Stasov's reviews
from the 1870 had four other elements in common. First, he
deemed each subsequent travelling exhibition better than the
previous one which, in his view, evidenced the progression
Russian national art was making toward perfection. Second,
Russian painters could only realize their full artistic
potential by exhibiting with the Wanderers Association.
Third, the work of any artist who broke with the Association
somehow suffered aesthetically. Finally, the Association,
despite the obvious tensions and conflicts, was a unified
group pursuing a common ideological goal.
Commemorating the first travelling exhibit in 1871, for
example, Stasov, echoing Kovalevskii, lauded the Association
as the product of new generation of "healthy and thinking"
artists ("Peredvizhnaia vystavka" 331). Putting a decidedly
idealistic spin on this development, and downplaying the
Association's pragmatic goal, Stasov argued that the
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Wanderers had decided to "leave their artistic burrows ...
plunge into the ocean of real life . . . thinking not only
about the buyers but also about the narod; not only about
rubles but also about those who will cling with their hearts
to [these artistic] creations and will start living by their
example" (329) . Stasov applauded the Wanderers for
producing works evincing "power, deep narodnost', striking
vitality" and a "complete absence of the former artistic
lies," presumably a reference to academic Neoclassicism
(336) . Invoking the Gogol analogy, Stasov proclaimed that
the new generation of artists were successful because they
"illustrated on their canvases those characters, types and
events of everyday life first observed and recreated by
Gogol" (3 32) . Extending this literary analogy even further,
Stasov continued, "true national schools of art always
follow in the steps of literature, which is the more mature
of the two and, therefore, the one which clears the path"
(337) .
Academy, "national protectionism" and the Wanderers
The appeal of the notion of a national trend in art and
the success of the Wanderers's travelling exhibits did not
go unnoticed by the Imperial Academy. This precipitated
what Soviet scholars have called the policy of "national
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protectionism" (Bespalova and Vereshchagina 90-91). In
essence, the Academy hoped to appropriate for its own the
notion of the "new, " national art which, thanks to the
efforts of Tret'iakov in the sphere of art patronage and
Stasov in that of art criticism, was becoming increasingly
identified with the works of the Wanderers. This is not to
claim, however, that this engendered any substantial review
of the Academy's pedagogy or a reconsideration of its
promotion of history painting as the pinnacle of the
Neoclassical hierarchy. In 1871, for example, the
compulsory subject for the Big Gold Medal competition was an
episode from drawn from the New Testament--The Raising of
Jairus' Daughter. Rather, the Academy's "national
protectionism," initiated under the guidance of the
Conference Secretary Petr Iseev, was essentially a three
pronged bureaucratic strategy designed to reassert control
over Russian art by modifying the rules governing
fellowships for study abroad, establishing institutional
links with the Wanderers, and pursuing efforts to keep
talented, young artists from joining the Association.
The Academy reduced the number of scholarships for
travel abroad,20 cut pensions from six to four years (RGIA,
f. 789, op. 9, ed. khr. 228) and, finally, in 1875
categorically prohibited Academy pensioners from
participating in foreign exhibitions (see note to Document
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74, Tovarishchestvo 2: 549; see also Nesterova 60). These
restrictions were designed to maintain the Academy's control
over the pensioners and reserve for itself the mission of
shaping the image of Russian national art abroad.21 Unable
to participate in Salons and other exhibitions, the
pensioners were financially beholden to the Academy while
studying in Europe.22 Through carefully selected
submissions to world's fairs and international exhibitions,
the Academy, in turn, sought to control the image of Russian
national art both abroad and at home.
These restrictions, however, had two significant
unintended consequences. First, they only increased the
appeal of the Wanderers Association. Raising funds by
selling one's work at a travelling exhibit was becoming a
rather attractive alternative to the restrictive pensions
doled out by the Academy. Second, these restrictions
strengthened the hand of critics like Stasov and collectors
like Tret'iakov because the issue of national culture was
already theirs. By attempting to isolate the pensioners,
the Academy only pushed them into the world of European art
or into its rivals' camp.
This is not to say, however, that the relationship
between the Imperial Academy and the Wanderers Association
was, as some Soviet and Western critics would have it, a
fierce struggle between ideological foes.23 While
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certainly competitive, there was hardly a definitive split
between the so-called controlled-official art of the Academy
and the free-democratic art of the Wanderers Association.
Most Association members had acquired their artistic
training at the Academy, many travelled abroad on Academy-
sponsored fellowships, and, finally, the Academy provided
the St. Petersburg venue for the first four travelling
exhibits. Association members, including some of the most
prominent critics of the Academy, accepted its professional
titles which came with attendant ranks in the civil service
and an increase in one's legal and social standing.24 Even
aesthetically, the difference between the Wanderers and the
Academy was at times difficult to make out.2S Like the
Academy's annual exhibitions, the Wanderers' travelling
shows presented an eclectic mix of artistic possibilities.
The Academy even sought to merge its exhibits with
those of the Association. In 1873 Grand Duke Vladimir
Aleksandrovich, Vice-President of the Academy, asked
Bogoliubov, Ge, Klodt and Gun, all active members of the
Association and also recipients of the title of Professor
from the Academy, to present such a proposal to the
Executive Board. After much debate, the Association turned
down this proposal in 1875 (see Documents 65, 69, 74,
Tovarishchestvo 1: 95, 1: 97-99, 1: 106-07). In a carefully
worded rejection, the Executive Board explained that, while
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their Association and the Academy both sought to further the
development of Russian art and "establish a moral connection
between artist and society," they felt that their missions
were sufficiently different that a merger would be
counterproductive (see Document 74, 1: 106).
Having failed to co-opt the Association, the Academy
responded with what Valkenier calls "economic retaliation"
(Russian Realist Art 41). Beginning in 1876, the Imperial
Academy sought to deprive the Wanderers of exhibition space
by withdrawing its venue from the St. Petersburg leg of the
fifth travelling exhibit and discouraging others from
providing alternative space (see Documents 99-100,
Tovarishchestvo 1: 127). Then, in early March, the Academy
set up its own travelling exhibit--the Society for Exhibits
of Works of Art (Obshchestvo vystavok khudozhestvennykh
proizvedenii) . It scheduled the inaugural show to coincide
with the opening of the Wanderers' fifth travelling exhibit
and mounted it in the venue denied the Association (see
Document 110, 1: 135; 2: 551-52). Later that same month,
the Academy officially prohibited its students and
instructors from participating in the Wanderers travelling
shows (see Roginskaia, Tovarishchestvo 29) .26
The Academy's economic retaliation, like its attempts
to control its students, was far from a complete success.
The Society for Exhibits of Works of Art never became a
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serious challenge to the Wanderers, folding after seven
lackluster years, and Repin, the Academy's most renowned
student, joined the Association as an active member in 1878.
The rise of the collector class, the greatly expanded role
of the independent art critic and the success of the
Wanderers' travelling exhibits insured that the Academy
could no longer serve as sole arbiter in matters of art.
The opening of Tret'iakov's Gallery in 1881 only served to
underscore this point. This is not to say that the Academy
did not remain influential. However, after the early 1880s,
it had to pursue a consistent strategy of accommodation to
remain relevant. This culminated in the 1893 reform of the
Academy which was planned and executed by an active
participation of some of the most prominent members of the
Wanderers Association.
In the meantime, Iseev and the Academy sought to
discourage the students from associating with the Wanderers
(see Bespalova and Vereshchagina 112). Competing for their
loyalty in ways both subtle and crude, the Academy could be
permissive or punitive depending upon how its actions might
be perceived by the public. For example, when II'ia Repin
and Konstantin Savitskii participated in the Wanderers'
third travelling exhibit in 1874, it punished Savitskii but
indulged Repin. Repin participated with four works, the
most notable being a portrait of Vladimir Stasov who by now
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was an open critic of the Academy. Savitskii exhibited two
works of which the most notable was Repair of the Railroad,
a painting strikingly similar in subject matter and
execution to Repin's Volga Barge Haulers which debuted at
the Academy only a few months earlier to widespread
acclaim.27 For his efforts Savitskii was banned from the
Big Gold Medal competition, effectively ending his academic
career and any chance for a pension to study abroad.
Meanwhile, Repin went off to Paris for the last three years
of a six-year pension he was awarded by the Academy in 1871.
This, however, was not the end of Savitskii's artistic
career. Tret'iakov purchased Repair of the Railroad for his
national gallery, allowing Savitskii to use these funds for
an independent trip to Paris.
Volga Barge Haulers and the critical debates over Russian
painting
One of the main reasons the Academy tolerated Repin's
participation with the Wanderers was the critical acclaim he
received for Volga Barge Haulers,28 a work which was deemed
a great success at the Academy and, later, at the
Weitausstellung in Vienna. Based upon numerous sketches and
studies made by the artist during tours along the Volga
River during the summers of 1870 and 1872, it represented a
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dramatic event in the development of Russian national school
of art. Based upon direct, intensive observation of actual
people, places and events, it combined elements of genre
painting, portrait and landscape to arrive at something
completely different.
An enormous painting, nearly three meters long and a
meter and a half high (131.5 x 281 cm), the composition is
dominated by eleven laborers tethered to a large cargo ship
seen in the background on the right-hand side of the image
(figure 6). Invoking a receding perspective evocative of
that found in Perov's genre painting Troika, Repin depicts
these men struggling forward, toward the bottom, left corner
of the picture plane through which the lead barge hauler is
within a few steps of passing into the world of the viewer,
further contributing to the sense of arduous forward motion.
There are few elements in the painting other than the
haulers, their burden and the river: two small figures can
be seen standing on the ship under tow; two vessels, one on
the far right and the other on the far left, float on or
near the horizon which bisects the painting; and an
abandoned fishing net and rock rest in the sand of the river
bank.
Repin's innovation is most evident in his treatment of
the barge haulers. His protagonists are not the "popular
types" of genre painting with its tendency to stereotype.
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Figure 6: Volga Barge Haulers (II'ia Repin)
Final version
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Rather, they are discernable individuals drawn from the
numerous studies and sketches of actual barge haulers he
made during his tours along the Volga. Thus, nearest to the
picture plane appears a man named Kanin, one of Repin's most
"beloved subjects" (Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe 261). To his
right is II'ia-the-sailor whose gaze is directed at the
viewer. Behind them struggles Lar'ka, a teen-aged youth.
What links these men to the stereotypes depicted in genre
painting is their economic situation. All wear similarly
tattered clothing and, with the exception of an ex-soldier,
the bast shoes of the peasantry. However, going beyond the
conventions of this genre, these men are bound not only to
their work by the heavy leather straps which stretch out
from the vanishing point but, also, to the landscape of the
Volga. However, despite this emphasis on actual people and
places, Volga Barge Haulers is not a depiction of objective
reality akin to a photograph. In fact, according to Vasilii
Vereshchagin who studied the same subject for an unrealized
painting, it took "two hundred to two hundred fifty" men,
not the eleven depicted by Repin, to move a boat along the
river (Perepiska Vereshchagina i Stasova 2: 271-72).
Repin's initial studies for Volga Barge Haulers, based
upon observations made along the Neva during the summer of
1870, used a compositional technique clearly grounded in
academic practice. Upon viewing some of these early
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attempts the landscapist Fedor Vasil'ev, who accompanied
Repin on his subsequent trips to the Volga, advised his
colleague not to "lose himself in the painting with too much
judgement and tendentiousness," by which he meant the
forward thrust of a large group of laborers organized into a
pyramidal shape--the sine qua non of academic composition
typical of the history painting--which distinguished these
early studies (figure 7). Instead, Vasil'ev suggested, "the
painting must be broader, simpler," and, in words
reminiscent of Dmitriev, it should depict "barge haulers as
barge haulers" (qtd. in Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe 215). "The
more simple the picture the more artistic it will be, " he
advised (215). Consequently, in the final version, Repin
pared down the number and eliminated the dramatic pyramidal
grouping of the human figures. This final composition,
Alison Hilton notes, provided "two important advantages: it
allowed Repin to present the individual figures more
clearly" and "to show the vastness of the Volga panorama"
("The Art of Repin" 37). In other words, it allowed Repin
to incorporate elements drawn from the portrait and the
landscape.
The innovations in Repin's work did not go unnoticed by
his colleagues, even though they were unable to articulate
exactly what they were. Kramskoi, for example, in 1875
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Figure 7: Volga Barge Haulers (II'ia Repin)
Early study
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noted that if "four years ago, Perov was ahead of us all."
Repin's success meant this was "no longer possible" (Pis'ma
2: 318) . Volga Barge Haulers, of course, also attracted the
attention of many critics, although none of them, as
Valkenier notes, seemed particularly interested in the
artist's technical accomplishments and pictorial innovations
("Politics" 17). Rather, critical attention focused almost
exclusively upon the painting's content, or what was vaguely
termed "truth," "beauty," "national character,"
"tendentiousness" and so forth. Everyone from the renowned
Dostoevsky to the less known critic Vasilii Avseenko felt
compelled to comment upon the painting's importance to
Russian national culture and its perceived link with Russian
literature--testimony to the success of the aesthetic
program outlined by the new generation of the independent
art critics of the 1860s.
Vladimir Stasov and the Repin-Gogol analogy
The significance of Volga Barge Haulers, needless to
say, did not go unnoticed by Stasov. Although he may have
been entirely incapable of providing a cogent definition of
Realism, he knew it when he saw it. Immediately after it
appeared in March of 1873, Stasov produced a short but
seminal review titled "Repin's Painting 'Volga Barge
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Haulers' " published in the St. Petersburg News. The
significance of this article was twofold: first, it
identified Repin as the Gogol of Russian painting, and,
second, it marked the first time the term Realist appeared
in Stasov's published criticism.
Stasov heralded Repin's work as "undoubtedly one of the
best paintings that has ever been produced in Russian art"
("Kartina Repina" 397). "With courage unheard of in
Russia," he wrote, Repin "abandoned any thought of the ideal
and plunged head first into all of the depth of national
life, national interest and the aching reality of the
nation" (397). Repin's "truthful and simple" depiction, he
added, was "the equivalent of the most profound creations of
Gogol" (398). In short, he proclaimed, "Mr. Repin is a
realist like Gogol, and like him he is profoundly national"
(3 97). Here Stasov was preparing the ground for an
important theme to be fully developed in the 1880s--the
close link between Realism and nationalism.
Expanding on this literary analogy, Stasov saw in
Repin's painting a critical element similar to that which
Chernyshevsky found in Gogol's narratives. "Just look at
the barge haulers of Mr. Repin," Stasov wrote, "and you will
immediately be forced to realize that no one else would dare
tackle a similar plot; you have not seen such a profoundly
shocking painting of Russian national life despite the fact
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that this plot and task has been in front of us and our
painters for a long time" (397-98) . Particularly
significant in this regard, according to Stasov, was the
image of Lar'ka, the teenaged boy. He is, Stasov argued,
"the center of the procession, of the painting and of the
entire composition" (399). The boy's pose and demeanor, he
concluded, are a "protest" against "the meek submission of
the mature savage-Herculeses, subdued by habit and time" who
surround him (400) .
Stasov, perhaps sensing that Repin had gone beyond the
confines of the "thinking genre," asserted, "Mr. Repin did
not create his painting in order to elicit pity or to
provoke civic sighs" (3 98). Rather, he argued, echoing
Belinsky's notion of the organic connection between artist
and nation, Repin's work sprung from a "vital need to depict
the distant, unknown life of Russia" (398) . The acclaim
awarded Volga. Barge Haulers at the Wei tausstelling in
Vienna, like that garnered by Perov's Troika in Paris,
served to validate Stasov's critical assertions. The
Europeans would finally have to acknowledge the "power" of
Russian national art, he argued (3 97) .
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Fedor Dostoevsky and the question of Russian national
super iori ty
Within days of the publication of Stasov's review,
Dostoevsky responded with "Apropos of the Exhibition" which
appeared in his politically conservative journal The
Citizen. As the use of the adverb apropos indicates,
Dostoevsky intended to discuss much more than the Academy's
annual exhibition in this long and desultory review which
was nearly four times the length of Stasov's. Dostoevsky
had two goals: first, to advance a view of Russian art
grounded in a sense of Russian moral superiority over the
West; and, second, to affirm literature's superiority within
Russian culture. To do so, Dostoevsky had to take issue
with nearly every point of Stasov's analysis. He dismissed
the Repin-Gogol analogy arguing that while the barge haulers
were "Gogolian figures" this did "not mean that Mr. Repin is
a Gogol in the sphere of art" ("Po povodu vystavki" 74).
Moreover, there was nothing particularly new in Repin's
work. "Our genre painting hasn't matured to the level of
Gogol and Dickens," Dostoevsky concluded (74) . In other
words, Russian painting still occupied a position
subordinate to Russian literature.
Dostoevsky dismissed the socially critical element
identified by Stasov as part of Repin's Realism. "As soon
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as I read in the newspapers of Mr. Repin's barge haulers, I
became scared," he wrote (74) . "Even the very plot is
horrific" conveying "a particular social thought regarding
the irredeemable debt of the upper classes to the people"
(74). This, of course, was a gross distortion of Stasov's
statements. Dostoevsky concluded, "To my surprise all my
fears turned out to be unfounded." Not a single barge
hauler "screamed to the viewer from the painting, 'Look how
unhappy I am and to what degree you, the viewer, are
indebted to the people'" (74).
In a rare moment of conciliation, Dostoevsky agreed
with Stasov that Lar'ka, the teen-aged boy, was "a wonderful
figure, almost the best of the entire painting" (74).
However, unable to concede on even this one point, he added,
"this young boy" is not the center of the work but merely an
"equal" to "the very least of the barge haulers, the
downcast peasant dragging himself alone whose face is
unseen" (74). Dostoevsky continued, "It is impossible even
to imagine thoughts of upper-class political, economic and
social indebtedness towards the narod ever entering the head
of this poor downcast peasant oppressed by a centuries-long
sorrow" (74). In a direct rebuke to Stasov, he admonished,
"Do you, our dear critic, know that it is precisely in the
humble innocence of this peasant's thoughts that your own
liberal, tendentious goals are achieved" (74). Here
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Dostoevsky was warming up to one of his favorite themes--the
value of innocent suffering. "It is impossible not to love
them, these defenseless ones," he wrote (74) . "It is
impossible not to think that one is really indebted to the
narod” who suffer the indignities of life with such aplomb,
he added (74).
All of this played off a larger theme in Dostoevsky's
conception of Russia. Russians were, he thought, endowed
with a unique capacity to transcend cultural boundaries
(69). This "special" and "extremely important gift" allowed
them to understand the essence of foreign cultures while
theirs remained a cipher to outsiders (69). "The bigger and
the more peculiar the [Russian] talent," Dostoevsky argued,
"the more it will be unrecognizable" to Europeans (69).
Thus, he opined, the Russians were destined to be "sadly
excluded from the European family of nations" (70) . From
this ooint of view, it was futile, even counterproductive to
compare Russian art to that of Europe. The innate
superiority of the former with respect to the later,
asserted Dostoevsky, meant "everything that is
characteristic, that is mainly national (and, in turn,
everything truly artistic)" is "unrecognizable to Europe"
(69). Seeking recognition as Stasov did through world fairs
and international exhibitions was a waste of time from this
perspective.
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Dostoevsky's analysis, even more so than Stasov's, was
framed in terms of content. Intent on using Repin's
painting as a foil against the liberals, Dostoevsky engaged
the debate on their terms and, in the end, missed the real
importance of Repin's work. Dostoevsky's comments, however,
are not irrelevant. They are significant precisely because
they indicate just how successful Repin was at eschewing the
tendentious excesses of the "thinking genre." No doubt, had
Volga. Barge Haulers been another typical depiction of "the
dregs of everyday life, " Dostoevsky would not have been
pleasantly surprised upon viewing it.
Vasilii Avseenko: The critique of the tendentiousness,
literature and Realism in Russian painting
Where Stasov and Dostoevsky differed over the
importance of Repin's Volga Barge Haulers for Russian
culture and its stature in the European context, the
defenders of the Neoclassical notions of ideal beauty and
high art rejected it outright. Notable here is an article
by the writer and critic Vasilii Avseenko titled "Do We Need
Literature?" published in the May 1873 issue of the Russian
Herald. Ostensibly a review of a treatise on Pushkin by
Pavel Annenkov and a series of critical essays by Aleksandr
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Pypin, Avseenko's critique took issue with the entire
content-oriented aesthetic of Belinsky and the radicals.
Invoking the sort of literary analogy favored by
Ramazanov during the 1860s and encouraged by none other than
Stasov, Avseenko saw literature contaminating all of Russian
culture with tendentiousness. A certain "confusion of
notions," he argued, alluding to the Romantic ideas of
Belinsky and Chemyshevsky, has led some to conclude that
Russian literature is an "aggregate of social ideas," an
"expression of national self-consciousness at a given point
in development" (390). This, he charged, encouraged the
assumption that the "goal of literature is to continuously
present progressive and liberal views to the public" (390).
As a result, literature becomes not only confused with "any
journalistic and newspaper rubbish" but ultimately
encourages an "anti-artistic" trend in the rest of culture
(390, 394). Echoing Ramazanov, Avseenko attempted to
explain how this contagion of tendentiousness had spread
beyond the confines of literature. Just as the literary
critic "demanded verses without poetry," so the music critic
"demanded opera without singing" and the art critic
"paintings and statues without beauty" (393) . Stasov's
review of Volga Barge Haulers, Avseenko argued, was a
"garish and convulsive" example of this "deplorable" and
"ignorant" trend in Russian criticism (395, 397).
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Turning specifically to artistic practice, Avseenko
charged that this anti-artistic trend had adversely
influenced even the most talented of Russian painters. A
"poorly understood realism," he argued, compelled them to
"run away from beauty and poetry" and "animate" their
canvases with "semi-civic motifs" (394). This was precisely
the problem with Repin's Volga Barge Haulers. It was the
direct "result of ideas" found in "the novels of sketches of
Nikolai Reshetnikov" (395). Repin's painting, he concluded,
was "nothing more than an illustration of The People of
Podlipnoe," Reshetnikov's ethnological novel notable for its
critical description of a group of poverty-stricken barge
haulers on the Kama River (395).
In opposition to this anti-artistic trend, Avseenko
offered history painting, specifically, by way of example,
Henryk Siemiradzki's Christ and the Woman Taken into
Adultery which debuted in 1873 along with Volga Barge
Haulers.29 Produced in Italy, where Siemiradzki spent most
of his career, this large history painting30 (measuring 250
x 499 cm) was based upon a poem by Aleksei Tolstoy (qtd. in
Bulgakov 2: 153). With its luminous palette, refined
brushwork and lofty theme, it was regarded as the embodiment
of the Neoclassical principles upon which the Academy was
founded. Even Stasov took note of its technical
accomplishment ("Novaia kartina Semiradskogo" 404). The
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acclaim this work received both in Russia and abroad
confirmed that Siemiradzki was one of the most talented
practitioners of the history painting in the 1870s.
Subsequently, he embarked upon a lucrative career producing
a large number of works centered primarily upon the
depiction of classical Greco-Roman and early Christian
scenes.
Ironically, even as Avseenko disparaged Repin's alleged
subordination of painting to literature, in his pursuit of
ideal beauty, he offered up an alternative which perpetuated
the same, grounded as it was in the literary-bound practice
of the Academy. Regardless, Avseenko argued that
Siemiradzki's Christ and the Woman Taken into Adultery was
"a work completely artistic, conceived of and executed
according to the laws of art" expressing "a complete
thought" and manifest of "a certain artistic ideal" (396).
Dismissing Repin's type of Realism, he added, "Here is
Realism understood in terms of the true representation of
nature, fruitfully combined with the highest goal of art:
the elevation of nature into a pearl of creation" (396).
Despite this debate over the content of Repin's
painting, its critical element, and its tendentiousness, the
artist himself was purposely "disinterested" in what he
later described in his memoirs as the "social order of the
barge haulers and their negotiations with their owners"
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(Dalekoe blizkoe 241).31 If he had been, his masterpiece
might have turned out to be another typical example of the
"thinking genre" against which Avseenko's critique, like
that voiced by Dostoevsky, might have carried some weight.
In fact, the success of Volga Barge Haulers was largely due
to Repin's conscious attempt to break with the tendentious
tradition.
Ironically, even though it came to be considered one of
the prime examples of the work of the Wanderers and of the
national trend, Volga Barge Haulers was almost exclusively a
product of the cosmopolitan Academy. It was commissioned by
Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, Vice-President of the
Academy,32 not Pavel Tret'iakov, the patron of national
art, and it debuted at an Academy exhibition, not one of the
Wanderers' travelling shows. In all fairness, however, the
aesthetic environment which encouraged Repin's work was due,
to a large degree, to the success of the Wanderers
Association whose travelling exhibits not only challenged
the preeminence of the Academy and its preference for
history painting but also underscored the inadequacies of
the "thinking genre" and the aesthetic of ugliness.
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Russian artist in the West
After the success of Volga Barge Haulers, Repin
departed for Europe and the second half of a six-year,
Academy-sponsored fellowship which he won for his treatment
of The Raising of Jaurius' Daughter in the Big Gold Medal
competition of 1871. Upon completing this quintessential
history painting, Repin asked to be reclassified as a
painter of "popular scenes" which allowed him to spend the
first three years of his fellowship touring Russia. The
result was Volga Barge Haulers. Now Repin was off to Paris,
an attractive destination for artists from all over Europe.
In Paris there was an established and extensive system of
public and private patronage; art schools, studios and
galleries were numerous; and the annual Salons, whose size,
renown and prestige were unrivaled, served as a "forum" for
the promotion of artistic careers (see Fink 113).
Paris for most of the Russians, Repin included, was a
symbol of freedom--a place where the stultifying atmosphere
of the Academy and the civic-minded demands of the liberals
and radicals were far removed.3 3 Its attraction was such
that Kramskoi advised Savitskii before his trip to Paris in
1874 to "get the hell out of Russia" in order to "inhale
deeply and live for a while like a human being" (Kramskoi,
Pis'ma 1: 278-80). Repin also recalled that Kramskoi,
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living in Paris for few months during 1876 where he worked
on his never completed history painting titled Derisive
Laughter, felt free "for the first time in his laborious and
drudging life" (Dalekoe blizkoe 183) .
However, their Romantic assumptions about the organic
link between the artist and his nation, reenforced by
critics like Stasov and collectors like Tret'iakov, made it
difficult for those Russians unwilling or unable to live the
life of an expatriate to fully enjoy the opportunities Paris
presented. Kramskoi, in a latter to Repin dated August 20,
1875, summed up this situation when he wrote, "You are
sitting at home and it is bad and all too constraining. You
wish to pull out. Then, once you have pulled out, you are
homesick and you want to go home" (Kramskoi, Pis'ma 1: 333).
Matters were further complicated not only by the speed with
which trends developed in Paris but also by the rise of
Russian Populism which saw in the peasantry an indigenous
revolutionary potential.3 4 Under the shibboleth going to
the people (khozhdenie v narod), the Populists sought to
combine nationalist sentiments with radical ideology.
Artists sympathetic to the Populist movement considered
going abroad altogether unnecessary (see Valkenier, Russian
Realist Art 55). Maksimov, for example, saw it as
positively harmful, especially for a young artist "not yet
familiar with his own homeland" (qtd. in Roginskaia,
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Tovarishchestvo 89). Instead of going to Paris, he
literally went to the people and in the Russian peasantry
attempted to find his artistic inspiration.
As for these artists who went abroad in the 1870s, the
political radicalism which inspired them at home was already
passe in Paris, having been displaced by a radical new
approach to artistic expression. The Impressionists were
challenging the basic assumptions of painterly technique
which had obtained since the time of Titian and Valazquez.
Although the Russians took note of these efforts, they
generally focused their attention on the traditional
academic art still dominant at the Salons.
As a result, many young Russian painters found it
difficult to adjust to life in Paris and harbored a
peculiarly Russian ambivalence toward Europe not unlike that
which afflicted Vasilii Perov during the 1860s. Repin,
Savitskii, Vasnetsov and, to a much lesser degree, Polenov
fell into this group. In general they maintained close and
continuous contact with Kramskoi, Stasov or Tret'iakov.
However, other artists, for example Aleksei Kharlamov and
Aleksandr Beggrov, were unburdened by this ambivalence and
gravitated toward the expatriate artistic community which
included Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgskii, Iurii Leman and Karl
Gun. One artist able to bring them together was Aleksei
Bogoliubov, a former professor of drawing at the Imperial
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Academy and a well-known figure in the artistic circles of
Paris.35 Bogoliubov served not only as the Tsar's agent
for acquisitions but also acted as the Academy's unofficial
advisor to the pensioners (see Grabar', Repin 1: 122;
Valkenier, Repin 50) . It was through Bogoliubov that the
young Russians could be introduced to Parisian artistic
circles. Through him Repin met Turgenev and, subsequently,
was introduced to the Russian author's impressive circle of
Parisian friends and acquaintances including the artists
Leon Bonnat, Alexande Cabanel, Carolus-Duran, Gustave Dore
and Mihaly Munkaczy, the novelist George Sand, the composers
Charles Gounod and Camille Saint-Saens and the art historian
Louis Viardot (see Zil'bershtein 23-26) . It was easy to see
how Paris could turn the head of a young Russian artist and
lead him away from the arduous path of Russian "Realist" and
"national" art.
The burden of being the Gogol of Russian painting
For that particular reason, Repin's activities in Paris
would be closely monitored by the Wanderers and their
supporters Tret'iakov and Stasov. They hoped to attract
him, Russia's most promising and renowned young painter,
ixiLo their orbit of influence. Needless to say, Stasov,
whose power rested upon his ability to lavish critical
206
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acclaim, took a leading role in this affair. However,
during his stay in Paris, Repin would learn how a
relationship with Stasov could be not only flattering but
also frustrating. Stasov was willing to use any means
possible to protect the young artist from what he perceived
to be the harmful influence of Europe.
Repin's initial letters to Stasov were reassuring.
From Italy he wrote that Rome was an "obsolete, dead city"
where the galleries were filled with "muck." He added, "I
feel that I am undergoing a reaction against the sympathies
of my predecessors: how they scorned Russia and loved Italy,
just so I now find Italy offensive with its sickening,
artificial beauty" (Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 1: 60).
This comment most certainly pleased Stasov whose disdain for
things Italian was well known. Echoing Stasov's Romantic
notion of the connection between artist and nation, Repin
stated, "I now respect Russia much more. I won't stay here
for long" (60). He concluded, reassuringly, "One ought to
work on native soil" (61). To the delight of Stasov, Repin
also criticized contemporary French painting upon arriving
in Paris dismissing it as "empty" and "stupid" (84) . Again,
echoing Stasov, Repin complained "there is no content at
all" (84) . "In general," he added, "I cannot view French
painting without disgust" (85).
207
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Repin seemed unaffected, even positively repulsed, by
what Tret'iakov would later call the "foreign daub"
(Kramskoi, Perepiska 152). In fact, in a tribute to
Tret'iakov, Repin stated, "There is only one thing capable
of supporting and developing art, and that is a national
museum which ought to be founded in every big city. Until
they exist there won't be true art" (Repin and Stasov,
Perepiska 1 : 85) .3 6 As late as June of 1874, Repin
appeared to be firmly under Stasov's critical sway. He
complained, reassuringly, about the lack of "content" and
the dominance of "form" in Western art. "European art," he
added, "looks like a caricature or a very weak illusion"
(100). Sounding very much like Perov in 1862, Repin
concluded, "It is terrible that I am cut off from Russian
life" (100).
Then something changed.
"How delightful Paris is now," Repin wrote in a letter
to Stasov dated September 15, 1874 (102). "There is life
everywhere, there is novelty, movement forward, effect after
effect," he enthused (102). Most disturbing to Stasov,
Repin added, "I am afraid I will get used to Paris very
much, this most marvelous city!!!" (102). In fact, Repin
was actively trying to break into the Parisian art scene.
Sometime early in 1874 he had begun work on a painting
titled Paris Cafe. Evocative of similarly themed paintings
208
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by Manet and Renoir, it was, as Valkenier notes, "a
statement of personal liberation from the Russian
preoccupation with the social or moral obligations of art"
(Repin 60) . Consultations with Kramskoi only confirmed
Stasov's worst fears. In a letter to the artist dated
October 16, 1874, Repin confessed, "I have now quite
forgotten how to reflect and pass judgement; and I do not
regret the loss of this faculty which used to eat me" (Repin
and Stasov, Perepiska. 1: 143) . He added, in a comment that
was probably aimed at Stasov and like minded critics, "May
God ... save Russian art from corrosive analysis" (143).3 7
It seemed that Russia's most promising and celebrated
young artist, the avatar of the national trend, Stasov's
Gogol of Russian painting, was slipping away, becoming a
Parisian. Thus, it was imperative to reclaim him, which
Stasov proceeded to do with the only tool available--his
pen. In 1875 he published an article titled simply "II'ia
Efimovich Repin" which appeared in the newly established
journal The Bee.3 8 At first, this piece appears to be
about Stasov's role in a dispute over the publication
earlier of a woodcut reproduction of Volga Barge Haulers.
Stasov argued that this woodcut was unworthy of a painting
which depicted a "national plot" ("Repin" 158). At the very
least, he continued, it should have been reproduced with a
"real," copper engraving (157). Moreover, since it was he
209
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who possessed the only photograph of Repin's masterpiece,
and it was he who first suggested that it be "disseminated
amongst the masses, " he should have been consulted prior to
any publication (157). Up to this point, the uninitiated
reader might think that Stasov was merely guarding the
reputation of an artist unable to speak for himself.
However, Stasov then noted that among the portraits produced
by Repin, that of himself was the "most successful" evincing
the "mighty stroke of a burning brush" (162). Finally,
using an extensive set of quotations carefully selected from
the artist's private correspondence to him, Stasov lead his
reader to conclude that not only was Repin unaffected by his
stay in Paris, but that he was positively repulsed by what
he found there.
Needless to say, when word of Stasov's article reached
Repin, the artist was outraged. Not only had Stasov
mischaracterized his positions on European art, making him
sound like a provincial boast much to his embarrassment,3 9
but he had done so using private correspondence. In a
letter dated April 1, 1875, Repin responded, "I was so angry
at you, Vasilii Vasil'evich, that I could not even write to
you until now" (Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 1: 110) .
Clearly chaffing at Stasov's bald attempt to appropriate his
career, Repin added, "Angry because your article about me
appeared to be an advertisement" (110). However,
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immediately switching to a more conciliatory tone which only
reaffirmed the success of Stasov's manipulations, Repin
added, "But that's in the past, I am already indifferent
toward this nuisance" (110).
Repin's conciliatory tone likely reflected his failure
to break into the Paris art scene.40 His Paris Cafe was
ignored at the Salon by both critics and collectors due, in
part, to poor placement.41 In 1876, cutting short his stay
abroad by nearly two years, Repin returned to Russia and
settled in his birth-place of Chuguev, avoiding as best he
could the critical debates over Russian national art. For
the next two years, he would remain equivocal in his
commitment to the Wanderers and Stasov's "new" art.
However, in another letter to the critic notable for its
obsequiousness, Repin acknowledged and reaffirmed Stasov's
influence. "I never wanted to break with you," he wrote,
"because I often need you, and finally, I love you very much
and respect you greatly (for your unselfishness, nobility
and tireless activity). I ask you to consider these words
as deeply sincere and then you will easily understand why
having returned [from Paris] not with the best works
[Repin's emphasis], I got confused and stepped back from you
into respectful distance until fate turned this around"
(140) .
211
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This indeed happened in 1878. That year Repin
proclaimed to Kramskoi, Stasov and Tret'iakov "I am yours"
(Kramskoi, Pis'ma 2: 146), and with this the most prominent
young artist of the decade, the Gogol of Russian painting,
eschewed the Academy and cast his lot with the Wanderers
Association. The sense of triumph was so strong that no one
seemed to mind that Repin had opportunistically postponed
his membership until he had completed his six-year Academy
fellowship and was certain it could not take retaliatory
measures. Commenting on Repin's participation at the sixth
travelling exhibition in 1878, where four of his paintings
were shown including The Timid Peasemt and The Archdeacon,
Stasov proclaimed, with a sense of proprietary satisfaction,
that Repin had returned to the "atmosphere native to his
talent," overcome a period of "stagnation and slumber," and
was "working with ten times his former strength"
("Peredvizhnaia vystavka 1878 g." 576).
This is not to say, however, that Stasov was always
successful in his machinations. His attempt to co-opt the
career of Mark Antokol'skii's also led to a rupture in the
relationship.42 Stasov's wheedling of the sculptor about
his supposed departure from the "realist trend" (Repin and
Stasov, Perepiska 1: 199) prompted Antokol'skii to declare
in 1876 that the critic "preached freedom" but was himself a
"tyrant" (Stasov, Antokol'skii 2 9 3) .43 Having established
212
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a career in Rome, and with no intention of returning to
Russia for health reasons, Antokol'skii could afford to
treat Stasov's meddling with contempt. For personal and
professional reasons, however, Repin's situation was much
more complicated. In fact, one of the astonishing things
about Repin's career was just how successful Stasov was at
appropriating it for his own purposes, at least until the
early 1890s.
Stasov and the "Realist" trend
Under Stasov's critical guidance the "new," national
art of the 1860s had become the Realist art of the 1870s.
Linked to Realist literature on the plane of content, this
art, like its literary counterpart, was perceived to be the
truthful depiction of Russian national life. This followed
from and was manifest of an organic connection between the
artist and the life of nation. This was essentially
Belinsky's definition of Realism transposed into the realm
of art criticism. Oriented as it was toward the Romantic
aspect of the radical ethos, Stasov's initial references to
the realist trend did not necessarily stress its critical
element. It was merely enough to represent the 'Gogolian
truth' or to depict subjects drawn from Russian national
life. The main attraction of the radical aesthetic to
213
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Stasov was its singular focus on content. For it was on
this abstract level that he could link Russian painting to
contemporary Russian Realist literature. However, because
he did so solely by illustrating through example rather by
describing through careful and systematic explication,
Stasov's critical opponents could and often did, like
Dostoevsky and Avseenko, for example, use his own rhetoric
to argue against his positions.
Petr Boborykin: Russian painting and "The Literary Trend"
In 1878, writer and journalist Petr Boborykin,
following both Dostoevsky and Avseenko, equated Stasov's
Realism with overt tendentiousness. In an essay titled "The
Literary Trend in Painting," Boborykin charged that an
emphasis on civic-minded content in Russian art had
engendered a set of "peculiarly Russian deficiencies"
including a "dull, gray color scheme," "mediocre and meager
selection of paint," "inadequately executed rendering, "
"limited phantasy" and a "lack of attention to detail" (56) .
This dismal state of affairs, he added, was encouraged by
critics like Stasov who "poorly understood the meaning of
realism" and were "ignorant of strictly painterly ideas"
(56). These critics sought to reduce painting to a mere
"illustration" or "supplement to the text," Boborykin argued
214
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(57). They were, he concluded, simply "infatuated with a
literary trend" (58). Boborykin was also dismissive of
commentators like Dostoevsky who argued "apropos of a work
of art" ignoring "how it was produced" (56; Boborykin's
emphasis). Both Stasov and Dostoevsky, he observed, only
encouraged a "crude and boastful chauvinism" which could not
but have a negative impact on Russian painting (58).
Significantly, Boborykin, unlike Avseenko, did not
offer history painting as an antidote. "We don't want the
reader to think," he wrote, "that we are attacking the
realist trend in painting or that we stand for the cold, dry
academic style" (57). "Quite to the contrary," he added,
"In each country where painting has become truly artistic,
it did so in direct connection with the life of the nation.
This is an elementary fact of art history" (57). Up to this
point there is not much disagreement between Boborykin and
Stasov. Both advocated an organic link between art and
nation. Where they differed was in their understanding of
Realism.
Both used the term Realism more as a powerful polemical
tool rather than the concept with specific descriptive
value. For Stasov Realism meant a close conceptual link
between painting and literature. For Boborykin, on the
other hand, the Realism of painting and the Realism of
literature were two entirely different things. "Realism,
215
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even the most extreme," he asserted, "is not the
predominance of literary and publicistic ideas over the
artistic essence of painting" (57) . Boborykin rejected the
conceptual link based on shared content as formulated by
Stasov. As for Boborykin's alternative, it was simply a
more perfectly executed genre painting without any traces of
the aesthetic of ugliness.
Boborykin's acerbic but rather sophisticated critique
put Stasov on the defensive prompting him to immediately
respond with a short, highly polemical yet
characteristically vague article titled "A Friend of Russian
Art. " Stasov claimed that if forced to invent its own
"plots, boundaries and goals" different from those of
literature, art would be nothing more than a "musty mould"
("Drug russkogo iskusstva" 410). He denounced critics likes
Boborykin who sought to separate Russian painting from
literature. "The painter and the writer should go hand in
hand," he argued. They should share "one single thought"
and "feel with one single heart," he added (410). Again,
Stasov's point was that the link between painting and
literature was not in concrete imitation but in shared
content. In this manner, literature led the way for
painting and, when latter matured to the level of former, it
became realistic and necessarily gained a similar cultural
status. Elevating the cultural status of painting had been
216
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the goal of Russian art critics since the late 1850s, and
with the success of the Wanderers and Repin, it was becoming
a reality. However, in that this success was built to a
great degree upon the tradition of the Imperial Academy, it
was prudent for Stasov to limit his assertions regarding the
"new," national and realist art to vague statements about
content rather than getting bogged down in the specifics of
painterly technique.
217
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Notes
1. Originally called the Association of Travelling Exhibits
(Document 1, Tovarishchestvo 1: 53).
2. Elizabeth Valkenier only alludes to this problem in her
history of Russian Realist art. Additional useful
information is provided by John Norman whose PhD
dissertation deals with Pavel Tret'iakov's relationship with
"three leading Russian Realist painters" Perov, Kramskoi and
Vereshchagin (v.) . However, the most useful source of
information which inspired this line of analysis is provided
in a two-volume collection titled Tovarishchestvo
peredvizhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystavok. 1869-1899.
Pis'ma, dokumenty (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987) . This
comprehensive collection, prepared and published by the
Tret'iakov Gallery with an introduction by S.N. Gol'dshtein,
brings together original official documents of the
Association, personal letters of its members held in various
archival repositories as well as the list of works presented
during the twenty five travelling exhibitions (1869-1899).
All 688 documents are accompanied by extensive scholarly
commentaries as well as a wealth of factual and biographical
information. The collection is also supplied by a number of
chronological charts, membership lists, the travelling
routs, financial data and statistical accounts of the
Association's viewership in the provinces.
3. After St. Petersburg and Moscow, the first exhibition in
1871 included only two provincial cities, Kiev and Khar'kov.
The eighteenth exhibition (1890/91) travelled to ten cities,
the largest number of places to be included.
4 . The non-members contributors were called eksponenty.
5. There, Ge produced a series of religious paintings such as
Christ and His Disciples Leaving for Gethsemane After the
Last Supper (1888) , What is Truth? (1890) , Judas (1891) ,
Golgotha (1892) and Crucifiction (1892 and 1894) .
218
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6. Among the first twenty travelling exhibitions, the shortest
one was the eighth which lasted nine months. It opened in
St. Petersburg on March 6, 1880 and closed in Kiev on
December 31 in that same year. The longest one was the
second exhibition. It lasted twenty three months, from
December 26, 1872, until it closed in Kiev, on January 6,
1874.
7. On the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, which was
established in 1820, see N.P. Sobko, Kratkii istoricheskii
ocherk Imperatorskogo Obshchestva pooshchreniia khudozhestv,
1820-1890 (St. Petersburg: V.I. Shtein, 1890); S.N.
Kondakov, Iubileinyi spravochnik Imperatorskoi Akademii
Khudozhestv, 1864-1914 (St. Petersburg: R. Golike & A.
Vil'borg, 1914-1915, especially pp. 263-64) .
8. Information on Tret'iakov is provided in A.P. Botkina, Pavel
Mikhailovich Tret'iakov v zhizni i iskusstve (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1960); John Norman, "Pavel Tret'iakov (1832-98):
Merchant patronage and the Russian Realist" (PhD
dissertation, Indiana University, 1989) .
9. The year 1856 is usually considered the beginning of
Tret'iakov's collecting activity. In that year he acquired
his first Russian genre paintings--Shi1'der's Temptation and
Khudiakov's Finnish Smugglers (see Gol'dshtein, "Tret'iakov"
66) .
10. Tret'iakov's will is reproduced in Gosudarstvennaia
Tret'iakovskaia galereia. Ocherki istorii, 1856-1917. Ed.
Ia.V. Bruk. (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1981. 301-03).
11. At that point the collection had 1,362 oil paintings, 526
sketches and studies and 14 pieces of sculpture. Following
the transfer of Tret'iakov's collection to the city of
Moscow in 1892, the Academy awarded him title of full member
(qtd. in Kondakov 2: 323) .
12. In January of 1873, Miasoedov expressed his willingness to
make "every possible concession in price" for his painting
Zemstvo at Lunch. Miasoedov lowered the price from 1,200 he
asked from the Academy to 1,000 rubles arguing that it was
"more gratifying" to have his work displayed in Tret'iakov's
collection rather than at the Academy (qtd. in Ogolovets
58) .
13. Information on Vereshchagin is provided in A.K. Lebedev,
Vasilii Vasil'evich Vereshchagin. Zhizn' i tvorchestvo
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972); Norman, especially pp. 224-306;
219
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Vahan D. Barooshian, V.V. Vereshchagin. Artist at War
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).
14. In 1867, while still in his twenties, Vereshchagin
accompanied the military campaign of General Konstantin P.
Kaufman to Turkestan where he participated in the defence of
the Russian fortress at Samarkand. Ten years later he
served as an official observer in the Russo-Turkish War.
15. In 1874, Vereshchagin held one-man exhibition in St.
Petersburg which displayed works from his Turkestan series.
The Turkestan collection was, according to Norman, "the
largest single purchase Tret'iakov ever made" (287) and as
such had "a decisive effect on the reputation of both artist
and patron" (239). It established Vereshchagin as "a major
force in Russian art" while at the same time it allowed
Tret'iakov to emerge "as the unquestioned dean of private
collectors of Russian art," attaining the "recognition from
the intelligentsia" (239-40).
16. The following is a short list of portraits of Russian
writers commissioned by Tret'iakov during the 1870s. From
Perov, he commissioned portraits of Pisemskii (1869),
Ostrovskii (1871), Dostoevsky (1872), Maikov (1872), Pogodin
(1872), Dal' (1872). In 1872 Tret'iakov bought Perov's
portrait of Turgenev. From Kramskoi, he commissioned
portraits of Shevchenko (1871), Tolstoy (1873), Griboedov
(1873), Goncharov (1874), Polonskii (1875), Mel'nikov
(1876), Grigorovich (1876), Nekrasov (1877), Samarin (1878),
Aksakov (1879) and Saltykov-Shchedrin (1879). From Ge,
Tret'iakov bought portrait of Herzen (produced in 1867,
acquired in 1878), Turgenev (1871), Saltykov-Shchedrin
(1872), Nekrasov (1872) and Potekhin (produced in 1876,
acquired in 1878) .
17. In the Moscow leg of the exhibition, twenty artists showed
eighty two works. In his review of the six travelling
exhibit in 1878, Stasov claimed that the Wanderers'
inaugural exhibition attracted 30,527 visitors, of which
8,527 were in the provinces bringing the total profit of
2,291 rubles ("Peredvizhnaia vystavka" 584).
18. This situation left some liberals disconcerted. The journal
Cause wrote disapprovingly of Aleksei Savrasov's The Rooks
Have Come, which debuted at the first travelling exhibit in
1871, stating that "in general, we do not very much like
artists who have chosen the landscape for their exclusive
and only specialty." While the "landscape is necessary to
the artist as background, as a decoration," the critic
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added, the "one-sidedness" of Savrasov's approach produced a
work that was "pointless" (qtd. in Valkenier, Russian
Realist Art 77).
19. For example, in the third travelling exhibit, which opened
in St. Petersburg in January of 1874 and visited seven
provincial cities before it closed in Riga in May of 1875,
of the sixty eight works presented nearly half--thirty
three--were landscapes.
20. While the total number of artists travelling abroad
decreased during the 1870s, reflecting changes in academic
policies, the number of students travelling to Paris
unsponsored increased. Among them were Savitskii, Aleksandr
Beggrov, Ivan Pokhitonov and Viktor Vasnetsov (see Nesterova
59) .
21. According to Polenov, the Academy's resolution which
prohibited the students from participating at the Salons
deprived them of the opportunity to test their talents and
potential in the competitive art world of Paris. In his
protest letter to the resolution addressed to Iseev, Polenov
charged that the principle of comparison was one of the main
avenues of artistic development and improvement. The
Academy's "cruel rule," he argued, completely paralyzed his
generation (Polenov Khronika 157-58).
22. This is not to say, however, that the students strictly
followed these rules. Repin, for example, submitted his
Paris Cafe to the Salon of 1875 contrary to the Academy's
regulations (see his letter to Stasov of April 1, 1875 in
Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 1: 111). In his letter to
Iseev, Repin asked the Conference Secretary not to tell
anyone that, despite the Academy's prohibition he and other
pensioners participated in the Salon of 1876 (qtd. in Novoe
o Repine 86) . Although he disagreed with the Academy's
policy, Repin, unlike Polenov, made no effort to directly
oppose the authority, only to circumvent it.
23. Moleva and Beliutin, for example, claimed that the
Wanderers, or as they called them, the "representatives of
ideological realism," were engaged in a "fierce struggle"
against the Academy (10) . Similarly, N.A. Dmitrieva claimed
that Academic art was the "enemy" of the Wanderers (19) .
24. Ge, for example, was granted the title of Professor in 1863
and became a member of the Academy Council in 1872.
Shishkin accepted the title of Professor in 1873. Kramskoi,
who denounced the Imperial Academy as the "main source of
221
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25 .
26 .
27.
evil" in Russian art (Kramskoi, Pis'ma 2: 414), accepted the
title of Academician in 1869. Later, in 1872, perhaps to
atone for this lapse, he refused the title of Professor.
Kramskoi, for example, spent much of his career obsessed
with his never completed history painting Derisive Laughter,
subtitled Rejoice, King of the Jews!. From its Biblical
theme to its composition and technique, this work is a
perfect example of the artistic practice of the Academy.
However, unaccustomed to such complicated composition,
Kramskoi was forced to make some one hundred fifty small-
scaled, three-dimensional clay models which he then re
arranged in actual space. In addition, he also made a
sculpture of Christ' head as well as a series of costumes
and armor (see Gol'dshtein, Kramskoi 108-09).
This action did not affect artists like Bogoliubov, Ge, Gun,
Klodt and Kramskoi who held titles from but not staff
positions at the Imperial Academy.
Savitskii, following Repin's example, based this painting on
direct, intense observation of actual people, places and
events. Invited by Kramskoi to spend the summer of 1873 at
his dacha near Tula, Savitskii recorded the labor of the
peasants recruited to work on the railroad nearby (see
Leonov 318) . The similarity between this work and Repin's
Volga Barge Haulers was so striking that it prompted the
editor and critic Aleksandr Suvorin, who no doubt thought
the comparison damning, to complain that Savitskii's work
too closely resembled Repin's (see Repin's letter to
Kramskoi, February 17, 1874). Savitskii went on to produce
similar works including his celebrated Meeting the Icon
which debuted at the sixth travelling exhibit in 1878. This
large work (measuring 141 x 228 cm) , also based on direct
observation, depicts a group of villagers worshiping an icon
of the Virgin Mary. To become fully familiar with this
subject, Savitskii travelled to the distant villages of the
Dinaburgskii region in Belarus where such ceremonies took
place (see Leonov 319, 325). In an interesting turn of
events, Repin produced a similarly themed work in 1883 under
the title Religious Procession in Kursk Province. Repin and
Savitskii actually became interested simultaneously and
independently in producing works depicting provincial
religious celebrations. Repin abandoned this subject when
Savitskii produced his work first. However, he returned to
it at the insistence of Kramskoi and the result was his
famous Religious Procession in Kursk Province.
222
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28. Preliminary version of Volga Barge Haulers was displayed in
1871 at the annual competition held by the Society for the
Encouragement of Artists where it won the first prize.
29. Reproductions of some of Siemiradzki's works are provided in
Kartiny G.I. Semiradskago. Fototipicheskoe izdanie (St.
Petersburg: Tip. A.A. Suvorina, 1890) and in Henryk
Siemiradzki, 1843-1902: obrazy i rysunki ze zbirow polskich
(Lodz: Museum Sztuki, 1968).
30. Vasilii Polenov produced a similarly themed painting in 1887
which the Soviet art historian Liaskovskaia linked to the
academic tradition (Liaskovskaia, "Tvorcheskii metod" 63).
31. This statement is, Alison Hilton points out, from Repin's
later account of the genesis and progress of Volga Barge
Haulers whose "highly impressionistic, conversational and
perhaps partially fictionalized" nature "supplements the
rather meager references to it in his letters" ("The Art of
Repin" 34-35) .
32. Alison Hilton remarks that Grand Duke "apparently saw no
irony in having it hung in his billiard room" ("The Art of
Repin" 41).
33. In his letter of December 1873 to the Conference Secretary
of the Academy Iseev, Polenov, apologizing for being taken
by a newly discovered sense of freedom, wrote "Having found
myself free, I misbehaved, like a prodigal son." He
continued with a rhetorical question "What is one supposed
to do?" adding that is "terribly good to live in freedom"
(Polenov, Khronika 107).
34. On Populism, see Richard Wortman, The Crisis of Russian
Populism (Cambridge: University Press, 1967).
35. In his memoirs, for example, Vasilii Mate wrote that "all
Paris knew Bogoliubov" (Mate, "Bogoliubov v Parizhe," RM, f.
14, ed. khr. 78, 1. 3 [8]). A detailed information on the
artist's biography is provided in N.V. Ogareva, Letopis'
zhizni i tvorchestva khudozhnika A.P. Bogoliubova (Saratov:
Izd. Saratovskogo Universiteta, 1988).
36. Repin's comment coincided with the completion of a new wing
of Tret'iakov's house which was intended to provide a much
needed exhibition space for a growing collection (see
Gol'dshtein, "Tret'iakov" 78, 332).
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38 .
39 .
40 .
41.
42 .
43 .
This comment echoed an earlier statement Repin made while
vacationing in the village of Veules on the Normandy coast.
From there he wrote to Stasov that the "one single
misfortune" shared by the Russians was their preoccupation
with civic demands (Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 1: 100) .
Information about the journal The Bee is found in Kaufman,
Ocherki is torii russkoi khudozhestvennoi kritiki. Ot
Konstantina Batiushkova do Aleksandra Benua (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1990, especially pp. 187-208).
In his letter to Stasov dated April 15, 1875 Turgenev wrote
angrily from Paris that "even without this article" Repin
would "not get along here: it is time for him to go under
your wing--or, better yet, to Moscow. There is his real
soil and environment" (Sobranie kriticheskikh materialov
328) .
Repin speculated that to survive in Paris one "has to have a
name" (Repin and Staov, Perepiska 1: 155) . This, he
believed, was the reason why and how Aleksei Kharlamov's
portrait of Madame Viardot, also displayed at the Salon
together with his Paris Cafe but on a more prominent place
in the exhibition hall, received positive press. Perhaps
because of Kharlamov's connections in the artistic world of
Paris and Turgenev's obvious preference for him, Repin was
somewhat scornful of the achievement of the Russian
expatriate. In a letter to Kramskoi he claimed that
Kharlamov "painted practically like the French and even draw
badly" (Kramskoi, Pis'ma i stat'i 1: 89).
Repin's painting was listed in the official catalog of the
Salon as Un cafe du boulevard (see entry no. 1711 of
Explication des ouvrages de peiture et dessigns, sculpture,
architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants,
Paris: [n.p.j, 1875). The painting was placed high on the
wall and was not properly lid (see Repin's letter to Stasov
of May 6, 1875 in Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 1: 111-12) .
Yet, it was none other than Stasov who "arranged the
funeral," after the sculptor's death in 1902, "wrote an
obituary, organized a commemorative meeting, and published
Antokolsky's correspondence and articles" (Olkhovsky 119).
Some aspects of Stasov's relationship with Antokol'skii are
illuminated in A. Lebedev and G. Burova, Tvorcheskoe
sodruzhestvo. M.M. Antokol'skii i V.V. Stasov (Leningrad:
Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1968).
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Chapter Four
1879-1893: Realism, nationalism and the Wanderers
Under Stasov's critical guidance, the "new" art of the
1860s, synonymous with the "thinking genre," became the
"national trend" which, by the mid-1870s, had become
"Realism." Each step in this progression marked even
further increase in conceptual vagueness. Eventually, the
terms "new," "national" and "Realist" were used
indiscriminately to describe the works of the Wanderers,
conveying the erroneous impression that in them was manifest
a unified aesthetic. Behind this ideological construct,
advanced by Stasov and, for the most part, left unchallenged
during most of the 1880s by his critical opponents such as
Aleksei Suvorin, Andrei Somov, Vladimir Chuiko and Alexander
D'iakov, the reality of the Russian art world and the place
of the Wanderers Association in it was much more
complicated. By the early 1880s, it was clearly evident
that the art presented at the travelling exhibitions could
not be reduced to a single aesthetic formula. Additionally,
throughout this and the following decade, the Tsar Alexander
III pursued an aggressive nationalistic agenda which
promoted Russian art sui generis through lavish and frequent
official commissions, a policy which, in effect, ended the
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"official hostility toward the [Wanderers] Association"
(Valkenier, Russian Realist Art 125) . This government-
sponsored nationalistic agenda culminated in the opening of
the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III in 1898.
Stasov, on his part, redoubled his own efforts to link the
Wanderers Association with his notions of Realist and
national art. By selectively choosing pictorial examples,
he attempted to construct a history, in the sense used by
Belinsky, of what he deemed to be Russian Realism--a body of
organically interrelated works suffused with narodnost' and
"serious content." This culminated in the book length
treatise "Twenty Five Years of Russian Art" published in
installments in 1882 and 1883. This endeavor marked
Stasov's first attempt to systematize, as much as he could,
his ideological and aesthetic positions. It also epitomized
the best and the worst about his role as the bibliographer
of Russian art. The vital link between painting and
literature upon which he based his critical assertions in
this treatise would be rejected in 1894 by none other than
Repin, Stasov's Gogol of Russian painting. In the end,
Stasov's attempts to co-opt the Wanderers Association led
many artists, most notably Repin, to agree with Antokol'skii
that in preaching freedom, the critic had become a tyrant.
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Wanderers, "common cause" and the "alien element"
Diversification of the art market, expansion of the
collector class and, most importantly, exposure to Western
artistic trends wrought changes in the Russian art world
deemed problematic by those preoccupied with the development
of a national school. The Wanderers Association, they
argued, must be the bulwark against alien and harmful
influences. Tret'iakov, in a letter to Executive Board
member Ivan Kramskoi, written five days after the opening of
the seventh travelling exhibit in February of 1879, bitterly
complained, "Why does the Association need so much of the
alien element ... Why do you need foreigners, or Litovchenko
or Makovskii ... " (Kramskoi, Perepiska 246) . The
"foreigners" were expatriates Aleksei Kharlamov and Iurii
Leman who lived in Paris and were participating for the
first time in a travelling exhibition; Leman with a
historical portrait titled Lady in the Costume of the Period
of the Directory and Kharlamov with a work titled The
Italian Children.1 Kharlamov's painting, a rather
innocuous depiction of two youths playing near a brass wash
basin, was problematic precisely because, as the title
clearly indicated, the artist was utterly disinterested in
depicting scenes drawn from Russian national life. As for
Litovchenko and Konstantin Makovskii, the former was deemed
227
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too closely associated with the Academy and the latter
ideologically unreliable.
Konstantin Makovskii, after being expelled in 1872, had
only been re-admitted to the Association as a full member in
1879. His submission to the seventh travelling exhibition
was a work titled Water Nymphs (figure 8) . This monumental
painting, over two and a half meters high and nearly three
and a half meters long (261.5 x 347 cm), was essentially a
reworking of Kramskoi's May Night which was exhibited at the
first travelling exhibition in 1871. The inspiration for
Kramskoi's painting was an eponymous short story by Gogol
wherein a peasant boy named Levko dreams of the mythical
rusalki or water nymphs of Russian folklore. Makovskii's
work is strikingly similar both in composition and theme to
Kramskoi's. There is, however, one notable difference.
Where Kramskoi's rusalki are contemplative and nearly all
fully clothed, Makovskii's are ecstatic and nearly all
completely naked. Never before had a work depicting a nude
female figure, much less fifteen of them, been included in a
travelling exhibit.2 In a letter to Vasilii Vereshchagin,
Stasov remarked, "What a painting, it is all naked women--
some kind of French women, they are all pretty awful"
(Perepiska Vereshchagina i Stasova 2: 30-31). Tret'iakov
apparently concurred, even though the similarly themed May
Night, for which he paid three thousand rubles, a huge sum
228
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Figure 8: Water Nymphs (Konstantin Makovskii)
229
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considering that in 1867 he paid only eight hundred fifty
rubles for Perov's Troika., was one of his favorite
paintings.
Tret'iakov's concerns, however, did not carry the
weight they would have only a few years earlier. The
expansion of the art market, due in great measure to the
success of the travelling exhibits, had given rise to a new
kind of patron who increasingly challenged his position of
authority. The dictates of the market, rather than those of
one man or institution, were beginning to shape Russian art.
None of this was lost on the Wanderers Association which, in
addition to re-admitting Konstantin Makovskii in 1879,
accepted Leman and Kharlamov as active members in 1881, even
though they continued to reside primarily in Paris. As
Kramskoi remarked in a letter to Tret'iakov dated March 1,
1879, it was better to have the "alien" element, which he
distinguished from the "real" defenders of the Wanderers,
allied with the Association than pitted against it
(Kramskoi, Perepiska 248). The participation of artists
like Leman, Kharlamov and Konstantin Makovskii in the
travelling exhibits, he explained, was useful because it
"made a very strong impression upon those powerful people
like Iseev and the Grand Duke" who were allied against the
Association (248). This is not to say, however, that
Kramskoi did not harbor misgivings about the foreign
230
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influence. In a letter to Repin he dismissed Kharlamov's
The Italian Children as "well executed, beautiful" but
utterly "stupid" (Kramskoi, Pis'ma i stat'i 2: 173).
Not all of the Wanderers were as sanguine as Kramskoi
about these developments. There were those who shared
Tret'iakov's misgivings, although for completely different
reasons. For example, even as Kramskoi defended his re
admission, Vasilii Polenov warned that Konstantin Makovskii
could prove to be "great burden" to the Association because
his "incredible productivity" would monopolize sources of
patronage (Document 173, Tovarishchestvo 1: 188). Polenov,
like Perov earlier, was concerned that the Association was
sacrificing its practical mission--improving the financial
standing of its membership--to an ideological imperative, in
this case the myth of institutional solidarity.
The Executive Board's response to this and other
concerns was twofold. First, in March of 1878 it
discontinued the practice of sharing dividends from entrance
fees with contributors (see Document 131, 1: 158). Second,
a year later, it tightened the rules for membership. No
longer would artists be allowed to petition to join.
Rather, membership would be by invitation only in order "to
guarantee that the Association will be protected from the
intrusion of those individuals who are useless to the common
cause" (Document 176, 1: 189). The effect of these changes
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was dramatic. No new active members were admitted to the
Association in 1880, 1882, 1885, 1887, 1889 and 1890.
During the entire decade of the 1880s only eight painters
were invited to join: Nikolai Nevrev, Vasilii Surikov, Leman
and Kharlamov in 1881; Nikolai Kuznetsov in 1883; Nikolai
Bodarevskii in 1884; Nikolai Dubovskii in 1886; and
Apollinarii Vasnetsov in 1888. Contrary to the myth of
aesthetic unity advanced by Stasov, this group represented
an eclectic mix including practitioners of everything from
the "thinking genre" to what many dismissed as empty, Salon
like painting.
Stasov, the "alien element" and organic "national
protectionism"
Although willing to express his reservations about the
"alien element" in private,3 in his public pronouncements
Stasov was intent on celebrating the success of the
Association and advancing the myth of institutional
solidarity. In an article titled "Artistic Exhibitions of
1879," Stasov enthused, "At this marvelous, great Wanderers'
exhibition full of talent, all 'comrades' are united, even
those who were once doubtful and ran into the foreign camp,
but who now see success, and have returned one by one"
("Khudozhestvennye vystavki 1879 g." 699). Although
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Makovskii's rusalki were "not Russians" but, rather, some
kind of "extraordinary mythological beings existing outside
reason, time and place," this work, Stasov concluded, was
not without its charm offering "beautiful and vibrant"
execution (707) . "After all, " Stasov remarked, "there is a
certain fantastic presence in the painting and even a whole
rather poetic aspect in the very middle where a moon beam
shines on the water and a red-haired, beautiful, water nymph
sways in a wave sculptured as if from ivory" (707) . Stasov
gently advised that the only flaw was Makovskii's rather
tenuous grasp of narodnost'. "Some, perhaps, are telling
the truth, " he wrote, "when they argue that had Makovskii
lived not in Russia but in Italy and not now but 200 to 3 00
years ago he would have been one of the first and the most
talented of artists" (707) . "He would distinguish himself
there as few could in allegorical, mythological and other
compositions, " he added (707) . Underscoring the positive,
Stasov concluded, "[R]eality is not in his nature, he always
seeks in the ardor and the energy of his talent to add
something, to beautify, to expand" (707).
As for the "foreigners," Stasov praised Leman's Lady in
the Costume of the Period of the Directory for its "elegant
French technique" (707). "This portrait," he wrote,
"exceeds all the others in the graciousness of its pose"
with its "excellent, very elegant (and, by the way, without
233
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anything saccharine or exaggerated) treatment of the face,
neck, breast, exposed arms, pink fabric of the dress and old
fashioned hat with a curved brim" (707) . Striking a
conciliatory tone designed to advance the myth of unity,
Stasov added, "One must note that all of the members of the
Wanderers Association are sincerely happy for this sudden,
completely unexpected and unanticipated success of a
colleague" (707).
Stasov did not view, at least not publicly, the alien
element as an inherent threat to the Association or the
national trend in art. Secure in his Romantic belief that
so long as the organic connection between the artist and
nation persisted, Russian art would remain national and
Realist, he focussed his attention instead on admonishing
those who turned their back on their homeland. After all,
had he not reclaimed Repin for Russian national art. For
Stasov, the major problem was not so much with things
foreign but with becoming a foreigner, that is with loosing
the organic connection with one's nation. He even coined a
series of terms to describe this phenomenon -- ob "evropeit' si a
(to become European) , ofrantsuzit'sia (to become French) ,
ob"ital'ianit'sia (to become Italian) .
By way of example, in an 1878 review of the Exposition
Universelle in Paris, Stasov complained that Antokol'skii,
living in Italy and with no intention of returning home, was
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essentially no longer a Russian but, rather, a
"cosmopolitan" who had abandoned his homeland ("Nashi itogi
na vsemirnoi vystavke" 660) . "In my view," Stasov wrote,
"Italy did not help but rather hurt" Antokol'skii (660) .
"Moreover, " he added, "it made him a European, but, what is
far worse, it turned him into an Italian." As a result,
Antokol'skii was no longer in tune with the "true drama"
found only at home in Russia (660) . Stasov's reasoning here
seemed to be that the power of the organic link was such
that it could bring the Russian artist closer to his
homeland or, if he strayed abroad too long, absorb him into
another culture. In the original Russian this is conveyed
on the level of grammar by the noun Italy literally turning
the artist into a European and an Italian (Italiia ego
ob"evropeila ... ona ego ob"ital'ianila, 660).
Similarly, Stasov insisted that the works produced by
Vasilii Polenov during his Academy-sponsored fellowship in
Paris from 1873 to 1876, though "graceful and elegant," were
suffused with "Frenchness" (fantsuzistost') (Polenov,
Khronika 229). In this case, Stasov argued that Polenov's
"character" was not Russian and that he would be better off
living permanently abroad in France or Germany (229) .
Challenging Stasov's logic, Polenov asked, "If in France I
underwent Frenchification (ofrantsuzhenie) , why in Russia
could I not undergo Russification (obrusenie) ?" (232) . To
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this Stasov responded, "I would never dare insist that a
certain artist live abroad forever, while another live
solely in Russia" (232) . However, he added, "Since the time
of Belinsky I have seen a fair number of examples when a
talented artist became weaker and even completely wasted
because he tried by force to get closer to something utterly
unfamiliar to him" (233). Here Stasov seemed to indicate
that the link between artist and nation was supra-personal,
beyond the control of the individual artist. This is not to
say, however, that he believed this link was beyond the
control of the art critic. After all, the critic's role was
to constantly remind the artist of its importance. Thus, at
least up until 1882, Stasov felt no compelling need to
defend Russian art against the intrusion or the threat of
foreign or alien influences. The inevitable course of
cultural and historical development would somehow insure the
vitality of the national trend in Russian art.
Russian art market: Diversification and its effects
Stasov's notion of a national art in which all
"comrades were united" was increasingly challenged by the
reality of the Russian art market. With the success of the
Wanderers travelling exhibitions and the emergence of a new
class of collectors, the market began to expand and
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diversify quickly during the late 1870s and throughout the
1880s. No longer was Tret'iakov the preeminent patron of
the Wanderers. His economic and aesthetic influence waned
as collectors like the sugar magnates and industrialists
Nikolai and Ivan Tereshchenko in Kiev,4 the industrialist
Sawa Mamontov5 and banker Ivan Tsvetkov in Moscow, and
Princess Tenisheva near Smolensk6 moved into the market.
The immediate sale of Kharlamov's The Italian Children to
Madame Voeikova was a clear sign that there was a market for
art with no civic-minded or national pretensions. Even the
Tsar, traditionally the preeminent patron of the Academy,
started to purchase works in earnest from the Wanderers,
instructing Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich to acquire
Makovskii's Water Nymphs for inclusion in the Hermitage. At
the sixteenth travelling exhibition in 1888, for example,
Tret'iakov bought ten works, Alexander III only five. The
following year, this ration changed drastically with
Tret'iakov purchasing only two painting from the Wanderers
while the Tsar took twenty seven for his collection (see
Valkenier, Russian Realist Art 211) .
With the opening of his gallery in 1881, Tret'iakov's
goal of creating a "beneficial institution" through which
the Russian people could acquaint themselves with the "new,"
national art had reached fruition. During the course of the
1880s his civic-minded ambitions were eclipsed by the
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individual interests of a more self-absorbed and less frugal
patron class. This new class of collector was interested in
securing private collections for personal enrichment, not
creating beneficial public institutions. Consequently, and
increasingly throughout the 1880s, issues of personal taste
and status superseded those of the civic-minded imperatives
which Tret'iakov had encouraged with a great success during
the 1870s. This trend engendered what Valkenier has termed
the "embourgeoisment1 1 of the Wanderers as active members and
contributors themselves sought to adopt the life style and
values of their new patrons (Russian Realist Art 120) .
The impact of this was initially most evident in
portraiture. During the 1870s, as previously mentioned,
Tret'iakov's commissions encouraged the Wanderers to produce
portraits of prominent Russian cultural figures for
inclusion in his national gallery. In these portraits the
liberally-minded critics, most notably Stasov, found a
worthy example of the organic connection between art, nation
and era. However, during the 1880s, responding to the
demands of their new patrons--the nouveau riche, the
nobility and the Imperial family--the Wanderers increasingly
produced portraits of persons notable only for their wealth
and official sinecure (see Fedorov-Davydov, "U istokov"
120) . For example, Nikolai Bodarevskii, who as a
contributor participated in the eighth travelling exhibition
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with a painting titled Amazonian Women, became a successful
portraitist of prominent and wealthy individuals.7 His
kind of art, proponents of Stasov's views within the
Association charged, was tainted by a foreign, Salon-like
quality. Active member Iakov Minchenkov recalled that the
more ideologically orthodox members of the Association
perceived Bodarevskii, along with Kharlamov and Konstantin
Makovskii, as a "heavy cross" to be bore by the Wanderers
(78-79) .8 With the number of such Salon-like paintings
increasing as the 1880s progressed, the art of the
Wanderers, it seemed, was reverting back to what Dmitriev
had dismissed in 1863 as mere entertainment for rich people,
that is art which was devoid of "content" and "any life-
educating element."
Even Kramskoi, whose supposed sympathies with the
liberal cause or his promotion of the civic-minded art would
be praised by Stasov after the painter's death and later
integrated into the official histories of the era by the
Soviet and post-Soviet Russian critics who often referred to
him as the "ideological inspirer of the Wanderers" (Kaufman
14), was not immune to this trend toward "embourgeoisment."
In the early 1880s, in an effort to prop up his own
increasingly affluent life style, Kramskoi sought patronage
from the wealthy elite. Of the six portraits he submitted
to the ninth travelling exhibition in 1881, all but two were
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of wealthy and titled patrons (see Document 231,
Tovarishchestvo 1: 218-28). Kramskoi's departure from the
ideological, civic-minded mission of the Wanderers led
Miasoedov to complain in 1887 that his "real place was in
the Academy" where he could indulge in his penchant for
"beautiful portraits" and "marvelous icons" (qtd. in Savinov
46) . This was a rather ironic charge leveled, as it was, at
someone who only a few years earlier had himself criticized
Kharlamov's The Italian Children for being "well executed,
beautiful" but utterly "stupid."
In light of the dramatic changes taking place among the
Wanderers' patronage, Polenov's warning about Konstantin
Makovskii turned out to be prescient. After shoring up his
list of patrons through exposure at the Wanderers travelling
exhibits, Makovskii left the Association for a second time
in 1884 refusing to submit a work titled Boyar Wedding Feast
to the eleventh travelling exhibition. Instead, he
presented it at a competing, one-man show organized in
contravention to the Association's exclusive exhibiting
rules. This underscored how dramatically different the
situation was for the Association by the mid-1880s. The
success of the Wanderers' pragmatic mission now challenged
the viability of the Association itself. Its commercial
restrictions and ideological imperatives were becoming
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increasingly irrelevant. Ge's warning about the hydra of
money destroying the Association seemed to be coming true.
Makovskii's example only underscored the seriousness of
the situation. His career, just as it had after he quit the
St. Petersburg Artel of Artists in 1864, actually took off
after he left the Wanderers in 1884. He maintained studios
in St. Petersburg and in Paris, received substantial
commissions from American and English collectors, and his
Boyar Wedding Feast was deemed a success at exhibitions in
St. Petersburg, Moscow, Paris and Antwerp,9 becoming widely
popular among the Russian bourgeoisie through a lithographic
rendering which appeared in the journal Cornfield (see
Leonov 178, 181) . Celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of
his career in 1910, Makovskii reminisced that his studio in
St. Petersburg attracted anyone "prominent and brilliant."
"Immense" financial success, he concluded, allowed him to
live in "royal luxury" (qtd. in Leonov 181) .
Stasov, who by the mid-1880s was keenly aware of the
forces pulling the Association apart, responded to
Makovskii's departure with angry denunciation. If in the
name of unity he found something positive to say about
Makovskii's Water Nymphs in 1879, he was clearly under no
such obligation in 1884. He dismissed Boyar Wedding Feast
as "insignificant, empty, completely superficial and
deceitfully brilliant" ("Nashi khudozhestvennye dela"
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738) .10 Later, in 1892 and again 1894, he argued that
Makovskii had been in decline ever since leaving the
Wanderers--a charge now leveled at anyone who left the
Association, including Perov ("Na vystavkakh" 264; "Khorosha
li rozn' " 410; "Dvadsatiletie peredvizhnikov" 281) . In
Stasov's mind the link between artist and narodnost' was now
mediated through membership in the Wanderers Association.
Orientalism as an alternative tradition
The presence of Orientalism at the Wanderers'
travelling exhibitions during the 1880s stood in glaring
contradiction to the myth of aesthetic unity propounded by
Stasov and was indicative of the heterogenous influence of
the market on Russian art. The patron class of the 1880s
was even less inclined to embrace civic-minded art than that
of the 1870s which rejected the "thinking genre." The new
patron class expected something more than endless depictions
of typical Russian scenes, landscapes and portraits of
important cultural figures. They expected and demanded
novelty. As it turned out, Tret'iakov's concern about the
"alien element" was not entirely misplaced. Orientalism,
which was perhaps as far removed from Stasov's notion of
national art as current painterly technique would allow,
insinuated itself into the travelling exhibits in the 1870s
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to become as prominent as the landscape and portrait,
revealing Stasov's notion of aesthetic unity to be more
rhetoric than reality.
Orientalism, introduced at the Paris Salons by the
French Romantics during the 1820s as a sort of "Romantic
variant" of the history painting (Rosenthal 94) , was notable
for invoking a "setting of opulent exoticism and a
combination of savagery and sensuality" (Harding 72) . The
Orient of Orientalism was a vaguely defined region which
included North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. The
French fascination with this region was piqued by Napoleon's
Egyptian campaign of 1798 and again in 1869 with the opening
of the Suez Canal, after which Orientalism became less
anecdotal and more accurate in its depictions of the local
people and their customs (74). Orientalism persisted in
France throughout the nineteenth century culminating in the
formation of the Societe des Peintres Orientalistes with
Jean-Leon Gerome as its honorary president in 1893 (74). At
the height of "Orientalist mania" in the mid-nineteenth
century, Oriental subjects appeared in every traditional
form of painting (see Rosenthal 93) .
With its territorial expansion eastward into Central
Asia and the Caucasus, a sort of indigenous Orientalism
appeared in Russian culture during the period from the 1820s
to the 1840s (see Bowlt, "Russian Painting" 121) . However,
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in the second half of the nineteenth century, except for
Vasilii Vereshchagin, Russian painters ignored this source
of Orientalism in favor of the foreign lands popularized in
the Paris Salons. Repin's Negro Women and Polenov's
Odalisque, both produced while these artists were Academy
pensioners living in Paris, clearly evidence the influence
of Salon Orientalism where the odalisque was a favorite
subject. Through the Parisian Salons the Russians became
familiar with Orientalist works by artists like Gerome,
Georges Clairin, Benjamin Constant and Leon Bonnat, under
whom Aleksei Kharlamov had studied, and, most importantly
the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny and his French student
Henri Regnault. The paintings of the latter included the
celebrated Salome, Study of an African Woman and Slave Girl.
Regnault's exploits and tragic death in the Franco-Prussian
war were the stuff of legend among the young Russians,
particularly Repin and Polenov.1 1
At about this same time Orientalism started to make its
appearance at the Wanderers' travelling exhibits. Nikolai
Makovskii and Vasilii Vereshchagin, participating as
contributors, submitted several Orientalist works to the
fourth travelling exhibit in 1875. Makovskii exhibited ten
watercolors including Cairo Woman on a Donkey, Entrance to a
Mosque and Bedouin on a Camel. Vereshchagin, who as already
mentioned studied in Paris under Gerome in the mid-1860s,
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presented six oils including Eunuch and Turkestan Views (see
Document 95, Tovarishchestvo 2: 120). Throughout the
remainder of the 1870s Orientalist works appeared
occasionally at the travelling exhibits. Shown posthumously
at the sixth exhibition in 1878 was Gun's Odalisque,
essentially an academic interpretation of the subject which
owes more to Ingres' Odalisque and Slave (1842) than to more
contemporary treatments such as Renoir's Woman of Algiers or
Odalisque. At the seventh exhibit in 1879, participating as
an active member, Nikolai Makovskii presented three
Orientalist works among them Cairo Barbershop and Cairo
Mosque. It was, however, during the 1880s, after Polenov
and the Makovskii brothers, Nikolai and Konstantin, traveled
to the Middle East, that Orientalism became a regular part
of the Wanderers exhibits. This climaxed in 1885 at
thirteenth travelling exhibit when seventy nine of the two
hundred forty five works presented were Orientalist oils and
watercolors by Polenov, part of a series titled From Travels
to the East.
The main attraction of the Orient to the Wanderers,
particularly in the 1870s and early 1880s, was its thematic
remove from Russian reality. The Orient was a world in no
need of social reform. This meant that the Russian painter
who choose it as his subject was free from the ideological
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imperatives of Tret'iakov, Stasov and other like-minded
critics. Moreover, it played into the desire of the new
patron class for something novel and different.
Interestingly, perhaps as part of his strategy to convey the
impression of unity among the Wanderers, Stasov all but
ignored these developments, apparently never making any
substantive comments either privately or publicly about the
intrusion of something as alien as Orientalism into the
realm of the Wanderers Association which he viewed as the
bastion of national art.
By the early 1880s it was obvious that Russian art was
moving in a direction entirely different from that charted
by the liberally-minded critics in the 1860s and early
1870s. The landscape, the fashionable portrait, history
painting, the allegory, Orientalism--all these kinds of work
are indicative of what John Bowlt has identified as an
"alternative tradition" within the Wanderers Association
(The Silver Age 21) . The existence of these alternative
traditions, many of them examples of Realism in Russia,
however, has been to great degree obscured by Stasov's
critical gloss which attempted to reduce the work of all the
Wanderers to the national trend and Russian Realism.
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Critic as a myth-maker
Nowhere would such notions play so prominent a role
than in Stasov's first published attempt to systematize and
conceptualize his ideological and aesthetic positions. Just
as he had used his pen to reclaim Repin for the national
trend in 1875, Stasov now set out to reclaim all of Russian
art with a massive treatise titled "Twenty Five Years of
Russian Art," serialized in the journal Herald of Europe in
1882 and 1883. Although the bulk of this work dealt with
painting, it also discussed at length architecture, music
and sculpture.12 This stemmed not only from Stasov's broad
intellectual interests but also from his fundamentally
Romantic belief in the interrelatedness of all art forms.
Following Belinsky's example in literature, Stasov intended
to produce the definitive critical survey of developments in
the Russian visual arts.1 3 However, lacking Belinsky's
philosophical sophistication and unable to rise above his
own anecdotal technique,1 4 Stasov produced what might be
called an annotated bibliography rather than a conclusive
history of Russian painting. In this bibliography, the
events of the last twenty five years were ordered to a set
of notions borrowed from Belinsky and his radical followers
which led Stasov to make four significant conclusions.
First, Fedotov and The Major's Courtship were only the
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"first glimmers" rather than the beginning of the "new"
trend in Russian art. Second, the "new" art was linked in
the most intimate way to Russian literature. Third, the
development of the "new" art was, according to Stasov, an
evolution from a state of cultural inferiority and reliance
upon foreign models to one of complete independence. And
finally, this art was Realist, national and displayed a
critical, "thinking" element.
Stasov, contrary to the beliefs of his critical
predecessors as well as his own prior assertions, pointedly
excluded Fedotov from the school of "new" Russian artists.
The author of The Major's Courtship was, declared the
critic, at best a proto-Realist, the "first glimmer" of a
new trend, an artist whose impact upon the generation of
painters which emerged during the late 1850s and early 1860s
was rather limited ("Dvadtsat' piat' let" 496). According
to Stasov, those painters who produced examples of what
Kovalevskii called "the Fedotovian type of painting" had
"little" if any knowledge of the artist (520) . This marked
a significant departure from Stasov's previous statements
regarding Fedotov. He now saw Realism growing out
exclusively of the ideological link between Russian
literature and Russian painting.
Thus, the "first and major features" of the "new"
Russian painting, he asserted, were "realism and
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nationalism" which were found not in the works of Fedotov
but, rather, in Russian literature (521) . Rejecting the
long-standing, tradition of academic ut pictura. poesis,
Stasov asserted that the "brotherhood" between literature
and painting was a relatively recent phenomenon peculiar
only to the "new" Russian art. The event which engendered
this relationship was Russia's humiliating defeat in the
Crimean War in 1855 which precipitated a cultural
reexamination and renewal first manifest in literature.
These developments, Stasov continued, "unleashed the tongue
of the Russian artist" and inspired him to march "in accord
with the rest of society" (521). Following the example set
by Gogol, Belinsky, Dobroliubov and Nekrasov, Russian
painting, Stasov argued, became Realist and national (522).
Developments in Russian art, he boldly proclaimed,
"literally repeated" those of literature (521) . Addressing
his conservative critics, Stasov explicated that the
connection between literature and painting was on the
abstract level of content. The "new" Russian artist, he
flatly stated, almost never based his works on "plots
[borrowed] from Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov,
Ostrovskii, Count Tolstoy, Goncharov, Ostrovskii, Turgenev,
Nekrasov and so forth" (532) . In other words, the "new,"
national and Realist art was not a mere illustration or
supplement to the text.
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The history of Russian art, according to Stasov, was
delimited by a three-phase evolution from a state of
inferiority to one of equality vis-a-vis Western European
art. First, there was the "courtly/foreign" which obtained
during the 18th century. This was followed by the
"professorial/state-official" against which the students
rebelled in 1863. Finally, there came the "national/free" --
the most advanced phase in this progression--which heralded
the emergence of Realism and the dominance of the Wanderers
Association (532-34; Stasov's emphasis). The first two
periods were, according to him, "cosmopolitan" during which
the Russian artist was a "speechless slave" to Europe (504)
while the third one was, by definition, free and national.
Hence his firm belief that neither the art of the West, such
as that of the Wanderers' contemporary Courbet, as well as
the established school of Russian Neoclassicism could serve
as model to be imitated by the new generation of Russian
painters he professed to promote. In fact, the break of the
"new" Russian art, understood as Realism, from the "old"
art, understood as the tradition of international
Neoclassicism, was now viewed as "more powerful and decisive
in Russian painting than in any other European school"
("Dvadtsat' piat' let" 525).
This particular line of analysis marked a subtle but
significant shift in Stasov's criticism. He now clearly and
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publicly shared Tret'iakov's concern over the deleterious
influence of the "alien element." However, intent on
celebrating the victory of Realism and nationalism, Stasov
couched his reservations in positive assertions. Thus, he
wrote, the "new artists" were "bored and cold" in Europe; it
was "an 'alien' summer to them"; and, while they were
"always ready and glad to be in foreign lands," they "do not
consent to extend their stay, to put down roots as did our
previous artists-cosmopolitans, indifferent idlers and empty
formalists" (531) . The not so implicit critique here was
that Antokol'skii had cast his lot with the cosmopolitans,
Repin with the nationalists, and Kharlamov and Leman
deserved close watching.
Stasov went on to argue that even during the era before
Russian art was free and national "sometimes the power of
Russian talents" was such that if their works "were
displayed in Parisian museums, they would have played a very
important role in France on French subjects" (567) . By way
of example he cited Gun's St. Bartholomew's Eve of 1868 and
Iakobii's Robespierre of 1864. On the other hand, he
continued, "not a single French, German or Italian artist
has been capable of doing the same based upon our plots"
(567) . "By the way," he added, "here is only repeated what
has happened previously in literature" (567). Pushkin and
Gogol could depict Germans, Italians and Spaniards "in such
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a way," he argued, "that even those nations could not
portray them better and deeper, while, at the same time,
their literature was never able to depict anything similar
on a Russian subject" (567) .15
These assertions are strikingly similar to the bold
proclamations made by Dostoevsky in his famous speech
delivered in 1880 at the dedication of the centennial
Pushkin monument in Moscow, an event which, according to
Marcus Levitt, symbolized yet another moment when "modern
Russian identity consolidated around its literature, with
Pushkin as its focus" (4). Dostoevsky's speech, Levitt
points out in his study of this quintessential "literary
holiday" (2), represented a "dynamic synthesis of romantic
'organic' aesthetics, on the one hand, and the Slavophile
notions of Orthodoxy on the other" (133). Following up on
themes introduced in his 1873 review "Apropos of the
Exhibition," in which he opposed every single point Stasov
made regarding Repin's Volga. Barge Haulers, Dostoevsky
argued that the Russian people possessed a unique capacity
for "universal responsiveness" which allowed them to
transcend cultural boundaries ("Pushkin" 145). This
capacity, he asserted, was most fully manifest in Pushkin
who could "become" a German while reworking a scene from
Faust, a Spaniard while writing his "Don Juan," and an
Englishman in "Feast During the Plague" because modern
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Russian national self-consciousness was 1 1 incontestably all-
European and universal" (146-47) .1 6 Dostoevsky went on to
state that the Russian capacity for "universal sympathy and
reconciliation" would, in the final analysis, provide the
ultimate salvation for the "contradictions" and "anguish" of
Europe by "pronouncing the final Word of the great general
harmony, of the final brotherly communion of all nations in
accord with the law of the Gospel of Christ" (147-48) .
However, this is also where Dostoevsky and Stasov
parted company. While Dostoevsky believed in the
transformative power of art which he linked almost
exclusively with messianism, Stasov, on the other hand, held
in high regard only its socially transformative force.
Dostoevsky championed the notion of Russian moral and
cultural superiority vis-a-vis European nations. Stasov,
however, simply advocated for Russian cultural independence
from foreign models. While Dostoevsky's analysis veered off
into pentecostal mysticism, Stasov's remained, for the most
part, grounded in Belinsky's Romantic notions of art and
nation. The label Romantic is justified because Stasov,
like the Romantics, assigned a supreme value to art, firmly
believed in the interrelatedness of all art forms and
consistently found in it a repository of national genius
entirely independent from foreign models.
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In arbitrarily selecting his examples of the "power of
Russian talents," Stasov had no intention of setting up
Russian national art as universal and all-European. After
all, these notions were associated in his mind with the
cosmopolitan art of "indifferent idlers." Rather, in his
penchant for literary analogies, Stasov had latched onto
certain unintended connotations. Truly "independent" art
for him followed only "its own national ideas" and, by way
of example, offered Volga Barge Haulers which, he again
stressed, should be regarded as the "first painting of the
entire Russian school" ("Dvadtsat' piat' let" 547). By way
of comparison, Repin's work, according to Stasov, sounding
very much like Zhemchuzhnikov, was an exemplar of the free
and national art of his generation, just as Briullov's Last
Day of Pompeii was of the professorial and state-official
art of his generation (549). Stasov's consistent promotion
of national independence from foreign artistic prototypes
and intellectual ideas should not be confused with the more
narrow-minded form of nationalism which became popular among
the Russian intelligentsia during the 1870s and was felt
even in the all-encompassing nationalistic almost
chauvinistic policies of the Tsar Alexander III during the
1880s and 1890s. Stasov was not, as Michael Curran
correctly observes, a "political nationalist or a Pan-
Slavist" (308).
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As for Stasov's understanding of Realism, he defined it
simply as "re-creating the truth" ("Dvadtsat' piat' let"
522). If the artist did this, the critic argued, the
painting would somehow be "suffused with serious content"
(ser'eznaia soderzhatel'nost') and the result would be "true
nationalism and realism" (526) . In a major departure from
his previous position on tendentiousness in art (see for
example his review of Volga Barge Haulers from 1873), Stasov
now seemed to be asserting that truly national art should be
the "interpreter" and the "judge" of social reality (536) .
In essence, Stasov's aesthetic position had come full
circle. He was, in effect, arguing that "new" Russian,
Realist art was akin to Kovalevskii's "thinking genre."
Russian Realism
Despite claims to the contrary made by Soviet critics
who considered "Twenty Five Years of Russian Art" a
"complete" and "precise" explication of historical
developments and artistic trends--supposedly because Stasov
"rendered concretely his premises regarding the formation of
the realist school in Russia" (Bespalova and Vereshchagina
148)--this treatise, while perhaps a fine example of
tendentious writing, is less satisfactory as history.
Several of Stasov's notions are particularly problematic.
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For example, he argued that his era represented the
culmination of evolution toward perfection which was vident
in the "new" art's complete independence from foreign models
as well as in its national and civic character. It is
difficult to accommodate portraits of wealthy merchants,
much less Orientalism, under this rubric. The appeal of
Stasov's rhetoric was such that even some Western scholars
have adopted his line of analysis. Richard L. Brown, for
example, proclaimed in his 1980 PhD dissertation titled
"Chemyshevskii, Dostoevskii, and the Peredvizhnik!: Toward
a Russian Realist Aesthetic?" that "non-Russian themes
remained scarce" throughout the Association's history (141).
This, according to Brown, accounted, in the final analysis,
for the Wanderers' stylistic and thematic "coherence and
homogeneity" (142) .
The most untenable aspect of Stasov's history, however,
was the implication that the art of the Wanderers was
somehow limited to civic-minded Realism. This and similar
notions, reenforced by Stasov throughout the late 1880s and
18 90s and left unchallenged even by his critical opponents,
eventually grew into the myth of Russian Realism as a
monolithic, civic-minded and democratic movement synonymous
with the Wanderers. Ever since the regimentation of Soviet
artistic life in 1932, Soviet historians have been
particularly fond of this notion. In 1950, Konstantin
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Sitnik argued that for Stasov, whose "aesthetic codex"
consisted of notions such as "nationalism, narodnost' and
Realism" (285), the "history of the Wanderers Association is
the history of Russian art" (293) . In an 1975 essay titled
"The Wanderers' Aesthetic Program," Vanslov summarized
similar sentiments when he proclaimed that the members of
the travelling Association produced art which was "realist
and democratic, truly innovative and nationally original"
("Esteticheskaia programma" 82). He concluded by arguing
that the essence of the Wanderers' aesthetic program was
"the question of Realism in as much Realism constituted the
core of their art" (74), a proclamation which he
substantiated only with Stasov's statements from "Twenty
Five Years of Russian Art" without any further explication
or elaboration. Natal'ia Zograf in 1977 asserted that the
Wanderers "understood art as civic duty, a moral demand, the
humanitarian affirmation of the value of being human" ("K
voprosu" 83) . The "nerve" of the Wanderers, she added, was
a "high moral demand, which forced them to see in art a
'textbook of life' as Chemyshevsky had expressed it" (85) .
In 1977 Tat'iana Kovalenskaia, although disagreeing with
Vanslov's conclusion regarding the Wanderers' unified
aesthetic program, nevertheless asserted that they were
"united by their common striving to get closer in their art
to the people" (15). More recently, Sarab'ianov in 1980
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asserted that during the era of the Wanderers "everything
gathered up toward the tendentiousness" as if some "higher
force directed [the development of] painting into one
stream, not allowing it to run away, to deviate" (Russkaia
zhivopis' 120).
These and similar assertions raise a particularly
difficult theoretical and historiographical question--does
the term Realism, particularly as used by Stasov and his
Soviet followers, have any descriptive value, or has it, as
Elizabeth Cheresh Allen notes in the context Turgenev's
poetics, been subject to such "variation, imprecision, and
downright confusion" as to become almost meaningless (14)--a
problem made particularly acute by the Soviet tendency to
use it as a universal, ahistorical category. Even Stasov,
often regarded as the chief aesthetician of Russian Realism,
remained utterly vague as to just what distinguished it.
Was Russian Realism a movement, a style, a doctrine, a
peculiarly Russian form of expression or simply a series of
artistic impulses and cultural tendencies which eventually
became embedded into a monolithic critical construct?
For Stasov, his critical opponents and his Soviet
followers, Realism did not function as a descriptive,
metalinguistic term but, rather, as a sort of rhetorical
signifier to which a value laden ideological signified could
be ordered. The term, thus understood, was not denotative
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and precise but rather connotative and vague. This was a
very different situation than that which obtained in Paris
in 1855 where the term Realism was associated in a very
precise and programmatic fashion with the works produced in
a particular style by Courbet.17 Depending upon one's
ideological orientation, the term Realism in Russia could be
used to praise developments in the "new" national school of
art, as did Stasov, or to condemn them, as did his
opponents. Lacking any denotative power, Stasov's use of
the term was both ideologically narrow and aesthetically
broad. It functioned both as a label for a Russian national
school of painting independent from those found in the West
and as a rhetorical tool deployed against ideological
opponents.
One way to escape Stasov's confusing and confused
rhetoric which led to his monolithic view of the
developments of Russian art during the second half of
nineteenth century is to make a provisional distinction
between what can be loosely called Realism in Russia, that
is any realistic mode of expression, and Russian Realism,
understood as Stasov's critical construct. The former
merely takes reality as its object while the latter focuses
on a particular aspect of reality ordered to a given set of
ideological expectations (as in the case of Repin's The
Unexpected Return, for example). The Orientalism of
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Konstantin Makovskii and Vasilii Polenov or the landscapes
of Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Shishkin, all members of the
Wanderers' Association, are examples of Realism in as much
as they also manifest a shift in the mimetic object away
from the ideal beauty of Neoclassicism toward reality.
However, not all of them are necessarily examples of Russian
Realism as understood by Stasov in that they do not depict
contemporary Russian life, contain socially 'progressive
content' or manifest narodnost'. The tendency to conflate
these related but different trends has been encouraged by
the critical gloss, initially formulated by Stasov during
the 1870s and canonized during the 1880s and 1890s, which
views Russian Realism as coterminous with the work of the
Wanderers--a confusion of institutional and aesthetic
categories.
The essence of Stasov's approach to developments in
Russian painting, even in his most systematic critical
endeavor "Twenty Five Years of Russian Art," was to
illustrate by example rather than to explicate by
description. This strategy allowed Stasov to selectively
choose from the diverse examples of Realism in Russia in
order to arrive at the monolithic model of what he
considered to be Russian Realism. Building this neat
critical order out of the complicated and diverse trends
encountered in Russian art world only served to illustrate
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the problem inherent in Stasov's approach. The highly
arbitrary and selective nature of his exemplars as well as
his unwillingness and inability to compromise the underlying
ideological principles which informed his critical
proclamations, accounted, in the final analysis, for his
notion of Russian Realism being both too broad and too
narrow.
Painting as illustration of liberal ideas
In the Summer of 1883, just few months after the last
installment of "Twenty Five Years of Russian Art" was
published, Repin, having returned from a trip to Western
Europe where he studied famous museums and galleries under
the critical guidance of none other than Stasov,18 began
work on an uncommissioned painting which would eventually
become The Unexpected Return, a work suffused with Stasov's
"serious content." The Unexpected Return is arguably the
most overtly tendentious work, outside of Arrest of a
Propagandist (1880), in Repin's oeuvre. It debuted at the
twelfth Wanderers exhibition in 1884 and immediately became
the focus of a debate over the artist's political intentions
and its importance for the national school of painting.
Stasov claimed, in his own elliptical reference to the
radical cause, that "the main protagonist in his face and
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entire figure expresses energy and strength not crushed by
any misfortune" ("Nashi khudozhestvennye dela" 745). He
considered it "one of the greatest works of the new Russian
painting" (745) , one which proved that Repin "did not rest
on his laurels after Volga. Barge Haulers" but was constantly
making "new steps forward" toward perfection (746). The
critic for the Herald of Europe asserted, "One can feel the
broken strength which is not yet shattered and will find its
way out" (qtd. in Liaskovskaia, "Proizvedenie Repina" 2:
107). Aleksei Suvorin, the publisher of the conservative
newspaper New Time and Stasov's main opponent during the
1880s, argued that Repin "imparted the physiognomy of the
one that enters (vkhodiashchii) with some exclusiveness,
something bad, evil, tendentiousness in a word" (108). Petr
Boborykin saw in Repin a "follower of literary realism" and
insisted that the civic-minded component of The Unexpected
Return was harmful to the strictly painterly qualities of
his work (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 156). The
critic of the St. Petersburg News accused Repin for igniting
an "unhealthy interest in the revolution" and political
prisoners (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 178). Nearly
all commentators, regardless of their political sympathies
or aesthetic persuasions, agreed that the content of Repin's
work was somehow critical and tendentious; that, shorn of
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the elliptical phraseology of the era, it depicted the
return of a political exile or prisoner.
Publicly, Repin was circumspect about his intentions.
This reflected the political climate of the mid-1880s which
was dramatically different from that of the previous decade.
The rise of Populism had been countered by mass arrests and
trials in 1877. This, in turn, engendered the formation of
more militant radical groups intent on pursuing a policy of
terror. On March 1, 1881, the People's Freedom organization
succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II. This event
ushered in the reactionary and ultra-nationalist rule of
Alexander III who actively sought to dismantle the reforms
of his brother. It was in this political climate that
Repin's work appeared.
(Un)expected re-writing of the painting19
There are two versions of The Unexpected Return. The
first depicts the return of a female student or kursistka
(figure 9). It was conceived of as an intimate family drama
and, in keeping with this theme, its dimensions are rather
small measuring 44.5 x 37 cm. The second depicts the return
of a young man and its dimensions are heroic (figure 10).
The canvas measures 160.5 x 167.5 cm. Repin himself
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Figure 9: The Unexpected Return
Early version
(II'ia Repin)
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Figure 10: The Unexpected Return (II'ia Repin)
Final version
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preferred the second version dismissing the first as an
"immature test" (Perepiska s Tret'iakovym 110) . He even
counselled Tret'iakov against purchasing the first version
which, argued Repin, would only serve as an obstacle to
understanding the final one. It would "split" the viewer's
"thought and paralyze the integrity of the impression," he
asserted (110) . In fact, Repin did not think that the first
version should be displayed at all in Moscow, indicating
that the best place for it would be somewhere in the
provinces (109).
Both versions share the same basic composition. The
setting is a sitting room rendered in a naturalistic
receding perspective with the vanishing point located in the
center of the image at approximately eye level of a standing
adult. The protagonist has just entered the room through a
doorway on the left-hand side of the image. Next to this
door, to the right on the rear wall of the room, are several
pictures. The protagonist stands approximately five steps
beyond the threshold of the doorway next to a glass-panned
door. A woman in the foreground on the right-hand side of
the image is lifting herself out of a chair.
Beyond the obvious change in the gender of the
protagonist, there are several striking differences between
these two fundamentally similar paintings, which even share
the same pattern for the wallpaper in the sitting room.
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Most notably, the first version is rendered in a style
reminiscent of the Impressionism of Renoir, while the second
invokes a technique that is more typical of genre painting.
This imparts a somber tone to the second version which, in
turn, is heightened by other changes. In the first version,
the woman rising from the chair wears a dark dress with a
bright floral pattern. She appears to be young and is
generally considered the sister of the woman entering the
room. In the second version, the dress is simply an austere
black, and the woman wearing it appears matronly. She is
generally considered the mother of the protagonist. The
sense of drama in the second version is heightened by
placing the gaze of the young man and the matronly woman,
who is nearly standing erect, on intersecting perspective
lines, an element entirely missing in the first version.
Additionally, the use of light is more dramatic in the
second version. The face of the man is sharply illuminated
from the side by light streaming in through the glass-panned
door.
Repin agonized over the depiction of the protagonist in
the second version. He modified the face of this character
four times during the period 1884-1888, repainting it even
after Tret'iakov had purchased the work in 1885 and
displayed it in his gallery. Repin's conundrum was how to
create an image which was both universal like the types
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found in the "thinking genre" while insuring that it was
particular enough to remain realistic. He was apparently-
dissatisfied from the outset with this aspect of the
painting (93), a situation further complicated by
reservations expressed by Stasov and Tret'iakov. Stasov
considered the protagonist "too static" and "declamatory"
(Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 2: 3 07) while Tret'iakov
suggested that he appear "younger and more likable,"
advising Repin to use the Populist writer Vsevolod Garshin
as a model, which, in fact, the artist did for subsequent
revisions (Repin, Perepiska s Tret'iakovym 100) . Despite
his attempts to individualize the protagonist, Repin still
produced a type, not a discemable person like the laborers
in Volga Barge Haulers.
Pictures within the painting
One of the most striking aspects of The Unexpected
Return is the use of the picture within the painting device
to establish symbolic associations, a feature unique in
Repin's oeuvre. While this motif appears in two other works
by Repin--Portrait of Pavel Tret'iakov (1883) and Formal
Session of the State Council (1903)--its function in those
paintings is to heighten verisimilitude, not set up symbolic
allusions.
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There are two sources for the picture within the
painting device in The Unexpected Return. The most
immediate is Kramskoi's portrait titled Nikolai Nekrasov in
the Period of 'Last Songs' (figure 11) Kramskoi started work
on this uncommissioned portrait of the famous liberal poet
and publisher, regarded as the leading representative of the
Realist school in poetry, in 1877, just a year before the
poet's death. Nekrasov was famous for his verse describing
the suffering of the Russian peasantry. Kramskoi's portrait
depicts a frail Nekrasov near the end of his life, half-
supine in a bed working on a final cycle of poems titled
"Last Songs." A cluttered side table is located on the left
side of the image next to the bed. On the wall to the right
and above the head of Nekrasov appear two portraits which
are either photographs or engravings. On the far, upper
left side of the image, behind the poet, rests a bust of
which only half appears in the painting.
Just as Repin agonized over the image of the
protagonist in his The Unexpected Return, Kramskoi struggled
with the setting in this portrait of Nekrasov. In initial
pencil studies, the walls were bare and the poet was
accompanied by his son. Later, when Kramskoi actually
started painting, the image of the son was dropped, and a
gun rack was added to the wall immediately above Nekrasov's
head (Gol'dshtein, "Iz istorii" 2: 157), a symbolic allusion
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Figure 11: Nikolai Nekrasov in the Period of 'Last Songs'
(Ivan Kramskoi)
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to the poet's well known passion for hunting. However, in
the final version, Kramskoi excluded such personal details
and, instead, quite literally recontextualized Nekrasov
within the liberal pantheon of civic-minded heroes. Thus,
the portrait immediately above the poet's head is that of
Nikolai Dobroliubov, the famous radical critic who was
Nekrasov's mentor, and the one next to it is Adam
Mickiewicz, the Polish Romantic poet exiled to Russia from
1824 to 1829 for his political views. As for the bust,
which is nearly a pentimento, it is of Belinsky. The
symbolic associations established by the use of these
elements are self-evident.
While there is an obvious link between Repin's The
Unexpected Return and Kramskoi's portrait of Nekrasov,
Alison Hilton's conclusion that Repin "borrowed the combined
portrait motif from Kramskoi" ("The Revolutionary Theme"
120) might be a bit premature. In fact, the manner in which
the pictures within Repin's painting are organized owes more
to Fedotov's The Major's Courtship than to any work in
Kramskoi's oeuvre or, for that matter, in the oeuvre of any
other Russian painter.
In the first version of The Unexpected Return there are
five pictures located on the rear wall on the right-hand
side of the image. There are two small, indistinguishable
pictures organized vertically. Two larger pictures, which
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appear to be family portraits, probably photographs, appear
next to these smaller pictures, one to the left, one to the
right. Above these pictures hangs the largest of the five,
a painting of Mount Vesuvius erupting. This allusion to
natural disaster is rather inexplicable. Perhaps the
kursistka was expelled from school? If so, then the
symbolic association seems a bit overwrought. Perhaps she
too is a political unfortunate. However, there is nothing
in her depiction that "expresses energy and strength not
crushed by any misfortune." With regard to the symbolic
aspect of this work, Repin was probably right. It would be
an obstacle to understanding the allusions established in
the second version.
There are eight pictures in the second version as well
as a wall map of Imperial Russia. Seven of the pictures are
located, as in the first version, on the rear wall on the
right-hand side of the image. The largest is an engraving
titled Christ on Golgotha by the German Academic painter
Karl Schteiben familiar to Repin since his childhood. To
the left of this engraving is a portrait of Taras
Shevchenko, the liberal Ukrainian poet and painter exiled
for ten years in 1847 for his efforts to encourage Ukrainian
nationalism. To the right is a portrait of Nikolai
Nekrasov. Both are clearly reproductions of paintings by
Kramskoi which Tret'iakov commissioned in the 1870s. They
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function as symbolic allusion to Repin's sympathy with
Kramskoi's liberal positions. Below each of these images
appear two small, indistinguishable pictures which are
likely family portraits. On the wall to the right appears a
small, framed photograph of the assassinated Alexander II
laying in state. Immediately next to this image is a large
wall map of Imperial Russia of which only a small portion is
included in the painting.
Repin, like Fedotov, used the placement of these images
to set up symbolic oppositions. The discernable pictures in
Repin's painting fall into two distinct categories: those
emblematic of the Russian Imperial state--the image of the
Tsar and the map of Russia; and those which are emblematic
of sacrifice and suffering--Schteiben's engraving and the
portraits of Shevchenko and Nekrasov. Just as Fedotov sets
up an opposition between his money-grubbing merchant and the
images of religious and secular rectitude by placing the
merchant's portrait upon a separate wall to the right of
that on which appear the pictures of the Metropolitan, the
monastery and the war heros, so too Repin sets up his
opposition by placing the images of the Tsar and the Russian
state upon the wall to the right of that on which the
pictures of Shevchenko, Nekrasov and Christ appear. Alison
Hilton, it should be noted, argues that the image of Christ
unites "all the victims represented--the revolutionary
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writers, the dead tsar, and the exhausted exile--under the
universal theme of Christ's sacrifice" ("The Revolutionary
Theme" 121) .20 This conciliatory interpretation of Repin's
symbolic use of the picture within the painting device
ignores two things. First, while Nekrasov was deeply
concerned about the suffering of the peasants, he himself
was a successful editor and publisher and could hardly be
categorized as a victim. Second, and perhaps more
significantly, the liberals are literally located on the
side of the saints while the Tsar, most pointedly, is not.
The affinities between the interior settings of The
Unexpected Return and The Major's Courtship go beyond the
obvious use of the picture within the painting device.
There is the use of perspective to establish symbolic
connections, for example between the Metropolitan and the
bride in Fedotov's painting and the protagonist, his mother
and Christ in Repin's work. Additionally, there is the
deliberate use of doorways and the grouping of characters
around a table. Particularly intriguing is the use of the
partially depicted chair, located at the edge of the picture
plane so that only part of it appears in the painting. This
element, apparently included to heighten the sense of
verisimilitude, does not appear in the first version of The
Unexpected Return but is shared by the second version and
Fedotov's The Major's Courtship.
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Painter as dramatist of liberal ideals
Repin wrote little about his intentions in creating the
second version of The Unexpected Return, probably a
reflection of the exigencies engendered by the increase in
police activity under the reign of Alexander III. However,
it is clear that he intended it to be an example of
tendentious, civic-minded Realism as evidenced by his
deliberate and highly uncharacteristic use of the picture
within the painting device. This is further supported by
the statement made by Repin in a letter written in November
of 1883 to the Ukrainian painter Nikolai Murashko where he
pointedly described himself as an "old-fashioned man of the
sixties" who still held in high esteem the ideas of "Gogol,
Belinsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy" (Repin, Pis'ma k
khudozhnikam 53) .
It is in this context that the affinity between Repin's
The Unexpected Return and Fedotov's The Major's Courtship
takes its own unexpected return. Both paintings depict
family dramas which, through symbolic associations are
recontextualized, into social commentaries. This is
realized through the careful staging of the drama in a
rigorously organized interior setting. As a drama, Repin's
The Unexpected Return, like Fedotov's The Major's Courtship,
stands as a successful example of Lessing's fruchtbarer
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Moment. Yet, the artistic results are radically different.
Just as Stasov's critical pronouncements had come full
circle by the early 1880s, so too had Repin's artistic
practice in The Unexpected Return. By resorting to the
kinds of "allusions and labels" which Dmitriev denounced in
1863 as academic affectations, Repin had produced a work
much closer to the "thinking genre" than to anything like
his Volga Barge Haulers. In this regard, The Unexpected
Return stands as one of the most successful, unsuccessful
examples of Russian Realism in as much as it was the most
obvious case of the ideological assumptions being imposed
upon the art proper.
New and old tendencies in "new" Russian art
By the time Repin was making his final alterations on
The Unexpected Return in 1888, tensions within the Wanderers
Association were reaching a crisis point as economic
conflicts were compounded by ideological divisions. This
was complicated by the fact that there was a new
generational split emerging, similar to that within the
Academy during the early 1860s, between the older generation
of artists who were active members of the Association and
the young artists who participated as contributors in the
travelling exhibits. This split was aggravated by the
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increasingly important, economic role the contributors
played in the travelling exhibits as the decade of the 1880s
progressed. For example, at the ninth travelling exhibit in
1881 members outnumbered contributors by a margin in excess
of two to one with the latter accounting for only seventeen
percent of the works displayed, while in 1887 at the
fifteenth travelling exhibit there were nearly as many
contributors as members, and they accounted for twenty four
percent of the works. Even though by 1890 contributors
outnumbered active members, their works remained a minority
of those presented at the eighteenth travelling exhibit. In
an effort to retain economic control over the travelling
exhibits and ideological control over the Association, the
active members checked the influence of the contributors by
limiting the number of works they could display.
In 18 90, understandably dissatisfied with this
situation, the contributors requested that their works be
displayed in a separate hall from those of the members at
the eighteenth travelling exhibit (see Document 369,
Tovarishchestvo 1: 352). The Executive Board rejected this
suggestion. The contributors responded with a letter to the
General Assembly of the Association requesting that
submissions be approved not just by active members but by a
committee of contributors and active members (see Documents
390, 373). This suggestion was also rejected. Young
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artists like Konstantin Korovin, Leonid. Pasternak, Elena
Polenova and Valentin Serov were becoming increasingly
frustrated with the Wanderers. Locked out of the decision
making process by the invitation-only membership rule and
unable to win any concessions from the Executive Board, they
were growing weary of what Polenova in a letter to Vera
Iakunchikova described as the "narrow-minded" and strictly
"moral" demands of the Association (Polenov, Khronika 455) .
"The relationship between the old and the young, between the
Wanderers and the contributors," observed Polenova, was
becoming "strained" (455) . The young artists, she added,
"do not want to be subjugated to the arbitrary routine that
the Wanderers are setting up" (455). Polenova concluded
that the situation had deteriorated to the point where she
"might have to go to the Academy" where artists were "more
free" (456).
The Association's attitude toward the young artists and
contributors was creating divisions within its membership.
In March of 1890, Polenov, in a letter written four days
after the Executive Board rejected the contributors' request
to change the rules for selecting submissions to the
travelling exhibits, stated, "The St. Petersburg Areopagus
in its self-importance behaved boastfully. Its cruel and
pedagogical attitude toward the young artists is loathsome.
It has affected everybody" (Polenov, Pis'ma 256-57) . "All
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this is very sad," he added, "and if things continue this
way many will leave the Association" (257) . Again, Polenov
was prescient. Vasnetsov and Repin both resigned in protest
over the Association's policy toward the contributors in
1890 and 1891 respectively (see Document 397,
Tovarishchestvo 1: 376) .21 Earlier, in a letter to
Savitskii in 1887, during a brief falling out with the
Association that year, Repin even equated the Wanderers
Association with the Academy (see Repin, Pis'ma k
khudozhnikam 67).
What remained was a core group of members who generally
subscribed to Stasov's notions and were quite comfortable
with the Association's increasing isolation. This group
included founding members Miasoedov and Prianishnikov as
well as Vladimir Makovskii, the youngest of the Makovskii
brothers, Efim Volkov and Nikolai Iaroshenko, the most
political of the Association's members. They distrusted the
younger generation and viewed their tendency to experiment
aesthetically as unhealthy.22
In 1890 the Association adopted a new set of statutes
designed to make membership even more exclusive. Pursuant
to these statutes a Council was established to take over the
affairs of the Executive Board. This body possessed the
sole authority to select new members. Participation was
limited to founding members who had never left the
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Association. Initially only five members qualified to serve
on the Council--Ge, Klodt, Miasoedov, Priannishnikov and
Shishkin. In 1891 it was expanded to include Iaroshenko,
Polenov, Pavel Briullov, Vladimir Makovskii, Kiselev,
Surikov, Savitskii and Lemokh. Having checked the intrusion
of those influences "useless to the common cause, 1 1 the
Council in March of 1891 invited ten artists to join as
active members. This group included the painters Abram
Arkhipov, Nikolai Zagorskii, Nikolai Kasatkin, Klavdii
Lebedev, Isaak Levitan, II'ia Ostroukhov, Sergei
Svetoslavskii, Aleksei Stepanov, Andrei Shil'der and the
sculptor Leonid Pozen. All had participated as contributors
in previous exhibitions and were known to be reliable
supporters of the Wanderers' positions.
To insure ideological unity, the Association in May of
1892 issued a set of rules for the twenty-first travelling
exhibit which stipulated that only those works with a
clearly defined intent "to render a story, an experience, a
feeling, a mood, a poetic moment" would be considered for
inclusion (Document 476, Tovarishchestvo 2: 423). These
rules went on to state that "the common requirement for all
works accepted ... is the ability to write with paint and
the knowledge of form, drawing and perspective" (Document
476, 423; emphasis added). The Wanderers Association was
now imposing the kind of programmatic requirements against
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which the Academy secessionists had rebelled in 1863. It
was as though the whole Russian art world had come full
circle, only now with the Wanderers Association playing the
role of the Academy.
Wanderers' Academy
While the Wanderers Association was becoming more
conservative, the Imperial Academy was becoming somewhat
more liberal. Conference Secretary Petr Iseev had been
dismissed in 1889 for misappropriating government funds and
was replaced by the more liberal Count Ivan Tolstoi.
Subsequently, a committee was set up to re-evaluate the
Academy's statutes and draft new ones in April of 1890 (see
note to Document 404, Tovarishchestvo 2: 601). Chaired by
Academy President Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, the
committee included Nikolai Benua, Fedor Buslaev, Nikolai
Filosofov, Ieronim Kitner, Dmitrii Khomiakov, Nikodim
Kondakov, Nikolai Petrov, Ivan Tolstoi, Tret'iakov, as well
as Association members Bogoliubov, Polenov and Repin.
Unlike previous attempts at reform, the Academy
eschewed the top-down approach in favor of a more broad-
based effort. Artists as well as prominent cultural
figures, even Tret'iakov and Stasov, were solicited for
opinions, although the latter refused to participate in the
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reform of an institution he considered "completely
unnecessary” (Repin and Stasov, Perepiska. 2: 422; Stasov's
emphasis). Some eighty individuals submitted suggestions
which were published in book form (see Moleva and Beliutin,
179).23 Nearly all agreed that the Academy should be
separated from the Imperial household and state control
(179). Even though the new statutes adopted in October 1893
did not follow through on this suggestion, they did usher in
a significant change in pedagogy. The Academy eliminated
its normative approach to teaching and replaced it with
studio-based instruction similar to that found in Paris
where the artist selected a master to work with in a manner
amenable to both. Several current and former members of the
Wanderers Association were offered and accepted positions in
the newly reformed Academy including Arkhip Kuindzhi, Ivan
Shishkin, Vladimir Makovskii and most notably II'ia Repin
(see note to Document 503, Tovarishchestvo 1: 611). Even
Nikolai Iaroshenko was offered membership in the Academy
which, of course, he declined (see Document 518, 2: 453).
Refusing to publicly accept the reality of the
situation, Stasov scoffed at any suggestion that the
Wanderers Association was in decline. He was certain in his
belief that Russian civic-minded Realism, in his mind
synonymous with the art of the Wanderers, was a vital and
dominant movement. In 1887, in a review of the fifteenth
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travelling exhibit titled "The March of Our Aesthetics,"
Stasov responded angrily to the critical charges made in
1886 by Nikolai Aleksandrov, the editor of the Artistic
Journal, who claimed that the Wanderers' shows became
"ordinary," "without content" (bessoderzhatel'nye) and
"boring" (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 143). Stasov,
taking a positive stance, asserted, "'Russian realism
without content (bessoderzhatel'nyi) ? How is that? If
there is among all new European schools one passionately
filled with content and striving only toward it, then it is
precisely the Russian one. It has been written and re
written about a hundred times; not only all the best Russian
artists agree, and with them all the most intelligent of our
critics, but the foreigners themselves admit it. They are
envious, they are looking to us" ("Pokhod nashikh estetikov"
205). Later, in a tribute to Kramskoi published shortly
after the artist's death in 1887, Stasov wrote that this
founding member of the Wanderers "constantly taught his
comrades in art not to think about technique alone ... not
to concentrate on mere trifles as practiced in such a
horrific measure in the West" but "to take care above all of
the content, the mood and the feeling of the entire artistic
creation" ("Kramskoi i russkie khudozhniki" 244). Unlike
Miasoedov, Stasov saw Kramskoi's career as a proof "that
'tendentiousness' is the law, that it is in the nature of
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things, that it is deeply in our roots" (244). Still
unwilling to concede, Stasov wrote in 1889, "Our Wanderers
were always our stronghold against misunderstanding and
routine in the sphere of art. They never wanted to serve
only the dilettante inclinations of the public for virtuoso
execution" ("Nashi peredvizhniki nynche” 14).
By 1894, with the mass defection of some of the
Association's most talented and prominent members to the
Academy, Stasov was no longer able to contain his anger.
This was a "betrayal of republicanism and democracy in art,
a defection into the monarchic and autocratic camp," he
charged in a letter to Repin (Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 2:
422) . "From free people and artists they turned into all-
obedient academicians and courtiers," he complained in a
letter to Tret'iakov (Perepiska Tret'iakova i Stasova 180;
Stasov's emphasis). Stasov was particularly devastated by
Repin's actions. The Gogol of Russian painting, according
to Stasov, was now merely a "traitor" and a "renegade"
(181).
Painter as a critic of liberal ideals
In the increasingly experimental atmosphere of the
Silver Age and secure in his position as one of Russia's
premier artists, Repin finally broke with Stasov's
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aesthetic-ideological prescriptions. The break became
imminent after the painter formally departed from the
Wanderers Association in 1890, joined the newly reformed
Academy in 1894 and published a series of articles in which
he sought to advance his own notion of art for and art's
sake following his recent trip to Western Europe, this time
without the critical guidance of Stasov. Crucial in
bringing about this rupture in their personal and
professional relationship was the 1894 article titled
"Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge and Our Claims On Art," ostensibly a
tribute to the recently deceased artist but actually more
apropos of its subject in which Repin repudiated any form of
tendentiousness and literariness in art.
Repin, sounding very much like the aesthetic critics
Boborykin and Avseenko,24 lamented that not only Ge but all
Russian painters were "enslaved by publicism
[publitsistika]" and "literature" (Dalekoe blizkoe 301). In
Russia, he complained, sounding somewhat like Polenova, the
artist "cannot be who he is, cannot be engrossed in the
secrets of art," cannot dedicate himself to art for art's
sake, studying it as pure "beauty" and "perfection of form"
(301, 312). Rather, argued Repin, the Russian artist is
"pushed into the path of the publicist" and praised only as
an "illustrator of liberal ideas" (301). "[U]tilitarianism
and literature reign in painting," he added (312) .
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Repin noted that the Russian demand for civic-minded
art stood in sharp contrast to the situation in the West,
from which he had just returned a few months earlier.
There, Repin remarked, the "word belletrist is considered an
insult in the circle of painters" (301). "It is used to
stigmatize an artist who does not understand the plastic
nature of forms, deep beauties, interesting combination of
tones," he added (301). In Russia, on the other, the
statement "what an interesting story” is a "painting's
highest compliment" (301). Here Repin anticipated Benois'
1902 critique of the Wanderers in which he argued that their
art suffered because painterly concerns were suborned by
ideas better suited to verbal expression (see Benois 178).
Stasov, needless to say, was appalled by Repin's
article and his eventual embrace of Symbolism, a phenomenon
he dismissed in a private letter to Leo Tolstoy dated
December 9, 1894, as "art without content and thought," a
true "horror" and "repugnance" (Tolstoi i Stasov 153). As
might be expected from a person whom a contemporary
described as being "completely incapable of adopting his
opponent's point of view" (Radlov 182), Stasov responded
angrily. In an 1897 article titled "An Enlighter of the
Arts," itself an embittered reply to the publication of
Repin's "In Defence of the New Academy of Fine Arts," the
critic claimed that by the 1890s his Gogol of Russian
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painting "had undergone an unfathomable change"--he "started
thinking, speaking and writing about art in such a way that
it stood in utter contradiction to everything he had
thought, written and spoken before" ("Prosvetitel' po chasti
iskusstva" 324) . The tragedy of the situation was not lost
to those familiar with the intensity of the relationship
between Stasov and Repin like Antokol'skii who called the
painter's embrace of Symbolism as "the crime against his own
father" (qtd. in Karenin 568) .
However, Repin's attitude toward art for art's sake, as
it turned out, was not only short-lived but also as
ambivalent as his earlier embrace of Stasov's tendentious
Realism of which The Unexpected Return was the best and the
worst example. In 1897, soon after the publication of an
article in which he defended the new Academy of Fine Arts,
Repin broke with the Symbolists, denounced them and their
art as "decadent" (Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 3: 26), and
rejoined the Wanderers Association. Stasov, in an 1899
article titled "Miraculous Miracle," proclaimed, in a
torrent of hyperbole, that Repin's return was a "salvation,"
a "recovery from a dangerous illness," a spiritual
"resurrection," and a "miraculous miracle" ("Chudo
chudesnoe" 365, 368). For good measure, he dismissed
Diagilev and the Symbolists as "insane Russian boy-
decadent s" (368) .
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Repin's return to the Wanderers was a hollow victory.
Although the Association would continue until 1923, it
already belonged to history. In fact, its official history
had already been written by Stasov under the title "Twenty
Five Years of Russian Art. " The center of gravity in the
Russian art world had shifted seemingly irrevocably from
institutions like the Academy and the Wanderers to smaller
groups of artists pursuing personal agendas supported by a
diverse patron class. Only a revolution or a complete
restructuring of society could turn the clock back to the
days when one institution or one man could control Russian
art. Only under such extraordinary circumstances could
Stasov's myth of unity ever hope to become a reality.
Perhaps, one day, Russian literature might again lead
Russian painting into such a civic-minded era. Of course,
Stasov, laying upon his deathbed in 1906, would have no way
of knowing what the future might hold in this regard.
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Notes
1. Tensions were not limited to the matters of ideology. With
the rise of bourgeoisie and other venues for sale and
commissions, some artists balked at the Association's
exhibiting restrictions. In a letter to Bogoliubov of 1879,
Kharlamov and Leman complained that the Wanderers'
exclusivity rule requiring active members to show works
submitted to the Association exhibitions, there and only
there, was the main obstacle in the way of their joining
later. They suggested that this restriction be modified or
completely eliminated. Bogoliubov, a politically astute
intermediary between the Wanderers and Russian artists
living in Paris, where both Kharlamov and Leman were at the
time, brought their request to Kramskoi's attention (see
Document 178, Tovarishchestvo 1: 190-91). However, their
request was never seriously entertained.
2. According to Mikhailov, the "complete absence of the naked
type" characterized Russian art of the 1860s and 1870s (97).
3. In 1875, for example, Stasov proclaimed that the foreign
artistic models adopted by Kharlamov while living in Paris
were of "no use" in Russia. There, "something quite
different" was needed (qtd. in Zil'bershtein 44).
4. On Tereshchenko, see Vospominaniia starogo uchitelia (Kiev:
Tip. S.V. Kul'zhenko, 1907).
5. On Mamontov, see Stuart Grover, Sawa Mamontov and the
Mamontov Circle, 1870-1905. Art Patronage and the Rise of
Nationalism in Russian Art (Madison, Wis.: Grover, 1971);
Mamontov, V.S, Vospominaniia o russkikh khudozhnikakh
(Abramtsevskii khudozhestvennyi kruzhok) (Moscow: Izd-vo
Akademii khudozhestv SSSR, 1950) ; Evgenii Aronzon, Sawa
Mamontov (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1995) ; Mark Kopshitser,
Sawa Mamontov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972) .
6. On Tenisheva, see Tenisheva, M.M., Vpechatleniia moiei
zhizni (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1991); Larisa Zhuravleva,
Kniaginia Mariia Tenisheva (Smolensk: Poligramma, 1994) .
289
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7. During the 1880s, Bodarevskii participated at the six
travelling exhibits: at the twelfth in 1884 he showed
Portrait of Madame V. ; at the fifteenth in 1887 he presented
Portrait of Madame F. and Portrait of Mister ***' Daughter;
at the seventeenth exhibition in 1889 he showed Portrait of
Mr. B.'s Daughter, Portrait of Madame B-tskaia and Portrait
of E.M. Petrokokino; at the eighteenth in 1890 he exhibited
portrait of his wife E.P. Bodarevskaia and Portrait of E.P.
Br-skii; at the nineteenth in 1891 he presented Portrait of
Madame Tereshchenko and Portrait of Mister T. ; and at the
twenty-six exhibition in 1893 he showed Portrait of Evreinov
and Portrait of Safonov (see Burova, Gaponova and
Rumiantseva 380-81). In his memoirs about the Wanderers,
published in 1940, Iakov Minchenkov noted that Bodarevskii's
portraits were "liked by the bourgeoisie, particularly by
the ladies" because of his ability to "accurately copy
fashionable dresses," to "beautify and make younger the
[sitters'] faces, like dolls," and to "satisfy the tastes of
his client" (61).
8. In the 1940 edition of his memoirs, this phrase had a less
critical overtones. There, Minchenkov stated that
Bodarevskii was a "torment" to the Wanderers" (61) .
9. This accounted for the fact that a large number of
Makovskii's paintings began appearing at the major auctions
during the 1980s and 1990s.
10. Similarly, in his article "Obstacles of New Russian Art"
published in 1885, Stasov proclaimed Makovskii's Boyar
Wedding Feast as a painting which was "bright, empty,
without content" and executed in a "false, Briullovian
manner" ("Tormozy" 763).
11. In a letter to Stasov dated January 6, 1874, Repin made a
reference to his and Polenov's reading of Arthur Duprac's
edition of Regnault's correspondence published in 1873
(Repin and Stasov, Perepiska 1: 83) .
12. Segments in Stasov's article were called "Our Painting,"
"Our Sculpture," "Our Architecture" and "Our Music."
13. Equally impressive in terms of its critical ambition was
Stasov's historical overview of the Russian art criticism
polemically called "Obstacles of New Russian Art" which, as
previously mentioned, was also serialized in the Herald of
Europe in 1885.
290
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14. This anecdotal technique is also evident in Stasov's dislike
of drafts. As Gutman notes, Stasov, having written an
article, would send it "immediately to the editorial office
and sometimes even directly to the typography to be type
set" (ix) .
15. This notion had been current in Russian critical thought at
least since the time of Belinsky who considered this
"miraculous sympathy" to be one of Pushkin's remarkable
facilities (see Levitt 132). A similar quaint notion could
be heard as late as 18 91, when the painter, art historian
and Repin's biographer, Igor' Grabar' argued that because
Europeans lacked the ability to sympathize with other
nations, Russians in particular, they could not fully
appreciate Repin's painting Zaporozhe Cossacks Writing a
Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880-1891) (Grabar',
Pis'ma 1: 30).
16. On the finer points of the rhetoric of Dostoevsky's speech,
particularly the fusion of messianism and aesthetics, see
Levitt 122-45.
17. Infuriated after eleven of his paintings were rejected by
the jury for the Exposition Universelle, Courbet organized a
private exhibition which he simply called "Realism." Two
years later, Champfleury, the novelist and art historian
with close ties to Courbet, published a volume of essays
titled Le realisme, which is often referred to as the
movement's manifesto.
18. On Repin's and Stasov's trip to Western Europe where they
visited Germany, Holland, Paris, Spain and Italy, see I.S.
Zil'bershtein, "Puteshestvie I.E. Repina i V.V. Stasova po
zapadnoi Evrope v 1883 godu" (Khudozhestvennoe nasledie 1:
429-524) .
19. The title of this segment alludes to the etymological
original of the Russian noun "painting" and verb "to paint."
Derived from the adjective zhivo, which means "lively,"
"vividly" or "strikingly" and the verb pisat', meaning "to
write," the Russian word for painting--zhivopis' means quite
simply "a thing written vividly." Similarly, "to paint a
picture" is connoted in Russian by the phrase "to write a
picture."
20. Alison Hilton notes, for example, that the symbolism of the
crucified Christ is suggested by the two beams of light
intersecting under the exile's feet and by the frame of the
door behind the exile's head which echoes the shape of the
291
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cross. In 1880s "golgotha" was a popular expression for the
prisoners' dock ("The Revolutionary Theme" 121).
21. Repin, in a repeat of Konstantin Makovskii's actions of
1884, organized a one-man exhibition in 1891 shortly before
leaving the Association (Document 425, Tovarishchestvo 2:
389) .
22. For example, in 1889 after Tret'iakov purchased Serov's
painting "Girl in Sunlight," a rather innocuous example of
Impressionism recommended by Repin, Vladimir Makovskii
chided the collector for "infecting" his national art with
"syphilis" (qtd. in Sternin, Khud. zhizn' Rossii na rubezhe
XIX-XX vekov 68) .
23. The portion of the queries, published under the title
Mneniia lits, sproshenykh po povodu peresmotra Ustava
imperatorskoi Akademii Khudozhestv (St. Petersburg: [n.p.],
1891), is quoted in Moleva and Beliutin.
24. In an 1882 article published in the journal Citizen,
Avseenko again charged that Russian painters felt obliged to
"grieve the civic sorrow and to be interested in Nekrasovian
spleen" (qtd. in Bespalova and Vereshchagina 154). In 1883,
Boborykin argued that painting is only a "toady of the
accusatory literature," and, as such, is "being towed by the
literary ideas and motifs" (qtd. in Bespalova and
Vereshchagina 155).
292
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Conclusion
So what is one to make of developments in Russian
painting during the second half of the nineteenth century?
How do they relate to two cultural oppositions identified in
the introduction of this study--those of literature and
painting and cosmopolitanism and nationalism? To what
degree were the Russians, led by Stasov, different in
applying literary analogies to describe non-literary
phenomena such as painting? Finally, why did Stasov's
notions on painting persist while those of his ideological
opponents fade into obscurity?
A literary bias in matters of art was not a peculiarly
Russian phenomenon although Russian culture was particularly
receptive to it. In fact, a number of so called 'sister
arts' theories were advanced in Western Europe during the
nineteenth century including the notion of la fratemite des
arts which had appeared in France in the 1830s (see Scott).
The art criticism of Emile Zola, for example, was marked by
a profound literary bias. He often examined paintings not
necessarily in terms of visual elements but, rather, as
"illustrated thoughts" (qtd. in Furst 175).
In Russia, Vasilii Avseenko and Petr Boborykin,
although writing from a radically different ideological and
aesthetic perspective than that of Stasov, also invoked
293
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literary analogies to describe Russian art. How was then
Stasov's understanding of the link between painting and
literature different? First and foremost for him, it
remained abstract and ideological not concrete and
practical. Stasov insisted that the "new" Russian art, like
its literary counterpart, should reflect the exigencies of
contemporary Russian social reality not merely serve as
supplement to the literary form. In the discourse of the
time this was couched in terms of shared 'content.'
Literature in this regard was to serve as an aesthetic
archetype not as an object of artistic imitation. Just as
phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny, the development of "new"
Russian painting would, according to Stasov, follow that of
Russian literature. Its relevance and stature as a cultural
institution would increase as it moved toward the imitation
of Russian social reality. However, and this would have
significant consequences for the development of Russian
painting during the second half of the nineteenth century,
Stasov never clearly explicated this notion. In fact, his
rhetoric, indiscriminately invoking shibboleths from
Belinsky and his radical followers, only encouraged a
confusion of nominal with actual relations. Thus, Stasov's
pronouncements about the links between literature and
painting taken out of context can be interpreted as
advocating something akin to the practical and the concrete
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link connoted by la fratemite des arts. This confusion has
carried well into the twentieth century being perpetuated by
Soviet art historians.1
Analyzed in the context of the radicals' aesthetic and
ideological program, Stasov's critical strategy, which
assumed the most intimate link between the arts of painting
and literature, also raises another intriguing question: did
he accept or reject the radical notion that the visual arts
were inferior to literature? The answer here depends upon
what kind of art one is examining. In Stasov's scheme, the
Academy's preferred genre of the history painting was most
certainly inferior to Russian literature while the "new"
Russian art, on the other hand, was a legitimate cultural
activity equal to it. The key here, again, is shared
'progressive content'. Stasov's goal was to encourage the
"new" Russian art by advocating contact with this content.
Only a complete ideological retooling of Russian painting
could wrest it from the cosmopolitan models imposed upon it
by the Imperial Academy and rescue it from the margins of
Russian culture.
It would be simplistic to argue that Stasov was alone
in distorting developments in Russian painting during the
second half of the nineteenth century to serve ideological
needs. His critical opponents did the same reducing them to
notions linked in the most obvious manner with things
295
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Russian under labels like progressive content or
tendentiousness which were, in turn, linked with literary
phenomena. The ultimate question here is why do Stasov's
assertions stand out? More than any other contemporary
commentator, Stasov was inclined to make links between
Russian literature and Russian painting in order to elevate
the latter by the reference to the former in a manner
entirely consistent with the assumptions of liberal and
radical ideology. Not coincidentally, he did so also to
promote his career by positioning himself as the Belinsky of
Russian art criticism. Furthermore, it was under Stasov's
critical guidance that the "new" Russian national art of the
1860s, most clearly expressed in the "thinking genre," had
become the 'realist' art of the 1870s. This kind of art
emerged and flourished, he argued, as the content of Russian
painting moved closer toward Russian national life and
became suffused with narodnost'. For Stasov narodnost'
served as a rhetorical lever to increase the relevance and
stature of Russian painting as legitimate cultural activity
on par with Russian literature. Stasov was the one critic
who consistently and relentlessly advocate a change in the
native attitude toward painting so as to make it a
legitimate cultural activity equal to Russian literature.
Operating as moderator between the demands of society
and the intentions of the artist in a manner consistent with
296
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the notions of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, Stasov believed
that no art can operate without a proper critical
explication. In fact, as early as 1844, he proclaimed that
the purpose of criticism was to "show to the world the
necessity of the existence" of works of art (Stasov, Pis'ma
k rodnym 1.1: 34) . For Stasov the purpose of art was never
merely "to satisfy a sense of beauty" (34), but, rather,
existed "together with life and only together with life it
can solve problems" (34). This civic-minded position
remained unaltered during his sixty-year career becoming
both his strength and his weakness as a critic. In fact, it
was Stasov's single-minded pursuit of his essentially static
ideological goals which, in the end, compromised not only
his professional judgement but also his personal
relationships. He conflated his own critical agenda with
the institutions and artists he wished to promote. While
Stasov's sincere passion for Russian national art2 was
appreciated by those artists who benefitted from his
critical commentaries,3 his single-minded pursuit of narrow
ideological goals often provoked a genuine disdain not only
among his critical opponents4 but also among those same
artists.5 In that respect, Stasov was indeed the best and
the worst advocate Russian national art ever had.
If the initial appeal of Stasov's assertions owed much
to their grounding in the writings of Belinsky and
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Chemyshevsky, then their persistence was due mostly to
Soviet historiography which accepted unquestioningly his
assertions regarding the Wanderers, the national school of
art and Russian Realism. Concerted efforts were made after
the regimentation of Soviet artistic life in 1932 to
construe a coherent body of aesthetic proclamations out of
the topical and anecdotal observations made by a critic whom
Aleksandr Serov, Stasov's one-time close friend, described
ruefully as "an excellent music critic among sculptors and
[an excellent] critic of sculpture among musicians" (qtd. in
Repin, "Vospominaniia" 17). The question which still
remains to be fully answered is that of Stasov's true place
in the history of Russian art criticism. This is an area of
investigation that needs to be explored in a greater detail
and more systematically than it has in works by Curran and
Olkhovsky in the West, and Lebedev and Solodivnikov in
Russia. A re-evaluation is justified and welcome because of
the pervasiveness of Stasov's assumptions among the Soviet
historians who all too readily accepted them without
reservation. Considering the fact that Stasov adopted
certain notions about the "new" Russian art from his
contemporaries such as Kovalevskii, Zhemchuzhnikov and
Petrov, a particularly intriguing question arises: can he
still be regarded as the founder of professional art
criticism in Russia as most Soviet historians have argued
298
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(see Sitnik 268)? Moreover, what of Stasov's ideological
opponents? Traditionally, they have been an
undifferentiated chorus of voices set in opposition to
Stasov. Clearly, as this study indicates, the situation was
much more complicated and these critics were not simply
"defenders of official academic art" as Sitnik had argued
(268) or "conservatives," as Bespalova and Vereshchagina
would have it (137-38).
Contrary to Stasov's assertions otherwise, developments
in Russian painting during the second half of the nineteenth
century cannot be reduced to simple formulas like Realism,
"serious content," nationalism and narodnost'. Moreover,
the art of the Wanderers was not a monolithic manifestation
of these notions. Rather, it was a much more variegated
phenomena. Stasov, with his ideological emphasis on the
content of a work of art, was completely blind to the
disjunction between his critical construct of Russian
Realism and the actuality of Realism in Russia. Unburdened
by Stasov's assumptions and with this distinction in mind,
developments in Russian painting during the second half of
the nineteenth century should become a more compelling field
of study for those scholars interested in investigating the
formal, strictly pictorial elements of the painting, what
Stasov dismissed as the vessel for a "deep and beautiful
content." With a full awareness of the artificiality of the
299
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ideological construct known as Russian Realism and the
arbitrariness of criteria for one's admission into the
Realist domain, a further analysis can be undertaken to
explore comparative issues related to the works of Russian
painters vis-a-vis their European counterparts.
300
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Notes
1. Frida Roginskaia, for example, claimed that the "plot" of
Perov's 1865 painting titled Funeral Procession was similar
to that found in Nekrasov's poem of 1863 "Red Nose Frost"
(Tovarishchestvo 54), or that the "plot" of Savitskii's
Repair Work on a Railroad of 1874 was probably derived from
Nekrasov's poem of 1864 titled "The Railroad" (100).
Similarly, in 1987 N. Popova argued without elaborating that
the fundamental "literariness" found in the paintings of the
Wanderers induced them to introduce "ideological coloring"
even into their landscapes (51). Fedorov-Davydov talked
about the "dominance of literary narrative" in the paintings
of what he calls the "ideological realism" (118).
2. In his unpublished and unfinished "Autobiography," Stasov
claimed that he "loved art from his early childhood," and
that during his entire life he considered it "the most
important, the most dear thing on earth," that, in fact, art
was for him "his entire life" (qtd. in Karenin 136).
3. Stasov exhibited an unfailing ability to provide Russian
artists with information which they needed during their
preparatory research for creative work. Among those who
benefitted from his role as the bibliographer of Russian art
were A.N. Serov, M.A. Balakierev, A.P. Borodin, M.P.
Musorgsky, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, P.I. Tchaikovsky, Repin,
Antokol'skii and Tolstoy (see Stefanovich 96; Karenin 159-
60). In his letter to Balakirev of 1858, Stasov confessed
that this was a peculiar form of co-authorship in as much as
he was aware of the lack of creativity in himself which did
not necessarily preclude him from "being useful to others"
(qtd. in Karenin 38). In an 1893 letter to Nikolai
Findeizen, he summarized that his "entire life was not a
solo but a series of duets, tierces, quartets, quintets and
other ensembles" (qtd. in Findeizen 63).
4. A number of derogatory labels were attached to Stasov's name
such as "Vavilo Barabanov" (a nickname derived from the
Russian word for drum--baraban; qtd. in Nezabvennomu Stasovu
xii), "trombone of Russian art" (qtd. in Karenin 14), "ram
of Russian art" (Suvorin's expression).
301
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5. Stasov's artists-friends described him as the "pusher" (qtd.
in Asafiev 55) , the "spur" and the "incendiary glass" (qtd.
in Findeizen 185) . The last two appellations came from the
celebration of Stasov's namesday--St. Vladimir's day--and
the fortieth anniversary of his critical career in 1886 when
an impressive group of more than eighty Russian painters,
composers and sculptors presented the critic with an
engraved testimonial certificate which included two crossed
quill pens, a spur and an incendiary glass (reproduced in
Stasov's Sobranie sochinenii 1: iii) .
302
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Bibl i ography
I. Archival Sources
Tret'iakov Gallery, Moscow
f. 18/60, ed. khr. l--Liaskovskaia, O. "Repin i
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manuscript, 140 p. 193 7.
f. 66, ed. khr. 171--I.E. Repin
f. 69--The Wanderers Association
Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), Moscow
f. 842, op. 4, d. 7--I.E. Repin
f. 783, op. 1, ed. kh. l--"Zapisnye knizhki Kramskogo"
f. 647--The Academy of Fine Arts
Russian National Library, St. Petersburg
f. 82, ed. khr. 19; ed. khr. 1--A.P. Bogoliubov
f. 708, ed. khr. 752; ed. khr. 772--S.P. Sobko
Russian State Historial Archive (RGIA) in St. Peterburg
f. 789--The Academy of Fine Arts
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OR, f. 15, ed. khr. 5-6--I.N. Kramskoi
OR, f. 18, ed. khr. 45--V.M. Maksimov
OR, f. 14, ed. khr. 78--P. Ia. Dashkov with an article
on A.P. Bogoliubov by V. Mate
303
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Asset Metadata

Creator Grubisic, Ljiljana (author)

Core Title Painting as text: Developments in Russian art during the second half of the nineteenth century

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Slavic Languages and Literatures

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art History,comparative literature,Literature, Slavic and East European,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-547308

Unique identifier UC11350209

Identifier 9720230.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-547308 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 9720230.pdf

Dmrecord 547308

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Grubisic, Ljiljana

Type texts

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