From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture 9781501757044

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From REALISM to the SILVER AGE

From Realism to the Silver Age New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier

Edited by R 0 S A LI N D P. B L A K E S L E Y and M A R G A R E T S A M U

Studies of the Harriman Institute NIU Press I DeKalb, IL

© 2014 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 All Rights Reserved Design by Shaun Allshouse Studies of the Harriman Institute Columbia University The Harriman Institute, Columbia University, sponsors the Studies of the Harriman Institute in the belief that their publication contributes to scholarly research and public understanding. In this way the Institute, while not necessarily endorsing their conclusions, is pleased to make available the results of some of the research conducted under its auspices. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data From realism to the Silver Age : new studies in Russian artistic culture : essays in honor of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier I edited by Rosalind P. Blakesley and Margaret Samu. pages: illustrations; em. - (Studies of the Harriman Institute) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-87580-703-4 (pbk.)ISBN 978-1-60909-162-0 (e-book) 1. Art, Russian-Russia-History-19th century. 2. Art, Russian-

Russia-History-20th century. 3. Realism in art-Russia-History. 4. Silver age (Russian arts) I. Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl, honouree. II. Blakesley, Rosalind P. (Rosalind Polly), editor of compilation. III. Samu, Margaret, editor of compilation. IV. Series: Studies of the Harriman Institute. N6987.5.R4F76 2014 709.47'09034-dc23 2013041731 Frontispiece from Ilia Repin, Abramtsevo, 1880

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

7. The Contemporary Reception of Ilia Repin's Solo Exhibition of 1891

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier and the World of Russian Art RONALD MEYER

xi

GALINA CHURAK

III

8. Pavel Tretiakov's Icons WENDY SALMOND

Introduction

123

9. Closing the Books on Peredvizhnichestvo:

ROSALIND P. BLAKESLEY AND MARGARET SAMU

Mir Iskusstva's Long Farewell to Russian Realism 3

JANET KENNEDY

1. Academic Foot Soldier or Nationalist Warhorse?

I4I

The Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, 1843-1861

l 0. Serov, Bakst, and the Reinvention of Russia's Classical Heritage

ROSALIND P. BLAKESLEY

ALISON HILTON

13

2. The Brothers Konstantin and Vladimir Makovskii: One Family, Two Fales ELENA NESTEROVA

11. Between East and West: 1he Search j(Jr National Identity in Russian Illustrated

27

Children's Books, 1800-1917 ALLA ROSENFELD

3. Making a Case for Realism: )Jze Female Nude in Russian Satirical Images of the .1860s MARGARET SAMU

I52

44

r68

12. Kandinsky's Sketch for "Composition II," 1909-1910: A Theosophical Reading

4. The Abramtsevo Circle: Founding

MARIAN BURLEIGH-MOTLEY

r89

and Aesthetic Direction

ELEONORA PASTON

13. Things That Are Not:

59

Marianne Werefkin and the Condition of Silence

5. Tolstoy, Ge, and Two Pilates:

JOHN E. BOWLT

A Tale of the lntemrts JEFFERSON J.A. GATRALL

6. Painting History, Realistically: Murder at the Tretiakov M 0 L L Y BRUNS 0 N

94

79

Contributors Index

2II

209

201

Illustrations

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier

5.1. Ivan Kramskoi, Christ in the Wilderness, 1872

x

l.L Mikhail Mokhov, Giving Alms, 1842

5.2. Nikolai Ge, What Is Truth?, 1890

19

Aleksei Kolesov, A Peasant Woman Giving a Soldier Something to Drink, 1859 22

ilr

89

Ilia Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581, 1885 95

1.3. Aleksei Savrasov, View of the Kremlin in Inclement Weather, 1851 23

6.2. Ilia Repin, Study of an interior for Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581, 1883 IOZ

2.l. Konstantin Makovskii, Shrovetide Fair on Admiralty Square in St. Petersburg, 1869 32

6.3. Ilia Repin, Sketch for The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (fragments of

2.2. Konstantin Makovskii, Rusalki, 1879

sashes, sash tied around the waist with two daggers tucked into it), mid-1880s I03

35

2.3. Vladimir Makovskii, Condemned, 1879

35

6.4. Ilia Repin, Iurii Repin, 1882

2.4. Konstantin Makovskii, Minin on the Square of Nizhnii Novgorod, Calling the People to Sacrifice,

1894-1896

7 .. Ilia Repin, The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan, 1880-1891 II4

37

2.5. Vladimir Makovskii, The Miser, 1891

Ilia Repin, The Annual Meeting in Memory of the French Communards at the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, 1883 n8

39

2.6. Vladimir Makovskii, The Despot of the Family,

1893

41

3.1. Arsenii Shurygin, Diversion in the Waiting Room, I 865 45

3.2. Timofei Neff, Bather, 1858

46

3.3. Nikolai Stepanov, "Bacchantes"

so

3.4. Unknown artist, "25. Nymph before Bathing" 3.5. V Reingardt, "Let's go, Sophie"

105

51

53

3.6. Nikolai Stepanov, ''I'm satisfied with the artist Rybkin'' 55

4.1. Unknown photographer, Members of the Abramtsevo circle in the dining room of Savva and Elizaveta Mamontov's house in Moscow, 1880s 6o

8.1. M. Dmitriev, Photograph of the interior of an Old Believer prayer room, ca. 1900 125

Unknown photographer, The Tretiakov Gallery, view from Room 7 looking into Room 6, showing installation of works by Miloradovich, Litovchenko, and Surikov, 1898 128 8.3. Firs Zhuravlev, Before the Betrothal, 1874

129

8.4. Unknown photographer, Vitrines to house Pavel

Tretiakov's icon collection, designed by Viktor Vasnetsov and made at the Abramtsevo Carpentry Workshop, 1904 132 8.5. Unknown artist, Icon of the Nativity, second half of

the sixteenth century

134

4.2. Viktor Vasnetsov and Vasilii Polenov, The Church of the Savior Not Made by Hands with the Clock Tower, Abramtsevo, 1881-1882; 1892 69

10.1. Lev Bakst, Terror Antiquus, 1908

4.3. Valentin Serov, Girl with Peaches, 1887

11. L Elizaveta (Elisabeth) Bern, Illustration for Azbuka,

4.4. Ilia Repin, Abramtsevo, 1880

72

ii, 73

4.5. Elena Polenova, Fairytale (The Wild Beast), 18951898 75

153

10.2. Valentin Serov, The Rape of Europa, 1910

1913

175

11.2. Viktor Vasnetsov and Viktor Zamirailo, Illustrations for Aleksandr Pushkin's Song of Oleg the Wise, 1899 177

153

11.3. Elena Polenova, Illustration for Russian Folktales and Humorous Sayings, 1906 179 1.4. Ivan Bilibin, Illustration for Aleksandr Pushkin's The Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1905 181 11.5. Georgii Narbut, Illustration for Boris Diks's Toys (Book II), 1911 183 12.1. Vasily Kandinsky, Sketch for "Composition If' (Skizze fiir "Komposition II"), 1909-1910 190 Unknown artist, Drawing of a group of Menhirs on the Abakan Steppes, Siberia 193 12.3. Vladimir Semenov, Photograph of a decorated stag stone from Tuva, Siberia 194 12.4. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition II, 1910

195

12.5. Unknown artist, Drawing of a decorated stag stone in Mongolia 195 l3.L Marianne Werefkin, Sunday Afternoon, 1907 13.2. Marianne Werefkin, In the Cafe, 1909

203

13.3. Marianne Werefkin, Tragic Atmosphere, 1910

viii

Illustrations

203

205

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to the Harriman Institute for its support of this volume's publication, and particularly to Ronald Meyer for serving as liaison to the Institute during all phases of the project. Thanks are also due to the many museums, libraries, and other collections that gave permission for images to be published. We extend our sincere gratitude to Amy Farranto at the Northern Illinois University Press for helping to ensure that the volume moved as smoothly as possible to completion. We would like to acknowledge the importance of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in the development of this volume and the field of Russian art history more generally. Since the 1970s and 1980s, annual conferences of ASEEES (formerly the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies) have served as a major venue for the growth of Russian art-historical scholarship in the West, as well as an annual reunion for a collegial and mutually supportive community of scholars. The present volume has its origins in the Association's 2009 annual conference in Boston, at which the editors, along with Jefferson Gatrall and Molly Brunson, presented a panel titled "Interventions in the Real: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Russian Art" in honor of Elizabeth Valkenier. In a happy coincidence, the panel took place on November 13-not only Valkenier's birthday, but also the anniversary of the day she mailed her manuscript for Russian Realist Art to the publisher. A festive luncheon ensued, toasts were offered, and the idea for a festschrift was first mentioned. We are grateful to the contributors, our colleagues, for creating the warm and inclusive atmosphere that permeates our field, and we look forward to many more productive meetings and collaborations arising out of ASEEES. This book uses the Library of Congress system of transliteration, but without noting hard and soft signs in the text. The only exceptions are the names of Russian rulers (Peter and Nicholas, for example, rather than Petr and Nikolai), and widely accepted renditions of famous figures such as Lev Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Vasily Kandinsky. The following

abbreviations are used throughout: GRM for State Russian Museum, GTG for State Tretiakov Gallery, RGALI for Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, TsGALI for Central State Archive of Literature and Art of St. Petersburg, and TsGIA SPb for Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg.

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier and the World of Russian Art RONALD MEYER

In his review of the "dismal show" of "Russian and Soviet Painting" mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977-1978), Hilton Kramer, the lead art critic at the New York Times, bemoans the poor quality of the exhibits, but is even more outraged at the museum offering nothing to counterbalance the standard Soviet ideological interpretations: "From neither the catalog nor the wall labels in the exhibition, moreover, can we expect to be told anything but the official Soviet line:' 1 Kramer recommends an antidote to the Met's ideological pandering: Fortunately, there is a new book at hand-Elizabeth Valkenier's Russian Realist Art (Ardis)-that fits the need for a serious and candid study of the political history of Russian art from the 1860s to the present. ... Her work has the great merit of providing us with a detailed account of the politics and ideology that have dominated so much of the art we see in this exhibition .... Hers is by no means the last word on the subject, but it is in many respects a useful first word, and it arrives just in time to act as a corrective to the Met's sunny embrace of this human tragedy. 2

First, it is interesting that rather than choose some standard history, Kramer promotes a first book by a relatively unknown author, published by a fledgling independent small press in Michigan with no track record as a publisher of books on art. But what is more interesting, and which perhaps explains my first point, is that Kramer appreciates Valkenier's "first word;' how she connects the rise and fall of Russian realist art from the "initial creative phase ofPeredvizhnichestvo;' to its "tendentious rehabilitation'' under Stalin. 3 And more important, how Valkenier challenges the prevailing view both in the Soviet Union and in the West, as exemplified by the Metropolitan Museum's show, through her analysis as a historian of the "nexus between society, politics and art:' Interviews conducted in the 1970s with both the conservative and liberal camps of art historians and

curators, undertaken in tandem with archival research, laid the groundwork for Valkenier's pioneering study. Fortunately, Valkenier was not a novice researcher in the USSR-the gloom of the Cold War atmosphere did nothing to facilitate access to archives and scholars. As she writes in her essay "The Totalitarian Model and Me;' her initial contacts and experiences in the USSR date back to a ten-day Intourist trip to Moscow in 1958, from which she brought back the impression that "Soviet citizens were not conforming to the totalitarian model:' 4 The following year she returned to Russia as a guide for the book section of the first American Exhibit, which reinforced her impressions that ordinary citizens, unlike the monolithic mass of true believers portrayed by Cold War ideologues, had independent opinions and hungered for information about the West from which they had been cut off for half a century. When Valkenier returned to Moscow in 1967, it was in the capacity of research assistant of Philip Mosely, a foreign policy scholar-Valkenier had followed Mosely from the Council on Foreign Relations, where he held the post of director of studies, to Columbia University, where Mosely had been named director of the European Institute. 5 Her careful reading as Mosely's assistant of the literature on Soviet foreign policy in the third world led her to believe that there were "disagreements over the old orthodoxies" and evolving new interpretations. Her research plan was to spend a month interviewing "Soviet specialists whose arguments [on foreign policy] represented the 'new thinking' of those days:' With Mosely's introductions she met highly placed Soviet experts with whom she maintained contact for the next thirty years, which yielded a number of articles and ultimately her second book, The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind (Praeger, 1983 and 1985). Valkenier's work in this field pointed to the economic difficulties in the ambitious Soviet aid policies-an argument that diverged from the prevalent belief in Moscow's successes in the developing countries.

Questioning received opinion would continue to be Valkenier's modus operandi on her art history research trips to the USSR and Russia, funded by the Russian and Harriman Institutes, IREX, the Pew Foundation, and the National Council for Soviet and East European Research. It is characteristic ofValkenier's approach that she enlisted both the conservatives, many of whom held influential positions in the Soviet Academy of Arts and arts administrations, and the liberals, who were more likely to be found at universities and on museum staffs and were suggesting new approaches outside of the official framework. She found both groups eager to influence how she would frame her story. The conservatives provided her with their publications of documents, letters, and the like, which reinforced the official-highly politicized-version of history. On the other hand, the liberals prompted her to see that "the Peredvizhniks' traveling exhibits from 18 71 on were motivated as much by a shrewd gamble to tap the market among the new middle class as by the proclaimed desire of the intelligentsia 'to serve the people;" 6 and that many of the Peredvizhniki who left the Academy in the 1870s in protest against the stultified official ways rejoined that tsarist institution some twenty years later. Two scholars of the liberal camp, Ilia Zilbershtein, editor of the scholarly book series Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Heritage), and Sofia Goldshtein, archivist at the Tretiakov Gallery, facilitated Valkenier's access to the papers of the State Committee on Art, established in 1936, "as a political watchdog and command center for the Stalinization of the field:' Under the supervision of the Committee, Repin became the equal of Rembrandt, and nonrealist works were banished to the storage bins. Needless to say, having the Committee's minutes and protocols helped Valkenier paint a very different picture of the posthumous reception and reputation of the Peredvizhniki. An interesting footnote to Valkenier's study of the State Committee on Art's archive is that a decade later, when she was working on her book on Repin, she was denied access to this particular archive. She also discovered that her first book was not available on open shelves in the libraries. Valkenier's three decades of research on art history in the Soviet Union and Russia would bear fruit as her three books: Russian Realist Art, based on her doctoral dissertation (Columbia University, PhD 1973, History), but considerably revised and expanded to go beyond the Peredvizhniks' heyday and trace their influence into the twentieth century as a model for socialist realism;

xii

Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (Columbia University Press, 1990), which is not simply a biography of the foremost Peredvizhnik but also an insightful look at the distorting lens of Soviet historiography; and finally, Valentin Serov: Portraits of Russia's Silver Age (Northwestern University Press, 2001), a study of Repin's best-known pupil set against the background of the transition from realism to Russian modernism and the interplay of art and social history during Russia's Silver Age. These lines from Valkenier's introduction to her book on Serov might be applied to her art history works as a whole: Painting prominent people of the day in business, government, society, and the arts, [Serov] provides a gallery of important figures in Russia's Silver Age .... Serov's penetrating "reading" of the lives and circumstances of his sitters gives us a far more varied and intricate group portrait of the epoch than is customarily presented in Russian or Western historiography. The visual thus richly extends and amplifies the usual sources, political or literary.

There is much more to be said about Elizabeth Valkenier's contributions to the study of Russian art, at the very least that she edited the catalogue of The Wanderers for the exhibition from the Soviet Union mounted at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1991, with contributions from both Russian and American scholars-surely a recognition of her status as one of the leading experts in the field. More recently, Valkenier, together with Wendy Salmond, was guest editor of a special issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture: "Russian Realist Painting. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology" (2008), a compilation of documents (for example, letters, miscellaneous writings, and official papers) in English translation. This anthology has become not only an essential reference work for scholars, but also an invaluable teaching resource that enables art historians who do not specialize in Russia to include the Russian dimension in broader courses on realist art. E L I Z A B E T H K R I D L , daughter of Manfred Kridl, a well-known scholar and professor of Polish Literature at Wilno University and leading proponent of Polish integralism (the Polish variant of Russian formalism or Czech structuralism), carne to the United States in 1941 with her mother and brother, to join her father who had left Poland and was now teaching at Smith College. Kridl had left the University ofWilno, where he had been both

ELIZABETH KRIDL VALKENIER AND THE WORLD OF RUSSIAN ART

dean of humanities and deputy pro-rector, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, when Polish personnel at the university were being relieved of their positions by the new Lithuanian Soviet government. Founder ofWilno's Social Democratic Club, Kridl opposed authoritarianism on both the left and the right. A photograph from 1936 shows the popular professor presiding over a picnic with a group of university students who included Czeslaw Milosz among their number? Milosz was not a student ofKridl's per se, but the professor was a steadfast supporter of the young poet from their early days together in Poland and during their joint emigration in the United States. Valkenier's most recent publication is "Way Back in Wilno ... ;' a memoir of her acquaintance with Milosz. 8 Though she made a conscious choice not to specialize in Polish history, mainly to avoid intellectual parochialism, Valkenier wrote several important articles on the Sovietization of Polish history after World War II. As was the case with her work on art and Soviet foreign policy, careful research was supported by personal interviews, all of which served to draw attention to politicized falsification. Kridlleft Smith College in 1948, the same year that Elizabeth graduated from the college, for Columbia University, where he held the Adam Mickiewicz chair until his retirement in 1955. Elizabeth went to Yale University and earned her M.A. in history (1949). It was at Yale that she discovered her love for Russian history while taking a seminar with George Vernadsky. And it was at Yale that Elizabeth met her future husband Robert Valkenier. They moved to New York City, where Elizabeth pursued her study of Russian history-the seminar in medieval Russia with Michael Cherniavsky led to her choosing a topic in art history for her dissertation-and earned the Certificate of the Russian Institute in 1951. Robbie was longtime editor at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the editor of all of Elizabeth's work until his death in 2003. Their home on Morningside Drive in New York and their rural getaway in Connecticut have hosted friends and colleagues from the United States and abroad for countless dinners, where the very good food is always bettered by the exciting conversation and camaraderie. I count myself a very lucky beneficiary of the Valkeniers' generosity. The present volume not only is testament to the influence of Elizabeth Valkenier's scholarly work and professional life, but also represents a tribute from colleagues, students, and friends, some of whom go back two or three decades, while others are fairly recent. It is no exaggeration to say that her extraordinary life and gift for friendship have helped shape her remarkable studies of the world of Russian art.

Publications by Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier Art History Books Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977; New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

The Wanderers. Masters of 19th-Century Russian Painting, exh. cat. (Dallas: University of Texas Press, 1991). Editor and contributor. Valentin Serov. Portraits of Russia's Silver Age (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). "Russian Realist Painting. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology;' special issue, Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 14 (2008). Coedited with Wendy Salmond.

Art History Book Chapters and Articles "The Peredvizhniki and the Spirit of the 1860s;' The Russian Review 34, no. 3 (July 1975): 247-65. "Politics in Russian Art: The Case of Rep in;' The Russian Review 37, no. 1 (January 1978): 14-29. "Repin's Search for the Revolutionary's Image in 'They did not expect him;" Gazette des Beaux-Arts 91 (May-June 1978): 207-13. "La Tentation par Ilya Repin (1844-1930);' La Revue du Louvre 2 (April1981): 131-33. "The Intelligentsia and Art;' in Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 152-72. "Ilya Repin arid David Burliuk;' Canadian-AmericanSlavic Studies (Spring-Summer 1986): 55-62. "The Art of the Wanderers in the Culture of Their Time;' in The Wanderers: Masters of 19th-Century Russian Painting, ed. Elizabeth K. Valkenier (Dallas: University of Texas Press, 1991), 1-23. "The Writer as Artist's Model: Repin's Portrait of Garshin;' The Metropolitan Museum of Art]ournal28 (1993): 207-16. "Repin za rubezhom [Repin Abroad];' Nashe nasledie [Our Heritage]6, no. 31 (1994): 41-49. "The Birth of a National Style;' in The Russian Stravinsky, ed. Joseph Horowitz (New York: Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1994), 24-32. "Repin in Emigration;' The Harriman Review 8, no. 4 (December 1995): 41-50. "Opening up to Europe: The Peredvizhniki and the

Ronald Meyer

xiii

Miriskussniki Respond to the West;' in Russian Art

and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts, ed. R.P. Blakesley and S.E. Reid (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 45-60. "Repin and His Critics;' in Critical Exchange: Art

Criticism of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Russia and Western Europe, ed. C. Adlam and J. Simpson (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 227-41.

"Glasnost' and Perestroika in Soviet-Third World Economic Relations;' The Harriman Institute Forum (October 1991). "Russian Policies in Central Asia: Change or Continuity?" SAIS Review (June 1994). "The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Future of the Socialist Model;' in Russia and the Third World in the Post-Soviet Era, ed. M.S. Mesbahi (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994).

Historiography Publications Other Art Publications Introduction and Catalogue, Exhibition of Soviet World War II Posters (The Russian Institute, Columbia University, 1976). Reviews of the exhibition of Russian and Soviet art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Christian Science Monitor (18 April1977) and the Village Voice (25 April1977). '1\n Unknown War" (The Lewis Cowan Collection of Soviet World War II Posters), Columbia Library Columns 29, no. 1 (November 1979): 197-213. Entries on Russian art and architecture in Academic American Encyclopedia (Princeton: Arete, 1981, 1993). "The Birth of Realism" and "The Move toward Decorativism;' The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 1993). Entries on nineteenth-century Russian painters in The Dictionary of Art (New York: Macmillan, 1995). Entry on Russian art and architecture in Collier's Encyclopedia (New York, 1995).

Selected Soviet/Russian Foreign Policy Publications "Recent Trends in Soviet Research on the Developing Countries:' World Politics 20, no. 4 {July 1968); reprinted in W.R. Duncan, ed., Soviet Policy in Developing Countries (Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970). "The USSR, the Third World, and the Global Economy;' Problems of Communism (July-August 1979).

The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind (New York: Praeger, 1983 and 1985). "East-West Economic Competition in the Third World;' in East- West Tensions in the Third World, ed. Marshall D. Shulman (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).

xiv

"The Rise and Decline of Official Marxist History in Poland, 1945-1983;' Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (Winter 1985). "Teaching History in Post-Communist Russia;' The Harriman Institute Forum (April1991). "Stalinizing Polish History: What Soviet Archives Disclose;' East European Politics and Society 7, no. l (Winter 1993). "The Changing Face of Oriental Studies in Russia;' Central Asia Monitor (April1994).

Notes 1. Hilton Kramer, "Detente Yields a Dismal Show" (Art View), New York Times (24 April1977). 2. Kramer, "Detente Yields a Dismal Show:' 3. Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The

State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1977; reprinted by Columbia University Press, 1989), xv-xvi. 4. "The Totalitarian Model and Me;' The Harriman Review 14, nos. 1-2 (November 2002): 1622; (accessed 7 November 2011). 5. See Valkenier's appreciation of her mentor, "Philip Edward Mosely;' The Harriman Institute, 1946-2006 (New York: Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 2006), 22-25. 6. Valkenier, "Philip Edward Mosely;' 19. 7. This photograph is reproduced in The Harriman Institute 1946-2006,40. Milosz stands behind Kridl making a funny gesture with his hands; Elizabeth Kridl is sitting third from the right -she and her brother are the youngest members on this picnic outing. 8. "Way Back in Wilno ... ;' An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, ed. Cynthia L. Haven (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 10-15.

ELIZABETH KRIDL VALKENIER AND THE WORLD OF RUSSIAN ART

From REALISM to the SILVER AGE

Introduction ROSALIND P. BLAKESLEY AND MARGARET SAMU

I

n 1916 Russian artist, archaeologist, writer, and philosopher Nikolai Roerich extended a sweeping pardon to those who, until recently, had remained ignorant of Russian art. "We must forgive all those who not long ago denied the existence of Russian Art; for they did not know! For they, poor things, had not seen!" 1 Much has changed since this most curious of Russian polymaths both acknowledged and excused the continuing prejudices held by many toward the art of his native country. In the twenty-first century, exhibitions of Russian art in foreign museums and galleries are rife. Sales of Russian art are among the most vibrant and lucrative in auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic. One of Roerich's contemporaries, Natalia Goncharova, has in recent years repeatedly held the record for the highest price commanded at auction by a female artist of any nationality. In academia, conferences and symposia debate Russian visual culture at length, publications abound, and two research centers have been devoted to the subject in the Englishspeaking world. 2 Yet if we take as our focus the century that immediately preceded Roerich's statement of "forgiveness;' there is still a lingering sense of cultural marginality in discussions of Russian art. Certainly, the avant-garde has been given its due as a central force in the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century. There has been a welcome growth

of scholarship on Russia's famous realist artists, the Peredvizhniki, spearheaded by this book's honoree, Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier. The Ballets Russes, too, have been widely acknowledged as a revolutionary episode in ballet, opera, and stage design, with a renewed surge of symposia, exhibitions, and publications to mark their centenary in 2009. But it is still relatively rare for Western scholarship to focus the full beam of its attention on the art of imperial Russia prior to the advent of Sergei Diaghilev and his glittering galaxy of artists, and the explosive innovations of the avant-garde. This volume of thitteen essays, conceived as a coherent entity and celebrating the scholarship of Valkenier, aims to redress the balance by presenting rigorous new research by Western and Russian scholars on Russian art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Starting in the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) and covering a period of eighty years, it rethinks the narratives of seminal episodes in Russia's creative development; brings to the fore works of art and modes of artistic expression or discourse that have been sidelined or ignored in other histories; and delves into little-acknowledged aspects of well-known artistic careers. Over three decades after Valkenier's landmark monograph Russian Realist Art established a new standard in the field, our aim is to showcase the latest methodological approaches and subjects of inquiry, and expand the parameters of what has become an area of

enormous intellectual and popular appeal. Interwoven throughout the chapters are such recurrent themes as the shifting contours and contiguities of institutions and communities; the role of exhibitions in focusing or exploding debate; the creation of museums and collections; hallmark connections between visual and written texts; and attention to continuities as much as splits and rifts in the Russian art world. The result is a network of case studies that provide formative new landmarks across a range of cultural territory and critical commentary. Collectively, they embrace a new era of collaboration between East and West, and profess a joint ambition to revise and revitalize the history of Russian art. AT T H E s T A R T o F the period under consideration in this book, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg reigned supreme. Founded in 1757 during the reign of Empress Elizabeth, and fully chartered by Catherine the Great in 1764, it was the empire's only state-sponsored art school, and the only official academy of arts in the Western world to boast its own boarding school. From the early nineteenth century, boys from as young as eight would spend up to twelve years uniformed and cloistered in the Academy's vast, neoclassical building on the northern bank of the Neva River, imbibing an idealizing tradition based on the aesthetic principles of classical art, which was the lifeblood of academic practice across Europe at the time. 3 As the reign of Alexander I ( 180 1-1825) took shape, the institution could rightly claim to have met its initial promise to tackle Russia's dependency on foreign artists by training native artists, and by establishing appropriate frameworks to ensure their elevated social standing and professional success. Many commissions for major painted or sculptural projects were now given to Academy-trained artists as a matter of course. Revised statutes of 1802 insisted that the construction and decoration of public buildings be entrusted to "artists educated in the Academy, in preference to foreigners of equal merit:' 4 And, as the institution's conference secretary boasted to his opposite number in London in 1801, foreigners had been virtually eliminated from the teaching staff: instead, the professors of painting, sculpture, and architecture were now almost exclusively Russian graduates of the Academy, "many of whom, by the genius and talents conspicuous in their works [... ] have acquired a very high reputation; these Artists are not unknown in foreign countries, most of them having traveled into Italy and France:' 5

4

I ~

INTRODUCTION

By the reign of Nicholas I, the Academy's achievements were legion. Paintings and sculptures produced under its aegis adorned the most fashionable city residences; some of its alumni were sufficiently recognized internationally to have self-portraits commissioned by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; and buildings such as the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg-designed and decorated by Academy professors, students, and alumni from 1801-stood as monolithic testaments to its success. The seed of artistic training had also been sown outside the capital city, with the emergence of Russia's first provincial art schools. When, in 1829, Nicholas I assumed direct patronage of the Academy, placing it under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Imperial Court (instead of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, as had been the case since 1811), one could be forgiven for assuming that his intention was to appropriate a successful institution that would bring luster to his reign. But all was far from well in the Academy of Arts by this date, as the tsar's arbitrary hiring and firing of hapless professors there might suggest. While the institution produced a generation of artists of truly international caliber, including Orest Kiprenskii and Karl Briullov, those same artists complained of feeling constrained by the anxiety that Nicholas's sudden interventions and high-handed pronouncements produced. The creative imaginations of other artists were almost entirely stilled. The result was a growing disillusionment among many progressive artists and critics with the academic elite, and a sense that uncritical aping, rather than artistic innovation, pervaded the Academy's halls. From the 1830s, the first serious alternative to the Academy emerged in the form of the Moscow Art Class and, later, the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture which, however inferior to the Academy, at least offered an alternative venue for artists to train, as Rosalind Blakesley explores in chapter 1. Some of the Academy's brightest young stars also placed distance between themselves and their alma mater by working for extended periods abroad, from where the likes of Aleksandr Ivanov inveighed against the stagnation and pusillanimity of an institution that had become part of the personal fiefdom of the tsar. Other artists quietly pursued fruitful careers elsewhere, as when Aleksei Venetsianov (a former civil servant who had trained at the Academy, but not as a fully matriculated student) adjusted his sights to the conditions of peasant life on his country estate, and set up a private art school there.

We must avoid the trap here of demonizing the Academy as the complete antithesis of artistic achievement at the time. It was far from regressive in every sphere, and continued to produce artists who played major roles in shaping Russia's cultural history, be it within the establishment or in opposition to it. Nor were the supposed innovators outside the Academy's orbit necessarily antagonistic toward it, as Venetsianov's ongoing quest for academic recognition attests: he was rewarded with the title of academician in 1812, and continued to hope for a position as professor. Recent scholarship has recognized the need to offer more nuanced appraisals of the Academy's ethos and intent, for example by reviving the careers of academic artists, and Elena Nesterova's work on the Makovskii brothers in chapter 2 of this volume advances that trend. It is nonetheless incontrovertible that the Academy lost credibility as Nicholas's reign progressed, as its critics laid charges of insular complacency and obsolescence at its door. Particularly keen was the sense shared by certain young artists and members of the intelligentsia that the Academy had become irrelevant in the modern age, and neither trained nor encouraged artists to engage with the idiosyncrasies of contemporary life. Here, as ever, the picture was more complicated than sweeping characterizations might suggest. Although it was a staunch defender of the primacy of history painting, the Academy had seen fit to include genre painting in its teaching program for many years. By the middle of the century, genre painters-and advocates of critical realism, at that-were even receiving some of the institution's highest accolades. Yet the Academy and its supposedly anachronistic practices were increasingly mocked in the popular press, as Margaret Samu illuminates in chapter 3. In her analysis of caricatures of female nudes, Samu argues that it was not the nudity that was under attack, but rather the academic artistic trope of the female nude which was, to liberal critics, lamentably disengaged with modern social concerns. Artists, too, bemoaned the growing disjuncture between reality and representation in the academic world. Famously, in 1863, fourteen students voted with their feet, and left the Academy in their final year of study when their request to select their own subject matter for the annual gold medal competition was refused. This episode, known as the Revolt of the Fourteen, was not a case of slighted students behaving rashly and unthinkingly, for they were keenly aware that their premature departure from Russia's premier art school

could halt their careers before these had even begun. Not only did they eschew the opportunity for statefunded foreign travel which success in the gold medal competition would have brought, but they alienated themselves from the Academy's labyrinthine systems of patronage, too. Clearly, the defectors needed to establish alternative frameworks of personal and professional support. Their answer was the Artel' khudozhnikov (Artists' Workshop), known as the Artel-an independent workshop in St. Petersburg where artists worked and socialized together, pooled their resources, and sought work as a collective. In 1870 this small, intimate organization was superseded by a new and entirely different group, now based in Moscow-the much larger and longer-lasting Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions (1870-1923). The Association's members, the Peredvizhniki (often translated into English as the Wanderers or the Itinerants), aspired to display their art to ever wider audiences through a series of annual itinerant art exhibitions, and to cut out the commercial middleman by establishing direct lines of communication between patron and artist. Russia's first wholly independent and financially sustainable artistic association was under way. Gradually, it attracted the foremost artistic talents of the time, some of whom prompted rich dialogue with other art forms, as Jefferson Gatrall explores in chapter 5. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, patterns of artistic patronage shifted, most notably in the well-studied proclivities of the Moscow collector Pavel Tretiakov. Tretiakov is a uniting theme in chapters 5 through 7 for his well-known support of Russian realism, but is of interest to Wendy Salmond in chapter 8 for his less celebrated engagement with icon painting, too. Related developments in patronage also occurred in the activities of patrons less studied in the West such as Ilia Ostroukhov, who features in chapters 7, 8, and 10. These and other passages in the book shed light on the cultural divide between St. Petersburg and Moscow, with the patronage of the imperial court on the one hand set against the proclivities of merchants and businessmen on the other. The movement between the two cities that takes place throughout this volume, however, reiterates the point that continuities as much as ruptures were at play. Yes, St. Petersburg, as birthplace of the Academy, was seen as the center of the artistic establishment, while Moscow, home of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, was equated with more progressive and democratic forces. But the essays here demonstrate that the differences between

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the two cities, like those between the Academy and other artistic communities, should not be overdrawn. With the advent of the Association ofTraveling Art Exhibitions, the Academy ceased to be the epicenter of Russian artistic life. This is not to imply that clear battle lines were set between the two organizations. If Soviet scholarship was keen to emphasize the difference between the Peredvizhniki and an institution as embedded in the tsarist regime as the Imperial Academy of Arts, later accounts have taken pains to acknowledge the complexity of the relationship between the two. A recent revisionist account even takes as a prime focus "the intricacies of the strong symbiosis of the young artists with the Academy of Arts;' pointing to the fact that members of both the Artel and the later Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions continued to exhibit in the Academy, and on occasion were the recipients of official academic titles and awards. 6 Ilia Repin, Russia's greatest realist artist and the subject of both Molly Brunson's and Galina Churak's chapters, is a prime case in point. Over the years, the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions heralded other artistic coteries that provided alternative forums for artists to meet, work, and debate the purpose of art. For example, at Abramtsevo, the country estate of Savva Mamontov, railway magnate and irrepressible cultural impresario, artists thrilled to his insistence that they apply their talents to ambitious communal projects (the design and decoration of a church, the staging of multiple plays), and experiment in media other than those in which they had trained. As Ella Paston explores in chapter 4, Academy-educated artists such as Viktor Vasnetsov and Vasilii Polenov found themselves designing costumes and sets. Polenov's sister, Elena Polenova, revitalized local handicrafts with designs palatable to the modern, urban consumer, and Mikhail VrubelRussia's brooding symbolist par excellence-found new direction with the brilliant originality of his iridescent ceramic designs. Under Mamontov's aegis, Abramtsevo artists such as Vasnetsov and Polenova developed a strikingly experimental artistic register in book design, too, as Alla Rosenfeld explores in chapter 11. Nor did Mamontov reserve his unalloyed enthusiasm for the visual and performative arts for the projects at Abramtsevo alone. Founder of the Russian Private Opera, he also joined Princess Maria Tenisheva (doyenne of Talashkino, Russia's other great artistic colony of the time) to sponsor Mir iskusstva (World of Art, 1898-1904), the journal produced by the

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INTRODUCTION

eponymous group of artists who, coalescing around Diaghilev, constituted the most dynamic artistic group in Russia at the turn of the century. 7 Consciously positioning themselves as an antidote to what were now seen in progressive circles to be the chauvinist attitudes and overblown moralizing of the Peredvizhniki, the Miriskussniki (as members of the Mir iskusstva group are known) favored a more cosmopolitan aesthetic than that of their realist predecessors. Aspiring to pull Russian art into the continental mainstream, they celebrated in their journal the work of artists as countercultural as Aubrey Beardsley, rather than repeating the claim of Russian exceptionalism that had become the hallmark of hagiographic literature on the realist school. Yet here, too, we must beware the appeal of simplistic narratives of polarity and opposition: as Janet Kennedy reveals in chapter 9, for all their markers of westernization and zestful proclamations of transnational intent, the Miriskussniki at times brought a nationalistic tenor to their debates. As Russia suffered a violent start to the twentieth century-enduring mutinous uprisings, terrorist attacks on politicians and other public figures, an unpopular war with Japan, and the shocking slaying of peaceful demonstrators in the heart of St. Petersburg in 1905so the art world entered a period of astonishing flux. Some artists focused their attentions in new directions, as when Valentin Serov-joyful exponent of plein-air painting and leading society portraitist who was a troubled witness to the 1905 atrocities-accompanied Lev Bakst on a journey to Greece in 1907. The result was a dramatic new engagement with the legacy of classicism in Russia, as Alison Hilton investigates in chapter 10. Some, such as Marianne Werefkin, moved abroad (in Werefkin's case to Munich), and there developed a new artistic voice. Still others began the inexorable transition from figurative painting toward more abstract modes of expression, be it through Kazimir Malevich's avowedly self-conscious system of suprematism, or the fragmentation of cuba-futurism. The myriad factors that lie behind these and other shifts negotiated by the avant -garde are beyond the scope of this volume. But in chapter 12, Marian Burleigh-Motley offers a robust new interpretation of one of these developments, positing a Theosophical explanation to the cultural equipage of Vasily Kandinsky's seminal painting, Sketch for "Composition No. II" of 1909-1910. The efflorescence that occurred in the visual arts in Russia as we reach the end of the eighty years covered by this book has been explored in depth elsewhere. The

thirteen essays here expose and illuminate developments of extraordinary richness and complexity before the internationally recognized triumphs of the avant -garde. With rigorous new research, innovative interpretation, and a novel focus at times, they collectively refute any charge of provincialism or marginalization that may still hover over the field of Russian art. I N P R E S E NT I N G T H I S new scholarship on Russian art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we must attend to some of the major trends in its analysis and interpretation over the last forty-odd years. Elizabeth Valkenier has already commented on the historiography of the period up to the 1970s, and it is not our intention to rehearse that material here: it will suffice to point the reader to her thoughtful and stimulating analysis oflate imperial and Soviet scholarship in the historiographic survey that concludes her 1977 book, Russian Realist Art. 8 During the closing decades of the Soviet Union and with the advent of glasnost, the picture changed dramatically, as our coverage here of certain advances and new lines of inquiry suggests. For the sake of clarity and succinctness, we will focus our study on the English- and Russianlanguage historiography of the nineteenth century to the Silver Age, and largely exclude from our observations the extensive literature on icon painting and other earlier considerations, or on the avant-garde and the many artistic developments of the Soviet period and beyond. The last two decades of the Soviet era saw a number of gratifying developments in art-historical scholarship, in both Russia and the Anglo-American world. In the West many of these developments can be traced back to Cold War efforts to create cultural connections with the Soviet Union on an officiallevel. 9 Even as political tensions remained, these programs allowed Western scholars the opportunity to study Russian art, and created a vital exchange of ideas between Russian and Western art historians. Cold War anxieties in the political sphere also led governments in Britain and the United States of America (as well as in other western states) to support the study of Russian language, literature, and culture for students in secondary schools and universities as well as the military. Such programs not only encouraged future social scientists and policy specialists, but also contributed toward the development of a generation of British and American art historians working on Russian art. In the 1970s state and private support for cultural exchange created new opportunities for art research and

exhibitions. 10 These exhibitions played a crucial role in making Russian art accessible to Western scholars and engendering broader public awareness of and interest in the subject. At the same time, opportunities increased for Anglo-American scholars to work in Russia supported by IREX, Fulbright, and other grants, even if the Western directors of such programs had to caution scholars against selecting subjects that were unlikely to get approval from the Soviet side. Russia exerted a distinct appeal for its distant, exotic allure; but there was also growing recognition that this was a large and complex field little known outside of Russia, and that research in the area could contribute something really new to art history and cultural studies. In particular, specialists in Russian literature such as John Bowlt began to work on the early twentieth -century literary and artistic circles that gave impetus to and, later, sustained the avant-garde. Their endeavors in publishing documents and theoretical material in English raised the level of scholarship in the field, and generated tremendous interest in the Russian avant-garde among both popular and scholarly audiences-an interest that gradually spread to earlier periods of Russian art. 11 Notable from the start was the overwhelming support that Western art historians have received from scholarly mentors in Russia, as every nonRussian contributor to this volume would attest. While it might seem invidious to single out individuals from among the many Russian art historians who welcomed their Western counterparts and facilitated their work, the likes of Eleonora Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, Grigorii Sternin, Dmitrii Sarabianov, Lidiia Iovleva, and three generations of curators in the Tretiakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, the Hermitage, and other museums have been extraordinary in their willingness to accept foreign scholars into their close-knit communities, and in their generous support of new work. As Western art historians awoke to the study of Russian art, so they had to take on board key differences in the practice of the discipline in Russia and the West. Striking in the first instance was that Western scholars who specialize in Russian art typically come to it from other disciplines, such as Russian language and literature studies, or from university training in European and/or American art. The art historians, in particular, bring to their inquiries a familiarity with the current work and theoretical approaches in the study of Western art. Students in various Western universities can now develop a scholarly interest in Russian art from as early as their undergraduate years, and many vibrant

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graduate programs embrace the study of Russian art, attesting to the current health of the field. In Russia, by contrast, European and Russian art have traditionally been treated in academia and museum circles as two distinct fields. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russian and European art are housed in separate museums (this separation of native and nonnative art being a major factor in the misapprehension in the West of the State Hermitage Museum as Russia's national gallery, when it is in fact the country's premier collection of non-Russian art). Similarly, the study and teaching of art at the university level is usually separated into two distinct categories or tracks. At times, Russian art historians have even been surprised to learn that Western colleagues study Russian art as part of their broader studies of European artistic production, rather than seeing these two specialties as mutually exclusive. For this reason, the study of Russian art in Russia has often developed in ways that are isolated from contemporary Western methods and approaches, many of which incorporate theoretical or methodological ideas from the study of literature and the social sciences. Western scholars (along with courageous, independent thinkers in Russia) have also become aware of the need to navigate their way carefully between fact and ideology as they engage with the available literature on Russian art. As Valkenier points out in Russian Realist Art, revisionist scholarship on Russian art was already starting to appear in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s; but its impact paled in comparison to that of the many publications repeating earlier, dogmatic viewpoints of the Stalinist period. 12 On the whole, Soviet-era scholarship was exemplary in its thoroughness, and many of the monographs produced in the mid-twentieth century, particularly on the life and work of major artists, continue to serve as standard references on their subject: one might mention Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov's Vasilii Perov, Igor Grabar's two-volume Repin, and Esfir Atsarkina's Karl Pavlovich Briullov, to name only a few. 13 These works are based on extensive use of primary sources, which include both archival material and publications from the artists' lifetime. As useful as Soviet-era publications may be for factual content, however, many of them veer into ideological territory when discussing artistic motivations and cultural context. So it is that Western art historians working on Russian art find themselves the beneficiaries of an immense wealth of data and sources presented in Soviet publications, but need to develop specific skills of

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INTRODUCTION

analysis and interpretation in order to recognize whether this literature was delivering straightforward facts that could stand up to some form of objective validation, or whether it was aligning the primary sources that were cited to suit the dominant ideological current of the time. Going back to archival documents and original period publications-rather than relying on Soviet-era sources-remains essential to moving beyond outmoded ideological interpretations, and is a dominant feature of the research presented in this volume. As the constraints of Soviet rule began to loosen under perestroika, art-historical scholarship in Russia evolved accordingly, branching out from its prioritization of a nationalistic view of realist trends to address new subject matter, and to place Russian art in a broader European context. 14 These approaches greatly expanded the parameters of the discipline in terms of both subject matter and methodology, even if, in the Soviet Union, studying the avant-garde was still off-limits until the late 1980s. In the mid -1980s, a small number of nineteenth-century specialists in the Soviet Union bravely undertook publications on major artists such as Petr Basin and Fedor Bruni who had been defenders of academic conservatism. 15 Such research prefigured the more recent attempts, mentioned above, to view the Academy in general in a more objective light. Bruni served as rector of the Academy from 1855 to 1871 and was typically portrayed in the mid-twentieth-century literature as the figurehead of institutional opposition to realism because of his lively debates in the press with radical critics such as Vladimir Stasov. Alia Vereshchagina, however, challenged this picture of Bruni as the state-backed nemesis of democratic realism by offering a more measured analysis of his theoretical statements and artistic career. While excavating the significance of nonrealist artists may have been a risky career move for Vereshchagina and like-minded authors, it indicates that ideas beyond the standard narrative of realism triumphant were starting to be heard as the Soviet Union faltered toward its demise. The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with some evermore ambitious exhibitions of Russian art in the West, which both reflected and initiated new avenues of inquiry. 16 Work on Russian nineteenthcentury art has also been buoyed by its growing popularity on the art market over the last quarter century. At auction houses, sales dedicated to Russian painting and decorative arts since the mid -1990s have been realizing ever-increasing prices, thanks in

large part to the fortunes of Russian businesses and individual entrepreneurs, and this commercial interest has fueled new research. Since 2003 Elena Nesterova and Tatiana Karp ova have led the way in producing monographs and exhibitions devoted to academic art, and to artists of the sort that had been considered antithetical to the progress of realism during the Soviet period. 17 Their efforts have helped to show the close relationships between many realist and academic artists, who were often presented in Soviet scholarship as belonging to opposing camps. Their work also presents greater congruity between the Russian and Western artistic traditions than had been acknowledged or discussed in earlier generations. Perhaps the single most important development in art history in Russia in recent decades, however, has been official recognition of the importance of the avant-garde, which has led to an explosion of publications on the subject. When avant-garde art began to be exhibited in the waning years of the Soviet Union, it created a sensation andin an ironic twist, considering the emphasis of Soviet scholarship-threatened to overshadow work on nineteenth-century art. Realism, in particular, fell from favor due to the perception created during the Soviet era that it had been a movement solely motivated by social concerns. Thankfully, this overbalance in favor of the avant-garde has been corrected in recent years, not least in a series of excellent exhibitions and catalogues produced by the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow. Some of these initiatives suggest that it is no longer appropriate to conceptualize native and Western historians of Russian art as two distinct camps, for perhaps the most meaningful development of recent years has been growing international collaboration. Large exhibitions of Russian art with a strong nineteenth-century component have been sent to prestigious venues in the West, including the National Gallery, London, in 2004; the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, in 2005; and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao in 2005-2006. 18 In 2001 curators at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands initiated an ongoing series of exhibitions of Russian painting-five to date-with catalogues available in English. 19 In addition, the Peredvizhniki were the focus of a major exhibition that traveled from Stockholm, Sweden, to Chemnitz, Germany, in 2011-2012, with a catalogue in English as well as Swedish. 20 In a telling throwback to earlier separations, though, the magnificent displays in both the exhibition From Russia! at the Royal

Academy, London, in 2008, and the Guggenheim exhibitions-which included work by Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as the greatest Russian artists of their generation-continued to be divided according to nationality, with Russian and Western works exhibited in different halls.Z 1 The result was a lost opportunity to view side by side Western European and Russian paintings that are normally housed in different museums, and to consider the aesthetic and intellectual dialogue that took place between them. Similarly, organizers of the recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Rooms with a View, which examined mid-nineteenth-century interior and genre paintings, planned to include Russian paintings alongside works by Central and Western European artists. Sadly, as loan requests could not be fulfilled, the unprecedented opportunity to compare the works in context occurs only in the exhibition catalogue. 22 Clearly, there is still work to be done before Russian art is celebrated as an integral part of the European mainstream, rather than being approached in the West as an interesting "other" to canonical developments elsewhere. I N L I G H T 0 F T H E T R E N D S and developments outlined above, what are the salient strengths and leitmotifs of this book? All of the chapters use Valkenier's lead as a springboard for new research and largely follow a chronological format, with specific groupings within this structure lending weight to particular connections or interrelated themes. In the first place, there is a recurring interest in artistic communities, paying attention both to official institutions and to various progressive groups that developed separately, Abramtsevo and Mir iskusstva foremost among them. Keen consideration is also given to the relationship between visual imagery and written texts, particularly in essays on aspects of realism by three new scholars in the field; in an illuminating exploration of national identity in illustrated children's books; and in a reading of Kandinsky's work in light of Theosophical ideas. There are stimulating new accounts of individual painters who left an indelible mark on the artistic culture oflate imperial Russia, as well as thoughtful exploration of issues of patronage and display. Chapter 1 offers a new assessment of the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, a crucible of artistic innovation in nineteenth-century Russia, which nonetheless remains understudied in Western literature. By examining the school's origins and history afresh, the account repositions both the Moscow School and

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the Imperial Academy of Arts, which, as the premier art schools in imperial Russia, provide context for many of the subjects covered in the book. Chapter 2 then turns to a pair of artists who began their artistic careers in the Moscow institution-the brothers Konstantin and Vladimir Makovskii, whose father, Egor, had been instrumental in setting up the school. The work of these prolific painters is compared to shed light on why these two artists-immensely popular in their time and at auction today, but unevenly treated in scholarshipfollowed divergent professional paths, and chose such different visual languages to express their ideas. Chapter 3 attends to the relationship between Russian caricature and the depiction of nude female subjects in the 1860s, focusing on the various iterations of and reactions to Timofei Neff's popular painting Bather of 1858. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, it shows how the reception of Salon-style nudes in the 1860s shaped perceptions of nineteenthcentury art production well into the Soviet era. Chapter 4, in contrast, takes as its subject the organizational structure and aesthetic direction of the artists' colony that developed at Abramtsevo, outside Moscow, from the 1870s. The chapter contends that the principles that underpinned activities there gave the circle a unique identity as a specifically Russian type of artistic association, and inspired the various forms of creative endeavor in which the Abramtsevo artists engaged. The next four chapters shift attention to some of Russia's realist artists and their foremost patron, Pavel Tretiakov. Chapter 5 probes various interconnections between realist literature and painting, focusing on the relationship between Lev Tolstoy's writing and the visual arts. By considering Tolstoy's varying responses to two very different renderings of Christ before Pilate-a fictional painting from Anna Karenina, and Nikolai Ge's actual painting What Is Truth?-the chapter addresses the power relations at play between novelists and painters in Russia at the time. Chapter 6 then explores what it meant for Russian realism, an aesthetic that privileged contemporaneity and authenticity, to venture into the representation of history, taking as a case study the complex construction and fraught history of Ilia Repin's renowned history painting, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581 (1885). Discussion of Rep in continues in chapter 7, which gives a detailed account of his groundbreaking solo exhibition of 1891, and uses this as a prism through which to assess the artist's career. Repin features here as

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IN T R0 D UCT I0 N

a figure of transition as much as a node of contention between different generations, picking up on the theme of continuity versus divisiveness that resurfaces throughout the volume. Chapter 8 then focuses on Pavel Tretiakov, arguably the most important individual patron in nineteenth-century Russia, and a seminal figure in any discussion of the perception and reception of Russian art. Significantly, Tretiakov is considered here not in relation to his well-studied collection of realist paintings, but instead as a connoisseur and collector of icons. Two of the giants of the Russian nineteenth-century art world-Repin and Tretiakovare thus given due prominence in this volume, but via an entirely new approach to their work. The final five chapters take the discussion forward to consider the artistic culture of late imperial Russia, with forays into both the Silver Age and the avantgarde. Chapter 9 calls into question the supposed cosmopolitanism of the Mir iskusstva circle, arguing that its artists drew on alternative models of nationality to those explored by Russia's realist artists, and at times evoked nationalistic sentiments as cliched as those that the realists inspired. Like chapters 7 and 8, it too takes the discourses generated by an exhibition or museum display as a focal point. Chapter 10 offers a brilliant new account of the complex classical revivalism of Valentin Serov and Lev Bakst, the latter a stalwart of the Mir iskusstva community and the Ballets Russes. Chapter 11 surveys the expression of national identity in illustrated children's books across the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the productions of the Silver Age. The complexity of text-image relations in Russian children's book illustration renders this a subject of great significance, but one that has, surprisingly, never been given such scholarly attention or chronological range. Finally, chapters 12 and 13 offer striking new perspectives on the work of Marianne Werefkin and Vasily Kandinsky, and exemplify the interplay between written and visual texts that underpins so many accounts of Russian art. Both Kandinsky and Werefkin embraced a spiritual rather than a realist outlook. Yet they equally admired children's drawings, folk art, and the powerfully expressive potential of decorative forms. Both were also Russians living in Munich, and in this respect they close one narrative-that of Russian artists primarily working and appreciated in Russia-and open up the debate to encompass the dialogue between Russian painters of the twentieth century and developments abroad. The thirteen essays include a range of approaches, from close textual readings to institutional critique. They

also develop major themes inspired by Valkenier's workamong them, the emergence and evolution of cultural institutions; the development of aesthetic discourse and artistic terminology; debates between the Academy of Arts and its challengers; art criticism and the periodical press in Russia; and the resonance of various forms of nationalism and Slavic identity within the art world. These and other questions engage multiple disciplinesart history, Slavic studies, and cultural history among them-and promise to fuel a vibrant and developing field.

Notes 1. Nikolai Roerich, "Russian Art;' in The Soul of Russia, ed. Winifred Stephens (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1916), 25. 2. The trailblazer among research centers was the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, established by John E. Bowlt in 1979 at the University of Texas, Austin, and based since 1988 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. More recently, the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre was founded in Cambridge and London in 2011. 3. Children had originally entered the Academy's boarding school at the age of five or six, but from 1802 they arrived at the age of eight or nine; by 1830 they were enrolling at the age of fourteen (the boarding school closed in 1840); and from 1859 they had to be at least sixteen and no older than twenty when they matriculated. See Sergei N. Kondakov, Iubileinyi spravochnik lmperatorskoi Akademii khudozhestv, 1764- 1914, vol. 1, Chast' istoricheskaia (St Petersburg: P. Golike and A. Vil'borts, 1914), 195. 4. Kondakov, Iubileinyi spravochnik lmperatorskoi Akademii khudozhestv, 166. 5. Prince Hoare, Extracts from a Correspondence with the Academies of Vienna & St. Petersburg, on the cultivation of the arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, in the Austrian and Russian dominions (London: J. White, T. Payne, and J. Hatchard, 1802), 33. 6. Evgeny Steiner, "Pursuing Independence: Kramskoi and the Peredvizhniki vs. the Academy of Arts;' The Russian Review 70 (April2011): 252- 71, quotation 253. 7. For more on the Russian Private Opera, which was based in Mamontov's Moscow mansion, see Olga Haldey, Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

8. Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 165-93. Other useful sources on developments of the period include John Bowlt, "New Soviet Publications on Art;' Russian Review 38, no. 3 (July 1979): 348-58; and his "Some Thoughts on the Condition of Soviet Art History;' The Art Bulletin 71, no. 4 (December 1989): 542-50. 9. For an example of this at the height of the Cold War, see An Exhibition of Works by Russian and Soviet Artists, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1959). 10. See, for example, Russian and Soviet Painting (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977), which was also shown at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the University of Minnesota and Smithsonian's The Art of Russia 1800-1850 of 1978-1979. 11. See, for example, Russian Art of the AvantGarde: Theory and Criticism, 1902- 1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking Press, 1976; London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), as well as the journal that Bowlt has edited since 1995, Experiment, published by the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of Southern California. 12. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 190-91. 13. Aleksei A. Fedorov-Davydov, V.G. Perov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi izdatel'stvo izobrazitel'nykh iskusstv, 1934); Igor Grabar: Repin. Monografiia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1964); Esfir Atsarkina, Karl Pavlovich Briullov. Zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963). 14. The trailblazer in this respect was Dmitrii V. Sarab'ianov, Russkaia zhivopis' XIX veka sredi evropeiskikh shkol (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1980). For later examples in post-Soviet scholarship, see Nezabyvaemaia Rossiia. Russkie i Rossiia glazami britantsev XVII-XIX vek, exh. cat., ed. Galina Andreeva (Moscow: Trefoil Press, 1997); Garmoniia i kontrapunkt: Rossiia-Germaniia. Zhivopis', XIX vek. Katalog, exh. cat. (Moscow: Khudozhnik i kniga, 2003); and Rossiia-ltaliia. Italia-Russia: skvoz' veka. Ot Dzhotto do Malevicha, exh. cat., ed. Irina Danilova and Viktoriia Markova (Moscow: Khudozhnik i kniga, 2005). 15. See, for example, Elena F. Petinova, Petr Vasilevich Basin, 1793-1877 (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1984); and Alla Glebovna Vereshchagina, Fedor Antonovich Bruni (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1985). 16. See, for example, 100 Years of Russian Art from Private Collections in the USSR: 1889- 1989, exh. cat., ed. David Elliott and Valery Dudakov (London:

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Lund Humphries in association with the Barbican Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1989); Tradition and Revolution in Russian Art, exh. cat. (Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications in association with the Olympic Festival, 1990); The Wanderers: Masters of 19th-Century Russian Painting, exh. cat., ed. Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1990 ); and The Twilight of the Tsars: Russian Art at the Turn of the Century, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, 1991). 17. See, for example, Plenniki krasoty. Russkoe akademicheskoe i salonnoe iskusstvo 1830-1910-kh godov, exh. cat., ed. Lidia I. Iovleva (Moscow: State Tret'iakov Gallery/Skanrus, 2004); Elena Nesterova, Konstantin Egorovich Makovskii (St. Petersburg: Zolotoi vek, Khudozhnik Rossii, 2003); Elena Nesterova, Pozdnii akademizm i salon (St. Petersburg: Avrora, Zolotoi vek, 2004). 18. The exhibition "Russian Landscape;' whose catalogue is cited in the next endnote, was organized in Groningen and presented in London as "Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy"; see also !:Art russe dans Ia seconde moitie du XIX' siecle: en quete d'identite, exh. cat. (Paris: Musee d'Orsay, 2005); and Russia! Nine Hundred Years ofMasterpieces and Master Collections, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006). 19. H.W. van Os, Repin: Russia's Secret, exh. cat. (Zwolle: Waanders, 2001); Russian Landscape, exh. cat., ed. David Jackson and Patty Wageman (Schoten: BAI, 2003); Workingfor Diaghilev, exh. cat., ed. Sjeng Scheijen (Schoten: BAI, 2004); Russian Legends, Folk Tales and Fairy Tales, exh. cat., ed. Patty Wageman (Rotterdam: NAI, 2007); Olga Atroshchenko et al., Russia's Unknown Orient: Orientalist Paintings 18501920, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: NAI, 2010). 20. The Peredvizhniki: Pioneers of Russian Painting, ed. David Jackson and Per Hedstrom (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum and Elanders Falth & Hassler, Varnamo, 2011). 21. From Russia! French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008). 22. Sabine Rewald, Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011).

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Academic Foot Soldier or Nationalist Warhorse? The Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, 1843-1861 ROSALIND P. BLAKESLEY

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hen, in 1842, Nicholas I was presented with a proposal to establish "a Moscow Academy of Arts;' the tsar memorably declared that his empire had no need of two art academies. 1 Apocryphal as Nicholas's comment may be, it drives home the centralization of artistic education in Russia at the time: for the tsar and the Imperial Academy of Arts alike, any other art school would only ever be part of the Gradus ad Parnassum, which led the truly talented of Russia's artists to study within academic walls. Within a year, however, the Ministry of the Imperial Court had agreed to open the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, inaugurating a vital new stage in Russia's cultural life. The early champions of the Moscow School did not abjure the Academy, or bridle at its limitations. Impelled by the absence of any formal artistic training in Moscow, their desire was simply to provide artists with the means to develop and refine their skills, and they recruited graduates of the Academy and followed the academic system of teaching to achieve this aim. Yet from its inception, the Moscow School was seen by some commentators to foster national and patriotic standing that ran counter to the cosmopolitanism of the Academy, as Elena Nesterova discusses in chapter 2. Bolstered by the cultural awakening of Moscow more generally, the Moscow School certainly contested the academic republic, not least by fostering different genres of painting. Yet the shifting and often ambiguous

dynamic between the two premier art schools of imperial Russia was not linear, nor were some of the more singular aspects of the Moscow School necessarily at loggerheads with academic thinking. With a sharper picture of the underlying continuities as well as the differences between the two organizations, this chapter positions the Moscow School as at once an extension to normative academic pedagogy, and a dramatic new forum in which a range of shifting cultural allegiances, memories, and expressions could be brought to bear on the shape of a Russian national school. T H E M o s c o w S c H o o L stemmed from the initiative of a small group of amateur and professional artists who shared the desire to practice life drawing (these included Egor Makovskii, father of the artists explored in chapter 2). As there was no such provision outside St. Petersburg, in 1832 they began informal evening sessions in a private apartment at a cost to each participant of 15 rubles a month. Initially, these meetings had no formal agenda or teaching provision, but paying members were entitled to bring a guest for free, and these nonpaying attendees tended to be art students seeking professional feedback on their work. The Moscow classes thus evolved from a discursive studio space into a teaching forum which, at a time when Nicholas was tightening his grip on artistic education, offered an environment relatively free from

the constraints of state dictates, and one in which artists were able to develop their practical skills. The group held its inaugural exhibition (and, probably, Moscow's first public art exhibition) in two rented rooms in 1833. Attendance was poor, but a cultured viewing public barely existed in Moscow at the time. As Aleksei Dobrovolskii, a portraitist, Academy alumnus, and champion of the Moscow art classes was to note wryly the following year, the visual arts in the ancient capital consisted of little more than a handful of galleries and a smattering of decent paintings and sculptures, all of which were in private hands? Determined to combat this inertia, Dobrovolskii and his colleagues agitated for a new philanthropic enterprise-what would become known as the Moscow Art Society-to raise public engagement with the visual arts by such means as art classes for men, women, and children; general lectures on "the history and theory of the fine arts"; and an art gallery, library, and print collection "for general use:' 3 Their laudable intentions were largely unrealized due to a lack of funds. But the Moscow Art Society did attract a group of wealthy aristocrat and merchant subscribers to the life classes, which from 1833 acquired the official sanction of the military governor-general of Moscow, Dmitrii Golitsyn, and became known as the Moscow Art Class. The enterprise boasted sixty-five committed participants within the year, and became a fulcrum of the campaign to develop the city's artistic life. The Art Class, held initially in private houses, was plagued with financial instability in its early years, and faced closure at one stage. Yet it nurtured high ambitions, and in 1833 submitted a proposal to the Academy to establish a permanent institution that would provide a program oflessons in copying, drawing from the antique, life drawing, painting, and sculpture over a period of four years. This echoed the standard academic divisions, and the Academy gave the venture its cautious support. Similar supplications followed from Golitsyn and Ivan Seniavin, the civil governor-general of Moscow, until, in 1843, the Ministry of the Imperial Court agreed to formalize the Moscow Art Class as a new art school, to be governed by the Council of the Moscow Art Society. The local journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite) was delighted: bemoaning the fact that "Moscow has an intellectual and a literary life [... ] but it still has little by way of an artistic life;' it saw the foundation of an art school as a major step toward filling this void. 4 The Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture duly opened the following

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year in the Iushkov House, an impressive building at 21 Miasnitskaia Street that had hosted the Art Class for the previous two years. Acquired by the Moscow Art Society in 1844, the Iushkov House has been home to art schools of various persuasions ever since. 5 As the Art Class morphed from amateur initiative to professional institution, so it was shepherded into the official fold. Like the Academy, the Moscow School was placed under the aegis of the Ministry of the Imperial Court, which authorized the statutes, approved the choice of professors, and agreed on an annual subsidy of 5,000 rubles. 6 The military governor-general of Moscow was ex officio head of the governing Council, which ensured official supervision. The Academy, too, exerted its hold, as students in Moscow were able to graduate only with the title of unclassed artist (also known as free artist), the Academy having been given in 1832 the exclusive right to bestow the higher medals and awards. As the minister of the imperial court made clear: "I consider it impossible to give the School the right to award its students medals and the title of artist, for this right, which defines the very position of the recipient, must be given exclusively by the Council of the Academy of Arts, composed as it is of a more significant number of specialists in every branch of art:' 7 The Moscow School's more successful recruits therefore had to send works to the Academy or even transfer there to compete for their profession's major qualifications and prizes. A move for greater autonomy during the drafting of new statutes in 1859 was rejected, and the Moscow School remained dependent on academic distinctions until1865. 8 That year, it merged with the architectural school attached to the Moscow Court Office to become the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and won the right to grant major and minor silver medals and the titles of classed artist, unclassed artist, and drawing teacher. Even then, the major gold medal and honorific titles were still granted by the Academy alone. 9 Such facts have led several historians to portray the relationship between the Moscow School and the Academy as one of growing hostility and estrangement, enforcing those narratives of the Soviet era in which opposition to the Academy served as shorthand for an anti-tsarist, proto-revolutionary stance. 10 But it is mistaken to infer a temporally progressive breakdown between the two institutions in this way. Certainly, the Moscow School, if no brainchild of the Academy, was fashioned in its image in the 1840s. And certainly, by the 1860s, it was anxious to exert its authority by

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cutting loose from the Academy's apron strings, and grant the full range of titles and awards. Yet relations between the School and the Academy were far more subtle and entwined than such a polarized chronology might suggest. To start with pedagogic practice, the teaching system in Moscow followed the standard academic program, with students drawing or modeling from originals or copies of works of art, examples of which were provided by the Academy. They would then progress, via the life class, to painting and sculptural compositions of their own. There were supplemental classes in perspective, anatomy, and landscape painting and, following abortive attempts in the late 1840s to introduce a more general education (an initiative quashed by the Ministry of the Imperial Court), the curriculum expanded in 1857 to include subjects such as Russian Orthodoxy, history, and the theory of color. 11 Exhibitions lasting from a fortnight to a month were held triennially for a decade from 1839, and then more regularly. Entrance to the exhibitions was free, and they gradually attracted so appreciative a public that every exhibit at the sixth exhibition, in 1851, was soldY From 1845, each exhibition was also accompanied by a raffle of faculty and student work. In the absence of public or commercial galleries in Moscow, and at a time when many patrons still preferred foreign art, the exhibitions, like those at the Academy, played a crucial role in raising the profile of contemporary Russian painting and sculpture; in promoting debate about the visual arts across a broad social spectrum; and in creating a market for student work. For all this recourse to the academic template, however, there were subtle differences of opinion and policy at the Moscow School from the start. The backers of the initial life drawing classes included men ofliberal views such as Mikhail Orlov, who had been associated with the Decembrists in 1825. It is important not to overstate the democratic credentials of the Decembrists, who remained psychologically and intellectually entangled with the concept of enlightened despotism. 13 Nonetheless, those linked to their circle acquired an eclat in liberal circles for their apparent antagonism to autocratic rule. Not closely involved in the uprising, Orlov was still exiled to the country and allowed to return to Moscow only in 1831. There he remained under official surveillance ("like a lion in a cage;' in Aleksandr Herzen's words), but found a welcome outlet for his energies in the art classes, which he funded personally in times of financial crisis. 14 The prehistory

of the Moscow School was thus entwined with that of a man whose public image was one of quiet opposition to the tsarist regime. It is difficult to pinpoint the legacy of Orlov and those of similar political persuasion in the genesis of the Moscow School. Clearly significant, however, is that Orlov advocated a socially inclusive art education, writing in 1835 of the need "to extend the teaching [of art] to all sectors of society;' including women, and "to invite the talented throughout the city to take part:' "The artistic education of society is a matter of governmental concern, and one of the most important ways to achieve genuine and meaningful enlightenment;' he opined. 15 Such ambitions were realized in the Moscow Art Class, whose students were praised in a report to the tsar of 1839 for their "exemplary behavior [... ] even though the majority of them belong to the lowest social estate:' 16 The Moscow School, too, professed a wide social embrace, and moved to accept serfs unconditionally from the start. The Ministry of the Imperial Court vetoed this plan, and changed the draft statutes so that serfs could only be admitted if their owners pledged to free them should they graduate with a silver medal or higher, thereby imposing similar stipulations to those at the Academy. Nonetheless, many serfs passed through the Moscow School, circumventing official policy just as they did at the Academy at times. The school charged fees-initially five rubles a month-that would often have been beyond a serf's reach. But members of the Moscow Art Society were each allowed to nominate two pupils to study at the institution free of charge, and possibly as much as 20 percent of the school's students, a number of them serfs, were sponsored in this way. 17 While demographic details over a broad period are scant, statistics for 1856 confirm this picture of relative social diversity. That year, classes were attended by 14 students from military or civil-service backgrounds; 52 whose fathers were of senior officer rank; 8 from clerical backgrounds, and the same from Moscow's foundling hospital; 43 from merchant families; 9 foreigners, including three from Finland (then part of the Russian Empire); 195 from the petty bourgeoisie; 15 state peasants; and 60 students who were or had been serfs. 18 Vasilii Perov, a star pupil in the 1850s and the school's most influential teacher in the 1870s, recalled students from as far afield as Siberia, the Crimea, Astrakhan, Poland, Constantinople, and even the remote Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. "Goodness me;' he wrote, "what a varied and multifaceted crowd gathered in the school:' 19 The school's public, too, seems to have reflected a broad social base: in 1853, winners in the annual lottery

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included 8 noblemen, 25 merchants, 24 artisans or petty bourgeoisie, 10 peasants, and 2 house-serfs.2° To comment on such diversity is not to set the Moscow School up as the demographic antithesis of the Academy. Pupils and teachers from varied backgrounds were part of the warp and woof of the Academy, and the heterogeneity of its student body in the mid-nineteenth century was memorably captured by the artist Ilia Repin, who matriculated in 1864. Sitting side by side, rubbing shoulders, were a disheveled lad in a peasant shirt and a grey-haired general in his uniform; next came a bearded man in a tail coat (a stunning artist with a goatee); then a university student, and a tall naval officer with a thick beard. On the next step up there was a whole pack of blond chaps from the Viatka region; a corpulent lady-a rare sight in the Academy at the time; some big-eyed Georgians and Armenians; a Cossack officer; and some prim Germans all spick and span, with their upright collars and their hair curled aIa Capoul. T H E Y w E R E , Repin concluded, "youngsters of various classes and ages from every corner of Russia. There were half-educated lower-class townsfolk [meshchane], thoroughly ignorant peasants, and university graduates, but they were all led by their own calling and brought their own ideas:' 21 Clearly, then, neither the Academy nor the Moscow School was elitist in its admissions policy, nor was either school socially, geographically, and culturally stratified. Nonetheless, if both institutions admitted students across the social range, a far greater percentage of the student body at the Moscow School came from the lower classes, and the school was repeatedly perceived as more liberal, even in those instances when the Academy did not, in fact, lag very far behind. Telling in this respect is the case ofVasilii Tropinin, the famed serf artist who studied at the Academy from 1799 to 1804 and won various medals there. Tropinin's master refused to grant him his freedom, whereupon he pursued his artistic interests in the minimal free time that he had from his duties in the kitchens and gardens of his master's Ukrainian estate. Finally manumitted in 1823, he established a reputation for portraits in which the subjects engaged in some everyday activity, removing his sitters from the particularities of their identity, and blurring the boundary between portraiture and genre painting. Well acquainted with many of the founders of the Moscow School, Tropinin enjoyed

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great favor there: not only was he elected an honorary member of the Moscow Art Society at the school's official opening in 1843, but his paintings were used as examples for students to copy, and he regularly visited to advise them on their work. This involvement has been construed time and again as evidence of the Moscow School's broad outlook, underscoring the common equation between progressiveness and an antiacademic stance. Yet Tropinin had been recognized by the Academy for years, having been elected an academician of portrait painting nearly two decades previously, and offered an academic teaching post. In 1836 Aleksei Dobrovolskii, his brother Vasilii, and Ivan Durnov had also been appointed academicians specifically for their efforts in founding the Moscow Art Class. It is important, therefore, not to see the Academy and the Moscow School as antithetical constructions, but as components of the emerging cultural state that diverged on certain issues, yet maintained much common ground. A list of honorary members elected to the Moscow Art Society in 1844 is sufficient to forestall any characterization of the Society or its adjunct, the Moscow School, as organs of antiacademic sentiment or radical zeal: alongside the Academy stalwarts Vasilii Shebuev, Fedor Bruni, Aleksei Egorov, and Karl Briullov stood such members of the imperial and political elite as Maximilian, duke of Leuchtenberg and president of the Academy; Prince Petr Volkonskii, minister of the imperial court; Count Uvarov, minister of public enlightenment and architect of"Official Nationality"; and Count Lev Perovskii, minister of internal affairs. 22 One area in which the Moscow School consciously set itself apart, however, concerned the nature of Moscow as a social and cultural sphere in which the scope of patriotism in the arts could be redefined. By the 1830s, the city was enjoying something of a cultural renaissance. Its literary and musical salons were attracting writers and musicians of the caliber of Pushkin and Glinka; following the short-lived but memorable opening of the Golitsyn collection to the public in 1810, campaigns were afoot to establish a permanent public art gallery in the city, including Zinaida Volkonskaia's detailed proposal of 1831; and journals such as Moskvitianin were giving voice to some of the pressing cultural debates of the day. 23 By the end of the decade, the city was also witness to one of the most ambitious acts of patriotic commemoration in the shape of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the massive monument in honor of the victory over Napoleon which was under construction from 1839 to 1860, and decorated for a further twenty years. Such

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projects, coupled with Moscow's architectural heritage, made the city increasingly attractive to those artists and writers keen to realign themselves away from the cosmopolitanism of St. Petersburg and its institutions, toward the more traditional, Slavic values that the ancient capital was felt to represent. Symptomatic of this reorientation is the painter Aleksandr Ivanov's letter to his father from Italy in 1835, in which he wrote of his desire to settle in Moscow, as much to develop themes from Russian history as to "escape the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts:'24 Slavophiles, too, began to position Moscow as the fulcrum around which Russia's national cultural development should rotate. In short, Moscow became a cipher for a form ofRussianness that stood in opposition to the supposedly corrupt and superficial values of St. Petersburg, Russia's modern "window on the West" whose history could be traced back for little more than 130 years. Such intellectual currents found resonance in the Moscow School, which was promoted from the start as a forum in which Moscow's distinctiveness in Russia's cultural development could take center stage. Seniavin, the school's first director, made great play with such ideas in his keynote address at the official opening, as Moskvitianin was only too happy to report. For Seniavin, the earlier art classes had proved that one simply needed "to nurture the talents of the Russian people in order for art to sprout a deep, national root in our ancient capital:' Getting into his stride, he went on to declaim: Every enlightened nation in the world takes pleasure in enjoying works of art which express their national spirit and character. Russia likewise takes pride in those names of Russian artists who are acclaimed in the West. There have been a few excellent efforts to give our art some sort of national feeling. But an ever greater role in this can undoubtedly be played by Moscow, where the physiognomy of the people, the monuments of antiquity, and historical memories all lead the fine arts toward new discoveries. Having adopted the best of Western artistic education via the northern capital, Moscow can now focus on giving it a national character.2 5

This was fighting talk, giving Moscow and its new art school ideological freight as the true cradle of national expression which cut against the cosmopolitanism of the Academy. The ancient capital was thus theorized as a vital corrective that could draw artists away from Western models, and expose them instead to the architectural monuments, ethnographic notation, and

cultural memories that would enable them to develop a distinctly Russian voice. Seniavin did not deny the need for outside assistance in achieving this goal, just as the Academy had called on foreign expertise nearly a century before: the best of both Russian and foreign artists were to be invited "to settle in Moscow, observe the beauty of Russian nature and of the Russian man, paint and sculpt him and educate those Russian talents which of course exist, but are still hidden and in need of development:' Nonetheless, as Richard Stites has noted, Seniavin's declamation "amounted to a manifesto exalting Moscow over St. Petersburg and Russian over cosmopolitan and academic arf' 26 Seniavin's rhetoric resounds with the topoi of Slavophilism, and many Official Nationalists and Slavophiles gave the school their support. Seniavin's speech was written by Stepan Shevyrev who, along with fellow Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov, served on the Council of the Moscow Art Society, helped to organize the school's exhibitions, and facilitated access to paintings in private collections for students to copy. Shevyrev's colleague, the prominent journalist Mikhail Pogodin, was an equally important advocate for the school, donating books to its library and, as editor of Moskvitianin, devoting many column inches to its activities. These were men immersed in the quest to nurture Russia's intellectual and cultural life. Pogodin, of serf origin, occupied the chair of Russian history at Moscow University, and was active in forging links with specialists in the Slavic world further afield. Shevyrev, critic, poet, and right-wing Slavophile, had had a hand in Volkonskaia's project to found a national art museum, served as professor of Russian literature at Moscow University, and interwove national interests even in the lectures on the Italian Renaissance that he gave at the Moscow School in 1845. 27 Perhaps most notably, Khomiakov, poet, playwright, and theologian, emerged as a key Slavophile ideologue in a series oflucid articles, including one of 1847 entitled "On the Possibility of a Russian Artistic School:' ''Art does not emerge from one mind alone;' Khomiakov proclaimed. "Rather, the entirety of human life with its enlightened spirit, free will, and religious belief is concentrated and expressed within it. An artist cannot create by his own conviction alone; it is the spiritual strength of the people which creates within the artist. From this it is evident that every form of art must be, and cannot fail to be, nationa1:' 28 The antithesis of affective individualism, art was thus a distillation of the spiritualism and moral fiber of all humanity, and was

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bound to take shape in national form. Tellingly, in an article published in Moskvitianin in 1845, Khomiakov had asked what the Russian soul and Russian painting had in common, using the adjective russkii (referring to Russian ethnicity) to describe the soul, but rossiiskii (pertaining to the imperial Russian state) to describe the art. 29 Clearly for him, existing Russian painting (by which he meant academic practice) and the broad Russian populace had yet to establish any meaningful relationship, and remained mutually exclusive domains. As Stites has noted, the pressing question is how the national commitment articulated by Khomiakov and other supporters of the Moscow School found visual expression in the work that its students produced. 30 Significantly, it was content, rather than form, which was believed to function as a prompt to national sentiment. Already in 1838 Pogodin had encouraged a focus on what he termed "domestic occurrences:' "Has anyone noticed what picturesque groups our workers, peasants, and artisans form as they come trooping home?" 31 Fueled by Slavophile rhetoric, such views were voiced with increasing frequency in the 1840s, and had a pronounced effect across the arts. In literature, they found resonance in what the critic Vissarion Belinskii in 1847 termed "the natural school" -a corpus of novels and short stories that supposedly signaled a new, national responsibility by maintaining a studied (and increasingly critical) focus on modern Russian life. Similarly, for many in the Moscow School, subject matter became the litmus test that separated national disengagement from patriotic intent, all the more so if it was taken from the commonplace of contemporary Muscovite life. To return to Seniavin's inaugural speech: The beauty of the Russian people, their picturesque grace and formal strength has been celebrated by our poets, and now awaits the sculptor's chisel and the painter's brush. Russian nature combines all the climates of the world, from the bright colors of the north, to the softer hues of southern climes; for the master of landscape painting there is every possible gradation, from the cold heavens of the wintry north, to the sultry midday sky. And is not our scenic Moscow, stretching out like paintings along hills and inclines, deserving of national painters, too? 32

Local subjects, then, were the key to a national art. This equivalence was to create one of the lasting metonymies of the Russian national school. Even in the final quarter of the century, national character in painting was still often assessed by the extent to which

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its subject was identifiably Russian, regardless of how that subject was actually portrayed. The Moscow School was neither the first nor the only expositor of such ideas. Yet its success in encouraging artists to draw on the fabric of everyday existence was acclaimed from the start. Reviewing the paintings exhibited at the school's official opening in 1843, Moskvitianin enthused about "the cradle of our Muscovite art" which, if still in its infancy, promised much. The reviewer singled out "the Russian subjects" of Mikhail Mokhov for particular praise: an elderly grandfather-"a Russian type" -giving his granddaughter the triple kiss ofEastertide, and a woman of sober mien observing a girl offering money to a poor boy (fig. 1.1). "The face of the girl is brought to life with such vivid coloring; you feel sure that you have seen the old lady somewhere; and the curly head of the boy is particularly graceful. This is our Russian boy:' In drawings, too, the reviewer delighted in the tangible sense of Russian nature "which is, of course, worthy of study:m The Moscow School's quest for legitimacy as an institution of national significance thus lay partly in a proudly parochial focus on the depiction oflocallife. 34 It is telling that, although the Moscow Art Society had the right to give foreign travel scholarships to those of the school's students who received a gold medal from the Academy, this privilege was only extended to one student, Vasilii Perov, in the entire period from 1843 to 1863. In contrast to the time-honored tradition of sending the creme de la creme of the Academy's students abroad to perfect their art, foreign experience was here deemed incidental to the nurture of a national school predicated on the depiction oflocallife. The Moscow School's advocacy of"Russian types" did not contravene practice at the Academy, which as early as the 1770s had set students in its "domestic exercises" class (an early incarnation of what would later be known as genre painting) such subjects as "a petty bourgeois teaching his son the Russian language" and "a painter soliciting opinions of his work:' While this class closed before the century was out, genre subjects persisted in the Academy, even if under the auspices of portraiture or miniature painting. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the focus had shifted to such scenes as "a Russian peasant and his boy rising in the morning" and "a recruit parting from his family;' and by the 1840s paintings of routine events were common fare? 5 But the Moscow School supported genre painting as a tool for the exploration oflocal subject matter to a greater extent. Significant

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l . 1. Mikhail Mokhov, Giving Alms, 1842. Oil on canvas, 14 7 x 111 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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here are the respective models that the two institutions used for students to copy. The Academy's students were encouraged to emulate the great Italian masters, whose work was easily accessible to them in the Hermitage by this time. Artists in Moscow, however, had no such resource, and instead tended to copy paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters (which they were able to see in private collections), or by the likes of Tropinin, who had himself been influenced by Netherlandish art. The exhibition at the Moscow School in 1849, for example, included eleven copies of Dutch and Flemish paintings, as against five of canvases by French masters (Vernet, Greuze, and Granet), and just one of an Italian work. 36 Such a focus reflected the Russian delight in Dutch and Flemish works ever since Peter the Great had favored these in the early eighteenth century. At the same time, the anecdotal and occasionally satirical genre painting of the Low Countries chimed with the stylistic and iconographic proclivities at the Moscow School. The development of genre as a form of painting that cultivated a distinctly Russian voice, and its evolution from sentimental or ethnographic exegesis to social and political broadside, lies outside the parameters of this account. Suffice it to say that, in the educational arena, the Moscow School prided itself on moving away from the idea that national artistic status meant aspiring to the European academic ideal, and instead began to conceptualize a national school by virtue of the "Russianness" of its subjects. The irony in this self-presentation is that many of the school's most influential and long-serving teachers in its first fifteen years were educated at the Academy and abroad, and their personal practice lingered over the neoclassical and Salon painting in which they had been trained. Indeed, until the mid-1850s, teaching in the Moscow School was dominated by a handful of Academy graduates-Karl Wilhelm Rabus, Fedor Zavialov, Mikhail Skotti-whose work embodied a conservative academicism to a greater or lesser degree and rarely, if ever, ventured into contemporary Russian content. Skotti, of Italian origin, never attempted Russian themes at all. Sergei Zarianko and Apollon Mokritskii alone had any real credentials to teach a modern Russian iconography, having studied under Aleksei Venetsianov, the first Russian painter to focus the full beam of his artistic powers on the peasant as subject, and the founder of a provincial art school where serf artists explored similar themes. But such exposure left little impression on Zarianko's work, and Mokritskii ultimately defected from Venetsianov's

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camp to study under the famous history painter, society portraitist, and darling of the Academy, Karl Briullov. Their reputation among students is vividly conveyed in Perov's memoir which, at times biting, at times affectionate, is a memorable summation of the strengths and shortcomings of the early faculty in the Moscow School. For Perov, Mokritskii was a pitiful, stuttering creature who only produced a handful of paintings of any significance, spent his days in homage to Italy and to "the Great Karl;' and might have been a teacher of some influence "had he not made [students] copy his bad works:' 37 Zarianko apparently saw art as "no more than imitation, that is, the attempt to imitate nature:' 38 "Look at nature!" he exhorted the students. "Do you see there any brushstrokes or globs of paint? Is it not true that there is nothing of this sort in nature? In nature everything is smooth and finished to an amazing degree. And only by such fine, careful, and deliberate copying will you achieve real works of nature:' 39 Skotti, though a decent painter in Perov's eyes, fared worst of all: "(W]ho, with the pride of a master and the conscience of a genuine artist, can say 'I am a pupil of M.I. Skotti?' I am sure that the answer is nobodY:' 40 The disharmony between the professed ambitions of the Moscow School and the competencies of its teaching staff reverberates in many student works. In Mokhov's Giving Alms (fig. l.l)-one of the paintings that had impressed Moskvitianin reviewer in 1843the formal gestures, inscrutable expressions, lustrous curls, and abundant folds of drapery speak less of the "Russianness" of the subject than of the Salon portraiture that the likes of Zarianko espoused. Even more pronounced is the disjuncture between the modernity of the subject and the polished academic style in A Peasant Woman Giving a Soldier Something to Drink (1859, fig. 1.2) by Aleksei Kolesov, who studied at the Moscow School from 1852 to 1856. The painter here emphatically referenced recent Russian history, as Russia had been at war in the Crimea from 1854 to 1856, and demobilized soldiers were a common sight in the second half of the 1850s. Furthermore, their depiction could work on a symbolic level, as the war's disastrous outcome exposed the inadequacies of the Russian army and its equipment, and prompted a series of social and political reforms. Images of soldiers, especially those who had fallen on hard times, could thus transmit ideologically coded statements about the credibility of Russia's military and political command, and they became a regular feature in Russian painting in the years following the Crimean War. For all the

ACADEMIC FOOT SOLDIER OR NATIONALIST WARHORSE?

gritty topicality of his subject, however, Kolesov is unable to break free of academic convention: his protagonists are arranged in a pyramid composition in standard neoclassical fashion; draftsmanship is clear and sharp; brushwork is concealed; and the carefully attenuated color harmonies of the trees in the background carry the imprimatur of a long-standing European tradition oflandscape painting. Such grafting of academic practices onto local themes is far from an aesthetic success, creating instead an uncomfortable hybrid in which the spatiotemporal specificity of the subject matter is undermined by the staidness of the composition, the punctilious definition of the figures, and the conventional application of paint. This is not to suggest that it was impossible to work in Western categories while thinking in Russian ways: such syncretic practice could lead to works of great subtlety and intrigue. It does, however, point to the problems which the dichotomy of foreign and familiar presented many artists of the Moscow School. Even in the eyes of their teachers and supporters, the early cohorts at the Moscow School had limited success. In July 1856, Zarianko gave a damning speech to the Council of the Moscow Art Society in which he decried the fact that the highest award yet achieved by any student of the Moscow School was a major silver medal, which had been won by Vasilii Khudiakov alone, in 1847. Even the lesser medals and the title of unclassed artist were rare among Moscow artists. Believing that these failings stemmed from the overspecialization of teachers, and from the rigid demarcation between the instruction of drawing and painting in the Moscow School, Zarianko proposed a radical overhaul of the teaching system. 41 Count Arsenii Zakrevskii, governorgeneral of Moscow and president of the Council of the Moscow Art Society, was also so concerned by the underperformance of Moscow art students that in 1858 he urged the Academy to be more exacting in awarding them academic titles, especially if they were enserfed. If uncomfortable at the terms that Zakrevskii suggested, the Academy did become far more stringent in granting medals and titles to Moscow students in the period from 1858 to 1863.42 Students at the Moscow School were thus repeatedly perceived in the early years as inferior to their counterparts at the Academy. Only gradually, in the 1850s, did the school recruit the caliber of artist and produce the sort of work that began to challenge such views. An early indication of this came in 1851, when paintings by Aleksei Savrasov in the annual exhibition of student work attracted

acclaim, and were singled out by the sculptor Nikolai Ramazanov in his review in Moskvitianin. Ramazanov may not have been the most impartial critic of the Moscow School, as he had largely launched its sculpture department in 1847, and remained involved in the school for almost twenty years. But Ramazanov's significance far outreached his role in Moscow. A recipient of every form of student medal from the Academy from 1836 to 1839, he had held an Academy scholarship abroad, was elected an academician in 1849, became professor of sculpture, and knew the affairs of the Academy well. He was also one of the first historians of Russian art in articles for Moskvitianin, and in his invaluable Materials for the History of the Arts in Russia (Materialy dlia istorii khudozhestv v Rossii, 1863). Ramazanov was, therefore, well qualified to review exhibitions at the Moscow School, and his critique of Savrasov's work carries some weight. Writing in 1851 of the young painter's Winter Night in Moscow (whereabouts unknown), he declared that "the cold of winter actually blows from his painting: and what a delightfully soft brush; what a winning compositional group; what silence in this frozen air!" 43 View of the Kremlin in Inclement Weather (1851, fig. 1.3) was similarly extolled for its uncanny evocation of temperature, movement, and sound. "Savrasov [... ]has conveyed this scene with astonishing truthfulness and vitality. You can see the movement of the clouds and hear the branches of the trees, the rolling grass. This is the sort of painting which says, there is sure to be a cloudburst and a storm:' 44 For Ramazanov, Savrasov's success rested on his stimulation of the senses of hearing and touch, as much as that of sight, in order to evoke the experience of Russian meteorological effects. In contrast to Mokhov and his reliance on academic practice, Savrasov also developed the rudiments of a new visual language to accompany his new thematic focus on the Russian terrain. In View of the Kremlin, the planimetric organization of academic landscape painting is still present, as is the staffage in the foreground to offset the splendor of the architecture in the rear. But a looser handling of paint and areas of scumbling in the mid to far distance intensify the threat of the lowering storm, while more precise definition in the foreground evokes the scrubby foliage and rough paths of the river-flat, anticipating the naturalistic practice and explicit references to place that were to become hallmarks of the Moscow School. Much was made from the mid-nineteenth century of such drift away from the pastoral aesthetic toward

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1.2. Aleksei Kolesov, A Peasant Woman Giving a Soldier Something to Drink, 1859. Oil on canvas, 91 x 64 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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1.3. Aleksei Savrasov, View of the Kremlin in Inclement Weather; 1851. Oil on canvas, 67 x 90.5 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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identifiably Russian responses to local topography, and View of the Kremlin became a portent of Savrasov's future success.45 Appointed an academician in 1854, he ran the landscape class at the Moscow School from 1857, and laid the foundations of a Moscow school of!andscape painting where Ivan Shishkin, among others, created the sort of paintings that for Russians evoke truly national scenes. Some of the most acerbic and influential genre painters of the 1860s, Perov and Illarion Prianishnikov among them, also began their careers in the Moscow School and later became authoritative members of its teaching staff. To conclude, then, the Moscow School may never have had the scale and breadth of operations, the national authority and prestige, or the resources of the Academy.46 Nor were its students involved in the big public commissions to decorate churches and cathedrals to the extent that graduates of the Academy were. Furthermore, the interfusion of quotidian subject matter and an academic style of painting in the work of many early students created unwanted ambiguities in their pictorial intent. In this respect, the school's artists operated at the intersection of various institutional discourses concerning subject matter and style, and did not always reconcile these in the visual field. A tug-of-war between thematic innovation and stylistic retrenchment was played out on the walls of the Moscow School. Nonetheless, if slow to produce artists of any lasting effect in its first decade, the Moscow School became an increasingly important center of critical realism and naturalistic landscape practice in the second half of the nineteenth century, and went on to train painters of real consequence in the Russian national school.

Notes 1. Nikolai Ramazanov, Materialy dlia istorii khudoz hestv v Rossii (Moscow: Gubernskaia tipografia, 1863), 37. On the tsar's interference in artistic matters, see Etta L. Perkins, "Nicholas I and the Academy of Fine Arts;' Russian History 18, no.1 (Spring 1991): 57-62. 2. TsGIA SPb, fond 448, op. 1, 1834, no. 114, 13 obverse: quoted in Nina Moleva and Elii Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963), 328. 3. TsGIA SPb, fond 448, op. 1, 1834, no. 114, 25: quoted in Moleva and Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola, 329. In 1836 Dobrovolskii

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published a further proposal in Moskovskii nabliudatel' to augment the art class with an art gallery, which would assist the professional development of artists. Svetlana S. Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche zhivopisi i vaianiia: gody stanovleniia (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2005), 33. 4. "Moskovskoe khudozhestvennoe obshchestvo;' Moskvitianin 6, nos. 11-12 (1843): 531. 5. Renamed the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1865, the school merged with the Stroganov School of Applied Arts in 1918 to become the Moscow SVOMAS (the acronym of the Free State Art Studios founded in various Russian cities after the Revolution). From 1920, this became VKhUTEMAS, or the Higher Artistic Technical Studios (later VKhUTEIN, the Higher Artistic Technical Institute), and was disbanded in 1930. The building on Miasnitskaia Street later housed the VI. Surikov Moscow Institute of Art, and is now home to the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, which the painter Ilia Glazunov founded in 1986. 6. There is confusion in existing literature as to whether the Moscow School was granted an annual subsidy of 5,000 or 6,000 rubles: it seems that Golitsyn requested a grant of 6,000 rubles, but was allocated 5,000. 7. V Duksht, Materialy k istorii Moskovskogo khudozhestvennogo obshchestva i sostoiashchego pri nem Uchilishcha zhivopisi, vaianiia i zodchestva. 1832-1866 (Moscow: 1904), 145, quoted in Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 182-83. 8. For the new statutes of 1859, which differed relatively little from those of 1843, seeN. Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche zhivopisi, vaianiia i zodchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1951), 81 - 83; and Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 136-39. 9. Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. Ihe State and Society: Ihe Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 7-8. 10. For Richard Stites, "the major issues in the history of this school [... ) together represent a case study of redefinition by rejection:' Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: Ihe Pleasure and the Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 326. 11. For the specific exercises set in the School's early years and the later expansion of the curriculum, see Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 30- 31, 48- 49, 73. 12. Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 78. 13. Nicholas V Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 18011855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

ACADEMIC FOOT SOLDIER OR NATIONALIST WARHORSE?

14. Aleksandr Herzen, Byloe i dumy, part II, chapter 8, quoted in Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 14. 15. Moskovskii nabliudatel'book 2 (May 1835), quoted in Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 14. 16. Quoted in Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 21-22. 17. Etta L. Perkins, "Noble Patronage, 1740s-18SO;' Canadian-American Slavic Studies 23, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 441. By the late 1840s, the Moscow Art Society had 70 members, who each paid an annual subscription of 250 rubles. For its demography, see N.N. Kovalenskaia, "Russkii zhanr nakanune peredvizhnichestva (khudozhestvennye i sotsial'nye osobennosti Moskvy);' in Iz istorii klassicheskogo iskusstva. Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1988), 70. Initially dominated by noblemen-just 6 of the 41 members in 1837 were merchants-the Moscow Art Society gradually accepted members from the middle classes, and these comprised approximately half ofthe membership by 1857. 18. Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 75. 19. Vasilii Perov, "Nashi uchitelia. A.N. Mokritskii i S.K. Zarianko;' Khudozhestvennyi zhurna/2, no. 8 (1881), reprinted in Rasskazy khudozhnika, ed. V Leonov (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii khudozhestv SSSR, 1960), 99. 20. Kovalenskaia, "Russkii zhanr nakanune peredvizhnichestva;' 76. 21. Ilia E. Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1986), 140-41, 149. 22. Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 244. 23. On the Golitsyn collection, see Rosalind P. Gray, "The Golitsyn and Kushelev-Bezborodko Collections and their Role in the Evolution of Public . Art Galleries in Russia;' Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 31 (1998): 51-67. On Volkonskaia's initiative, see Rosalind P. Blakesley, "Art, Nationhood, and Display: Zinaida Volkonskaia and Russia's Quest for a National Museum of Art;' Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 912-33. 24. Quoted in Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 22. 25. "Moskovskoe khudozhestvennoe obshchestvo;' 535-36. 26. Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 328. 27. Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 328-29. 28. Aleksei S. Khomiakov, "0 vozmozhnosti russkoi khudozhestvennoi shkoly;' in Russkaia estetika i kritika 40-50-kh godov XIX veka, ed. VK. Kantor and A.L. Ospovat (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), 126-50, esp. 128. Reprinted from Moskovskii literaturnyi i uchenyi sbornik na 1847 god (Moscow, 1847).

29. Aleksei Khomiakov, "Pis'mo v Peterburg po povodu zheleznoi dorogi;' Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900), 114. 30. Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 329. 31. Nikolai Barsukov, Zhizn' i trudy M.P. Pogodina (St. Petersburg, 1890), 5: 250-51, cited in Kovalenskaia, "Russkii zhanr nakanune peredvizhnichestva;' 71. 32. "Moskovskoe khudozhestvennoe obshchestvo;' 536-37. 33. "Moskovskoe khudozhestvennoe obshchestvo;' 532. 34. For typical subjects at the Moscow School in the 1840s and 1850s, see Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 50, 60. 35. N. Kovalenskaia, Russkii klassitsizm: zhivopis', skul'ptura, grafika (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), 89, 279. 36. Kovalenskaia, "Russkii zhanr nakanune peredvizhnichestva;' 72. 37. Vasilii Perov, "Nashi uchitelia;' 98. 38. Perov, "Nashi uchitelia;' 124. 39. Perov, "Nashi uchitelia;' 124. On Zarianko, see Aleksandr M. Muratov, Sergei Konstantinovich Zarianko: khudozhnik, pedagog, teoretik iskusstva (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003). 40. Perov, "Nashi uchitelia;' 108. 41. In his "Project for a method of painting;' Zarianko proposed a more organic, integrated system of education that moved away from copying originals and casts, toward drawing and painting actual objects. The course consisted of two sequential parts-a preparatory course in painting and drawing skills, followed by a more advanced, "artistic" stage. Following fierce controversy, which at times reflected the ageold disegno versus colore debate, the revised statutes of 1860 introduced two new preparatory classes in painting, and instruction in the depiction of simple and more complicated objects from life. See Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 60-72; and Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 125. Concerns about the teaching system in the Moscow School nonetheless remained, as detailed by the inspector, Mikhail Bashilov, just four years after the new statutes, in 1864. Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 252. 42. In a letter to Fedor Tolstoi, vice president of the Academy, Zakrevskii suggested that candidates for the title of artist should have at least two silver medals for drawing and painting, and should undertake an examination in the Academy or the Moscow School. The Academy pointed out that such a move would be unconstitutional, as its statutes of 1840 made clear

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that medals were not a prerequisite for the titles of classed or unclassed artist. Stepanova, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 133. However, the Academy did endorse Zakrevskii's bias against serfs by saying that it would be easier to raise standards if those entering the Moscow School came from the higher, more cultured sectors of society, reprising the conviction of Aleksei Olenin and others that those in bondage would never attain the moral fiber and social finesse required of an artist. See Dmitri eva, Moskovskoe uchilishche, 48; and Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 289-91. 43. Nikolai Rarnazanov, "Nechto po povodu vystavki, byvshei v Moskovskom Uchilishche zhivopisi i vaianiia;' Moskvitianin l-2, nos. 19-20 (October 1851): 220. 44. Ramazanov, "Nechto po povodu vystavki;' 221. 45. For the way in which Russian painters gradually rejected the attractions of southern, Italianate landscapes in favor of the geographical specificities of their own country, see Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature:

Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). 46. The Moscow School never spent more than 15,000 rubles a year, compared to the Academy's annual expenditure of approximately 100,000 in the 1860s. Kovalenskaia, "Russkii zhanr nakanune peredvizhnichestva;' 72.

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A C A D E M I C F 0 0 T S0 LD I E R 0 R N AT I 0 N ALI ST WA R H 0 R SE ?

The Brothers Konstantin and Vladimir Makovskii One Family, Two Fates ELENA NESTEROVA

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onstantin (1839-1915) and Vladimir (1846-1920) Makovskii came from the same artistically talented family, and shared a home environment, education, and other early opportunities. The two gifted brothers entered the art world in the 1860s and worked well into the 1910s, a period in which Russian painting reached new heights, and played a notable role in European artistic development. During that time, each artist established a name for himself in the artistic circles he preferred. The creative outlooks and destinies of the brothers, however, diverged significantly. The fluctuating careers of Konstantin and Vladimir thus offer an interesting case study to consider how shared familial and educational backgrounds can impel artists along very different aesthetic and professional paths, as this chapter will explore. The artists' father, Egor Makovskii-a hereditary, though not a wealthy, nobleman-was a civil servant in the Moscow Court Office. He was an ardent art lover, collector, and connoisseur, while their mother, Liubov Kornelievna, sang beautifully. The Moscow home of the Makovskii family duly became a gathering place for members of the city's musical and artistic elite; among the family's friends were Mikhail Glinka, Vasilii Tropinin, and Karl Briullov. Egor Makovskii also played an active role in founding the Moscow Art Class, which subsequently developed into the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture (later the Moscow School

of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture). 1 Naturally, Konstantin and Vladimir became students of the School as soon as they each reached the appropriate age of twelve. They both exhibited unmistakable skill, and during the course of their studies were awarded medals of various distinctions on numerous occasions. Vladimir graduated from the Moscow School in 1866 and remained in Moscow. Konstantin, however, left Moscow in 1857 and moved to St. Petersburg; his entire later life was linked to the capital, where he continued his studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts. The very fact of receiving his artistic education and living in St. Petersburg (then the capital of the Russian Empire) proved to be an important factor in the formation of Konstantin's artistic position, which was soon to move decisively away from that of his younger brother. St. Petersburg was in many ways the polar opposite of Moscow-it was the "center of government, a city that was primarily administrative, bureaucratic, and official;' whereas "a feeling of family dwells on all and in all that is Moscow;' as Vissarion Belinskii remarked? The St. Petersburg and Moscow schools of art also had clear differences between them. It was not only that the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg was the official institution that was subordinate to the Imperial Court, and served to train state artists as civil servants, while the Moscow School arose from private initiative and bore a more democratic character (see chapter 1). The very system of training in these

institutions made it possible to distinguish graduates of the Academy and the School both by their work, and by the overall direction they followed in their art. The distinctive way oflife in the two cities made its mark on the activities of the artists who settled in them, too. The majority of genre painters were concentrated in Moscow. As artist Illarion Prianishnikov wrote, "For us Russian genre painters, Moscow is a treasure trove. In Petersburg one can paint everything that could be found in any European city, but here there is so much that is original, distinctive, such an abundance of material for artists' pens and brushes to explore:' 3 Muscovites thus focused on contemporaneity, often portraying situations from real life, while Petersburgers were more oriented toward the classical academic tradition that placed historical subjects first in the hierarchy of genres. The different fortunes and artistic exploration of the two Makovskii brothers were deeply entwined with these two cities in which they based their careers. K 0 N S T A N T I N M A K 0 V S K I I graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1863, at the very moment when reaction to the outdated academic system came to a head within the Academy itself. 4 That year, the notorious "Revolt of the Fourteen'' took place, when fourteen talented students refused to paint the subject assigned to them for the gold medal competition, depriving themselves not only of the medal, but of other benefits and advantages from the Academy, too. The outcome of this was the organization of the Artel' khudozhnikov (Artists' Workshop) in 1863-unique as the first independent professional artists' organization in Russia-and later, the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions ( Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnikh khudozhestvennykh vystavok) in 1871. Konstantin Makovskii was the only one of the fourteen dissenters who did not become a member of the Artel. By that time he was already earning a fair wage (up to 2,000 silver rubles a month), and had commissions from high-ranking patrons: as Pavel Dzhogin wrote to Ivan Shishkin in April1864, "Makovskii has a great deal of work, portraits, but he is too dandified, by the way, he has such an audienceall are princes and barons:'5 Konstantin also played practically no role in the history of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, and had complicated relations with the Peredvizhniki, as the Association's members were known. He joined and left the group several times, acknowledging himself as a loner who preferred to work in solitude.

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Nonetheless, Konstantin's undisputed talent and his ability to please the tastes of patrons attracted many high-ranking clients, both from aristocratic circles and the democratic intelligentsia. The most fashionable portraitist of his day, he secured commissions not only in Russia, but also from abroad. Tsar Alexander II even went so far as to call him "my artist:' Awards and titles came in abundance, too. In 1867, notwithstanding his participation in the Revolt of the Fourteen, Konstantin received the title of academician, and in 1869 he was appointed professor at the Academy, even though he had never taught there. (Excessively emotional and impatient, and accustomed to getting an immediate result, the artist could never have become a pedagogue.) In 1885 Makovskii also received a gold medal at the International Exposition in Antwerp for the painting A Boyar Wedding Feast in the Seventeenth Century (Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens, Washington, D.C.). In 1889 he repeated this success with a gold medal at the Paris Universal Exposition for the paintings The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1888, Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nice), The Judgment of Paris (1889, private collection), and Tamara and the Demon (1889, Serpukhov Art and History Museum), and was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur by the French government. In 1898 Makovskii was named a full member of the Academy of Arts, the highest level of membership, which very few artists attained. These many achievements culminated in 1910, when Konstantin was awarded the rank of state councilor, the fifth highest of the fourteen civil service ranks in imperial Russia. Konstantin was outgoing and very receptive to the variety of new impressions that he received during his journeys abroad. He traveled to the United States twice, leading Russian journalists to make inflated claims about his considerable success there. In 1902, for example, the journal Niva (The Grainfield) reported: "The artist's brilliant talent has already been appreciated in Western Europe and America for a long time:' After he arrived in the United States, the notice continued, he "created a furor there with his work, especially his portraits. The new president [Theodore] Roosevelt granted him an audience and agreed to sit for a portrait-his first presidential portrait, a commission for which the best American artists were strenuously competing:'6 Konstantin spent nearly every winter in France and Italy, as the scant light in St. Petersburg in the autumn and winter interfered with the artist's work. He also visited Switzerland, Spain, and other countries

THE BROTHERS KONSTANTIN AND VLADIMIR MAKOVSKII

on several occasions and traveled to Egypt as early as the 1870s, becoming one of the first Russian artists to do so. This visit resulted in a series of monumental canvases depicting the quotidian life and rituals of the local population, as well as many vigorous and colorful studies of national types. These works by Konstantin represent one aspect of the orientalist strain in Russian painting-a trend that was popular in Europe but practically absent from Russian art. Konstantin Makovskii was thus fully inscribed in a pan-European history of artistic development, and was highly regarded during his lifetime, both in Russia and abroad. He was an artist of far more than regional significance alone. According to his contemporaries, Konstantin's image was that of the perpetual golden boy, the darling of fortune and of the public, with manifest talent in many spheres. A captivating and handsome man, married to one of the most charming women in St. Petersburg, he considered painting to be a pleasure rather than labor, even if it still brought him huge financial rewards. Indeed, Konstantin became one of the most highly paid Russian artists of his day. He was often featured in the society pages, was comfortable with publicity, and directed and organized social events such as tableaux vivants, which were hugely popular at the time. For landscape artist Iulii Klever, Makovskii was "the life and soul of the party, be it among artists, in high society, or in the circles of financial magnates. He was never at a loss, and always put himself in the spotlight:' 7 For her part, the artist's daughter recalled her father as follows: Healthy, energetic despite his soft personality, always content, enthusiastic, enamoring people with his childlike trust, and seemingly never tired ofliving and enjoying life. True, the tiniest misfortune or failure brought him to a state of genuine despondency ... but not for long. Soon the studio would trill again with the sound of his heart-felt songs, and beneath his paintbrushes new images would emerge from his inspired creativity. 8

W H I L E K oN s T A N T I N was living a charmed and charming life, Vladimir left a very different impression on his contemporaries and on posterity alike. 9 Much more serious and responsible than his brother, it was no accident that teaching constituted a significant part of his life, first in Moscow, starting in 1882 at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and from 1894 in St. Petersburg, where he was invited

to work at the newly reformed Academy of Arts. He even served as its rector from 1894 to 1896 and then as a professor, heading his own studio right through to 1918. Unlike his brother, however, his outstanding results demanded a tremendous expenditure of energy. In his art, for example, Vladimir would redo a subject many times, even after it was complete and had been exhibited, in order to attain a better effect, no matter how insignificant the changes he made. In contrast to the well-traveled Konstantin, although Vladimir traveled around Russia, he rarely traveled abroad. Instead, he remained in the same artistic milieu that he had chosen from the start, which led to a certain conservatism in his creative work. Vladimir's career progressed successfully, if not quite as smoothly as that of his brother. In 1870 he petitioned the Council of the Academy of Arts to grant him the title of academician for the paintings Return from Night Pasture, Head of a Sexton, and Civil Servant (current locations unknown), 10 though his petition remained unanswered. Only in 1873 was he granted the title of academician for Nightingale Fanciers (GTG). In 1902 he was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur by the French government, as his brother had been in 1889, and in 1905 he was awarded the title of state councilor for career service. Artist Iakov Minchenkov, writing in his memoirs of the Peredvizhniki, recalled: Everything that (Vladimir] had did not come easily, but was earned by stubborn labor, by persistent, systematic work. Each of his days was filled by the hour, and each hour had its task: in the morning he went to the student studio, then worked on his own, while after lunch and a short rest he practiced music. He took part in many meetings and committees, and also found time for the theater and concerts, not to mention the daily gatherings in his home. 11

Konstantin was older than Vladimir by seven years, and no matter how talented both brothers were, the younger was always in the position of trying to catch up, ever in the shadow of his older brother's success. The example of the highly gifted Konstantin, who was well off in every way, was ever present: even when they were living in different cities, Vladimir would know the details of his older brother's life and work not only by personal communication, but also from the press. The first article devoted to Konstantin appeared in 1864 in the journal Severnoe siianie (Northern Lights), when the young artist was only twenty-four years old, and in 1871

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he was featured in an article in Niva, the most popular publication of the time. 12 Nor did Konstantin escape the rapt attentions oflater critics, who positioned him as the heir of the great Karl Briullov. Author Petr Boborykin even made Konstantin and his wife Iulia Pavlovna the protagonists of his novella Umeret'usnut' (To Die-To Sleep). Such casting speaks of the tremendous popularity of the artist and his work, as few people have works ofliterature devoted to them within their own lifetime. Naturally, the popularity of his older brother could not have left Vladimir Makovskii indifferent. At the beginning of his career, he was even reproached for imitating Konstantin. After visiting the student exhibition at the Moscow School in May 1872, Ilia Repin wrote to Vladimir Stasov, "in the last works he (oh! the unlucky thing!) decided to imitate his brother Konstantin Makovskii. His Knife Grinder and the boys' fight are pathetic things, imitations of the foppish K. Makovskii:' 13 Recognizing that the artist brothers would always be compared, as soon as he was old enough to make independent decisions, Vladimir therefore chose a path diametrically opposed to that of Konstantin, ensuring that comparisons of their work could result in contrast alone. He became a permanent and active member of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, entering its ranks in 1872 and remaining a pillar of the organization until his death, which coincided with the end of the Association's activity. In contrast to Konstantin, Vladimir always sought company, too, as he needed the support and affirmation that came from being part of a group. While Konstantin organized several solo exhibitions, Vladimir did so only once, in 1902, and even that was in collaboration with his Peredvizhnik colleague Efim Volkov. Such was his distance from his brother that, in his mature years, Vladimir's relations with Konstantin became increasingly strained, with contemporaries remarking that "they almost did not associate with one another:' 14 The cause of such a split is unknown, but it may well be that Vladimir was concerned not to be compared in the arena that Konstantin had mastered, emphasizing instead the separation from his older brother in both his art and his life. I F T H E M A K 0 V S K I I B R 0 T H E R S chose different educational paths and professional affiliations, there were both parallels and divergences in their art. The range of Konstantin's creative work was wider than that of his brother. However, the artist evolved relatively

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little during his long life. He painted large history and genre paintings, formal Salon portraits and souvenir portrait types (golovki), landscapes, and decorative allegories, as well as decorating the ceilings of wealthy mansions and screens for interiors, all of which were conceived and improvised with unusual ingenuity. His enthusiasm for all types of painting caused a certain lack of focus in his artistic decisions. But the surface effect and elegance of his art, the ability to make everything his paintbrush touched beautiful, if not splendid, contributed to his popularity among aficionados of society Salon art. Contemporaries called him the "Russian Rubens;' and Alexandre Benois compared him to other artists who worked for important patrons: ''As Briullov was for the time of Nicholas I, David for Napoleon, Boucher for Louis XV, Tiepolo for eighteenth-century Venice, Veronese for sixteenth-century Venice, Gozzoli for the Medicis, etc., etc.-so was Konstantin Makovskii for the Russian beau monde of the 1870s-80s:' 15 While Konstantin was praised above all as a portraitist and master of history painting, Vladimir, by contrast, became a prominent representative of genre painting, a quintessential painter of daily life who compiled a veritable encyclopedia of Russian contemporary scenes. He also worked in the genres of portraiture and landscape painting, as well as drawing and illustration, and produced religious muralspractically his only foray into monumental paintingfor Orthodox cathedrals, including the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow (late 1870s), the church in Borki that was erected after the imperial family's train wreck in 1888, and the icons for the iconostasis in the Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral at Orenburg (early 1890s). These projects were more likely a means of earning money than a result of artistic predilections, and Vladimir never took to large-scale decorative painting with the zeal and panache of his brother. If Konstantin's monumental murals depicted a whole array of mythological gods and allegorical figures, and wove entire garlands of people, animals, and flowers into complex decorative schemes, then the religious canon did not allow Vladimir to give free rein to his imagination, but forced him to adhere to strictly defined parameters instead. It is possible that their choices of painting reflected the personalities of the two brothers: Konstantin was a lively optimist who admired beauty in all its manifestations, while Vladimir was a modest man who lacked confidence but was solid, responsible, and prosaic in his approach. It is unsurprising that his most distinctive and popular work

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was his genre paintings, which occupy a fundamental position in his oeuvre. They responded wholeheartedly to the democratic tendencies of Peredvizhnik art and became a celebrated fixture of the Association's exhibitions. Relatively small in size and modest in content, they stood in sharp contrast to the large-format canvases of his brother. For all the differences between them, however, it is interesting to compare the work of the two brothers, particularly those paintings that were similar in genre, if not in spirit, for both artists verged at times into territory that was otherwise alien to their art: Konstantin engaged enthusiastically with genre painting in the 1860s-1870, while Vladimir sometimes undertook depictions of early Russian noblewomen (boiaryshni), whose saccharine folk depictions brought his brother such acclaim. Both men also painted portraits and landscapes from nature throughout their lives. Comparisons between such work shed light not only on the personal and professional decisions of two related artists, but also on wider processes of cultural and artistic formation in Russia at the time. AT T H E BEGINNING of his career, as he was finishing his training at the Academy of Arts, Konstantin Makovskii presented several works to qualify for the gold medal competition in history painting, including Christ Healing the Blind after the Expulsion of the Moneylenders from the Temple (1860) and Charon Ferrying the Souls of the Dead across the River Styx (1861). Both subjects were well received, but the young artist refused to complete them for the history painting competition, and instead received a minor gold medal in 1862 for Agents of the False Dmitrii Assassinating the Son of Boris Godunov. 16 This painting marked the beginning of his interest in prePetrine Russian history-what his son, the art critic Sergei Makovskii, would call his "patterned Muscovite style:' 17 Despite these early forays into history painting, however, Konstantin later received the titles of both academician and professor of genre painting. Genre painting was on the ascendant in Russia at the time, and became so topical and popular in the 1860s that even the Academy began to award titles and gold and silver medals for genre scenes. Riding this wave of popular interest, Konstantin painted an entire series of works that responded to the spirit of the times. The largest in scale was Shrovetide Fair on Admiralty Square in St. Petersburg (fig. 2.1). It is evident here that the spirit of social criticism that defined the progressive

strand of democratic realism was foreign to Konstantin. Instead, he and other academic artists in St. Petersburg were more comfortable with a neutral depiction of daily life, and produced paintings known as "physiologies:' which demanded exact indicators of location and time. For Konstantin, the central, most beautiful square in St. Petersburg, where the entire city gathered for a public festival during Shrovetide week at the start of Lent, served just such a purpose. But the artist painted his genre subject on the scale of a history painting (215 x 321 em). This scale was highly unusual for Russian genre painting in the 1860s, which favored the domestic scale of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters, who in many respects served as models for Russian genre painters at the time. Largely because of this innovation, Shrovetide Fair seems more a page out of Russian history, not least as the venue that Konstantin chose-the central square of the capital, where the Winter Palace is located-was the residence of the Russian tsars. The artist received the title of professor for this work and a series of other paintings exhibited at the Academy that year, and the artistic principles that Konstantin developed in this large-scale painting were continued in many of his later works. In the words of a critic writing after his death: There are artists whose work can be called agrand spectacle. In their work outward brilliance, a sense of splendor, decorativeness on a large scale, an abundance of figures, images, and scenes [... ] come together and are harmoniously unified. The painting that such an artist creates resembles a theatrical production, a scene from some grand drama, tragedy, or opera. 18

This proves an accurate assessment. Indeed, whatever the subject that Konstantin Makovskii approached, be it the historical past of Russia, literary or mythological musings, ethnographic paintings of everyday life and the customs of the native land or of the East -and this is far from the full range of his abilities-the academic idea of the "big picture" was ever present in his work. Influenced by the changes that took place in art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his grandiose canvases became ever more decorative and, in their pictorial qualities, closer to the panneau [a decorative panel painting] than to the easel painting-a development true oflate academic painting in general at the time. And yet his work always maintained the distinction between the study and the finished painting and never melded the two, as was then the case in the work of many artists.

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2.1. Konstantin Makovskii, Shrovetide Fair on Admiralty Square in St. Petersburg, 1869. Oil on canvas, 215 x 321 em, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Vladimir Makovskii also submitted genre paintings as he was graduating from the Moscow School. In 1865 he received a minor silver medal for the painting Artist's Studio, and in 1866 a major silver medal for Literary Reading. As he had not studied at the Academy, he did not participate in the competition for the major gold medal. Nonetheless, after completing Peasant Boys Guarding Horses at Night in 1869, the Council of the Academy of Arts awarded him the Vigee-Lebrun gold medal for expression and the title of classed artist, first degree. Vladimir went on to produce his first significant genre paintings in the 1870s, and in the 1880s he entered his prime. Nightingale Fanciers (1872-1873) received particularly favorable reviews in the press and even caught the attention of Fedor Dostoevsky, who devoted a special study to it in one of his articles about art. To quote just part of Dostoevsky's compelling and comprehensive account: Here something is taking place that is touching to the point of ridiculousness. Sitting by the window with his head slightly down, one hand lifted and suspended in the air, listening, he is melting, a beatific smile on his face; he listens to the trill. ... He wants to seize something, fears losing something. Another man sits at the tea table, almost with his back to us, but you know he is "suffering" no less than his companion. Before them, the host is pressing them to listen, and of course, selling the nightingale to them. [... ] In front of these shopkeepers he, by his social status, that is, by his income, is of course an insignificant figure; but now he has a nightingale, and a good nightingale, and for that reason he looks on proudly (as if he himself is singing), and treats the merchants with a sort of insolence, even with sternness (impossible, sir) .... It is curious that the shopkeepers sit and think that all is as it should be, even though he has scolded them, because "oh, his nightingale is so good!"[ ... ] Even we look at the painting and smile; we remember it later, and again for some reason it amuses and pleases us. Indeed-and let them laugh at me-in precisely these small paintings, in my opinion, lies the very love of humankind, not just in Russia in particular, but in general. 19

One of the most important qualities ofVladimir's genre scenes is their ability to create a precise type around whom the entire space of the painting rotates. This type, moreover, personifies some important aspects of the national character, as Vladimir's protagonist defines not only the content, but also the mood of the

canvas, its main effect. If the types from one of his paintings were moved to another, the painting would fail. It is, for example, impossible to imagine any other dramatis personae than those he portrays in works such as Making Jam (1876, GTG), Four Hands (1880, location unknown), Bank Failure (1881, GTG), On the Boulevard (1886-1887, GTG), Fight after a Card Game (1889, GRM), and Explanation (1889-1891, GTG). To expand the parallel between Vladimir's genre painting and the theater, one could say that his work is more like an actors' theater in its approach, rather than a director's theater. In the 1860s, the heyday of genre painting in Russia, the most important figure in the painting was the artist -director, who assigned roles and made the actors move according to the miseen-scene he had invented. Vladimir's works, however, suggest that his actors are more important than the director-that they are stronger, more expressive-that their action comes from the essence of their types. It is not surprising that Vladimir was particularly strong in his famous two-figure "chamber novellas;' in which the figures' dialogue seems to be played out by professional actors, unfailingly winning the viewer's heart. So original and natural are the subjects of his paintings that they seem to be observed from life, and Vladimir was known to derive inspiration at times from criminal reports in the press, as the titles of some of his paintings suggest; Bank Failure (1881, GTG), Prisoner (1882, GTG), Condemned (1879, GRM), Acquitted (1882, GTG). Unlike the multi-figure, large-format paintings of his brother, Vladimir preferred closeup shots, trading Konstantin's polyphonic crowd for monologues and dialogues between the main characters. On several occasions the brothers actively competed in an attempt to differentiate themselves from one another. At the seventh Peredvizhnik exhibition in 1879, for example, both brothers took part, Vladimir exhibiting eleven works, and Konstantin eight. Among the latter was Rusalki (fig. 2.2), which the artist had worked on in Paris and planned to exhibit at the Paris Salon, where it would have appeared completely at home. The huge dimensions of the canvas, overt eroticism in the depiction of the beautiful temptress rusalki, the blending of fantasy and reality, and the piquant nature of the subject itself all corresponded to the preoccupations of Parisian Salon art at the time. But instead, the canvas made its debut at the Peredvizhnik exhibition, where it stood in sharp contrast to Vladimir's Condemned (fig. 2.3), a painting remarkable for its somber objectivity. The opposing

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ambitions of the two artists were evident in their subject matter alone, which contrasted poetry with prose, a sweet daydream with tragic reality. Both artists wanted to touch the viewer's feelings but in different ways, the one arousing hidden emotions, while the other, depicting the grief of the condemned man's parents and emphasizing the curiosity or indifference of those around them, called up a more active sympathy. Konstantin's canvas appeared cosmopolitan, regardless of its Ukrainian scenery with characteristic Ukrainian Baroque church and overgrown vegetation, while Vladimir's painting evoked current national events. The one artist came across as relaxed and dynamic, seducing with the exoticism of his supernatural subject; the other was reserved, objective, and attracted viewers with the subdued tone of his narrative and the honesty ofhis intent. In their use of lighting, too, the brothers set themselves apart, Konstantin using mysterious moonlight, while Vladimir employed artificial illumination in the courthouse corridor to give clarity to each detail of the event. It is particularly noteworthy that these paintings came together at the Peredvizhnik exhibition, exemplifying the different currents that existed simultaneously in Russian art: academic Salon painting and realist painting. Moreover, Makovskii's Rusalkithe overtly academic painting-won a huge number of admirers at the exhibition. Antagonism between academic artists and the Peredvizhniki was evidently not as clear-cut as the polarity constructed in the Soviet era would have us believe. According to contemporary accounts, visitors to the eighth Peredvizhnik exhibition the following year even looked for Rusalki again, and were disappointed by the absence of a new canvas that pleased them as much as Konstantin Makovskii's had the previous year. To return to themes that Konstantin and Vladimir shared, images of peasant children, peasant labor, and their daily life and celebrations feature in the work of both men. Konstantin's female peasants are pretty rather than industrious, his impoverished children sentimental to the point of cloying, even erotic at times. Here Konstantin is clearly swayed by fashion, his forays into supposedly "democratic" subject matter still framed by the devices of Salon painting. For all the immediacy of Children Running from a Storm (1872, GTG), for example-one of the most unfailingly popular ofKonstantin's peasant paintings-the mood of a Russian fairy tale still prevails. The sentimentalism of the girl giving her brother a piggyback here is typical

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of the artist, and it is evident that the scene is invented, rather than painted from life. Images of children also play a significant role in Vladimir's work throughout his career, from early paintings such as Playing Knucklebones (1870, GTG) and Night Pasture (1879, GRM), 20 through the peak of his experimentation in the genre in Peasant Boys (1880, GTG) and The Meeting (1883, GTG), to late works such as Children in the Artist's Studio (1909, GRM), Distracted Children, and Schoolboys (both 1912, private collection). Although not excessively sweet, these images do not always escape the sentimentality that Konstantin's images of children evoke. The Meeting, for example, depicts a mother who has arrived from the country to see her son, who has been sent away to be apprenticed to a craftsman in town. The painting foretells the events of Anton Chekhov's short story "Van'ka Zhukov" (written three years later, in 1886) which, unlike Konstantin's painting, gives the impression of being grounded in real life. The mother looks sadly at her son as he devours the bread she has brought as a gift, chewing with such concentration that he is unaware of his surroundings, while the setting-a modest shelter depicted in a saturated brown tone, so as not to distract from the figures-reveals the artist's mastery of a loose, free handling of paint. Vladimir, unlike Konstantin, was concerned with social issues, and interested in subjects with a social resonance. If the emotion is occasionally overblown, his characters do not flirt with the viewer as Konstantin's do in works such as Young Widow (1865, GRM), where the protagonist seems theatrical and insincere. Unlike his brother, Vladimir never exhibited as a history painter, nor did he paint decorative costume paintings on subjects from Russian history. He did, however, work on themes relevant to contemporary historical events, such as Evening Party (1897, GTG), Khodinka. Vagan'kovskoe cemetery (1896-1901, Museum of Political History, St Petersburg), and January 9, 1905 on Vasil'evskii Island (1905, State Museum of Russian Modern History). These paintings were reactions to political events that took place before his contemporaries' eyes, painted in a monumental format that places them in the category of historical painting. Yet subjects such as mass scenes of the shooting at a peaceful demonstration on Bloody Sunday in 1905, or searching among the bodies of the dead crushed on Khodynskoe field at the time of Nicholas II's coronation, did not allow Vladimir to show his strongest quality: close-up depictions of vivid types

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2.2. Konstantin Makovskii, Rusalki, 1879. Oil on canvas, 261.5 x 347 em, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

2.3. Vladimir Makovskii, Condemned, 1879. Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 113 em, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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and characters. In his canvases, the center of attention is usually not an event, but people; in the paintings devoted to contemporary history, however, events take precedence, and individual characters are subordinated to the crowd. Vladimir was genuinely outraged at the events, and a patriotic sense of responsibility for what happened compelled him to express his position, aligning him with the democratically minded intelligentsia of his day. Unable to remove himself from the particularities of the events or look at them through the lens of time, however, the artist failed to create anything truly epic, and his canvases, although of topical interest, border on mere reportage. Konstantin, for his part, did not react in any way to contemporary political turmoil at this time but remained immersed in history, and as often as not in a history of costumes, rather than of people. At the turn of the century, he was working on such subjects as Grandma's Fairy Tales (1889, Pavlovsk State Museum Preserve), The Death of Petronius (1904, location unknown), and his largest history painting, finished in 1896 and on a Russian theme, Minin on the Square of Nizhnii Novgorod, Calling the People to Sacrifice (1894-1896, Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum, smaller version in GRM, fig. 2.4). A spirit of patriotism comes through in this canvas, which tells of the unification of the Russian people in the face of foreign invasion, when the citizens ofNizhny Novgorod prepared to sacrifice their personal property at the behest of the merchant Kozma Minin. Even women took off their jewelry to gather funds for the war effort. The artist's patriotism, however, seems superficial and theatrical here, reflecting the spirit of official patriotism that came into vogue in any manifestation of national expression during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, and found growing support from both ends of the social spectrum. The many portrait types and boiaryshni, for which the artist kept a large collection of costumes, stemmed from Konstantin's reaction to this trend. During the First World War it became especially fashionable to commission him to paint one of these supposedly patriotic portraits of court ladies in early Russian costume with kokoshnik headdresses. As one artist of the period recalled: "Maestro Konstantin Makovskii grew wealthy on this type of patriotism. All the court ladies, wives of ambassadors from the Allied Powers, ladies-in-waiting of Her Majesty, wives of high-ranking military officers were commissioning[ ... ] portraits aIa russe:m In this respect, Konstantin was responding to a new national official culture which, as

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Richard Wortman has shown, affected more than just costumes. 22 Vladimir did not resort to this kind of opportunistic practice, though he did produce one painting titled Boyar's Wife (1880, National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus), in which he showed offhis ability to paint fur, brocade, jewels, and beguiling faces, as if competing with his brother, the acknowledged master of the genre. Instead, Vladimir developed a different approach, depicting young women in national costume, usually Ukrainians (the artist frequented the Poltavska region), but also women from other ethnic groups of the Russian Empire. In these works he satisfied a demand for colorful, decorative, costumed images in which the detailed attire was in some ways more important than the face. Both brothers were strong portraitists. However, unlike Konstantin, Vladimir was not particularly interested in commissioned portraits, choosing instead to depict relatives or people he knew well. The resulting pictures are relatively modest both in the choice of sitter and in execution, and offer unquestionable likenesses that are documentary rather than showy in effect. As the artist aspired to be emphatically objective, he did not render his female sitters as beauties, while in male portraits-which greatly outnumber portraits of women in Vladimir's oeuvre-his priority was to create a colorful, characteristic effect. Many of his portraits even developed into generalized images such as Lawyer (1889, Belarus Art Museum, Minsk), Misr (fig. 2.5), and Gogolesque Type (1911, GRM). Among his sitters were the painters Illarion Prianishnikov, Aleksei Strelkovskii, Efgraf Sorokin, and Sergei Korovin, sculptor Vladimir Beklemishev, academician Ivan Ianzhul, and other prominent people. In this respect Vladimir's work was typical of Russian portrait painting in the late nineteenth century, when depicting people who were thinkers or activists who had made their name in some sphere of society became a salient trend. It was precisely at this time that Pavel Tretiakov, the prominent collector who actively acquired works from the Peredvizhniki, began to assemble his portrait gallery of celebrated Russians, predominant among them male portraits by artists such as Ivan Kramskoi, Vasilii Perov, Repin, and Nikolai Ge. Female portraits occupied a much more modest niche in the history of Russian art at the time. Here, though, Konstantin Makovskii, far from neglecting women's portraits, created an organic connection of the showy and the intimate, the grandiose and the

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2.4. Konstantin Makovskii, Minin on the Square ofNizhnii Novgorod, Calling the People to Sacrifice, 1894-1896. Oil on canvas, 273 x 233 em, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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sentimental, which gave rise to a distinctive new type of Salon portrait. So successful was Konstantin in this endeavor that contemporaries claimed that women waited in line to be painted by him. A Salon portrait by Makovskii meant excellent workmanship; a fine sense of detail and its place in the overall composition; rich and decorative color; free and evocative brushstrokes; and, often, an erotic charge to the image of the woman herself. Full, moist lips with a hint of teeth showing, sparkling eyes, tender white skin highlighted by pearls and gold bracelets-such were the leitmotifs of Konstantin's idealized woman. The artist as a rule did not enter the terrain of psychological portraiture, but was able to evoke a lightly romantic mood, render the details tastefully, and indulge in a certain artistic license. As a result, the accessories in the portraits dominate over the individual personality. Painted in a rich and expressive manner, they upstage the face, the latter attracting attention only if it is beautiful. Indeed, the intrigue of Konstantin's portraits consists precisely in this tension between splendid surroundings and physical charm. Vladimir produced occasional masterpieces of female portraiture, too, for example that of Maria Fedorovna, one of his rare state portraits (1912, GRM). Its large scale (267 x 192 em), classical columns, drapery, rugs, chair with an ermine mantle, appropriate accessories, and full-length figure in ceremonial dress all demonstrate the portrait's conformity to the conventions of the genre. Masterfully executed, it can certainly rival Konstantin's state portraits. Yet Vladimir's work nonetheless fell short of his brother's; it is just that bit duller and drier, with less improvisation or panache. His work did not have the breadth of Konstantin's, the difference in their personal qualities manifesting itself in their artistic production, too. If one brother trumped the other as a portraitist, they were both excellent landscape artists. They perceived and responded to their natural environment vividly, using the landscape as a background in their canvases, and consciously making space for nature in their work. Both rendered the landscape in a precise and elegant language, using saturated color and convincing tonal schemes. However, neither of the brothers could be called a plein-air painter in the sense of an artist making consistent use of outdoor painting as a working method. Konstantin, with his decorative way of thinking, developed qualities in his landscapes that were characteristic of Salon painting: festive lighting, showiness, and a refined ornamental lightness.

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Vladimir in turn tended toward a precise, realistic rendering of nature, although the decorative sense of coloring inherent in his work was especially visible in his landscapes. It should be noted that the impressionist approach, which spread throughout Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, resonated with the personal and artistic temperament ofKonstantin. Very much a man of impressions, he may well have become a disciple of impressionism had he belonged to a later generation of artists. His son Sergei even quotes his father as saying, "Those renegades, trouble-makers, cast out by the guardians of good taste, have very interesting innovations:' "What lively paints, so much air and light in their carelessly daubed canvases!" 23 Conversely, we do not know if Vladimir ever expressed an opinion on the impressionists, but he is known for his indefatigable struggle against the so-called "decadents" -a term already used in the mid -1890s by the older generation to refer disparagingly to younger artists. Vladimir's opposition to certain new directions favored by young artists is particularly evident in his response to Valentin Serov's Girl Lit by Sunlight, also known as Girl with Peaches (1887, fig. 4.3). When Tretiakov, with his excellent eye for genuine talent, recognized the innovation and significance of this painting and acquired it for his gallery in 1889, Vladimir asked him defiantly over a Peredvizhnik lunch, "Since when, Pavel Mikhailovich, have you started infecting your gallery with syphilis?" 24 Indeed, Vladimir was never embarrassed of nor tried to hide his conservative artistic preferences. Devoted to the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions and to its ethical and aesthetic beliefs, he militantly defended what he believed to be the purity of its ranks. Ironically, his attitude may have had a positive outcome: young artists interested in showing their work, but prevented from participating in the Association's exhibitions by the intransigent core of veteran Peredvizhniki, started to launch new artistic organizations, such as the Union of Russian Artists (Soiuz russkikh khudozhnikov), that provided platforms for innovations in Russian art. A s T H E Y EN T E R E D the twentieth century, the Makovskii brothers still belonged to the art world of the late nineteenth century. They were both representatives of Russian realism, but their distinct temperaments, circles of acquaintance, and priorities caused them to manifest it in quite different ways. Konstantin tempered the realist method with individual qualities: rich color

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2.5. Vladimir Makovskii, The Miser, 1891. Oil on canvas, 71.5 x 71 em, private collection.

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and lively, sketch-like, informal execution made his paintings stand out for their heightened emotion, strong energetic brushstrokes, and decorative color. But if his method was realist, then his allegiance was to Salon painting, and his style was eclectic, with historicism, romantic reminiscence, and a democratic intent all playing a part to some extent in his art. At the basis of Konstantin's creative work (as in academic and Salon painting as a whole) lay composition, for which the artist drew heavily on invention and imagination. Above all, he valued external, physical beauty, understanding it as both ideal form and artistic content. An omnivorous artist, he catered to the tastes of the most diverse circles, from aristocratic to democratic, including readers of the hugely popular turn-of-thecentury magazine Niva, where his paintings were often reproduced. Even Makovskii's younger contemporary Alexandre Benois, who espoused very different artistic views, had to acknowledge, "If any artist was popular in Russia, it was he. Maybe they did not idolize him, did not call him a god, but everyone loved him, and even loved his shortcomings-just exactly what united him with his time:'25 In his obituary of the artist, writer Ieronim Iasinskii mourned "the universal favorite, whose paintings hung and still hang in museums, palaces, in private collections rich and poor [... ] reproductions of his Rusalki, A Boyar Wedding Feast, and various portrait types can be found at any cheap saloon, candy store, or hairdresser's:' 26 Konstantin developed as an artist during a period when the Academy of Arts, as an official institution, started to confront the aspirations of a more democratically minded younger generation. The art world began to bifurcate as a result, and it became necessary for artists to establish on which side they stood. Yet in this changing art world, Konstantin chose not ideology, but audience, and stayed true to those patrons with mainstream tastes who had surrounded him since childhood. The beau monde of the 1870s and 1880s in which Makovskii shone did not think too deeply about artistic issues. In the visual arts, as in other areas of culture, society tastes did not differ radically, nor were they particularly nuanced or refined (as Sergei Makovskii exclaimed, "In music, sweet Italian-style singing reigned, and was not Apukhtin the favorite poet of Petersburg drawing rooms?" 27 ). Konstantin must have realized this, but he did not attempt to put himself above those around him, catering instead to the desire among his audiences for an idealized beauty, even if in his execution this

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became little more than prettiness at times. Even when the subject matter for his portrait types descended to the banal, however, Makovskii always remained at the top of his profession as a colorist, astounding viewers with his flawless sense of the medium of paint, and of its decorative color harmonies. His talent, combined with his unfailing professionalism, helped to steady his way, regardless of the style in which he worked or the method he employed. Vladimir Makovskii intended his artistic output for a very different audience, whose priority was not beauty, but truth. More systematic in his views and preferences than Konstantin, realism was for Vladimir not only a method, but both a direction and a style. If Konstantin proclaimed himself to be creating in the name of beauty, then Vladimir never tired of emphasizing the importance of a painting's content, although technical expertise had to stand up to the painting's message as well. He summarized his reflections on contemporary art as follows: A true work of art should unite both of these aspects. No matter how well an artist has thought through the message of his painting, if it is technically bad it will always fall short, and the painting will not produce the desired impression on the viewer who understands art. The opposite is also true: a painting brilliantly executed and beautiful in technique, but lacking any messagethe educated viewer will always respond coldly to such a work. 28

Vladimir's audience was the educated middle class, the raznochinnaia intelligentsia, viewers who questioned truth, goodness, and beauty in their contemporary world. These were precisely the concepts for which he sought an adequate expression in his art. He preferred to draw the viewer in with a touching story in which gentle humor accompanied edification as, for example, in The Despot of the Family (fig. 2.6). The notion of beauty had not only an aesthetic meaning for him, but also an ethical one, as it was inseparably linked to concepts of goodness. Relying on life itself, the artist saw value in the most uncomplicated and insignificant of subjects, but he rendered even these in such a way as to arouse compassion in the viewer. Vladimir's interest in creating images of types required expressive faces and gestures, and he managed this perfectly, lending a sense of naturalness to highly emotive scenes. At the time, Russian artists were preoccupied with the development of plein-air painting, and fascinated

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2.6. Vladimir Makovskii, The Despot of the Family, 1893. Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 68 em, private collection.

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with the role of the environment in the emotional composition of a work of art. Vladimir could in no way be considered an innovator in this area, but his natural sense of painterly harmony and unquestionable talent enabled him to find the artistic means to produce vivid figures who were ably supported by the painterly evocation of their surroundings. To c o N c L u D E , the artistic production of Konstantin and Vladimir Makovskii has much in common. Talented contemporaries, they were both interested in narrative scenes of everyday life, portraits of their contemporaries, and landscape painting. They even shared various artistic devices-the famous short, slanted brushstroke resembling hatch marks, for example, which can be seen in the work of both men. But their differences in temperament and the influence of the circles in which they moved led to distinctions between them that are visible at first glance. The elder brother, who frequented Europe, kept a studio in Paris, had the right to exhibit his work at the Paris Salon hors concours, associated with aristocratic circles in St. Petersburg, oriented himself toward the tastes and wallets of the bourgeoisie, and developed the traditions oflate academic painting. The younger brother, in contrast, was devoted to Peredvizhnik ideals with their democratic priorities. If Konstantin was the more famous and popular artist during his lifetime, the work of both brothers was subsequently reevaluated. Having been viewed in radically different terms by Stasov and Benois (as Janet Kennedy also explores in chapter 9), in the Soviet era, when ideology was paramount, Vladimir became one of the most famous Russian artists of the nineteenth century, a household name whose works were reproduced in elementary school textbooks and emulated by Soviet artists of thematic paintings. As for Konstantin, he was unjustly forgotten for a long time. As an academic Salon painter, his name was deliberately excluded from the canon of Russian art, and in the public understanding his work became partially confused with that of his Peredvizhnik brother Vladimir, which retained its ideological currency and popularity. Konstantin's particular calling card during the period was his genre painting Children Running from a Storm, which could easily be taken for a work by Vladimir. It was only at the turn of the twenty-first century, when a wealthy class once again began to emerge in Russia with a pressing desire to spend money on art,

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that Konstantin's lost popularity returned. Now both brothers are valued for their merits and are equally well known, each with his own set of admirers, who-just as before-cannot see eye to eye on the respective merits of the two artists' work. Vladimir and Konstantin Makovskii thus remain a remarkable phenomenon in fin-de-siecle Russian art, representing different but occasionally intersecting movements, and dramatically broadening the artistic horizons of the genres in which they chose to work. The divergence between them proves to be a conflicted and telling response to a bifurcation of the Russian art world, and illuminates the complexity of the structural division between different styles of painting that operated at the time.

Notes This essay was translated by Margaret Samu and edited by Rosalind P. Blakesley. 1. For more on the Makovskii family, see The Makovskii Artists, exh. cat., ed. Nadezhda Bol'shakova (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, Graficart, 2008). 2. VG. Belinskii, "Peterburg i Moskva;' Fiziologiia Peterburga, ed. N. Nekrasov (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1984), 66. [Originally published in two volumes, St. Petersburg: A. Ivanova, 1844-1845.] 3. N. Aleksandrov, "I.M. Prianishnikov;' Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia 1319 (May 1894), quoted in T.N. Gornia, Russkaia zhanrovaia zhivopis' XIX-nachala XX vekov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), 365. 4. For a detailed study of Konstantin's career, see Elena Nesterova, Konstantin Egorovich Makovskii (St. Petersburg: Zolotoi vek, 2003). 5. P.P. Dzhogin to I.I. Shishkin, 10 April1864, in Ivan Shishkin, Perepiska, dnevniki: sovremenniki o khudozhnike (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1978), 96. 6. "K risunkam;' Niva (1902): 36- 37. Roosevelt's official presidential portrait was by American artist John Singer Sargent (1903), but for evidence that the president sat for Makovskii in 1902, see V Tolmatskii, "Konstantin Makovskii-Portretist Amerikanskogo Bomonda;' Antikvarnoe Oboz renie 3 (2012): 26-3 1; "Gossip of the Capital;' New-York Tribune (22 December 1901); "About People and Social Incidents: At the White House:' New- York Tribune (7 December 1901). For an image ofMakovskii's painting, see "Look Upon This Painting and Then on This Photograph of the President;' New York Herald (26 January 1902).

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7. S. Makovskii, Portrety sovremennikov, ed. E.G. Domogatskaia and Iu.N. Simonenko (Moscow: Agraf, 2000), 15. 8. E.K. Makovskaia, "Detstvo, otrochestvo, iunost:" in RGALI, f. 2512, op. 1, ed. khr. 745, l. 27. 9. For a detailed study of Vladimir's career, see E.V. Zhuravleva, Vladimir Egorovich Makovskii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972). 10. Return from Night Pasture was reproduced in Niva 4 (1875). 11. Ia. D. Minchenkov, Vospominaniia o peredvizhnikakh (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1980), 77. 12. K. Varnek, "K.E. Makovskii;' Severnoe siianie 3 (1864): 54; "Konstantin Egorovich Makovskii;' Niva 9 (1871): 140-41. 13. Letter dated 27 May 1872, I.E. Repin and V.V. Stasov, Perepiska v 3-x tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1948), 31. 14. Minchenkov, Vospominaniia, 84. 15. Aleksandr Benua, "Khudozhestvennye pis'ma, Konstantin Makovskii;' Rech', no. 346 (17/30 December 1910): 2. 16. It may seem strange that a subject from the history of the Russian state was assigned for the genre painting competition. This paradox is explained by the changing notions of history painting that were characteristic of the early 1860s, when even academic professors employed the term in a variety of different ways. G.G. Gagarin compared the canvases of history and genre painters, writing: "... we arbitrarily call history painters those whose work is painted in a high style, idealistic rather than realistic. Genre painters may also undertake historical subjects, but they treat them from a realistic point of view, dealing with specific, individual events:' Quoted in A.G. Vereshchagina, Istoricheskaia kartina v russkom iskusstve: shestidesiatye gody (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990), 22-23. The events from Russian history in Konstantin's paintings were indeed specific and individual by Gagarin's standards. 17. Sergei Makovskii, Otets i moe detstvo (Moscow: Agraf, 2000), 45. 18. "K.E. Makovskii;' Niva 42 (1915): 762-67. 19. Fedor M. Dostoevskii, "Po povodu vystavki;' Grazhdanin 13 (1873), reprinted in FM. Dostoevskii ob iskusstve (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973), 212. 20. The tradition of sending village boys to watch over the horses at night pasture serves as the basis for Ivan Turgenev's short story "Bezhin Meadow;' first published in Sovremennik (No.2, 1851) and later

included in his volume Sketches from a Hunter's Album (Zapiski okhotnika). Vladimir Makovskii undertook this subject several times in the 1860s-1870s both because of its popularity, and for the opportunity it provided him to depict a wide range of peasant children types. 21. I.N. Gurvich, Khudozhestvennye obshchestva Petrograda 1907-1917. Manuscripts Department, State Russian Museum, f. 221, ed. khr. 7, tetrad' 3, str. 111 ob. 22. See Richard Wortman, "'Ofitsial'naia narodnost' i natsional'nyi mif rossiiskoi monarkhii XIX v.;' in N.N. Mazour, ed., Rossiia!Russia, vyp. 3 (11): Kul'turnye praktiki v ideologicheskoi perspektive: Rossiia, XVIII-nachalo XX v. (Moscow: O.G.I., 1999), 233-44; and "National Narratives in the Representation of Nineteenth-Century Russian Monarchy;' in Marsha Siefert, ed., Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred f. Rieber (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2003 ), 51-64. 23. Sergei Makovskii, Portrety sovremennikov, ed. E.G. Domogatskaia (Moscow: Agraf, 2000), 56. 24. Quoted by Igor Grabar; Avtomonografiia (Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1937), 125. 25. Aleksandr Benua, "Konstantin Makovskii;' Rech' 258 (1915): 2. 26. I.I. Iasinskii, "Konstantin Makovskii;' Birzhevye vedomosti 15096 (21 September 1915): 4. 27. Makovskii, Portrety sovremennikov, 12. 28. Manuscripts Department, State Russian Museum, f. 41, ed. khr. 19. Chernovyk rukopisei V.E. Makovskogo, l. 6.

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Making a Case for Realism The Female Nude in Russian Satirical Images of the 1860s MARGARET SAMU

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rsenii Shurygin's painting Diversion in the Waiting Room (1865) depicts a scene that would have been familiar to many of its viewers in nineteenth-century Russia: an impoverished gentleman gazing at a painting to help pass the time in the waiting room of a man of superior social rank (fig. 3.1). He is on his daily rounds to members of the city's aristocratic elite seeking money, patronage, or any kind of favorable attention. 1 This humiliating ritual was a fact of life for an entire class of men, and the waiting room was a space in which they wasted many hours. Rather than placing him in a room bustling with other petitioners, Shurygin portrays him alone in a dimly lit corner, focused on a painting of a bathing woman, as if to emphasize the sense that everything else in the world except the painting had fallen away. Nineteenth -century observers of Shurygin's painting would not only have known the man as a distinctive type, but would also have instantly recognized the painting at which he peers so intensely as Timofei Neff's Bather (fig. 3.2). The paintings of nude young women that Neff produced around 1860, usually bathers or so-called nymphs, seem to have acquired a degree of prominence in popular consciousness in St. Petersburg at the time. In the years after the Bather made its debut at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, caricatures based on it appeared with impressive regularity in illustrated satirical publications. Not only was the

painting exceedingly popular, but its tondo format and asymmetrical single-figure composition made it easy for caricaturists to render it recognizably in a few strokes. These recurring caricatures indicate the popularity of Neff's work; read collectively, they allow us to analyze the attitude of these publications toward the Bather and to understand this response in the context of contemporaneous developments in the art world. Graphic satire of the visual arts first appeared in the Russian press in the late 1850s. The journals that published these caricatures, in particular Iskra (The Spark) and Budil'nik (The Alarm Clock), were popular among the liberal intelligentsia and students.2 Both their editors and the artists who contributed to them generally espoused liberal social views and promoted the progressive realist movement in art. Illustrated satirical publications modeled themselves on French periodicals of the 1830s such as La Caricature and Le Charivari, but turned their attention to distinctively Russian types and ways oflife for their satirical content. 3 Caricatures about art serve as a form of art criticism that also subversively state their authors' sociopolitical outlook with parodies of recognizable social types, state institutions, and artistic groups that may have specific political associations. Issues such as artistic conventions, the visual literacy of the public, the legibility of the image, the comprehensibility of the exhibition catalogue-all became targets of the satirist's wit.

3.1. Arsenii Shurygin, Diversion in the Waiting Room, 1865. Oil on canvas, 33 x 27 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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3.2 Timofei Neff, Bather, 1858. Oil on canvas, 153 em diameter, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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M AKIN G A CASE F0 R REALISM

To date, much of the scholarship on Russian caricature has focused on works of political and social satire, from images lampooning the French army during the Napoleonic wars to those mocking established types in Russian society. 4 The goal of Soviet-era scholars was to establish graphic satire as a form of progressive, proto-revolutionary sociopolitical commentary; for this reason caricatures on social issues, rather than art, were best suited to their purposes. In 1960 Evgenii Kovtun published the first article on caricature dealing with art, arguing that satirists in the liberal press promoted the newly emerging realist movement. 5 More recently, Carol Adlam has taken this work several steps further in a thorough study of graphic satire from the late 1850s to mid-1860s. 6 Her work closely analyzes caricatures to show how their portrayal of the relationship between observer and art object serves as a commentary on the relationship between art and reality. This chapter will build on the work of Kovtun and Adlam to demonstrate how caricaturists targeted one popular genre of art in order to make a case for realism. Focusing on caricatures dealing with the female nude in art, it will show that works such as Neff's Bather came to emblematize everything that the realist movement opposed. Part of the humor of these caricatures lies in the obvious contradiction between the proprietyindeed, the prestige-of looking at works of high art and the indecent exposure of the subjects they depicted. Behind the humor, however, stood a more serious commentary about the state of the Russian art world. This analysis will show that the subject of these caricatures was not simply nudity in art as such, but rather the type of art the nude represented. For liberal critics, the female nude became an emblem of frivolous, foreign art that was not engaged with present-day social concerns-the antithesis of realist art. The female nude has been neglected in studies of Russian art in large part because Soviet-era scholarship emphasized the realist movement and focused on art that dealt with national themes and social criticism. The present chapter will provide evidence that this marginalization of the nude did not begin during the Soviet era, but rather, it was a process that began in the 1860s. IMAGES 0 F NUDE W 0 MEN in the form of high art first appeared in Russia in the 1710s, when Peter the Great imported over thirty Italian Baroque sculptures of nude and lightly draped women for the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg. 7 By comparison, there were only four fully draped female figures and about ten

male figures, both draped and nude. The centerpiece of the tsar's collection was a Hellenistic sculpture of Aphrodite, now known as the Tauride Venus (second century BCE, State Hermitage Museum); he built a special pavilion guarded by a soldier to protect this ancient treasure. He used the Summer Garden for parties that he called assemblei, during which the sculptures served as a sort of three-dimensional textbook in Western mythology, iconography, and aesthetic traditions for aristocrats who attended. Later rulers and aristocrats followed Peter's lead by establishing collections with paintings by Titian, Rubens, Boucher, and other European artists that depicted nude women in mythological or biblical guises. While these works never dominated Russian galleries, they did assert their owners' familiarity with Western art-they served as emblems of westernization. Educated collectors were familiar with the writing of ancient and Renaissance authors dating back to Pliny, who counted the depiction of the undraped female form among the greatest of artistic achievements. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian artists produced their own images of nude women in high-minded paintings and sculptures. They most often created these works while finishing their training abroad in Paris or Rome, where they first had the opportunity to work from female models. Because male figure studies were the basis of academic training in both Russia and the West, male nudes continued to be an important part of their work. During their time abroad, however, artists often sent back to St. Petersburg at least one female nude to prove their mastery of Western subject matter. In the 1820s to early 1840s, many of the prominent young Russian artists in Rome produced a painting or sculpture of a nude female figure to send back home to their sponsor or the Academy. These works earned recognition for their creators by being acquired for the Hermitage collection or winning the artists titles such as academician or professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts. 8 Because the St. Petersburg art market focused on European art, Russians had to present themselves as cosmopolitan, westernized artists in order to compete for patronage and prestigious commissions; depicting the female nude was one way for them to do so. Through the 1850s, the nude female figures that Russian painters and sculptors produced brought them recognition, promotions, and future commissions from the very highest quarters. Ivan Vitali, for example, received a commission from Nicholas I for a marble Venus based on a Hellenistic bronze statuette (1852,

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GRM). The work he produced not only entered the Hermitage collection, but also earned the artist 10,000 rubles, the Order of St. Anna second degree with the imperial crown, a promotion at the Academy of Arts to full professor, and a commission for a second female figure to match. 9 Although this type of reward was certainly not typical, it testifies to the acceptance in Russia of nude female figures in art. There is virtually no evidence in art criticism or documents from the period to suggest that patrons, artists, or critics found nudity in art objectionable. On the contrary, the presence of such images in exhibitions, public and private collections, and as decorations for aristocratic residences, was simply an unremarkable fact of the art world. By the end of the decade, however, the situation had started to change. Indeed, Timofei Neff's paintings of nude young women from that period appear to have served as a catalyst for a new phase in the reception of the female nude in Russia. Shortly after the 1858 Bather, Neff produced a work that confirmed his reputation as a painter of the female figure: a painting entitled Two Nymphs in a Grotto (1859, GRM). When the Two Nymphs went on exhibition at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists in 1860, the gallery set new records for attendance. In the same year Tsar Alexander II acquired both paintings for the Russian galleries of the Hermitage, where they drew large numbers of copyists, sometimes a dozen or more at a time. 10 They were also reproduced as engravings that were published in both an art album and a popular journal. 11 Moreover, new reproductive technologies such as photography and color oleo graph prints were helping to develop new audiences for art. These less expensive forms of reproduction made such images accessible to a much wider audience of diverse social classes. As a result, in the 1860s images like Neff's were moving from the realm of elite art owned and viewed only by aristocratic collectors, to that of middlebrow art owned by a new upwardly mobile class. The sheer quantity of nudes on view in one form or another seemed to be growing exponentially. It should be emphasized here that gauging perceptions of the nude in Russia is easier than gauging facts. Simply ascertaining which works to include in a nude census is difficult, since subjects such as Venus and bathers are easy to identify as nudes, while bacchantes and nymphs may or may not wear transparent drapery, and titles such as By the Stream or Landscape with Figures are impossible to identify as nudes in an unillustrated catalogue. But judging

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from the titles of paintings and sculptures listed in its catalogues, the Academy of Arts exhibitions usually had three or four female nudes on display in a given year, reaching the minuscule peaks of five nudes in 1863 (out of213 works in all) and seven in 1867 (out of 458 works). 12 In other words, during the 1860s, nude female figures never represented more than about 2 percent of the works on display, and more often made up 1 percent or less. Compared with the nudes blanketing the walls of the Paris Salon at the time, this was nothing. The extent to which critics and caricaturists chose to engage with nudes can, therefore, seem disproportionate, though there are several possible explanations for this response. First, the perception of nudes may stem not just from those on view at Academy exhibitions, but from the many copies, prints, and photographs that inevitably followed. Second, there may have been more nudes on view in print shops and at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, but these displays did not publish catalogues and never merited art reviews. It could be that reviews of Academy exhibitions provided an occasion for critics to release their pent-up concerns over St. Petersburg visual culture as a whole. Third, the perceived nude problem may not relate to the quantity of nudes on view at all, but rather to the fear that these works were falling into the hands of viewers who appreciated them more as titillating images than as works of art. Whatever its cause, the sense that images of nude women were proliferating at exhibitions and in print made them a target of caricaturists. This new critical attitude toward the female nude corresponded with a period of significant changes in the Russian art world that took place in the 1860s. One of the major developments was a realist movement independent of the Academy of Arts. 13 In the 1860s a number of Russian artists and critics began to call for art that depicted contemporary life and was engaged in the major social issues of the day. They promoted the idea that realist painting should be grounded in specifically Russian subject matter, contributing to the formation of a national school that was distinct from Western art traditions. Another important change during this period, which will be addressed below, was the expansion of the art market to include members of the new middle class. These developments in the Russian art world created an atmosphere in which long-standing artistic conventions based on the Italian Renaissance tradition began to be called into question. In the 1860s, because written art criticism in Russia was just starting to develop, there were few writers

capable of addressing the problems in the art world at the level already established in literary criticism. 14 In the mid-nineteenth century most people writing on art were cultural and literary figures whose texts on art were descriptive rather than analytical. They usually focused on individual works of art and rarely dealt with larger issues, such as major artistic trends or the state of the Academy of Arts. There were several factors that made it difficult for art criticism to develop in Russia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, many in the art world believed that negative criticism and harsh comparisons with Western art would discourage Russian art production. Moreover, negative reviews of exhibitions at the Imperial Academy of Arts could be interpreted as criticism of the emperor or the state. 15 Official censorship muted and occasionally silenced the critics. By the 1860s, a few critics were beginning to emerge, such as Vladimir Stasov and Ivan Dmitrievgenerally members of the liberal intelligentsia who came from cultured, even artistic families. The repression of written criticism by the state allowed graphic satire, or caricature, to become a significant outlet for voicing opinions on both the art world and individual works of art. Satire was the most effective means of conveying a critical message in a way that was pointed, yet ambiguous enough to elude the censor. In Russia, graphic satire of the visual arts first appeared in 1859. In the illustrated satirical journal Iskra, caricatures on art became a regular feature. During the annual exhibition at the Academy of Arts, the journal would publish a two- to four-page spread with up to six caricatures on each page. At other times, one or two caricatures on art would appear amid other subjects. Some of these works dealt with a particular painting or sculpture, while others looked at the phenomenon of the exhibition as a whole. Like the caricatures of French artists such as Honore Daumier, their captions often took the form of comments by or dialogues between ordinary visitors to the exhibition. Caricaturists capitalized on the realists' objections to classical subject matter by giving featured roles to nude bacchantes and nymphs. Artists favored these pseudo-mythological subjects for nude figures because their origins in classical antiquity gave them an aura of high-mindedness, even though their iconography was fundamentally erotic. Occupying a lower status than goddesses, they did not require the decorum expected from a Venus or Diana. 16 Nymphs were objects of sexual pursuit for gods and satyrs, while bacchantes' association with Bacchus (Dionysus) called for displays

of uninhibited behavior. Exhibition catalogues from the period list titles such as Bacchante with a Wine Cup, Bacchante with Fruit, Bacchante with Tambourine, and other imaginative variations. During the 1863 annual exhibition of the Academy of Arts, Nikolai Stepanov produced a caricature for his journal Iskra depicting a face-off between artists and a group of bacchantes (fig. 3.3). The caption reads, "Plain bacchantes and bacchantes with tambourines, unfavorably received by the public, vow to artists never again to return to the exhibition:' By staging a real-life interaction between artists and the subject of their paintings, this image makes a humorous allusion to the idea of realism. The timing of Stepanov's caricature associates it with an important moment in the development of the realist movement. It appeared on 18 October 1863, just ten days after the fourteen top students on the point of graduating from the Academy of Arts formally petitioned for permission to paint a subject of their own choice for the gold medal competition. On 9 November the students learned that their petition had been ignored, and they would be assigned a subject, Feast of the Gods at Valhalla. Their refusal to paint this mythological subject is an event known in Russian art history at the Revolt of the Fourteen (Bunt chetyrnadtsati). 17 Forgoing the chance to compete for a three-year trip abroad that would launch a successful professional career, the students left the official art world altogether to form an independent communal workshop, the Artel' khudozhnikov, commonly referred to as the Artel. Some scholars have speculated that the students' rebellion was linked to increasing criticism in the liberal press of the academic practice of assigning subjects for history painters. 18 Indeed, critics in both Iskra and Sovremennaia letopis' (The Contemporary Chronicle) had been questioning the need for assigning an abstruse theme of no interest to either the artists or the public, and called for students to be allowed to choose their own subjects for academic competitions. 19 The Academy had already experimented with allowing history painters to choose their own competition subjects in 1862.2° When the results of the 1862 competition went on view at the annual exhibition in September and October 1863, the next year's graduates apparently sensed that the Academic Council was planning to revert to its earlier practice of assigning themes. Their anticipation of a change in rules and their unanswered letter to the Academic Council created an extremely volatile atmosphere at the Academy during the course of the exhibition.

Margaret Samu

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I

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Commentaries on the exhibition that year appeared in greater numbers than ever- Iskra alone had two articles in two parts each, as well as four pages with multiple caricatures-several of them expressing irritation with the repetitious, conventional subject matter. Rather than writing openly about tensions brewing at the Academy, critics channeled their concerns toward the nudes in the annual exhibition. That year there were four paintings on view depicting bacchantes that received a disproportionately large amount of critical attention. Many reviewers expressed disdain for the subject, finding it cliched, uninteresting, and banal. In his caricature, Stepanov goes farther than his text-based counterparts, imagining a confrontation in which the official art world lost its most retrograde subject matter. The bacchantes' walkout in Stepanov's caricature indicates, however comically, the kind of pressure that was building up in the Academy. Although Stepanov could not have anticipated the students' rebellion that would happen within weeks, his work suggests that position lines were being drawn and ultimatum was in the air. Once the rebellion occurred, art critics could not write about it openly, as students uniting against institutional authority had an air of political mutiny. Mentions of the conflict in the St. Petersburg press were removed by the censors before publication. 21 Graphic satire used images of bacchantes and nymphs not only to address larger issues at the Academy, but also to confront the problem of mythological subject matter in a clear and explicit way. One anonymous work from 1867 does so by depicting a group of men gaping at a life-size painting of a full-length female nude (fig. 3.4). The man in the foreground is an elderly gentleman, toothless and balding-clearly representing the old guard-whose glasses spring from his face to express his energetic response to the painting. Lecherous old men and the use of glasses to emphasize viewing are frequent tropes of graphic satire on art not only in Russia, but also in other countries. The caricature's caption parodies the high-flown language of the exhibition catalogue. 25. Nymph before Bathing-by Mr. Tiutriumov. A painting of allegorical content. The nymph- a personification of the beautiful yet fruitless direction of art-rather than plunging into the Lethe once and for all in order to make room for other, more true-to-life ideals, looks at the crowds of viewers and artists around her, puzzled as to why she is being evicted and whether

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the ostracism is genuine. The lascivious gazes fastened on her from all sides resolve her doubts and the nymph, yielding to the collective desire, remains for an indefinite period on the walls of the Academy for the enjoyment of dilettantes and inspiration of artists. 22 Again, the caption imagines an actual interaction between the painted subject and the audience. By presenting the nymph as a "personification of the beautiful yet fruitless direction of art;' the author both mocks the artistic convention of allegorical painting and criticizes images of nymphs as useless. The accusation of "fruitlessness" and suggestion that such pictures blocked "more true-to-life ideals" from being exhibited were major points of contention for

Margaret Sam u

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realist artists and critics. Realists of the 1860s believed that art should expose and comment on social issues. Artist Vasilii Perov was a leading exponent of this idea at the time, producing paintings with strong anticlerical messages such as his Village Easter Procession, Village Sermon (both 1861, GTG), and Feast in the Monastery (1865-1876, Museum of Russian Art, Kiev). The expectation that artists should produce denunciatory paintings-or at least unflinchingly accurate depictions of real-life hardships-resulted in a cultural environment in which subject matter took precedence over issues of style. This utilitarian attitude toward art originated in literary criticism by such writers as Vissarion Belinskii and others in the 1840s. It began to reach the visual arts in the late 1850s after the publication of Nikolai Chernyshevskii's treatise The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality. The anonymous caricature on the Nymph before Bathing suggests that artists were aware of liberal beliefs that such works had no social purpose, but continued producing themwith the support of the Academy-to satisfy demand. In written criticism, by comparison, critics would bemoan the large numbers of landscapes and portraits at exhibitions as well as nudes, but for graphic artists, the female nude was the prime target. It could arouse strong feelings in a way that a peaceful landscape or flattering portrait could not. Nudes highlighted both the irrelevance of depicting antique and mythological subjects, and the implausibility of an ordinary, modern Russian woman being depicted with no clothesnotions that a humorous or satirical approach could bring to the fore. The focus on social issues in caricaturists' critiques of nudes far outweighed comments on their morality, although some graphic satire lampooning the female nude has been used as evidence that Russians considered images of nude women indecent. One example is V. Reingardt's caricature depicting two upper-class women at an art exhibition, one of them trying to pull the other away from a painting recognizable as Neff's Bather (fig. 3.5). "Let's go, Sophie;' she says. "It's indecent for us to look at such immodest paintings, Mama will find out-she'll be angrY:' 23 As a satire, however, this work is not meant to be read in a straightforward way. The speaker's severe, lined face and concern about her mother tell us that she is an old maid attending the exhibition with her sister. The latter has her back to the viewer, with her bonnet obscuring her face to show that her full attention is focused on the Bather. Despite the speaker's cautionary

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words, however, the viewing glasses she holds near her eyes betray her own fascination with the nude-a fascination she tries to control with appeals to decency, modesty, and "Mama:' Indeed, this caricature is not a direct condemnation of the nude as indecent, but rather a humorous look at the two sisters. Reingardt lavishes attention on their fashionable outfits to highlight the contrast with the undressed woman in the painting. He pokes fun at their unexpected interest in the painting and offers a commentary on the seductiveness of art. The complaint of indecency in relation to nude figures was not as pronounced in Russia as it was in the United States and Britain, where anti-obscenity statutes and campaigns promoting moral purity condemned nudity in art as immora1. 24 In these countries, defenders of nudity in art argued that the nude depicted pure beauty, untainted by sensuality. Debates over nudity in art and the morality of employing female models were the subject of public discussions and letters to the editor. In Russia, by contrast, similar debates over nudity in art do not appear to have taken place in a public forum, if at all. The difference between the realists and the academic artists boiled down to one of an emphasis on content and subject matter versus an emphasis on Western artistic traditions and aesthetic issues. Conservative critics did not vocally support nudes in art, but praised the best ones on exhibition in general terms, sometimes citing poetry to evoke their grace and beauty. In the short article accompanying the engraving of Neff's Bather, for example, the editor of Severnoe siianie (Northern Lights) compares her at length to Heinrich Heine's Lorelei, writing, "In her very beauty there is something cunning, in her gesture-something threatening. She sits on the cliff of a wild riverbank, by a precipitous cataract, as if awaiting her unfortunate victim, who is already fated to die:'25 Comments like this one both remove the female nude to the supernatural sphere and place her in the company of recognized works of literature. In addition to the problem of subject matter chosen as a pretext to depict nude female figures, the economic issues that perpetuated their production also became a major point of contention. Nikolai Stepanov captured the issue in a two-panel caricature illustrating dialogues between a patron of the arts and two artists (fig. 3.6). In the left panel, the patron protests that he cannot possibly turn away the artist Rybkin, whom he currently supports, to which the artist Kliuchkov responds by insisting that he accept a painting of a nude woman. On the right, we see the patron in fact turning away

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Margaret Samu

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Rybkin, saying that Kliuchkov had offered him "highly favorable terms:' 26 Even the artists' names provide clues to their social class and their potential dynamics with art patrons: Rybkin's name, derived from the word "fish;' still carries the stench of his fisherman lineage, while Kliuchkov's, derived from "keys;' suggests that he is capable of unlocking a successful career. Stepanov's caricature highlights the problem of the patronage system in an art world where artists from lower-class backgrounds were forced to make their way in a world of wealthy clients. In this art market, the female nude was valuable currency. Critic Ivan Dmitriev raised the same issue a year later in a notorious article, also published in Iskra, titled "Art that Bows and Scrapes:' Dmitriev blames the low quality of art at exhibitions on the structure of the Russian art world, which forces impoverished artists to earn their living by pandering to the tastes of wealthy patrons: Many such artists[ ... ] make it the chief aim of their activity to win [... ] noblemen's favor as often as possible. From then on all their work is oriented toward this seductive goal; this idea is clearly perceptible in every painting, however diverse the subject-matter: whether in the warlike figure of a hussar leaning on a saber, or a naked woman in voluptuous abandon, one fundamental, importunate theme clamors for attention: "J beg your Excellency's favor, which for me is more precious than anything in the world ... " [italics in the original] 27

By 1866 Dmitriev's outspoken criticism had landed him in prison; he was later exiled from St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, Stepanov, who had delivered essentially the same message in visual form, continued to live and work in the city. There is no question that Stepanov intended his caricature to play a role in social reform. As coeditor and copublisher of Iskra with Vasilii Kurochkin, he directed the artistic aspects of the journal and contributed to discussions of the literary portion that Kurochkin oversaw. He believed that graphic satire was equivalent, and potentially even superior, to text. In the almanac Znakomye (Acquaintances), which he worked on before founding Iskra, Stepanov wrote an article on the function of caricature in which he compared it to writing: "[G]raphic images may be the most useful and essential for social improvement, and the very best helper to the written word; the pencil ought to explain and supplement the pen. Caricature brings the same benefit as mockery and irony; drawings function the same way as [verbal]

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satire:' 28 Art criticism in other countries-France in particular-already served as a not-so-covert forum for discussing social and political matters. 29 Taking sides in artistic and aesthetic discussions was tantamount to taking sides politically; French political camps and their newspapers favored certain artists and disdained others, while critics expressed their opinions in coded political terms. 30 In Russia Belinskii and other literary critics had established their field as the prime venue for addressing such issues during the 1840s. The subsequent development of Russian art criticism enabled it to fill a similar role. As the most progressive of the illustrated satirical journals of the period, Iskra and its editors were constantly under threat by cen~ors for mocking the vices and weaknesses of civil servants. Stepanov had to ensure that the caricatures they published represented only generalized types who could not be recognized as specific government officials.31 Caricatures on art, however, unlike social and political caricatures, openly addressed specific, named works and artists, suggesting that censors perceived them as less dangerous. Stepanov and his colleagues in the artistic section of Iskra used their mockery of the female nude in art to comment not only on problems in the art world, but also in society as a whole. As in their other social caricatures, the types they portrayed were recognizable by their costume and deportment. Collecting female nudes became a notable characteristic of one such type, typically a pretentious, self-indulgent dandy, who appeared in both graphic satire and literature. One caricature from 1867, for example, depicts a man with a copy of Neff's Bather on his wall, bursting with pride over his bowtie and wishing the ladies could see him. 32 Works like this one point to an important change in the art market of this period: its expansion to include members of the new middle class. 33 These new collectors tended to prefer conservative, conventionally pretty works of art-landscapes, portrait types, and nudes-more than the paintings produced by artists of the progressive realist movement. Often lacking confidence in their own tastes, they sought reassurance from established tradition-the Academy or the West-in acquiring works for their collections. Their unthinking pursuit of art marked as Western in emulation of the upper classes clashed with the ideals of progressive Russian thinkers. A similar caricature from 1863 suggests how collecting images of nude women was associated with a particular stance in society. The work depicts a man looking in the mirror to adjust his necktie while seated

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Margaret Samu

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in a room decorated with elegantly framed nudes. It appeared in Iskra just two years after the emancipation of the serfs, a period in which many educated Russians were debating progress in social and economic reform, when stagnation (zastoi) was a major concern. The art collector portrayed in the caricature alludes to these issues from his own narcissistic viewpoint, saying, "The devil with all these events! They're causing nothing but stagnation in society. Here for a whole month already the fashion in neckties hasn't changed ... What a bore, really... :'34 By using such politically loaded language to discuss fashion, he shows complete disregard for the social problems of the day. Caricatures like this one equate acquiring and exhibiting nudes with idleness, vanity, and most importantly, a profound lack of social engagement. The westernizing ambitions of Russian collectors of nudes naturally raises the question of how the abundant nudes produced in France were received by caricaturists there. According to Marjorie Munsterberg, graphic satire of the female nude in nineteenth-century France focused on the enthusiasm of male viewers and embarrassment or disgust of women.3 5 At stake in these images was the fine line between ideal nudity and vulgarity. More recently, Karen Leader has observed that French caricaturists used a nude or otherwise voluptuous woman as an allegory of art itself. 36 Coining the term "art as tart" to describe this phenomenon, Leader reads these figures as embodying the state of the art market, representing the conflation of art exhibitions and consumerism, sexual appeal and the seductiveness of objects-a criticism of the art world not unlike what we see in Russia. Censorship of art reviews and satirical illustrated publications in France did put constraints on what critics and caricaturists could publish, but according to Neil McWilliam, this censorship focused on work with specifically political content. 37 In terms of targeting the female nude in art, however, French graphic satire essentially served as a humorous echo to written criticism in the periodical press. In Russia the conditions were quite different: both censorship and the underdeveloped field of art criticism severely limited writing about art. As we have seen, the use of humor allowed graphic satire to avoid censorship more easily than written criticism. But its effectiveness as art criticism stemmed also from the virtual absence of other meaningful art writing. Most people writing on art were outsiders to the art world who were ill equipped to address artistic questions or larger institutional matters. Many caricaturists, by

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comparison, were trained artists, familiar with aesthetic issues and with current problems in the art world. Their insider status and the visual strategies they employed allowed them to produce pointed commentaries on specific works of art and incisive observations of the art world. In their work, images of well-known nude female figures stood for retrograde artistic conventions and served as a foil to promote progressive realist ideals. The critical debates that shaped perceptions of the female nude in the second half of the nineteenth century lived on in the Soviet era. Soviet art historians were expected to promote socialist realism and defend against the encroachment of bourgeois art. As Elizabeth Valkenier has shown, they created a historical lineage for the art of their new society by portraying nineteenth-century realist artists as forefathers of the socialist realists. 38 Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, scholars continued to use nineteenth-century realist critics and artists to stand for essential ideas such as freely choosing one's own themes in art rather than following the tastes of consumers, the notion of being authentically Russian rather than falsely Western, and the goal of creating art associated with liberal ideas rather than money. 39 The nude remained an emblem of non-utilitarian, market -oriented, westernized artin short, bad art that was unworthy of investigation. The relative neglect of mainstream academic art and deliberate skewing of the record have shaped perceptions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth -century Russian art world as a whole. The resulting information vacuum on academic art left little to substantiate the change in attitudes toward the female nude in the 1860s and the way in which graphic artists used the subject to stand for larger issues in Russian artistic culture. In the nineteenth century, the talents of caricaturists were ideally suited to criticizing the art world from the inside. Shurygin, for example, produced both oil paintings and graphic satire. 40 In his Diversion in the Waiting Room, the visual language of graphic satire has clearly penetrated the world of painting, allowing viewers to understand the work even without a caption. By 1865 Neff's Bather had become a familiar sign for the seemingly ubiquitous female nude. Its presence in the waiting room speaks of its absent owner, a wealthy nobleman who collects fashionable art and is little interested in the plight of his social inferiors. But the focus of attention in the painting is the impoverished petitioner as he peers through the tube formed by his curled hand, attempting to get a better view of the beauty on the wall. He is not only passing the time, but

also assimilating the tastes of a man of higher rank. If he does manage to advance in society, there is no doubt that he will collect art based on this model. Shurygin, like other artists who used visual humor to make statements on art and society, employed social types and works of art that his audience would recognize in order to produce a strong impact. In Russia of the 1860s, graphic satire and satirical painting spoke more loudly than texts in their criticism. Satires of the female nude in art, more than any other subject, revealed the fault lines in the Russian art world.

Notes Support for this research came from a Swann Foundation Fellowship for Caricature and Cartoon at the Library of Congress in 2011-2012. Thanks to Rosalind P. Blakesley, Karen Leader, and Galina Mardilovich for their helpful suggestions and insightful comments on this essay. 1. Faddei Bulgarin devotes an essay to this type, entitled "Chuvstvitel'noe puteshestvie po perednim;' Severnaia pchela 15 (4 February 1830), 17 (8 February 1830), 18 (11 February 1830), 21 (18 February 1830), reprinted in Durnye vremena. Ocherki russkikh nravov (St. Peterburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2007), 76-87. 2. Grigorii Sternin, Ocherki russkoi satiricheskoi grafiki (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), 145. 3. Rosalind P. Gray [Blakesley], Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 55-57. 4. Lev Varshavskii, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Stepanov, 1807-1877 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952); Grigorii Sternin, Ocherki; John E. Bowlt, "NineteenthCentury Russian Caricature;' in Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 221-36. 5. Evgenii Kovtun, "Russkie karikatury na temi iskusstva;' Iskusstvo 12 (1960): 70-72. 6. Carol Adlam, "The 'Frisky Pencil': Aesthetic Vision in Russian Graphic Satire of the Period of the Great Reforms;' Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2004). [accessed Oct 2009]. 7. Sergei Androsov, Petr Velikii i skul'ptura Italii (St. Petersburg: ARS, 2004), 330- 42; Oleg Neverov,

"Nuovi materiali per una storia delle sculture decorative del Giardino d'estate;' Xenia 13 (1987): 85-109. 8. See Margaret Samu, "Exhibiting Westernization: Aleksei Venetsianov's Nudes and the Russian Art Market 1820-1850;' Nineteenth-Century Studies 26, forthcoming. 9. E.V. Karpova, "K izucheniiu statui I.P. Vitali 'Venera, snimaiushchaia sandaliiu7' in Russkaia i

zapadnoevropeiskaia skul'ptura XVIII-nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2009), 132-43; Ol'ga Alekseevna Krivdina, "Venera I.P. Vitali;' in Ivan Petrovich Vitali (St. Petersburg: Sudarinia, 2006), 34-44. See also Margaret Samu, "The Nude in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Russian Sculpture;' in "Russian Sculpture;' ed. Wendy Salmond, special issue, Experiment: A Journal ofModern Russian Culture 18 (2012): 33-35,54-56. 10. One testimonial comes from Neff's daughter, Mary von Griinewaldt, in Skizzen und Bilder aus dem Leben Carl Timoleons von Neff (Darmstadt: C.S. Minterische, 1887), 132-33. 11. Reproductions include engravings ofboth paintings made from steel plates by F.A. Brokgauz in Leipzig for an article by P.N. Petrov, "Professor T.A. Neff;' Severnoe siianie 1, no. 10 (1862): 608-18; and an engraving of the Two Nymphs by an unknown artist for the album Kopii s kartin russkikh khudozhnikov (GRM, inv. no. Gr-1979, Gr-1980, 16.4 x 11.9 em). 12. These statistics come from the exhibition catalogues, usually titled Ukazatel' khudozhestvennykh proizvedenii, which are held in the research library at the State Russian Museum and in the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. The nudes counted here include works of both sculpture and painting, but the total numbers of works also include architectural models and designs that appeared in the same galleries. For the census, titles indicating bacchantes and nymphs are counted as nudes along with Venuses and bathers, unless reviews or illustrations suggest that they are in opaque drapery. 13. Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art.

The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). As Carol Adlam points out, the term "realism" did not start to replace "naturalism" or "the natural school" in Russia until the 1880s, but the convention in current scholarship is to call the movement "realism" from its origins. See Carol Adlam, "Realist Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art Writing;' Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (October 2005): 638-42. 14. On early Russian art criticism, see Alexey Makhrov, "The Pioneers of Russian Art Criticism:

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Between State and Public Opinion, 1804-1855;' Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 4 (October 2003): 614-33; Alla Glebovna Vereshchagina, Kritiki i iskusstvo. Ocherki istorii russkoi khudozhestvennoi kritiki serediny XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2004). 15. Vereshchagina, 496, 505-8. 16. Michele Haddad, La Divine et I'impure. Le nu au XIXe (Paris: Jaguar, 1990), 24. 17. For English translations of primary sources from the Revolt of the Fourteen, see "Russian Realist Painting. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology;' ed. Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier and Wendy Salmond, special issue, Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 14 (2008): 58-66. 18. More recently, Evgeny Steiner has called this interpretation into question in his article "Pursuing Independence: Kramskoi and the Peredvizhniki vs. the Academy of Arts;' The Russian Review 70 (April 2011): 254-58, in which he argues that the charismatic Kramskoi led his peers to revolt, in part, because he was concerned about his own success in the competition. Steiner asserts that lack of freedom in choosing subjects was not a major concern for the students so much as for Stasov, whose writing became dogma in the Soviet era. 19. Oblichitel'nyi poet [D.D. Minaev], "Putevoditel' po khudozhestvennoi godichnoi vystavke;' Iskra 5, no. 37 (27 September 1863): 517-18; 0 [Vladimir Stasov], "Zametki o vystavke v Akademii khudozhestv;' Sovremennaia letopis' 42 (1862): 5-9. 20. A.G. Vereshchagina, "K istorii konkursa na bol'shuiu zolotuiu medal' Akademii khudozhestv 1863 gada;' in Voprosy khudozhestvennogo obrazovaniia 17, ed. I. A. Bartenev (Leningrad: Akademiia khudozhestv, 1976): 20-21. 21. N.I. Bespalova and A. G. Vereshchagina, Russkaia progressivnaia khudozhestvennaia kritika vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1979), 32. One exception was Nikolai Ramazanov, professor at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, who criticized the walkout in political terms for the Moscow periodical Sovremennaia letopis' 41 (1863): 3. 22. Unknown artist, Iskra 9, no. 38 (8 October 1867): 461. 23. V. Reingardt, Iskra 2, no. 27 (15 July 1860): 292. 24. Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 216-39. For an example from the United States, see Mary Smart,

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A Flight with Fame: The Life and Art of Frederick MacMonnies (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1996), 166-75. 25. Red.[aktor], "Nimfa, s kartinoi Neffa;' Severnoe siianie 1, no. 1 (1861): 2. 26. Nikolai Stepanov, Iskra 4, no. 2 (12 January 1862): 21. 27. Ivan Dmitriev, "Rassharkivaiushcheesia iskusstvo. Po povodu godichnoi vystavki v Akademii khudozhestv;' Iskra 5, no. 38 (4 October 1863): 154. Translation by Carol Adlam available at . This anonymous essay is attributed to Dmitriev in L. Gutman, "Bor'ba za realisticheskuiu estetiku v Akademii khudozhestv;' Iskusstva 6 (1939): 143. 28. Quoted in Varshavskii, Stepanov, 25-26. Thanks to Kristen Regina for helping me to locate this volume. 29. Neil McWilliam, "Presse, journalistes et critiques d'art a Paris de 1849 a 1860;' Quarante-huit/ Quatorze 5 (1991-1992): 56. 30. Patricia Mainardi argues that this was the case from about 1800 to 1855 in "The Political Origins of Modernism;' Art Journal45, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 11-17. 31. Varshavskii, Stepanov, 23-24, 32-33. 32. See the caricature by Ia.Ia. Gromov in Iskra 9, no. 19 {28 May 1867). 33. Makhrov, "Pioneers;' 628-30; Ia. V. Bruk, "Iz istorii khudozhestvennogo sobiratel'stva v Peterburge i Moskve v XIX veke;' Gosudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia galereia. Ocherki istorii, 1865-1917 (Leningrad: KhudozhnikRSFSR, 1981), 31-34. 34. A. R-n, Iskra 5, no. 33 (30 August 1863): 441. 35. Marjorie Munsterberg, "Naked or Nude? A Battle among French Art Critics of the Mid-Nineteenth Century;' Arts Magazine 62 (Aprill988): 40-47. 36. Karen Joanne Leader, ''Art as Tart: Allegorizing Art in the Popular Illustrated Press;' in 'TEsthetique du Rire: Caricature and Art in Nineteenth-century Paris" (PhD diss., New York University, 2009), 256-304. 37. McWilliam, "Presse, journalistes et critiques d'art;' 55-56. 38. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 132, 165-93. 39. See, for example, Grigorii Sternin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn' Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka, 70-BOe gody (Moscow: Nauka, 1997), 137-38. 40. Gosudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia Galereia, Katalog sobraniia vol. 4, Zhivopis' XVIII-XX vekov book 2, Zhivopis' vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Krasnaiaploshchad: 2006), 445.

The Abramtsevo Circle Founding Principles and Aesthetic Direction ELEONORA PASTON

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he Abramtsevo circle has gone down in history as one of the most significant phenomena in Russian artistic culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The circle united such artists as Ilia Repin, Vasilii Polenov, Viktor Vasnetsov, Mark Antokolskii, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Vrubel, Elena Polenova, Mikhail Nesterov, Apollinarii Vasnetsov, and Ilia Ostroukhov, who gathered around the Mamontov family in the 1870s to 1890s (fig. 4.1 ). The artistic ideas born of the circle manifested themselves in explorations in painting, sculpture, drawing, theatrical stagings, and works of decorative art and architecture, all of which played a major role in the development of Russian modernism. Fine artists and painters turned their attention to art forms other than easel painting for the first time in the Mamontovs' community, which was a fundamentally new endeavor in Russian artistic life of that time. Ultimately, this reflected a new way of conceiving the very function of art, as well as new ideas about the relation between art and life. The artists also sought a unified stylistic approach that was based on a creative reworking of forms drawn from folk art and early Russian art. During the construction of the Abramtsevo Church of the Savior Not Made by Hands (Spas Nerukotvornyi, 1881-1882), in the production of the workshops devoted to carpentry (from 1885) and ceramics (from 1890), and in a series of theatrical and decorative works at Abramtsevo and Moscow, artists developed new stylistic techniques that led to the formation of the

neo-Russian style. The staging of amateur theatrical productions for the circle and Savva Mamontov's Russian Private Opera laid the foundation for the flourishing of Russian theater decoration at the turn of the century. Indeed, the theatrical initiatives of the Abramtsevo circle anticipated the founding artistic ideas of Sergei Diaghilev's enterprise. Mamontov's principle of the unity of artistic presentation and performance received a new interpretation in the ensemble approach of Diaghilev's Russian Seasons (1907-1929), with their art of pure spectacle, synthesis of forms, and free stylization. At the same time, in the fine art that Abramtsevo artists produced, one can trace new tendencies that both reflected general artistic developments of the time, and arose spontaneously within the community thanks to its artistic and creative atmosphere and the interactions and reciprocal influences of its members. Despite this multitude of aesthetic tasks undertaken in the community, the Abramtsevo circle was not a formally organized association. It did not have a program or charter; members did not officially enter or leave the group; and it was never officially registered with the state. The association was not even a circle for members of a single profession. Alongside artists there were singers, instrumental musicians, actors, engineers, representatives of the business world, and members of the Mamontov family. It was an association of people who shared a common spirit and were creatively close to one another, living with mutual artistic

4.1. Unknown photographer, Members of the Abramtsevo circle in the dining room of Savva and Elizaveta Mamontov's house in Moscow, 1880s.

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interests in the friendly family atmosphere of the Mamontovs' home in Moscow and their nearby estate of Abramtsevo. The association received its actual name "the Abramtsevo circle" only later, when its activity attracted the attention of researchers. By exploring the fundamental principles and aesthetic direction that lay at the heart of the organization, this chapter aims to shed light on the unique identity of Abramtsevo, which arguably became the most important crucible of artistic innovation in Russia in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. T H E F o u N D E R o F the Abramtsevo group, Savva Mamontov (1841-1918), was a major figure in Russian industry and railway development, one of the brightest representatives of a new generation of educated members of Moscow's middle class who combined a new type of daring, nontraditional entrepreneurial activity with a wide and varied cultural engagement. By the time he first became acquainted with artists, Mamontov-a man of multifaceted artistic talent-had already tried out various art forms himself, gaining practical experience in many of them. His journals and memoirs testify to his passion for the theater, especially opera, first in secondary school and later as a university student. 1 Then came attempts to test his voice, followed by singing lessons (1854), when he mastered the techniques of the bel canto style with an instructor called Maestro Farioni in Milan. His memoirs record his participation in amateur theatricals in plays by Aleksandr Ostrovskii at the Sekretarevskii Theater (1865). They also describe lessons in sculpture at Antokolskii's studio in Rome (1872), which uncovered a genuine talent in Mamontov, and prompted advice that he seriously pursue this branch of art. 2 Later, this multifacetedness naturally led Mamontov to the theater, more precisely, to opera, an art form that is synthetic to its core. In Mamontov's ideology it is possible to identify a series of distinguishing features. He was close to the Slavophile movement, as were many Moscow merchants, who were connected at the time by what Thomas Owen has called the "merchant-Slavophile alliance;' with friendship and family connections to the Slavophile gentry? But although Mamontov was for the most part caught up in the spirit of this environment (which resonated in his artistic origins, too), he cannot be called a Slavophile in the strict sense of the word. His tastes combined a strong interest in national artistic styles and motifs with an enthusiasm for antiquity,

contemporary Western European art, and a passionate love of Italian opera. This absence of Slavophile doctrine lent particular significance to Mamontov's aestheticism, which became a kind of religion for him. His famous assertion, "Religion is failing and art must take its place;' 4 reflects to some degree the complexity of his ideological quest. Another of Mamontov's pronouncements reveals the particular way in which he reinvented Russian folk and Slavophile ideas: "I am deeply convinced that art is destined to play an immense role in the reformation and reeducation of the Russian people, and that Russian society, morally reborn through art, is perhaps destined someday to serve as a beacon, a source of spiritual renewal even for Western Europe:' 5 In short, Mamontov was endowed with a merchant's energy and a "particular sensitivity and responsiveness to all the dreams and aspirations by which artists constantly live:' 6 Concentrating around himself the interests, strivings, and fates of talented people, he was able to unite them into a creative artistic community. Legends abound of his artistic insight and sensitivity, the breadth of his aesthetic interests, and his uncompromising and courageous advocacy of artistic interests. 7 Through the abundant energy of his restless personality, Savva Mamontov generated an atmosphere of enthusiasm in the circle, which aroused the creative drive of its participants. Mamontov's wife, Elizaveta (1847-1908), was a person of rare allure, and was sensitive to art in its various manifestations. Deeply meditative, she became a source of moral and ethical fellowship. A talented pianist, having taken lessons abroad with Clara Schumann, the widow of the German composer, she later masterfully performed the works of Beethoven and Schumann for members of the circle. For five years she also studied literature with the historian and archivist Petr Bartenev, and attended lectures on mathematics as part of the women's courses at the Second Men's Gymnaziia. Guided by Adrian Prakhov, she studied architectural monuments and visited museums, galleries, and artists' studios in Italy, mainly in Rome. Elizaveta was especially interested in the early Christian art of the Roman empire, and systematically studied the artistic culture of ancient Rus as well as early Russian architectural monuments. According to Nesterov, the main feature of her personality was her "happy blend of a great intellect and a great heart:' 8 She possessed an inquisitive mind and exceptional kindheartedness, "a rare balance of both one and the other:' 9

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The circle's formation-even if it went down in the history of Russian culture as free and oriented around friends and family-was on Savva Mamontov's part a conscious and deliberate act. Inviting artists to move to Moscow, he wrote specifically that he saw in the new community "the entire world of the future:' 10 And the artists, seeking precisely the kind of informal and free organization that Mamontov had in mind, essentially foresaw its potential. Neither at the start of the circle's activity, nor later, when the work of its members became an event of Russian cultural life, did the members of the community ally their art with any kind of aesthetic policy. Instead, there is a document that clearly reveals their attitude to art in the form of Polenov's drawing for the cover of the album Khronika nashego khudozhestvennogo kruzhka (Chronicle of Our Artistic Circle), marking the fifteenth anniversary of the community, which members celebrated in 1893. (They dated the beginning of their collective activity from the first theatrical performance at the Mamontovs' Moscow home in 1878, when a series of tableaux vivants were staged.) Polenov's drawing depicts an entrance, many of whose details echo those of the entrance to Mamontov's office, where the home performances took place. At the same time, the image is filled with deep symbolic meaning: drapery recalling a theatrical curtain, an antique sculpture with a rotunda behind it, and romantic lighting, all of which testifies to the special world that opened up before the circle's participants: the world of Beauty. 11 Indeed, although the circle had no formal program, in a deeper sense-in the community's spiritual life, and in the closeness of the creative efforts and pursuits of its members-one can read their predisposition to the aesthetic ideas of the romantic era, one of the fundamental postulates of which was the cult of Beauty. This predisposition emerged from a latent development in art and aesthetics at the time, and transformed the community's aesthetic direction into neo-romantic tendencies. What exactly was the nature of this development? The formation of the Abramtsevo circle occurred during the 1870s, a period about which literary historian Semen Vengerov wrote: "By no means rejecting the realist direction of the 1860s, we are beginning to reconcile ourselves with the ideals of the 1840s, and the result of this amalgam, of this strange combination, is precisely the 1870s:' 12 Even amid the materialist and positivist ideas and the predominant mood of educated society in the 1870s, the young scholar keenly grasped

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the dawn of a new attitude toward the aesthetic of romanticism that had prevailed from the 1820s to the 1840s, and new, neo-romantic tendencies in Russian artistic culture. An observation by an art critic for the Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), analyzing works of art shown at the Peredvizhnik exhibition of 1879, is telling in this respect. Writing about Polenov's painting Grandma's Garden (1879, GTG), he calls the artist a "romantic;' though he immediately qualifies his statement by explaining that this is only "in so far as romanticism is generally accessible to a Russian artist in the sense of appearing in paintings and images of Russian life:' 13 As it turned out, what was accessible was already making itself known in the work of the artists of the Abramtsevo circle. The possibility that the ideals of the 1840s reemerged in the 1870s is supported by the fact that the romantic strain in Russian art and Russian thought did not wane in the second half of the nineteenth century. In these years, many of the seeds planted by the romantics continued to bear fruit. The interest in folk art, early Russian literature and architecture, and the national roots of Russian culture as a whole that arose in Russian culture during the first quarter of the century, never ended. Instead, the romantics' quest to familiarize themselves with medieval Russian art developed further in the scholarly work of Fedor Buslaev, as well as in the activities of the Kireevskii brothers, Konstantin Aksakov, Mikhail Pogo din, and Stepan Shevyrev (the last two active in the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, as we have seen in chapter 1). Moreover, the romantic principles of the 1860s to 1870s continued to exist in almost all the fundamental directions of Russian painting, too. 14 They were evident in both academic painting, and in the work of artists who struggled against the academic system such as Ivan Kramskoi and Nikolai Ge. 15 The bases of the romantic method, like those of classicism, were preserved in the system of academic instruction which, given the gathering force of realistic genre painting and the gradual liberation of history painting from formal canons, became a center of the battle against academic routine within the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, and sharpened debate among its students. According to their memoirs, the Academy's students found support for their pursuits in the late 1860s to early 1870s in the views of philologist, linguist, and philosopher Mstislav Prakhov (1840-1878), a professor at Dorpat University (1870-1878) and dedicated follower of Schelling who was spiritually aligned with

the idealism of the 1840s. Prakhov became acquainted with the future members of the Abramtsevo circle while they were training at the Academy through his brother Adrian, then a student at St. Petersburg University specializing in the history of art. 16 According to Antokolskii: [Mstislav's] discussions were simple and clear. Thanks to him I understood beauty, its meaning and significance, and most importantly, I understood the great significance of art, its power to move people, to attune them precisely to the intonation of those harmonies under whose impact art finds itself at the present moment. 17

In 1873 Mstislav Prakhov met the Mamontovs and stayed with them for an extended period in Moscow and Abramtsevo. Like the Academy students, Mamontov came under his influence, writing of Prakhov to Polenov in 1874: "Aie, aie, aie, such an idealist as I've never seen! [... ] Thanks to him I'm still clinging to the proper height of sentiment, though, truly, soon I'll be no worse than any other shopkeeper:' 18 Polenov, too, later confirmed Mstislav's importance to the community in a letter to Mamontov of 1900, when the results of the Abramtsevo circle's work began to be reassessed: [Mstislav] became the founder of our group almost without realizing it, having laid the cornerstone of artistic knowledge. [... ]At that time, when aesthetics were being expelled from art, and doctrine and tendentiousness were being set up in their place, he with his na!ve idealism had the courage to go against this movement and quietly yet firmly argue for human aesthetic needs-not only as important for potential creators, but as one of the most essential sources of human existence. 19

Thus it was precisely to Prakhov that the circle's participants assigned the role of spiritual leader. This compels us to pay attention to the scholar's aesthetic views, tastes, and preoccupations in order to understand the nature of his impact on the artists, and exactly why the circle assigned him the role of intellectual founder of the group. Mstislav Prakhov, who reached maturity during the period in which "the natural school'' was developing and the socially critical movement in art and literature was at its peak (see chapter 1), was an adherent of romantic aesthetics. Both his articles and his reviews

critiquing current artistic events that are preserved among his notes testify to his convictions. 20 Judging from these texts, Prakhov argued for a superior and autonomous value for art, maintaining that a work of art is a manifestation of the highest human capabilities, in which the human spirit emulates the creation of nature itself. Prakhov's idols in contemporary literature were, above all, Afanasii Fet, the early work of Ivan Turgenev, and Fedor Tiutchev, followed by Apollon Maikov, with whom he enjoyed a close personal friendship, and Iakov Polonskii-poets who stood apart from others in literature of the time. Prakhov characterized Fet, Turgenev, and Tiutchev as poets of daily life, since the mundane in their work serves as a synonym for the natural, the uncontrived. Alongside this, he highly valued both Maikov's poetry on antique subjects and his drama Dva mira (Two Worlds), on the historical struggle between early Christianity and paganism in the age of Nero. Prakhov's evaluation of antique art, inflected by Schelling's thinking, differed both from the formal, academic admiration for this art, and from the negative attitude toward the use of the antique tradition in aesthetics characteristic of the 1850s to 1870s. If the academic approach toward antiquity could not accommodate an interest in folk art, then the romantic attitude toward the art of ancient Greece harmonized completely with Prakhov's scholarly and aesthetic interest in early Russian and folk art. His thoughtful approach to antiquity, combined with his lengthy study of The Tale of Igor's Campaign, among other works of early Russian literature, serve as instructive examples. In his text Narodnaia poeziia (Folk Poetry) of 1862, for example, the chapter titled "On the Characteristics of Folk or Epic Poetry in General" places side by side examples from Russian legends and Homer, the myths of Russian and Greek paganism.2 1 Mstislav Prakhov was the foremost representative of romantic thought among Mamontov and his artist friends. But others in the growing circle's orbit were also connected to the romantic aesthetic tradition, among them Mstislav's younger brother Adrian, art critic and theoretician who served as professor of art history at St. Petersburg University (1873-1878) and the Academy of Arts (1875-1878). In 1875-1878 Adrian headed the art section of the journal Pchela (The Bee), which published articles on the art and culture of Greece and ancient Egypt, contemporary European art, and the new realist school of painting in Russia, as well as reviewing exhibitions and presenting the work of a number of

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artists. In his articles it is possible to trace a system of views similar to the aesthetics of Mstislav, though less strict and more open to contemporary art forms. The roles of the two brothers in the Abramtsevo circle were correspondingly different from one another. Adrian was no distant tutor to the circle's members, but one of their own, in whose company they formed their artistic views-he participated in the artistic undertakings of the community, and lived with his family for an extended period at Abramtsevo. His articles found a warm reception among the community, as his aesthetics and approach to art encapsulated something essential to the future of their artistic movement, something of which the artists were keenly aware-namely, the very aesthetic purpose of art. A further source for the romantic outlook of the circle's participants could be the direct experience of the romantic era as preserved in the memory of the previous generation. Particularly important was the historical legacy of the Abramtsevo estate itself, which Mamontov had purchased from the heirs of the writer Sergei Aksakov. The main estate house was typical of the domestic architecture of the midranking nobility from the second half of the eighteenth century. Carefully preserving there everything that remained from the previous owners-Aksakov's books, engravings, furniture-the Mamontovs essentially affirmed themselves as the successors of estate culture of the previous era. Harking back in a similar way to the previous generation, Savva Mamontov found teachers in Dmitrii Polenov (father of the artist Vasilii), an archaeologist, bibliographer, and fine connoisseur of ancient art, and his close friend Fedor Chizhov, a man with a highly developed aesthetic sense. 22 For Mamontov, Chizhov's short stories about his encounters with Friedrich Overbeck, the leader of the Nazarene movement, held great significance. (These meetings took place in the studio of Aleksandr Ivanov in Rome.) The idea of an artistic brotherhood that bound together a group of German and Austrian artists who were trying to recreate the traditions of medieval and early Renaissance art in their work must have had an effect on Mamontov, not only broadening his aesthetic horizons, but also giving him the idea to establish his own artistic center. The entire intellectual environment that surrounded the circle's participants during their years of training at the Academy of Arts in the 1860s and their travels to Italy and France in the 1870s fostered in them an openness to the romantic ideas

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that were reappearing in Russian culture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This explains to a significant degree the power of Mstislav Prakhov's influence on the community as it was forming. But this influence could undoubtedly exist only to the extent that Prakhov's views coincided with the creative needs of the artists, and enabled their spiritual impulses to emerge. His principles were in tune with the aspirations of artists who repudiated academic aesthetics in a new way (without arguing for a higher meaning for aesthetic values based on formal, academic lines), and responded to the artists' need to maintain freedom for creative expression and artistic pursuits. These aspirations manifested themselves in the 1870s in the artists' debates about art, beauty, its nature and meaning-debates whose repercussions have reached us in their letters and their evaluations of new developments in Western painting. Alongside themes of great public and social resonance, the artists' attention was increasingly attracted to poetic motifs from everyday life, landscape, the intimate bonds between individuals and nature, and varied moods and feelings. At the time of his period of study in France, for example, Repin painted Parisian Cafe (1873-1876, private collection) and Sadko (1876, GRM), and immediately upon his return to Russia produced the poetic canvas On the Turf Bench (1876, GRM). During this time Polenov was also in Paris, where, along with the historical paintings Le Droit du seigneur (1874, GTG) and Arrest of the Huguenot Woman (1875, GRM), he produced numerous plein-air studies with Repin. The first works he showed at the Peredvizhnik exhibitions on his return to Russia were the poetic paintings Moscow Courtyard (1878, GTG), Grandma's Garden (1879, GTG), and Overgrown Pond (1879, GTG). The poetry of everyday life in Russian painting of the late 1870s would become increasingly prominent, culminating in the work that Polenov, Repin, Serov, Korovin, and other artists produced at Abramtsevo in the 1880s and 1890s. The longing for nature, for simple unpretentious motifs, the desire for sincerity and truthfulness brought the participants of the Abramtsevo circle closer to the members of numerous other artists' colonies that found country retreats in order to draw from rural life. In this sense the circle can be compared to those artists' colonies founded in Barbizon (Abramtsevo is often called the Russian Barbizon), Grez-sur-Loing, the Breton town of Pont Aven, Concarneau, and other parts of France. In one such place in Normandy, Repin

and Polenov-then Academy pensioners and future members of the Abramtsevo circle-mastered pleinair painting during the summer of 1874. Indeed, in accepting Mamontov's invitation to move to Moscow for work, the artists probably dreamed of organizing a community of exactly the same kind as the Barbizon School. They found at Abramtsevo everything an artist could need-the natural environment they craved, locals from nearby towns who were eager to pose, and the opportunity to observe peasant life. The main difference was that the artists largely lived with the Mamontovs on their estate. Even if they settled in nearby towns, they regularly visited the estate. In other words, the artists' ties with the Mamontovs were particularly close, and the estate became the center of their collective artistic efforts. According to Nesterov, at Abramtsevo there arose a "kind oflife that was pleasant to the highest degree;m and this was not only reflected in the artists' painting practice, but was intimately connected with the community's aesthetics and collective work. The first collaborative undertaking at Abramtsevo was the evening readings at which community members read classic Russian and European dramatic works, their roles allocated in advance. Initiated by Mstislav Prakhov, the gatherings stemmed from his ambition to enrich the artists' intellect, to prevent "the soul drying up;' as he would often say. 24 One of the most important aspects of the romantic approach to the past was the desire to live in its spirit, to reproduce in oneself the feeling of an earlier time. The evening readings accordingly opened artists up to the rich and varied spiritual life of past eras, and enabled them to understand their ambitions better. As Polenov recalled of the readings, "The great written creations of all periods and nations became a living source of spiritual life for the whole communitY:' 25 Musical evenings alternated in the Mamontovs' home with scholarly discussions and debates about art; evening readings alternated with stagings of tableaux vivants. The transition to theatrical performances was thus natural. These served to organize and unify the community, and enabled them to establish the lighthearted, informal artistic atmosphere in which all kinds of experiments were possible without fear of failure. Aesthetics, ethics, and outlooks intrinsic to the plays that were performed in the home theater related directly to issues that preoccupied the artists, and clarified artistic pursuits that had only just begun to emerge. In the manuscript collection of the Abramtsevo Museum Preserve there is an album started by Mstislav

Prakhov titled Dramatic Evenings ofS.I. Mamontov (1877-1880). A Record of Literary Readings with the Distribution of Roles. 26 The list of works read during this period is not complete. But even as it is, it is astounding in its scope, richness, and variety, with most Russian and many Western works of classic drama tackled in just a few years. Given this range, the choice of which plays to perform must have been carefully planned, as only a few of the many dramatic works that were read aloud were given a theatrical incarnation. What, then, determined the decision about which plays to stage? Of the many works the members of the circle read together, only four plays were staged: Dva mira (Two Worlds) by Apollon Maikov (1879); Kamoens (Cami5es) by Vasilii Zhukovskii (1882); Snegurochka (Snow Maiden) by Aleksandr Ostrovskii (1882); and Zhenit'ba (Marriage) by Nikolai Gogol (1888). The choice of the first three of these is especially interesting: Maikov's Two Worlds is devoted to a comparison of Christian and ancient world philosophies; Zhukovskii's Camoes, a reworking of a play by the German romantic playwright Eligius Franz Joseph von Mi.inch-Bellinghausen, tells the story of the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet who dedicated himself to serving art and died in poverty and solitude; and Ostrovskii's Snow Maiden-to his contemporaries' surprise-evoked a mythological world based on Russian folklore that celebrates tradition and patriarchy, and compares romantic love to rational detachment. The drama of these plays attracted the circle's participants in specific ways: in the first, the author's admiration of antique art, and the beauty of the antique world as distinct from the recourse to antique art as a source for formal imagery (a growing preoccupation for Russian artists at this time, as Alison Hilton explores in chapter 10); in the second, the romantic concept of a genius cast out from society, not broken but summoning his moral power for the sake of art; and in the third, the rich possibility of the renewal of national and folk art that was already taking shape at Abramtsevo. In this way, Two Worlds, Camoes, and Snow Maiden essentially complemented one another, and together embodied the overall aesthetic direction of the circle. In addition to these plays, the repertoire of the domestic theater encompassed dramatic works by Mamontov. A few of these, such as Alaia roza (The Crimson Rose) and Volshebnyi basmachok (The Magic Lady's Slipper), had specific counterparts in German romantic tales by Johann Ludwig Tieck, Navalis, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Characteristic is the plot of Alaia roza, which is taken from the folktale Alen'kii tsvetochek

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(The Little Crimson Blossom), recorded by Sergei Aksakov, but retuned in a European key (the action takes place in Spain). Moreover, the merchant's tale of his travels recalls to some degree the knight's tale in Zhukovskii's Ondine (1837). The artists' participation in the amateur dramatics not only as designers, but also as actors and directors, made possible-through Mamontov's unique role as patron and producer-an interrelated ensemble of all the components of a theatrical event. Notably, the circle's participants brought to the design their understanding of a play's visual structure, and the decorations became an inseparable part of the unified effect. Such qualities were first noted in Polenov's sketches for the sets of Maikov's Two Worlds, Zhukovskii's Camoes, Mamontov's Joseph, and The Crimson Rose-works that, in the words of Alexandre Benois, were "unconsciously groping" toward a new artistic imagery for the first time. 27 The results of this quest would ultimately lead to spectacular flourishes on the Russian stage in the theatrical work of Polenov's students Korovin and Aleksandr Golovin. Polenov's successor in stage design for the domestic theater was Viktor Vasnetsov. He undertook designs for Snow Maiden having never really considered, as he put it, "touching the theater, staging, and performance" until after the reading of Ostrovskii's tale one winter evening in 1881 at the Mamontovs' Moscow home. 28 Under the influence of Mamontov's "inspiring despotism;' the artist was allocated the role of Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz) in the play. Thus began the story of Vasnetsov's Snow Maiden, which produced nothing short of a revolution in Russian theatrical decoration, forging for many generations of artists a new way of designing plays on Russian themes. Ostrovskii's Snow Maiden, imbued with gentle humor and set in a fantastical fairy-tale world, is based on imagery from Russian folklore, and contains many genre scenes that corresponded perfectly to Vasnetsov's talents and creative pursuits. Not for nothing did the artist call it his most "heartfelt" work. In sketches of the sets and costumes for Snow Maiden, he sought to develop an artistic language that was the visual equivalent to folk and fairy-tale themes, elaborating motifs from folk art and early Russian architecture into a set of general principles, as well as devising more individual methods of stylization that would subsequently reappear in his art. Already the first forays of the Abramtsevo artists in the realm of theatrical decoration proved the

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fruitfulness of their theatrical experience. The very notion of the role of scenery changed. The set no longer simply represented the place and time of the action, but embodied the spirit and mood of the play. This stylistic reevaluation and psychological rethinking became a new phenomenon not only in theatrical decoration, but arguably in the realm of the visual arts as a whole. Boosted by the experience that the Abramtsevo artists acquired in amateur dramatics, in 1885 Mamontov opened his own theater, the Russian Private Opera (1885-1891, 1896-1900). The first show performed was Aleksandr Dargomyzhskii's Rusalka (1885), designed by the circle's artists. The staging was predicated on an organic unification of all components of the performance. Vasnetsov, Polenov, Korovin, Serov, and later even Vrubel took part directly in preparing the productions, not only as designers, but essentially as codirectors, too. The most significant staging was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Snow Maiden (1885), which ran with designs that Vasnetsov reworked from his sketches for sets and costumes for the home theater. The two productions-RimskyKorsakov's Snow Maiden and Ostrovskii's play by the Abramtsevo circle-opened at about the same time, and Rimsky-Korsakov and Vasnetsov went to Ostrovskii's play in search of ideas for how to create the poetic world of folk mythology. The resulting harmony between the dramatic, musical, and visual layers of the performance made the Russian Private Opera's Snow Maiden the very embodiment of unity in the arts, inspiring contemporary music critics to call it a "Wagnerian'' work. 29 Polenov, who taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (see chapter 1) and was always close to and supportive of its young artists, introduced the school's graduates Isaak Levitan, Aleksandr Ianov, Nikolai Chekhov, Viktor Simov, and Konstantin Korovin to Mamontov in 1884, and recommended them for work in Mamontov's theater. Not all of them would stay in the theater, but Korovin became particularly closely associated with both the Mamontov circle and the art of theatrical decoration. He took part in most of the performances of the Russian Private Opera's first period of activity, initially producing decorations designed by Vasnetsov and Polenov, then later designing the sets himself. In just one year of work on several performances, Korovin-until then completely unacquainted with the technique of theatrical painting-grew to be a master of the field, revealing both a distinctive design style and a rich understanding

of theatrical and decorative art. Such quick mastery of the rules of the stage was due to the expressiveness of Korovin's artistic nature. This developed not only in the theater and amateur dramatics of the Abramtsevo circle (here rivaling the work of Valentin Serov), but in every detail of the artist's personality and behavior, in his love of jokes and improvisations, in the expressiveness of his painting, and in the genuine theatricality that Mamontov spotted in him. Among the many productions designed in the Mamontov theater, it is worth noting Korovin's designs for Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Sadko, which the composer allowed to premier there on 26 December 1897. This production exemplified the friendly collaboration that took place among director, artists, and performers, and spawned a host of memories recorded for posterity. Fedor Chaliapin later wrote that all the artists were completely carried away with the opera, and looked forward to its staging "like their own name daY:' 30 Serov helped with the designs, making a costume for Variaga (played by Chaliapin), while Vrubel made sketches ofVolkhova's costume for his wife, Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, and "astonishingly;' according to Chaliapin, depicted the bottom of the sea. 31 The performance's main artist, however, was Korovin, as musicologist Vasilii Iakovlev recalled: "fundamentally important [in this production] was that artistic unity, that corresponding paint from K. Korovin's sweeping brush, which perfectly suited the subject's folktale style and the composer's musical goals, all of which could be felt in the most immediate waY:' 32 Benois, who attended Sadko when the Mamontov theater was on tour in St. Petersburg in 1898, wrote about the production: I can testify that Korovin and Vrubel made as astounding an impression as Chaliapin, especially the former. Our favorite artist suddenly drew himself up to his full height and unfurled his talent to its full extent! From where did he get such sensitivity to early Rus? From where such a knowledge of sets? From where this determination to do away with all the traditional formulas of the design "profession;' and how did he dare to apply his "painting" technique (true, marked by great daring) to hundreds of

square yards ?33 Having gained his "sensitivity" to early Rus in the Abramtsevo circle, Korovin, following Polenov's example, introduced to theatrical design not only "incandescent paints" the likes of which had never

been seen before, 34 but also the ability to create with his expressive painting a theatrical spectacle, a space constructed by color. The result was a series of visual images that created an overall harmony between the stage picture and the musical structure of the work, and found corresponding spots of color in the costumes and the surrounding set. The staging ofRimsky-Korsakov's Sadko was already in the second stage of Mamontov's Russian Private Opera, when the influx of new artistic strength brought about by the arrival of such talented vocalists and composers as Chaliapin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov allowed Mamontov's theater to realize its artistic ambitions to a much greater extent than had been possible in the 1880s. The synthesis of arts that underpinned the Private Opera's artistic mission was perfected during this period with the staging of operas by Russian composers: Mikhail Glinka's A Life for the Tsar, Aleksandr Borodin's Prince Igor, Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden, The Maid of Pskov, Sadko, May Night, Mozart and Salieri, Vera Sheloga, The Tsar's Bride, and The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, The Oprichnik, and The Maiden of Orleans, Aleksandr Serov's Rogneda and Judith, and Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov. These operas were performed with designs by Viktor and Apollinarii Vasnetsov, Polenov, Korovin, Vrubel, Serov, and Sergei Maliutin. Mikhail Vrubel first joined the Abramtsevo circle's theatrical activity in the 1890s, participating in the amateur theatricals of 1890 and 1893 as an artist, actor, singer, and stager of tableaux vivants. In 1891 he was commissioned by Mamontov to design a sketch for a curtain for the Russian Private Opera, and in the same year produced the curtain itself with help from Serov. In his sketch, Vrubel attempted to express the essence of the theater's aesthetic conception. It depicts several variations of a subject from the Renaissance, the most highly finished of which shows the audience in late Renaissance costumes, listening attentively to a singer with a lute. The scene is set amid a beautiful Neapolitan landscape, with examples of the sort of ancient art that was being revived in Italy. Light, transparent curtains, opening the scene to the viewer, associate it with the world of theater, a magical world of sublime images, romance, and beauty. The curtain's subject resonated with the inscription on the theater's poster and programs: "Vita brevis, ars longa"- "Life is short, art is eternal"-the theater's motto which, according to

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vocalist Nadezhda Salina, was regarded with great pride by all of the workers there? 5 From 1896 to 1902, Vrubel regularly collaborated with the Russian Private Opera, and from the late 1890s, after Korovin's departure for the Imperial Theater, he became for all intents and purposes the theater's main artist. His decorative gifts and ability to create complex fantastical worlds in his compositions were used to full effect in his designs for Rimsky-Korsakov's operas on folktale themes. The composer's ability to unite the real and the supernatural in subjects from romantic tales and Slavic mythology, and to create sounds that were almost physically tangible images, was especially close to Vrubel's heart. The artist expressed his enthusiasm for Rimsky-Korsakov's music particularly clearly in his designs for the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900 ). For the act that takes place in the City ofLedenets, he used a free combination of expressive scenery painting and volumetric details, outdoing all other contemporary theatrical artists, and heralding the level of theatrical artistry to which we are accustomed today. The Abramtsevo circle's artistic pursuits found their fullest and most sustained expression in Mamontov's Russian Private Opera. It is precisely for this reason that scholars use its achievements as a reference point when discussing the origins of the World of Art group. For Boris Asafiev, Mamontov's opera and the artists grouped around it promoted principles similar to those of the World of Art movement, with folk and national tendencies in place of its Petersburg Europeanism, but sharing the attraction for a new sense of antiquity. In short, a new artistic sensibility was born in Moscow, and still prompts the question: was it not in Moscow that the Russian artistic renaissance first arrived, which was reflected in the northern capital in the World of Art movement? 36

H A V I N G D I S C 0 V E R E D I N the home theatricals and, later, on the operatic stage the possibility of applying their powers outside the realm of easel painting, the Abramtsevo artists subsequently began to master ever newer forms of art. In the 1870s Mamontov had had two new buildings constructed on the Abramtsevo estate: the Workshop (1873), designed by Viktor Gartman, and a guest wing called the Bath-Tower (Bania-teremok) (1878), designed by Ivan Ropet in the so-called Russian style that was popular at the time. These buildings added a

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distinctively national flavor to the estate, indicating its owners' commitment to Russian antiquity. They also became a point of departure for the Abramtsevo circle's later stylistic experimentation, not least when, in 1880, they conceived the idea to build a church. Everyone set to work together, and constructed the Church of the Savior Not Made by Hands from 1881 to 1882 to designs by Polenov and Viktor Vasnetsov, with the participation of other members of the group (fig. 4.2). The project was based on seventeenth-century churches ofNovgorod and Pskov, in part the Church of the Savior on Nereditsa near Novgorod. These historical prototypes were then creatively reworked to produce a unique, resplendent church that was both lyrical and profound. The Abramtsevo church has gone down in the history of Russian architecture as the first structure in the neo-Russian style, a major component of Russian art nouveau (and a style vividly explored in book design and illustration, as Alia Rosenfeld discusses in chapter 11). A decade later, in 1892, a chapel designed by Vasnetsov was added to its northern fa32 Here Kramskoi indeed anticipates one of Nietzsche's major heresies in The Antichrist (1889). In short, Kramskoi, at least in his letters, is much less tongue-tied than his supposed avatar Mikhailov. In Anna Karen ina, the only part of Kramskoi's defense of Christ in the Wilderness that Tolstoy echoes is the painter's peculiar confession that he had actually seen a vision of Christ. In an 1876letter to V sevolod Garshin, Kramskoi describes in detail what he calls a "hallucination": "Once, at a time when I was especially busy ... I suddenly saw a figure sitting in profound

thought. I very carefully began to watch him, to walk around him, and during all that (quite long) time that I was observing him he didn't move or seem to notice me:' 33 In Anna Karenina, Mikhailov insists he could not paint an image of Christ that "was not in his soul": "If a small child or a cook could see what was revealed to them, then they would be able to portray what they saw:'34 Tolstoy thus infantalizes what Kramskoi pathologizes: revelation as the source of true art. As these parallel passages indicate, Mikhailov and Kramskoi do share an understanding of the need for sincerity in artistic vision. From the Nazarenes and the French realists to the pre-Raphaelites and the Peredvizhniki, sincerity was a rallying cry for virtually every major secession movement in the nineteenth-century art world. On the one hand, critics and artists pushed the concept of sincerity backward in time toward the pre-Renaissance painter, a sort of artist-priest figure who works in selfless anonymity and only from genuine inspiration. On the other hand, such midcentury critics as John Ruskin and Jules Champfleury co-opted the term "sincerity" for the new movement of realism.35 The sincerity of the realist consists in remaining faithful to nature, or to social reality, without embellishing that which might be harsh and ugly yet undeniably true. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy follows the first of these two tendencies, allying sincerity not with an outward fidelity to reality but rather with inward vision. There are three very different medieval figures in Tolstoy's staging of Mikhailov's painting in Anna Karenina: the medievalist Golenishchev, who is writing a book about Russia's Byzantine heritage; Vronsky, a false medieval artist who simply imitates the style of early Italian painting; and Mikhailov, who, like a stereotype of the authentic medieval artist, labors to uncover all the layers of a "revelation" that unfolds before him. 36 Given how often nineteenth-century novelists as a group ally themselves with the "brother of the brush"-in Henry James's phrase37 -the erudite yet pretentious Golenishchev seems at an inevitable disadvantage before the inarticulate yet sincere Mikhailov. What is a deficiency for Kramskoi (or Mikhailov) becomes an advantage for Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy follows a well-worn path of realist novelists who exploit the mimetic immediacy of the painted image in their struggle against the abstractions of the philosopher. In Mikhailov's workshop, painter is privileged over scholar, the artist's painting over its critical reception, and his

inner vision over the false meanings attributed to him. Tolstoy indeed seems concerned less with Mikhailov's Admonition of Pilate in itself than with undercutting the ability of his audience to say anything meaningful at all about the work. This deference of the novelistic word before the painted image forms a peculiar chapter in the ancient paragone between poet and painter. Mikhailov's Admonition of Pilate, whatever its flaws may be, preserves an aura of authenticity denied to the word environment in which it is found, from the characters' cliched responses to the narrator's minimalist ekphrasis. Yet in Anna Karenina, as in so many other novels, the price of the image's power is the painter's silence.

Toward an Iconography of the Tolstoyan Christ Mikhailov's Admonition of Pilate was hardly Tolstoy's last foray into the subject of the Christ image. Shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy started work on Confession. In terms of cultural history, it is difficult to overestimate the authority that this seminal yet often misunderstood document conferred on Tolstoy, not least in the realm of Christian iconography. In his comprehensive study of Tolstoy's fiction and theology, Richard Gustafson persuasively challenges the notion that there are "two Tolstoys, the pre-conversion artist and the post-conversion religious thinker and prophet:'38 At no stage of Tolstoy's career were religion and art far from one another in his thoughts. Yet it certainly seemed to Tolstoy's contemporaries that he had made a radical break from literature when he began distributing manuscript copies of Confession in 1879 (the censors delayed its publication untill884). Here the text's first readers followed its spirit, if not its letter. In his autobiography, Tolstoy structures his ongoing search for truth as a series of Buddha-like renunciations: "Faith in the significance of poetry and in the evolution oflife was indeed a faith, and I was one of its high priests:' He had "nai:vely" thought he could "teach everyone, not knowing myself what to teach:'39 As the hagiographic tone of Confession itself suggested, Tolstoy was experimenting with new forms for teaching beyond the merely poetic. Even more so than his rejection of Church or State, his avowed loss of faith in literature provoked strong reactions among his contemporaries. To borrow Bourdieu's terms, what changed from Anna Karen ina to Confession two years later was less Tolstoy himself than his "position-taking" in the field

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of cultural production. Specifically, Tolstoy's Confession initiated a public rite of passage from his secure status as a novelist in Russia to his highly contested role as the founder of a religious movement. Here Tolstoy's status in Russia parallels that of Zola in France to a remarkable extent. As Bourdieu suggests, not only did the literary field attain its apex of autonomy from the field of power in the second half of the nineteenth century; in the process, new and highly unstable position-takings for professional writers also emerged, including the "intellectual;' a position that Zola helped to "invent:'40 As for Tolstoy, he was able to build on the autonomy and prestige of an imaginative writer to become not just an intellectual or cultural critic butimprobably and largely beyond his own control-the figurehead of a modern, global religion based on the "teachings" of Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Schopenhauer, among others. From the early 1880s till his death in 1910, Tolstoy's interactions with painters were complicated by the extraordinary level of charismatic authority that he commanded across the social sphere. In Confession, Tolstoy also made public his renunciation of Russian Orthodoxy. As with Luther before him, one of Tolstoy's immediate tasks as the leader of a nascent schismatic movement was a new translation of the gospels. During the years 1880-1885, Tolstoy devoted considerable labor to A Harmony and Translation of the Four Gospels, a work that stirred debate long before its publication in Geneva in 1891. In this work, Tolstoy includes passages from the four gospels in the original Greek, in the canonicall821 Russian version, and in his own translation, all laid out in parallel columns. Through extensive glosses he further compares his work with contemporary translations into other European languages. Most importantly, for each thematically organized section he provides his own "exposition"; that is, retellings of select gospel passages that together comprise a unified narrative of the life and teaching ofJesus. His expositions were later published separately in multiple languages. Ironically, he defined this thoroughly exegetical undertaking through an analogy with the art of icon restoration: "the life and teaching ofJesus [is )like a wondrous painting that, for temporary purposes, has been covered over with a layer of dark paint[ ...which) one must scrape off:' 41 He repeats this analogy in various forms throughout his commentary to illustrate his opposition to the false deification of Christ by the major churches. Yet in his own retelling

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of the gospels, Tolstoy, like an overly enthusiastic iconrestorer, scrapes off so much doctrinal palimpsest that only the thinnest layer of original image survives. Thus he jettisons much of the staple material of Christian iconography, including the birth ofJesus, all of his miracles, and the Resurrection. Unlike Strauss and Renan, moreover, Tolstoy shows no interest in piecing together the life of the historical Jesus according to "the useless manner of science and the history of religion:' 42 As a result of such exegetical iconoclasm, what remains are mostly the logia of Christ-his sermons, sayings, and parables. Such parsimony in matters of iconography from the world's most famous religious dissenter at the time prompted more than one painter to reexamine their artistic assumptions concerning the Christ image. In the wake of Confession and the religious tracts that followed in quick succession in the early 1880s, members of Russia's cultural elite tended to frame their own praise or criticism of Tolstoy as a choice between competing social positions: following the example ofTurgenev's deathbed open letter imploring Tolstoy to "return to literature;' many refused to recognize in him any other legitimate position than that of novelist; others, such as the young Chekhov, succumbed with varying degrees to the charisma accompanying his newfound position as prophet. Among painters, Kramskoi belonged to the former camp. In 1885 he wrote to Tolstoy-with whom he had not otherwise communicated for more than a decade-to urge him to reconsider the path he had selected: I don't know whether it is possible to be a prophet in an age of the telegraph.... If you want to stir "charity" in the human heart, if you are a teacher, don't try to prove what is necessary[ ... ] but simply command. But if you aren't a teacher, but rather a human being who is preoccupied and deeply worried about personal, irresolvable moral questions, then wait a little, step back, and form them into images .... Christ is not a myth and not the creation of a poet, but a real person. The artist gives real, living images. 43

In this letter Kramskoi offers a textbook rendition of the Christ image as a model for artistic process. Kramskoi further points to Dostoevsky and to Tolstoy's own novels-which had previously "lacked an emphatic moralizing tendency" 44 -as exemplars of such intermedial alchemy, that is, the poet's reduction of words into images.

Kramskoi thus articulates precisely the type of literary project that Tolstoy had come to regard with deep suspicion. For Tolstoy, it was no longer enough to picture the Christ image; new art forms, both verbal and visual, had to be found to convey Christ's teaching in ways that effect real social change. Max Weber defines the role of the prophet in terms not unlike those ofKramskoi: "the genuine prophet[ ... ] preaches, creates, and demands new obligations:'45 Tolstoy was indeed preoccupied with the neglected genre of the "commandment:' At the conclusion of Resurrection (1899), for example, the protagonist Nekhliudov condenses the Sermon on the Mount into five core "commandments" (zapovedi). Having read the Sermon on the Mount, which he had always found moving, [Nekhliudov] saw in its teaching now for the first time, not beautiful abstract thoughts, presenting largely exaggerated and unrealizable demands, but simple, clear, practical commandments, which, if obeyed (and this was fully possible), would establish a completely new foundation for human society. 46

For Mikhail Bakhtin, these gospel passages at the end of Resurrection represent a "dead quotation, something that falls out of the artistic contexf' 47 Bakhtin's wellknown objection is valid in an aesthetic sense, yet ultimately one-sided. Tolstoy's experiments with the "commandment" as a literary genre, if not always successful, represent a remarkable development in their own right. As a matter of cultural history, Tolstoy's "practical commandments:' especially his injunction "do not resist evil with evil;' did in fact reverberate across the field of power in late imperial Russia. In contrast to Kramskoi, Nikolai Ge, a cofounder of the Peredvizhniki, sought to develop an iconography that would correspond to Tolstoy's aesthetically minimalist Christology. Indeed, Ge's evolving artistic collaboration with Tolstoy from 1882, when the two first met, until Ge's death in 1894 provides a compelling counter-model to the ekphrastic metapoetics of the realist novel. After becoming a full-blown disciple, Ge spent large amounts of time at the writer's country estate Iasnaia Poliana, where he taught the writer's daughter drawing, an approved Tolstoyan visual art. He also avidly read Tolstoy's theological works with an ear for their practical instruction: he adopted vegetarianism and even abandoned the use of oil paints for a time. 48 As if commenting on his own conversion experience, Ge's 1884 portrait of Tolstoy represents the writer in

thought over a manuscript of the banned tract What I Believe. As an established artist, Ge was also well positioned to serve as an illustrator in Tolstoy's populist endeavors. In 1886 Ge agreed to illustrate a new version of Tolstoy's "What Do Men Live By?" (1881), the first work of fiction the writer had published since Anna Karen ina and one that had especially enchanted the painter. In this folktale, a shoemaker assists a stranger whom he finds lying naked and motionless near a shrine. The stranger, who is invited to live with the shoemaker's family, turns out to be an angel. Like Tolstoy's later "Where Love Is, There God Is Also;' this tale rehearses a common plotline in hagiographic literature; namely, either Christ or an angel appears on earth as a man in great material need in order to test the charity of Christians. Tolstoy's choice of an angel over Christ in both tales is not an incidental one. The rules for portraying imaginary agents, which are not real yet serve a moral purpose, differ from those for the teacher Jesus, who is a genuine historical figure. Such, at least, is the manner in which Tolstoy treats the miraculous elements in the sacred texts of Buddha and his followers: "excluding its miracles, looking at them as fabula that express thought, this teaching opened the meaning of life to me:' 49 The key term "fabula" helps distinguish the iconography of Tolstoy's own folktales, where angels and miracles are common, from the cult of image more commonly encountered in the mainstream realist novel. Rather than distilling the essence of religious experience into a single and culminating image of Christ, Tolstoy disperses the morals of his often fantastic tales throughout the length of their story line. Appropriately, Ge sketched not one but twelve illustrations for "What Do Men Live By?" Tolstoy's numerous folktales likewise break from the nostalgia characterizing the Jesus redivivus tale, that is, stylized legends involving Christ's return to earth. Unlike Balzac in "Jesus-Christ en Flandres" (1831) or Flaubert in "La legende de Saint Julien le Hospitalier" (1877), Tolstoy is not restoring legends from a simpler past for the edification of an educated readership; on the contrary, the Russian novelist wrote and self-published tales for mass distribution to Russia's culturally disenfranchised peasantry. As if confirming their contemporary relevance, two of Ge's illustrations for "What Do Men Live By?" were blocked by the censor. Tolstoy further waived copyright for his tales, a decision that facilitated their rapid dissemination to an international audience. Ge's participation in Tolstoy's populist endeavors

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did not end with his illustrations for "What Do Men Live By?" In 1884 Tolstoy, along with the leading Tolstoyans Vladimir Chertkov and Petr Biriukov, founded Posrednik (The Intermediary), a populist publishing house that was to prove highly prolific over the next few decades. Aside from Tolstoy's many folk stories, Posrednik published annotated illustrations on "gospel themes" as part of its broad intervention in the moral education of the Russian peasantry. In each of these planned publications-"The Temptation of Our Jesus Christ;' "The Last Supper;' and so forth-a gospel passage appears above an illustration with an editorial gloss explaining this passage's meaning underneath. None of the illustrations or texts was signed, despite the involvement of such well-established artists and writers as Repin and Garshin. In the summer of 1886, Ge sent Tolstoy a detailed plan for gospel illustrations of his own. In the first of eight illustrations, Ge intended to portray the following "vision": "John the Evangelist with a book. He's writing and sees John [the Baptist], who points to a crowd of people; in the middle is the Savior holding the hand of a child. [... ] Behind the Savior are Elijah and Isaiah; behind them are Socrates, David, Buddha, and Moses, and behind them are Abraham with his son and Moses. The sky is covered with two flying angels:' 5° In John's vision, Ge incorporates three major figures of Tolstoy's Confession (Christ, Socrates, and Buddha) into a modified version of the Annunciation. That John is portrayed writing his gospel further reflects Tolstoy's interpretation of Christ as teacher. It is not clear whether Ge ever executed this illustration. 51 Yet its uneasy conflation of traditional Christian iconography and post-Christian ecumenicalism reflects the kinds of artistic challenges that the Tolstoyan Christ posed. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was not as an illustrator of Tolstoyism that Ge most impressed Tolstoy. In addition to collaborating over gospel illustrations, Ge communicated frequently with Tolstoy about his plans for a series oflarge-scale paintings devoted to the events of the Passion. Ge's early letters to Tolstoy are distinguished by an almost mystical tone of reverence and intimacy. I work with delight, all the time planning to come to you [... ] what I am making, I will take with me to show you. There's no such thing as space, and not because railroads exist, but because true love destroys all distance. I am all the time with you; I live at one with you in thought, I even see you in visions: I've seen you in my dreams

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already twice, and today, having had a vision of you, I wanted to write you several words oflove. 52 In response to such letters, Tolstoy generally urged Ge not to neglect actual work on his paintings. Tolstoy even wrote to Repin that he feared the words Ge used to describe his planned Passion series would prove "more forceful and artistic than the impression'' 53 made by the paintings themselves. In a lengthy homage to Ge after his death, Repin echoed Tolstoy's thought, lamenting that no one had ever "stenographed" the painter when he spoke of his own work. 54 Ge's own heady approach to Christian iconography placed him in a unique position-after the initial euphoria of conversion had subsided-to develop a compelling image of Christ as teacher. By the end of the 1880s, as Repin's reminiscences make clear, Ge had fallen under the influence of yet another master of biblical hermeneutics, namely, the Church father Tertullian. As Tertullian argues in his anti-docetist treatise De Carne Christi Libre, written in 206, "[men] despised [Christ's] outward appearance, so far was his body from being of human comeliness, not to speak of celestial glory": "it was precisely the non-marvellous character of his terrestrial flesh which made the rest of his activities things to marvel at:' 55 The first ofGe's paintings with a Tertullian-inspired Christ was What Is Truth? (1890, fig. 5.2). As Repin records, Ge intended to portray a Christ who, "in protest against the pagan ideal;' assumed the "most humble and insignificant human image in order to demonstrate to people that what was important was the soul:' 56 In What Is Truth? Ge indeed presents a shockingly unattractive Christ. Pilate, in the pose of a Roman orator, stands in the light of a palace door. The question "What is truth?" (John 18:38) has become purely rhetorical, as Christ remains silent and in shadow. Short, wispy-haired, purse-lipped, and steelyeyed, Ge's Christ has no peer in nineteenth-century Russian religious painting. The furor that What Is Truth? provoked at the eighteenth Peredvizhnik exhibition in 1890 exceeded in intensity the controversy surrounding Ge's own Last Supper (1863) nearly three decades earlier. Alexander III could barely contain his disgust in ordering What Is Truth? to be taken down from exhibition, calling the picture "repulsive:' 57 After being forced into exile, Ge's painting caused further controversy in several German and American cities. According to Repin, one American critic wrote a whole book condemning it. 58 Despite himselfbeing wary of what he called Ge's "exceptionally unattractive" Christ, 59 Tolstoy-in

5.2. Nikolai Ge, What Is Truth?, 1890. Oil on canvas, 233 x 171 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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a reversal of the roles of master and apprenticeplaced his own formidable influence at the service of the painter's much-besieged masterpiece. After the painting's removal from the St. Petersburg exhibition, Tolstoy wrote letters to critics abroad in an attempt to guarantee the painting's safe passage through the foreign press. In advance of the painting's exhibition in Boston, for example, he explained its meaning to an American journalist: Here a conversation takes place (John 18:33-38) in which the magnanimous governor wants to descend en bon prince to the level of the barbaric interests of his subjects .... Jesus is tormented, and it takes only one look at [Pilate's] well-groomed, self-satisfied, smug [... ) face for him to realize the abyss separating them as well as the impossibility and terrible difficulty of making Pilate understand his teaching.... The merit of the picture, in my opinion, consists in the fact that it is true (realistic, as is now said) in the most authentic sense of the word. Christ is not such, as would be pleasant to look at, but precisely as someone must be who has been tortured all night and is still being tortured. And Pilate is such as any governor must be[ ... ] even in Massachusetts. 60

Given his own outspoken rejection of beauty as a criterion of truth in art, Tolstoy-almost alone among Ge's Russian or international critics-was able to look past the shock of Ge's Christ in order to analyze the painting's surface realism and, more importantly, its rich ideational texture. For most of Ge's viewers, neglect of Christ's beauty, an entrenched iconographic signifier, was tantamount to a rejection of his divinity. Ge's Christ is indeed all too human. Yet the unsightly appearance of Christ serves to accentuate the rigors of his uncompromising teaching. The Christological insights of Tertullian and Tolstoy are thus harmonized in an iconography that is entirely Ge's own. In What Is Truth? Ge had dared to invoke the wrath of public opinion by tarnishing the beauty of the Christ image. It is a testament to Tolstoy's acumen as a critic that he recognized, even exaggerated, the importance of Ge's innovation. Tolstoy may not have been able to prevent What Is Truth? from being removed from public exhibition, but he did ensure that it would return to Russia by pressuring Pavel Tretiakov, who disliked the painting, to purchase it. In a letter to Tretiakov of July 1890, Tolstoy argues that Ge's painting comprises no less

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than "an epoch in the history of Christian art:' Prior to the modern period, Tolstoy explains, "Catholic art had predominantly portrayed saints, the Madonna, and Christ as gods:' More recently, artists across Europe had begun to portray Christ as a mere "historical figure;' needlessly alienating Christian viewers who, albeit falsely, still view him as God. Tolstoy proceeds to break down the diverse attempts of artists in Russia and Europe to escape this double bind into five broad categories: ( 1) painters who "polemicized directly" against the divinity of Christ, including "the pictures ofVereshchagin and even Ge's Resurrection"; (2) painters who "tried to produce treatises of these subjects as historical-among them, Ivanov, Kramskoi, and again Ge's Last Supper"; (3) painters who "wanted to ignore any controversy[ ... ] (Dore, Polenov)"; (4) painters, such as "[Fritz von] Uhde;' who attempt "to bring Christ God down to earth, as well as from the pedestal of history onto the soil of [contemporary]life. [... ] Christ in the guise of a priest, barefoot, in the presence of children, etc:' Tolstoy reserves the fifth category exclusively for Ge's What Is Truth?: "Christ and his teaching not in words alone, but in word and deed, in confrontation with the teaching of the world:' 61 Tolstoy elaborates on this fifth category in a letter to his American contact: "In our era there have been attempts to portray a moral understanding of the life and teaching of Christ"; until Ge's What Is Truth?, Tolstoy asserts, "these attempts had not been successfu1:' 62 In the end, it is to Ge that the honor goes for rendering the Christ image viable in modernity. In this remarkable series ofletters, Tolstoy surveys the controversies surrounding realist paintings of Christ in Russia and Europe with a rhetoric as authoritative in tone as it is dazzlingly reductive. The writer-turnedprophet does not necessarily interpret What Is Truth? in a persuasive manner. Even in Tolstoy's own terms, Ge's painting proved as alienating as any listed in his first category above, and there remains a seeming disconnect between the silence and stillness of Ge's Christ and Tolstoy's emphasis on this figure's "teaching in word and deed:' Tolstoy and Ge continued to exchange views on religious art in their correspondence as the latter worked on other paintings in his series on the Passion, including Golgotha (1893, GTG) and Crucifixion (1894, location unknown). And Tolstoy continued to defend Ge in letters to critics in Russia and abroad. As the writer explains to Tretiakov on the occasion of Ge's death in 1894:

The run-of-the-mill public wants Christ-icons to which they can pray, but [Ge] gives them a Christ who is a living person; this produces disenchantment and dissatisfaction, just like a man, who had been expecting to drink wine but is given water instead, spits out the water in disgust, even though water is healthier and better than wine. Last winter I went three times to your gallery and each time I involuntarily stopped before What Is Truth?, completely independently of my friendship with him and even forgetting that it was his picture. 63

Curiously, in this same letter, Tolstoy claims that he "knows no better Christ" than the one in Kramskoi's Christ in the Wilderness, a work that he had four years earlier consigned to his second, "historical" category.64 It is hard not to wonder how Tretiakov must have reacted to this apparent about-face. The collector already owned Kramskoi's masterpiece, so at least he was not being asked for more money. For the purposes of understanding Tolstoy's undeniable impact on the fate of Ge's What Is Truth?, what is most crucial is not the merit of his judgments but rather the charismatic authority that empowered him to make and even enforce them. Tolstoy's engagement with Ge, Kramskoi, and others over the problem of the Christ image presents an extreme yet illustrative case of the role that writers often assumed in the production and reception of artworks beyond their ostensible area of expertise. Over the final decades of imperial Russia, Tolstoy's charisma constituted a sociological fact. The high level of charismatic authority that he commanded across the social sphere- unmatched in Russia and rivaled only by Zola's globally-does not diminish or delimit Ge's accomplishment. Thus Ge is not simply the official illustrator of the Tolstoyan Christ, as if he were a reallife Mikhailov. Yet neither must Tolstoy be viewed as a meddlesome dilettante burdened by the irresolvable contradictions of his own worldview. Rather, the value of What Is Art? ultimately derives from social processes involving the interaction of multiple cultural producers. Ge's much-disparaged Tolstoyism helped guide him toward one of the most original and provocative Christ images in a highly competitive artistic environment. Tolstoy's most important role nevertheless lay in the value that he conferred on the finished product. That What Is Truth? is still on permanent display in the Tretiakov Gallery, and in the canons of Russian art history, is due, at least in part, to Tolstoy's timely intervention.

Notes 1. L.N. Tolstoi, "Gde liubov: tam i bog;' in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [hereafter PSS] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1937), 25:38. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine. 2. New Revised Standard Version used here and throughout. 3. Tolstoi, "Gde liubov: tam i bog;' 45. For further analysis of this folktale, see Wolfgang Kasack, Christus in der russischen Literatur: Ein Gang durch die Literaturgeschichte von ihren Angangenbis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1999), 60-62. 4. Tolstoi, letters to P.M. Tret'iakov, 30 June 1890 and 19 June 1984, in L.N. Tolstoi i khudozhniki: Tolstoi ob iskusstve: pis'ma, dnevniki, vospominaniia, ed. I.A. Brodskii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 96, 119. 5. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, in PSS 19 (1935): 275. 6. Tolstoi to Tret'iakov, 30 June 1890, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 98. 7. See Tolstoi, Chto takoe isskustvo?, in PSS 30 (1951): 130. 8. For a recent discussion of the Russian Christ in nineteenth-century painting, see Laura Engelstein, "Between Art and Icon: Aleksandr Ivanov's Russian Christ;' in Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 151-91. 9. Tolstoi, Chto takoe isskustvo?, 70. 10. Tolstoi, in conversation with Iu.l. Ugumenova, July 1907, quoted in A. Mikhailov, Mikhail Vasil'evich Nesterov: zhiz n' i tvorchestvo ([Moscow]: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1958), 214. 11. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 34, 35, 43, 44. 12. See Anna Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1981), 175, 437. 13. J.K. Huysmans, La-bas (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 37. 14. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 34, 41, 42, 43. 15. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 45. 16. Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 110. 17. Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina, 41, 43. 18. Tolstoi, Chto takoe iskusstvo?, 146. 19. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 40, 44. 20. Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 143; V.E. Vetlovskaia, "Poetika 'Anny Kareninoi;" Russkaia

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literatura, no. 4 ( 1979): 17; Svetlana Evdokimova, "The Drawing and the Grease Spot: Creativity and Interpretation in Anna Karenina;' Tolstoy Studies JournalS (1995-1996): 33; Justin Weir, "Tolstoy Sees the Truth but Waits: The Consequences of Aesthetic Vision in Anna Karenina;' in Approaches to Teaching Anna Karenina, ed. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 175; E.N. Kupreianova, "Vyrazhenie esteticheskikh vozzrenii i nravstvennykh iskanii L. Tolstogo v romane 'Anna Karenina;" Russkaia literatura, no. 3 (1960): 124. 21. See Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina, 49-51, 105; Rimvydas Silbajoris, Tolstoy's Aesthetics and His Art (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1991), 153. On ekphrasis in Tolstoy, see also Mack Smith, Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 115-56. 22. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 47. 23. Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1989), 10-17. 24. I.E. Repin to V.V. Stasov, 12 April1878, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 68. 25. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 43. 26. On the connection between Mikhailov and Kramskoi, see especially Kupreianova, "Vyrazhenie esteticheskikh vozzrenii i nravstvennykh iskanii L. Tolstogo;" 124-25. 27. I.N. Kramskoi to Tolstoi, 29 January 1885, in Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, ed. S.N. Gol'dshtein (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965-66), 2:170. 28. Kramskoi, "Zapiski po povodu peresmotra ustava Akademii khudozhevstv;' in Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, 2:297-98, quoted in Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 14. 29. Kramskoi to A.D. Chirkin, 27 December 1873, in Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, 1: 218. 30. Kramskoi, letter to Chirkin, in Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, 1:219. 31. V.V. Vereshchagin, "Realizm;' in Povesti. Ocherki. Vospominaniia, ed. V.A. Kosheleva and A.V. Chernova (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1990), 197; Vereshchagin, Realism, trans. B. MacGahan (New York: American Art Galleries, 1891 ). 32. Kramskoi, letter to Chirkin, in Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, 1: 219. 33. Kramskoi to V.M. Garshin, 16 February 1878, in Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, 1:446-47. 34. Tolstoi, Anna Karen ina, 42.

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35. See Jules Champfleury, Le Realisme (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 3; John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London: J.M. Dent, 1929), 3:60-65. 36. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 42. 37. Henry James, "The Art of Fiction;' in The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 29. 38. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger, xiv. 39. Tolstoi, Ispoved', in PSS 23 (1957): 6. 40. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 129. 41. Tolstoi, Soedinenie i perevod chetyrekh evangelii, in PSS 24 (1957): 797. 42. Tolstoi, Soedinenie i perevod, 12. 43. Kramskoi, letter to Tolstoi, in Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, 2:170, 171. 44. Kramskoi, letter to Tolstoi, in Kramskoi: Pis'ma, stat'i, 2:171. 45. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 359-61. 46. Tolstoi, Voskresenie, in PSS 32 (1936): 443. 47. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel;' in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 344. 48. Vsevolod Dmitr'ev, "Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge;' Apollon, no. 10 (1913): 32. 49. Tolstoi, Ispoved', 52. 50. N.N. Ge to Tolstoi, 14 July 1886, in Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, kritika, vospominaniia sovremennikov, ed. N. lu. Zograf (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 128. 51. At least one of Ge's gospel illustrations, "The Last Supper;' was prepared for publication. It was not permitted by the censor and has since been lost. Ge submitted a second set of planned illustrations to Chertkov in 1891. Zograf, Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, 340nn27-28. 52. Ge to Tolstoi, 26 October 1893, in Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, 128. 53. Tolstoi to I.E. Repin, 15 April1892, in Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, 169. 54. I.E. Repin, "Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge i nashi pretenzii k iskusstvu;' Niva 11 (1894): 540. 55. Tertullian, Tertullian's Treatise on the Incarnation, ed. Ernest Evans (London: S.P.C.K., 1956), 37-39. 56. Repin, "Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge;' 540. 57. Alexander III, quoted in Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, 352n57.

58. Repin, "Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge;' 540. I have not been able to identify any book fitting Repin's description. 59. Tolstoi to Ge, 5 November 1893, in Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, 184. 60. Tolstoi to George Kennan, 8 August 1890, in Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, 149, 150. 61. Tolstoi to Tret'iakov, 30 June 1890, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 98-99. 62. Tolstoi to Kennan, 8 August 1890, in Ge: Pis'ma, stat'i, 150. 63. Tolstoi to Tret'iakov, 19 June 1894, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 122. 64. Tolstoi to Tret'iakov, 30 June 1890 and 19 June 1894, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 98, 122.

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Painting History, Realistically Murder at the Tretiakov MOLLY BRUNSON

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n 16 January 1913, shortly after ten o'clock in the morning, the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow was the scene of an attempted murder. The gallery had just opened its doors. The halls were mostly empty, quiet, awaiting the day's visitors. Paintings emerged from the shadows of the dark winter night as the guards made their customary rounds. Nearly fifty years later, a senior employee would recount the events of that morning: There were no other visitors in the gallery yet. The silence was such that every step was audible. Suddenly a sharp sound resounded throughout the whole gallery. It sounded as if something cracked. At first I thought that a painting had fallen. Then suddenly I heard a loud thwack-and then trrr! And another thwack-and another trrr! Some kind of a noise and bustling broke out in the Repin hall. I flew there, as did the other employees and Khruslov [the museum curator] . Two employees had seized a young man by his hands and were trying to wrench a switchblade from him. The young man was screaming: "Enough blood! Down with blood!" His face was pale, his eyes mad. At first I did not know what had happened. What had produced those noises? Who was this man with a knife? Looking at the painting of Ivan the Terrible, I was stunned. There were three horrific gaping slashes through the painting. [.. .] The edges of the slashes were a piercing white. The primer coat underneath the paint had been bared. The

threads of the canvas extended out from the slashes like tiny pointed teeth. It seemed to me that the painting had been ruined forever. I saw Khruslov shaking, all pale, not knowing what to do. 1 The vandalization of Ilia Repin's painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581 rocked the Russian art world (fig. 6.1). The perpetrator of this crime, identified as Abram Balashov, a mentally ill book dealer and icon painter, was arrested and subsequently hospitalized. Ilia Ostroukhov, the chairman of the Tretiakov Board, immediately resigned, and the artist and art historian Igor Grabar was assigned to his post. After a rather overzealous and ultimately unsuccessful restoration by Repin himself, Grabar and two other museum experts took up the task of saving the masterpiece, a painting that Grabar would later proclaim to be an achievement of "the utmost power and supreme masterY:'2 But the damage to Repin's painting had been quite severe. Balashov, lashing out in rage, had ravaged the body of the picture and left it for dead. His knife had cut deep, exposing and unraveling the threads of the canvas and slicing through the wooden support. Describing the disfiguration of the young Tsarevich's nose and the urgency of the ensuing restoration, Grabar resorted to language usually reserved for a surgeon. "There was no time to waste;' he wrote. 3 By all accounts, the repairs were successful and,

6.1. Ilia Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581, 1885. Oil on canvas, 199.5 x 254 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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as any modern -day visitor to the Tretiakov can attest, the work has survived with barely a trace of its injuries. Tragically, the museum curator, the artist Khruslov, did not fare as well. A month after the fateful act, which had happened on his watch, Khruslov threw himself under a train. So why did Balashov attack this painting and this one in particular? And why with such unrestrained violence? These questions occupied the popular press for weeks following the attack. The newspaper Rech' (Speech) published a letter from Repin, in which he blamed the younger generation of artists, in particular the symbolists and the futurists, for their attacks on the "classical and academic monuments of art:' 4 Repin accused the futurists of bribing Balashov to destroy his painting, and concluded that Balashov's crime represented "the first signal of a genuine artistic pogrom:' 5 In defense of the young artists, the poet and critic Maksimilian Voloshin responded by publishing his own article and organizing, along with the futurist David Burliuk and the Knave of Diamonds group, a public debate at the Moscow Polytechnic Institute. Voloshin argued that it was "not Balashov who [was] guilty before Repin, but Repin who [was) guilty before Balashov;' that beneath the surface of Repin's painting "lurk[ ed] the forces of its own destruction:' 6 In his lecture at the public debate, Voloshin summarized his verdict on the Balashov affair: It is astonishing that no one, no one! has realized that in Balashov we do not have a criminal, but a victim ofRepin's work. His madness was aroused by Repin's painting. He is guilty insofar as he believed Repin in full. He was deceived by the most naturalistic and most natural representation of a horrible event and could not endure the position of a weak-willed and idle witness. He shattered that protective, invisible glass that separates us from a work of art, and threw himself inside the painting, as if it were reality. 7

Voloshin concluded his lecture by suggesting that the rightful place for Repin's painting would be in a freak show or a hall of curiosities, or at the very least, in its own special room at the Tretiakov Gallery behind a sign reading, "For Adults Only:' 8 It is important to note that Voloshin's response to Repin is very much situated within its own historical moment, determined by a climate of artistic upheaval and transition. 9 In order to defend the legitimacy of the new generation of artists, Voloshin used the

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opportunity of the Balashov affair to reclaim the category of the "real" from the particular brand of nineteenth-century realism practiced by Repin and his compatriots, an aesthetic that, while certainly radical at its outset, had become a symbol of all things traditional, staid, and antimodern. By stripping Repin's painting of its realism and relegating it to a brute and even dangerous naturalism, Voloshin effectively salvages the category of the "real" for the works of the Russian avant-garde. Although Voloshin plays fast and loose with his aesthetic categories, swapping realism and naturalism to suit his particular aims, he is, I would argue, essentially right about the central conceit underlying Repin's painterly aesthetic. It does invite its own destruction. In the following pages, I will explore these destructive mechanisms, the ones that Voloshin saw lurking beneath the surface ofRepin's painting, and that provoked such a violent reaction not only from Balashov but also from the painting's first viewers in 1885. Repin's Ivan the Terrible, I will propose, relies on the production of an analogy between represented history and the present moment, in order to shatter the protective field between art and reality and affect the viewer in a markedly visceral manner. It is this blurring of art and reality that allows for the human and the bodily to enter into an otherwise disembodied historical narrative. And yet, Repin's painting is not only a painting of a historical moment, it is a painting about painting that historical moment, and, more specifically, about painting history within the confines of a realist aesthetic. Repin's painting insists, or so I will argue, on the unique potential of the painterly medium to represent history, to lift it into the present and into the human. This self-conscious dimension is what Voloshin misses (or chooses to ignore) in Repin's realism. On the one hand, Voloshin is right that Repin's painting revels in its ability to produce a powerful illusion, one so convincing that a viewer could imaginatively merge with the picture and respond to the subject in ways both physical and emotional. On the other hand, Repin's painting never forgets that it is paint on canvas and it is this awareness of the medium that ultimately saves Repin's painting from rote naturalism. By applying pressure to these spaces of dissonance-between the past and the present, as well as the historical subject and the painterly medium-we can glimpse what it is that produces the force of Repin's history painting and, by extension, of his realism.

Making History Present With its premier position in the hierarchy of genres, history painting during much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was still closely associated with official academic culture, and with an art that privileged the representation of the ideal and the monumental over the particular and the popular. In its earliest manifestations, Russian history painting conformed to the European conventions of the genre. 10 We can look to Anton Losenko's Vladimir and Rogneda (1770, GRM) for a paradigmatic example of the genre's transposition into Russian painterly culture. Although the subject is Slavic in origin, classical details predominate on the canvas. A Greek vase adorns the bottom left corner and marble columns rise behind the two central figures. Clothed in rich red velvet and embroidered fabric, Vladimir and Rogneda are regal, statuesque, and dramatic, arms perfectly poised to exaggerate the significance of the moment. It is the servant kneeling in the lower right corner that provides the only visually discernible Slavic element; her long braid and traditional headpiece contrast with the antique profile of the female servant opposite her. Despite this detail, the European and, more specifically, classical references ultimately lift Losenko's historical subject out of the particular and into the idealized pantheon of Western culture. With the rise of realist painting a century later came the need to reimagine history painting. Given realism's emphasis on ideological content, nationalism, and contemporaneity, it is little wonder why the genre posed such a problem. 11 In the early works of Viacheslav Shvarts, it is possible to see the first steps toward reinventing the history painting, toward making it more "real:' In his Ivan the Terrible beside the Body of His Son (1864, GTG), Shvarts emphasizes the particularly Slavic nature of the story. Orthodox imagery adorns the walls along which the priests stand, reading the liturgy over the dead young man. Ivan himself is slouched in a chair, his face and hands grizzled from years of rage and grief. This picture, of the same subject that Repin will take up twenty years later, is neither idealized nor monumental. It defies the conventional borders of the history painting, drawing on native material and introducing the everyday realia of a genre painting and the psychologism of a portrait. Shvarts's tentative gesture toward ethnographic accuracy and psychological interiority will be mastered in the following decades by the leading group of realist artists in Russia, the

Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions (known as the Peredvizhniki), and some of its most notable members, Nikolai Ge, Viktor Vasnetsov, Vasilii Vereshchagin, and Vasilii Surikov. 12 By grounding their historical subjects within specific spatiotemporal parameters and imbuing them with emotional complexity, these artists will seek to make historical representation more present, more authentic, and more relevant for their viewers. Repin himself only completed three history paintings over the course of his long career- Tsarevna Sofiia in the Novodevichii Convent at the Time of the Execution of the Strel'tsy and the Torture ofAll Her Servants in 1698 (1879, GTG), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581 (1885, GTG), and The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880-1891, GRM)P It is, I propose, Repin's outsider status vis-a-vis the tradition that highlights the moments in his works in which the struggle for a realist history is still in play. Whereas Surikov's enormous canvases sweep effortlessly through centuries of history, embracing the variegated facial expressions of the people and the minutiae of the everyday, Repin's pictures work hard, and visibly so, to square history painting with the demands of a more contemporary aesthetic. They readily expose their anxiety, their desire to bridge the past and the present, the subject and the medium. 14 The leading theoretician and critic of Russian realism Vladimir Stasov did not recognize this complexity in Repin's historical pictures. In response to the painting of Tsarevna Sofiia, Stasov writes that Repin "is not a dramaturge, he is not a historian, and in my sincerest estimation, if he were to paint twenty more paintings on historical subjects, he would still not be successful:' 15 Stasov goes on to argue that perhaps the time has not yet arrived in Russia for history painting, that artists do not yet possess the requisite "historical spirit and historical comprehension:' 16 Repin and his colleagues, according to Stasov, would be better served by focusing on subjects directly relevant to contemporary life. Indeed, frustrated with his progress on the painting of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Repin expresses much the same doubts in an 1881letter to Stasov: "I shall abandon all these historical resurrections of the dead, all these popular ethnographic scenes; I shall move to Petersburg and begin paintings I conceived long ago, directly from stirring reality, surrounding us, understood by us, and which move us far more than past events:' 17 During the 1880s, Repin remained largely true to his word, basing

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canvas after canvas on the tumultuous events of his own time. His topics ranged from the clandestine whispering and plotting of A Secret Meeting (1883, GTG) and the arrest of a radical youth in The Arrest of a Propagandist (1880-1892, GTG) to a haggard revolutionary man returning home from exile in They Did Not Expect Him (1884; 1888, GTG). But there was one contemporary event that was far too risky to paint. On 1 March 1881, a young member of the left-wing terrorist organization People's Will (Narodnaia volia) threw a bomb at Tsar Alexander II, killing him. Repin was in St. Petersburg during the days following the assassination, and a month later witnessed the public execution of several members of the People's Will. For Repin, along with many members of the liberal intelligentsia, the assassination and execution represented a bitter reckoning with the violent consequences of a charged political scene. It was a "bloodstained year;' and the only catharsis available for Repin was to be found in an even bloodier and more brutal event from history. 18 Years later Repin would recall the Moscow evening in 1882 when he first had the idea to paint Ivan the Terrible: I was returning from an exhibition in Moscow where there was a Rimsky-Korsakov concert. His musical trilogy-love, power and revenge-so captured me that I desperately wanted to represent something akin to the force of his music. Feelings at that time were weighed down by horrible contemporary events. Such was the general mood of life. These paintings stood before our eyes but no one dared paint them. It was natural to search for an escape into an even greater tragedy from history. 19

These horrific pictures-a picture of a tsar bleeding on a Petersburg street, a picture of young revolutionaries executed in their prime-could not be painted. And so Rep in turned back the clock, exactly three hundred years, to 1581, inspired by the lofty themes of Rim skyKorsakov, but also by the very real contemporary moment. 20 This contemporary moment, despite Repin's claim, could not be fully escaped. The year 1881 is apparent not only in the tenor and the morbid mood of the Ivan painting, it also resounds in the year visible in the lower right corner of the canvas, 1885. For the contemporary viewer, this date would have been a reminder that, like Ivan, he was standing in the shadow of a brutal historical moment. For a staunch ideological realist,

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the value of Repin's painting could be found precisely in this ability to draw such a parallel between the past and the present. It is this analogy between Ivan's murder of his son and the tsar's execution of the young revolutionaries that ultimately saves the picture from the supposed irrelevance of a conventional history painting. This kind of historical analogy has two functions: it makes the past authentic by association with the present, and it imbues the present moment with historic potential. 21 The suggestion of such a historical parallel did not go unnoticed. Ivan the Terrible was shown for the first time in 1885 in St. Petersburg at the thirteenth Peredvizhnik exhibition. After seeing Repin's painting, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod and valued adviser to Tsar Alexander III, sent the tsar a vitriolic condemnation of the work, accusing it of "naked realism;' "critical tendentiousness;' and a lack of "ideals:m As a result, it was promptly taken down and prohibited from exhibition in Moscow. 23 Pavel Tretiakov, who purchased the canvas for his collection, received a sharply worded order to keep the painting locked up, away from the gaze of the public. While Repin created this forceful, and to some offensive, historical parallel largely through thematic rhyming, he bolstered the link between past and present by painting Ivan the Terrible into a series of his other political pictures from the period. A Secret Meeting and The Arrest of a Propagandist both depict young radicals under the cover of darkness. The two heroes, typologically related within Repin's artistic world, wear bright red shirts, rare punches of color in otherwise dark interiors. In a related moment from European revolutionary history, The Annual Meeting in Memory of the French Communards at the NreLachaise Cemetery in Paris (1883, GTG), which Repin himself had witnessed while abroad, a red flag stands out amidst the sea of dark clothing and peach-hued faces (fig. 7.2). Viewed as part of this series, Repin's Ivan the Terrible becomes one possible, albeit anachronistic, culmination of the artist's paintings of nineteenthcentury revolutionary themes. If the controlled punches of the color red had signaled revolutionary activity in the earlier works, the saturation of that red throughout the depiction of Ivan signals its unfortunate aftermath. Controlled rage and activism this time spill over, painting the entire room red. This bloody culmination renders all the more troubling yet another painting, Alexander III Receives the District Headmen in the Courtyard of the Petrovskii

Palace in Moscow (1886, GTG). By way of accepting the commission for this work in 1886, Repin reached an agreement with the censors for the release of the ban on his Ivan the Terrible, which had been locked away in the Tretiakov Gallery for a year and a half. In contrast to Ivan the Terrible and the revolutionary pictures, the painting of Alexander III is striking in its restraint. The atmosphere is bright, the colors are crisply painted and the lines clearly defined. As in the other works, an isolated touch of red is visible, in the sash that circles the tsar's waist. This red sash is, on the one hand, simply an example of a realist detail, an element of costume that serves as a sign of authenticity. On the other hand, it is a perverse mutation of the revolutionary crimson of the earlier paintings. In this detail, so precise and contained, the potential of a popular revolution has become an imperial accessory. It is not unreasonable to speculate that a different painting of the same subject as Ivan the Terrible may have failed to elicit such an extreme reaction from the authorities. But Repin's picture hit a nerve. It posited an analogy between the horrors of the past and those of the present with such conviction that it was deemed downright dangerous, capable of delivering an unsavory message to the public about the abuses of imperial power and maybe even provoking a recurrence of the horrific assassination. This structure of provocation and repetition or, to use the language of realist aesthetics, description and prescription, contains the potential to reach far beyond the painting itself, as we see in the Balashov affair. In 1913, a moment when the rights of the aristocracy and the bloodlines of imperial power are being questioned along with almost every other social convention, a moment much like 1881, an impressionable young man falls victim to a representation. We might speculate that what he sees in Repin's painting is an overwhelming reflection of his own time in the bloody one that came before him, a reflection that proved convincing enough to spur him into action. In a way, then, Balashov is partial proof of the "success" of Repin's realism, its ability both to depict a subject accurately and to transform its viewer into an active participant. In her study of Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Russian literary realism, Irina Paperno summarizes what she considers this peculiar, and perhaps peculiarly Russian, attitude toward the relationship between art and life: "Taking its material from life, refashioning it, and then returning to life for imitation and actualization, literature regenerates and

extends contemporary life into the future and recasts man as he is into a new man:' 24 This formula ascribes an enormous power to the role of realist art in society, charging literature and, I would add, painting with the representation and reconstruction of reality. If there is any proof of the effectiveness of such a realism, it is to be located in the reactions of the audience-the hostile response of Pobedonostsev, the even more outsized reaction of poor Balashov, and the many shrieks and swoons to which I will now turn.

Making History Human In an 1885letter, the artist Ivan Kramskoi wrote with an ecstatic, yet clearly bewildered, exuberance about his fellow Peredvizhnik's painting of Ivan the Terrible.2 5 It is evident from his halting prose that Kramskoi was still reeling from having glimpsed the still unfinished work. He explains that he had previously believed the only purpose of realist history painting to be its ability to produce the kind of parallel between past and present that I have just described. But when faced with Repin's picture, Kramskoi doubts this firmly held conviction. He admits that Ivan the Terrible extends beyond a simple rhetorical device, beyond pure analogy. It possesses depth. One wonders what kind of murder this is. Is this man crazy? Or is he an animal? What Kramskoi intuits is how Repin locates the ultimate meaning of a history painting not only in its power to analogize, but also in its ability to illuminate far more general and profound questions about humanity.2 6 This dual focus-on the historical and the human-becomes even more apparent when we consider that Repin had planned to name the painting Filicide, only later switching to the longer and more historically grounded title, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581. In fact, for Kramskoi, the sheer humanity of the father and son trumps the extraordinary bloodiness of the painting: Can you really imagine a pool of blood going unnoticed and not affecting you, because in this painting there is this terrible, sensational expressiveness of the father's grief and his piercing scream? And in his arms is his son, his son whom he has killed, and he . . . already he cannot control the pupil of his eye, he breathes heavily, feeling his father's grief, his horror, his cry, his tears[ . . .]27

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While Kramskoi suggests that the blood is drowned out by the emotion of the painting, other viewers could only see the blood. Shortly after the painting's public debut in St. Petersburg, Anatolii Landtsert, professor of anatomy at the Academy of the Arts, criticized the work in a public lecture for its physiological inaccuracies, arguing that an injury of the kind sustained by the tsarevich would not have produced so much blood. Moreover, Landtsert concluded that this grotesque and unnecessary amount of blood, rather than adding to the picture's spectacular attraction, would actually repel any potential viewer. 28 In an article written nearly a decade later, Vasilii Mikheev provides yet a third perspective on the matter, claiming that the blood is not only unavoidable, it is the key to the painting's power: "Blood, blood!" they screamed all around. Ladies swooned, nervous people lost their appetite. Of course, it could have been rendered without blood. Undetectable internal bleeding often occurs as a result of fatal blows by a sharp weapon. But would the horror on Ivan's face, full of pity and repentance, the horror, which is the psychological task of the painting, have been understood? [... ] And it is thanks to the blood that this murderer stands before us, like a lost child, covering the wound that he had inflicted, this father awakened within the sovereign, like an exposed psychological apparatus in all of its psychopathic brutality, in all of the humanity of a man and a father 29

As I have already noted, it is possible to view the bloodiness of this painting as part of the power of its analogy, creating a strong link between the crimson rooms oflvan the Terrible and the punches of red in Repin's political painting of the 1880s. But what the comments of Mikheev and Kramskoi suggest is that we can also understand the painting's goriness apart from its analogic structure. In a way that is more felt than rationalized, the bloodiness engages a humanity unbound by any one political period or historical moment. When the viewers shriek, "Blood, blood!" and Balashov echoes "Enough blood!" and viewers swoon, grow nauseous, and lose their appetites, this is not a reaction to a historiographic proposition alone but to a shared and far more elemental sense of what it means to be a human being. 30 Repin may have gotten this powerful mixture of gore and humanity from Nikolai Karamzin's History of the Russian State (1814-1824), in which Karamzin offers the following account of the famous murder? 1

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The Tsar inflicted several wounds with his sharp weapon and forcefully struck the Tsarevich on the head. The unfortunate Tsarevich fell, gushing blood. The Tsar's anger disappeared. Turning white from horror, trembling, frenzied, he screamed: "I killed my son!" and bent down to embrace and kiss him; he tried to suppress the blood flowing from the deep wound; he cried, moaned, called for the doctor. 32

To complete the point, Karamzin describes Ivan at his son's burial as "stripped of all signs of the imperial mantle, in a mourning robe, in the guise of a simple, despairing sinner:m Repin attempts precisely such a disrobing in his canvas, revealing the father beneath the imperial varnish, and the humanity beneath history. This humanity has an unmistakably religious character. The embrace of the father and the son bring to mind Michelangelo's Pietii (1498-1499, Vatican), and the theme and composition of the picture are clearly reminiscent of Rembrandt and, in particular, his David and Jonathan ( 1642) and The Return of the Prodigal Son (1661-1669), both housed at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This Christian narrative adds another temporal dimension to Repin's painting, one outside of historical time, and suggests an interpretation of love, forgiveness, and redemption. The allusions to biblical narratives help to wrest the two Ivans out of 1581 and position them in a more general realm, one of universal humanity and age-old struggles between fathers and sons. 34 This humanity, however, is not to be understood only as an abstract condition of human existence or a generalized attempt at psychological interiority.35 It also includes the very visceral realities of the human body, our shared awareness of the body's movements and limitations, its weight and fragility. Bathed in light, it is to the two Ivans, locked in a serpentine embrace, that our gaze first travels. Although his son occupies the true center of the composition, Ivan's intensity is unavoidable. He pushes his body to its limit. His eyes bulge. The vein traveling through his sunken left temple is visible, as are the tendons and veins of both his hands. These hands are engaged in difficult work, straining to stanch the flow of blood and support the weight of another. This physical exertion is a desperate attempt to turn back time and save a son, whose body, especially in relation to his father's, is far more ambiguous. Perched between life and death, the younger Ivan seems to oscillate between a body in control of its weight,

holding itself up with one arm, and a body no longer able to counter the laws of gravity. In his discussion of Eugene Delacroix's history painting, Peter Brooks develops the concept of a "perfect moment;' a moment that "perfectly illustrates a narrative sequence-and more: which concentrates and condenses in itself, in a way that narrative sequence cannot, the essence of an event, the plastic figuration of its profound meaning:' 36 For Brooks, this "perfect moment" allows the history painting to achieve a fullness and intensity of representation that is unavailable to a narrative record. Repin, who was known to be an admirer of Delacroix, carefully chooses just such a moment for his painting. 37 He positions his figures not in a moment pregnant with future potential, but in the moment after the fatal blow. As a result of this choice, we as viewers are left to imaginatively reconstruct the events of the crime. Ivan's hand covered in blood leads us to the lower right quadrant of the painting, where blood pools on the Oriental rug and the deadly staff lies ominously nearby. We know from early studies that Repin had intended for Ivan to still be holding the staff. By wrenching it out of his hands and tossing it onto the floor, Repin effects a critical change in the dynamics of his picture. He produces a series of narrative connections that allow us to imagine the movement of the two central figures through space and time. We see the son fall back to the floor, the father pick up the weapon, the son rise to his feet, and the father strike him with the staff. It is a sequence that continues if we follow the other clues. Rugs buckled in the course of the scuffle. A cap tossed aside in haste. A chair overturned and a pillow fallen to the floor. By precisely locating the two men and these objects in an implicit chain of causality, Repin animates what could have been a moment frozen in time. The resulting narrative supplies the verbs that are missing from the otherwise anti-narrative title, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, and "condenses;' to quote Brooks, all of these verbal units, these individual actions, into a singular moment. This "perfect moment" invites us to imagine history not as a static monumental picture like the one barely visible on the wall in the background, but as an image inhabited by human beings, pulsing with life and coursing with blood. Highly effective as narrative triggers, Repin's objects contribute still more to the painting's humanization of history. This is particularly evident in a study for the picture, which depicts a chair suspended on two legs, supported only by the edge of a table (fig. 6.2). This

chair, teetering as it is, recalls the human force that would have placed it in such a precarious position. And in the same way, the objects out of place in the final painting-the staff, the chair, the cap-urge us to return them to their owners, to humanize the artifacts of history. We can discern this transformation of the historical into the everyday in Repin's own creative process. After making several studies for this painting in the palaces of the Kremlin, Repin later reconstructed the imperial apartment within his own studio. 38 His engagement with these objects was thus not limited to simply inserting museum pieces into the pictorial space as markers of authenticity. On the contrary, he imagined these things outside of their glass display cases, charging them with movement and the warmth of human touch. In their dynamic placement, these painted objects retain the traces of their contact with living bodies. This ghostly trace of a human body becomes somewhat of a leitmotif in Repin's preparatory sketches for another of his history paintings, The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan, on which he was working at the same time as Ivan the Terrible (fig. 7.1). One study shows three fragments of traditional Cossack belts floating vertically on a plane parallel to that of the surface of the paper (fig. 6.3). By insisting on their decorative design, the belts are devoid of convincing dimensionality and become almost pure graphic experiment. In the bottom left quadrant of the study, Repin explores a fourth belt, this one wrapped around the invisible midsection of a human body. In stark contrast to the other fragments of material, this sash seems to be all about dimension. One end is folded over the other, creating a pocket in which two daggers are tucked. Celebrating the powerful illusion of figurative representation, the drawing summons forth a convincing physical body from an inanimate object. In this study, we see Repin working out the specific visual strategies for what will guide his approach to history painting. It is an exercise in coaxing forth the human out of otherwise lifeless ethnographic things. What I have been calling Repin's humanization of history, art historian Michael Fried would likely call "embodiment:' In his study of the German realist Adolph Menzel, Fried develops the notion of an art of embodiment, an art that involves "countless acts of imaginative projection of bodily experience:'39 In a way that is not dissimilar to what Fried describes, Repin calls on the viewer to imagine his or her own physical relation to the painting by infusing his historical objects

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6.2. Ilia Repin, Study of an interior for Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 16 November 1581, 1883. Oil on wood, 13.8 x 23.3 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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6.3. Ilia Repin, Sketch for The Z aporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (fragments of sashes, sash tied around the waist with two daggers tucked into it), mid1880s. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite pencil on gray paper, 24 x 32.8 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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with the residue of human engagement. And ultimately, Repin, much like Menzel, asks "the viewer to make a conscious effort at empathic seeing in order to 'enter' and 'activate' a painting that otherwise threatens to remain inexpressive or inert:'40 This activation through embodiment is what makes Repin's history so human. Not only do we sense the physicality of his subjects, we are invited to relate our own sensations and emotions to those in the picture. As we trace the movement of the father and son-struggling, falling, embracingwe imbue the picture with the energy of our own movements, our visceral memories of what it means to be a human body in space. Since its exhibition in 1885, Ivan the Terrible has inspired rather lively polemics, distilled by one scholar into two main tendencies: "Repin's painting is a historical canvas consisting of an allusion to the contemporary moment; Repin's painting is not a historical work but a psychological drama:'41 What I have proposed is that these two tendencies need not be mutually exclusive. Repin's painting is at once an elaborate historical parallel and an ahistorical psychological drama. Working in tandem with historical analogy, Repin's humanization of history makes Ivan and his son fully present in the time and space of the viewer. And it is precisely the fusion of these two functions, one objective and the other subjective, that highlights the picture's power to make history painfully, shockingly, radically real.

Painting History, Realistically Admittedly, what I have been describing thus far sounds suspiciously similar to what Voloshin considered the crucial violation of Repin's painting. Referring to Balashov, Voloshin wrote that "he shattered that protective, invisible glass that separates us from a work of art, and threw himself inside the painting, as if it were reality:'42 As I stated at the outset of this chapter, I think that Voloshin was partially right. By taking advantage of the full expressive potential of analogy and humanization, Repin produces a picture that turns on its ability to connect with a viewer, such as Balashov, who is situated within well-defined historical, physical, and emotional parameters. Given that Balashov was a trained icon painter, it is even more understandable that he would have been especially vulnerable to this fracturing of the divide between art and reality. And yet, there is a dissonance between history and painting in Repin's

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history painting, and it is in this dissonance that we glimpse the artist trying to make sense of this traditional genre within the context of a contemporary aesthetic paradigm, that of realism. Alexandre Benois, the turnof-the-century art historian, may have been the first to describe what I have in mind here. Speaking of Repin's history paintings, Benois writes that "history plays a minimal role" and that "the plot disappears behind the painterly task:'43 Or to put it slightly differently, history disappears behind the paint. What exactly does it mean that history disappears behind the paint? One senses this phenomenon in the ground plane of Ivan the Terrible, overlapped as it is with Oriental rugs. The longer one looks at these rugs, the less convincing becomes their ability to contain rational space, and thus to provide the space needed by narrative to unfold. Since the background is so cloaked in darkness, it is impossible to see where the floor meets the wall. And while the patterns of the rugs respond to the depth of the room, in some places they seem to warp and buckle. In fact, to create a more reliable spatial cube in which to distribute the characters and their props, Repin simply could have swapped his patterns, moving the rugs to the wall to hang as tapestries, and moving the checkered wall to the ground as a series of perspectival tiles. This is precisely the spatial strategy that Nikolai Ge employs in Peter I

Interrogates Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich at Peterhof(l87l, GTG). But unlike the regular floor tiles of Ge's spatial cube, Repin's rugs do not behave. They are fickle; they only flirt with dimensionality. In one moment they constitute a horizontal floor, and in the next, they flip up parallel to the picture plane. In a portrait of his son completed just three years before the Ivan painting, we see Repin experimenting with this kind of spatial manipulation (fig. 6.4). Here again are the Oriental rugs (in fact, in both paintings, these were modeled on the rugs in Repin's studio), but this time, draped as they are over a chair, they function both as vertical backdrop and as horizontal spatial support. In his recent book on the cultural myths of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, Kevin M.F. Platt also takes note of the strange echo of Ge's checkered tiles and Oriental rugs in Repin's Ivan the Terrible. 44 Based on this coincidence and other convincing visual observations, Platt hypothesizes that Repin, in conscious dialogue with Ge, '"builds out' Ge's historical allegory to grasp not only the Petrine greatness of the reform era but also the terror of the decade that followed, announcing that the hard, impenetrable

6.4. Ilia Repin, Iurii Repin, 1882. Oil on canvas, 110.4 x 55.5 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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surface of Ge's depiction of raison d'etat in fact belied depths of despotic violence:' 45 Platt goes on to suggest that these two paintings "represent not only alternative views of Russia's past and present but correspondingly alternative modes of seeing those realities:' 46 Ge, with his rational and measured space, mobilizes the mode of historiography; whereas Repin, with his irrational and melodramatic sensibility, turns to the mode of the theater or the opera. I think that Platt is right to see in Repin's history painting an interrogation not only of its subject, but also of its mode of representation. In the remainder of the chapter, I will develop an alternative, but not contradictory, line to his argument. If a comparison of Ge and Rep in suggests a comparison of historiography and theater, a sustained consideration of Repin's painting alone reveals a related opposition present within the work itself. In other words, Repin's painting already contains the possibility for its own aesthetic critique. When we focus on the Oriental rugs, bright reds, and shaky ground plane of Repin's Ivan the Terrible, we witness the painting becoming self-conscious, becoming aware of its very task of representation. The picture asks itself the question, "How must history be represented?" Repin's Zaporozhian Cossacks makes this project perhaps even more explicit (see chapter 7 for the reception of this painting). In order to complete this epic work, Repin consulted a range of archival documents and undertook extensive field research. Moreover, he worked closely with the Ukrainian historian and archaeologist Dmitrii Iavornitskii, who would ultimately become the model for the scribe, the central figure of the large canvas. 47 In a very real way then, The Zaporozhian Cossacks is about representing history. Under Repin's brush, Iavornitskii is transformed into his subject of study, and his historiographic document into a primary source. But Repin does not stop here, for this painting also takes a stand on which mode of representationhistoriography or painting-can evoke the past more successfully. Standing before the canvas, it is the horizontal plane of writing that first catches the eye. 1be bright white of the paper and the quill highlight the heart of the painting, the supposed location of its message, the letter that expresses in words the freedom and rambunctious spirit of the Cossacks. But this letter turns out to be a false lead. Its words are illegible, and we must instead glean its message from the riot of facial expressions, postures, and colors that surround

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the scribe. Moreover, although the men shout and guffaw in this undeniably loud painting, they do so not with sound but with the visual. It is a feat of painterly representation, and a triumph of paint's ability to conjure the space in which an otherwise flat historical record can attain the multiple dimensions of human experience. This statement on modes of representation makes The Zaporozhian Cossacks a "real allegory;' to borrow another concept from Michael Fried's study of realism, a painting that allegorizes its task of realist representation. In the case of the Cossacks, Repin posits a written word that is rendered mute and almost invisible by the overwhelming power of the pictorial plane. 48 The allegory in Ivan the Terrible is not as explicit but is nonetheless operative and even originates from a related image, that of a hand in the center of the canvas. Based upon the preparatory sketches, we know that it was important for Repin to get the tsar's hand just right. After all, it is the hand that had swung the murder weapon, and the hand that applies pressure to the mortal wound. It is also, and this is the allegorical move, the hand that holds the paintbrush. Covered in a viscous, dripping crimson paint, Ivan's hand merges with the hand of the artist. And for a moment, blood is no longer blood, but red, red paint, a raw material not yet bound within a signifying system. 49 This is what it means for the plot to disappear behind the paint. Of course, it must be added that the plot disappears only for a moment; history, the story, always reasserts itself. After all, we must remember that Repin's painting is still operating within a realist tradition. It is not yet dependent upon the kind of medium specificity that would come to define modernism, and so, when the materiality of the paint does assert its dominance, it does so as part of a dynamic interrelationship between medium and message. This tension between the historical narrative (blood) and the nonnarrative presence of the medium (paint) is further embodied in the central figures. They are, first and foremost, the two !vans, father and son, caught in a familial and political struggle. At the same time, they are also identifiable as their real-life counterparts. The writer Vsevolod Garshin, a close friend of Rep in, served as one of the models for his younger Ivan. In the months that Repin worked on Ivan the Terrible, the two artists spent countless hours together. Repin was trying to solve the puzzle of a realistic history painting and, inspired by his sittings with Repin, Garshin had returned to a short story begun years before, what would become

"Nadezhda Nikolaevna;' a story about an artist trying to paint Charlotte Corday on the eve of her murder ofJeanPaul Marat. It must have been a heady collaboration, two artists thinking deeply about what it means to represent history. No less significant were Repin's three other models for the Ivan painting: the composer Pavel Blaramberg and the artists Vladimir Menck and Grigorii Miasoedov. Holding the models and their subjects together in our imagination, we see in the Ivans two painters, one composer, and one writer, all locked in an embrace, in a struggle between literary narrative and the nonverbal expression of music and painting. In these and other moments, what we witness in Repin's painting of Ivan the Terrible is his working out of a solution to the problem of a realist history. He layers one historical moment upon another in a series of analogous tragedies. He draws on human experience, both of the physical realities of the human body and of the very condition of humanity. He loops together narrative structures and then silences those narratives with opaque, thickly applied oil paint. The final product is a work that balances two experiences, the experience of witnessing a historical story unfold, and the experience of feeling in oneself the present moment and the humanity of history. This is not, as Voloshin would have it, a crude naturalism. Rather, it is a realism loaded with transformative potential, for if the picture can lure the viewer in, it can also return the viewer to the world. The painting initiates this critical return by drawing the viewer's attention to the tactility of the red paint, countering its illusion with the reality of its medium. In this way, Abram Balashov came close to embodying the ideal viewer of realism. He certainly believed the painting and shattered the protective glass, stepping into the political and emotional maelstrom of the red room. But rather than returning to the real world to resist the abuses of imperial power, he was unable to distinguish between history and its representation. And so he killed the painting, instead of the painted.

5°

Notes An early version of this chapter was presented at the symposium ''Art in Russia: 1770-1920" at Yale University on 24- 25 March 2011. I am grateful to the participants of this symposium and the members of the audience for their invaluable comments and suggestions. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Russian are mine.

1. N.A. Mudrogel: Piat'desiat vosem' let v Tret'iakovskoi galeree: Vospominaniia (Leningrad:

Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1966), 127-29, cited in Maksimilian Voloshin, "Kommentarii k 0 Repine," in Maksimilian Voloshin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Ellis Lak 2000, 2005), 3:538-39. 2. I.E. Grabar: Repin (Zhizn' zamechatel'nykh liudei) (Moscow: Zhurnal'no-gazetnoe ob"edinenie, 1933), 157. 3. Grabar: Repin, 157-58. 4. Cited in Maksimilian Voloshin, "0 khudozhestvennoi tsennosti postradavshei kartiny Repina;' in Voloshin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:315. 5. Cited in Voloshin, "0 khudozhestvennoi tsennosti postradavshei kartiny Repina;' 3:315. 6. Maksimilian Voloshin, predislovie k "0 Repine;' in Voloshin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:307-8. Voloshin published the text of his article ("0 smysle katastrofy, postigshei kartinu Repina;' Utro Rossii [19 January 1913]) and his lecture ("0 khudozhestvennoi tsennosti postradavshei kartiny Repina;' public lecture, Moscow Polytechnic Institute, 12 February 1913), along with other supporting documents, a year after the Balashov event in 0 Repine (1914). 7. Voloshin, "0 khudozhestvennoi tsennosti postradavshei kartiny Repina;' 3:333- 34. 8. Voloshin, "0 khudozhestvennoi tsennosti postradavshei kartiny Repina;' 3:335. 9. For a discussion of 1913 as a critical year for the avant-garde, see Jane A. Sharp, "The Russian AvantGarde and Its Audience;' Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 3 (1999): 91 - 116. 10. For more on history painting in Russia, see A.G. Vereshchagina, Khudozhnik, Vremia, Istoriia.

Ocherki russkoi istoricheskoi zhivopisi XVIII-nachala XX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973). For the middle of the nineteenth century, more specifically, see M. Rakova, Russkaia istoricheskaia zhivopis' serediny deviatnadtsatogo veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979) and A. G. Vereshchagina, Istoricheskaia kartina v russkom iskusstve. Shestidesiatye gody XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990). 11. Despite the aesthetic and ideological challenges of historical representation, historical subjects were nonetheless attractive to the artists, writers, and dramaturges of Russian realism. For a discussion of the peculiar "obsession with history" in Russian letters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (an obsession which, I would argue, Russian painting shares), see Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An

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Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), especially 1-18. 12. The classic English language study of the Peredvizhniki remains Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier's Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977). For more on the relationship between European history painting and that of the Peredvizhniki (namely, of Surikov), see D.V. Sarab'ianov, "Surikov i evropeiskaia istoricheskaia kartina vtoroi poloviny XIX veka;' in Russkaia zhivopis' XIX veka sredi evropeiskikh shkol (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1980), 141-65. 13. For more on Repin within the context of Russian history painting, see Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 87-89, and David Jackson, The Russian Vision: The Art of Ilya Repin (Schoten, Belgium: BAI, 2006), 75-101. 14. Curiously, Voloshin remarks that Abram Balashov had paused at Vasilii Surikov's Boiarynia Morozova before continuing on to the Repin room and the Ivan painting. Voloshin writes that Surikov's painting failed to affect Balashov because it retained some kind of invisible line of protection between the viewer and the picture (Voloshin, "0 smysle katastrofy, postigshei kartinu Repina;' in Voloshin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:309). 15. V.V. Stasov, "Khudozhestvennye vystavki 1879 gada (1879);' in V.V. Stasov, Izbrannye sochineniia v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952), 2:24. 16. V.V. Stasov, "Khudozhestvennye vystavki 1879 goda (1879);' 2:26. 17. I.E. Repin to V.V. Stasov, 2 January 1881, in I.E. Repin i V.V. Stasov. Perepiska, edited by A.K. Lebedev and G.K. Burovaia (Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1949), 2:58-59. The English translation belongs to David Jackson (Jackson, 95). 18. "Bloodstained year" is a loose translation from a 1913 interview with Repin ("Beseda s I.E. Repinym (po telefonu ot nashego korrespondenta);' Russkoe slovo, no. 13 (17 January 1913): 2, cited in Grabar: Repin, 151). 19. Nauchno-bibliograficheskii arkhiv Akademii khudozhestv, f. 25, op. 1, ed. khr. 27, 1. 1, cited in Il'ia Repin. Zhivopis'. Grafika (Leningrad: Avrora, 1985), 238. 20. Repin was not the only nineteenth-century artist to take up the subject oflvan the Terrible. In addition to the previously mentioned painting by Viacheslav Shvarts (Ivan the Terrible beside the Body of

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His Son, 1864), Mark Antokol'skii's sculpture oflvan (1870) and Viktor Vasnetsov's painting Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1897) are important to mention (although as Mut'ia shows in her study, there are many more). With the twentieth century and the Soviet period came a renewed interest in the tsar, the most discussed cultural example of which is Sergei Eisenstein's uncompleted film trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). For more on the image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian and Soviet culture, see the work of Maureen Perrie, Kevin M.F. Platt, and N.N. Mut'ia: Maureen Perrie, The Image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Folklore (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Maureen Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) (Perrie discusses images oflvan before 1934, including many examples from nineteenthcentury literature, drama, and the visual arts, on pp. 5-21); Kevin M.F. Platt and David Brandenberger, "Terribly Romantic, Terribly Progressive, or Terribly Tragic: Rehabilitating Ivan IV under LV. Stalin;' Russian Review 58, no. 4 (1999): 635-54 (published later in a modified version in Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, edited by Kevin M.F. Platt and David Brandenberger [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006], 157-78); Kevin M.F. Platt, Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Myths (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2011); N.N. Mut'ia, Ivan Groznyi: Istorizm i lichnost' pravitelia v otechestvennom iskusstve XIX-XX vv. (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2010). 21. Although many critics and scholars have observed the implied parallel between 1581 and the 1880s in Repin's painting, it is important to note that Maureen Perrie employs the precise term "historical analogy" in her study of the image of Ivan the Terrible in Stalinist Russia (Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia, 3). 22. Konstantin Pobedonostsev to Alexander III, 15 February 1885, in K.P. Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1923), 1:498. 23. Repin will include Pobedonostsev in his enormous canvas Formal Session of the State Council in Honor of Its Centenary on 7 May 1901 (1903, GRM). The study of Pobedonostsev for this painting shows a pale, bald old man, with sunken cheeks and deeply hollowed eye sockets. His clasped hands rest on a relentlessly blank geometric shape meant to signify a piece of paper. I cannot help but speculate that the way in which Pobedonostsev and his document are both

rendered mute by paint might be Rep in's partial revenge for the censorship of his 1885 Ivan the Terrible. 24. Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 9. 25. I.N. Kramskoi to A.S. Suvorin, 21 January 1885, in I.N. Kramskoi, Pis'ma, stat'i v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965-1966), 2:167-68. 26. See Vereshchagina, Khudozhnik, Vremia, Istoriia, 69. 27. Kramskoi, Pis'ma, 167-68. The English translation belongs to David Jackson but has been slightly modified (Jackson, 87). 28. A. Landtsert, "Ioann Groznyi i ego syn 16 noiabria 1581 g.;' excerpted in Voloshin, 0 Repine, in Voloshin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:356-62. 29. V.M. Mikheev, "'.E. Repin;' Artist 4, no. 29 (1893): 108, cited in 0. Liaskovskaia, Il'ia Efimovich Repin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962), 180. 30. Descriptions of the excessive reactions of viewers to Ivan the Terrible have become part of the painting's mythology and a commonplace in Repin scholarship. For further examples, see Valkenier, Ilya Repin, 121-22. 31. Given his propensity for exhaustive research, Repin may have also consulted Sergei Solov'ev's History of Russia from Earliest Times (1851-1879) (Valkenier, Ilya Rep in, 87). In partial explanation of the amount of gore in Ivan the Terrible, several scholars mention that Repin was deeply influenced by several impressions from his 1883 trip to western Europe, in particular, the bloody canvases of European painting and the bullfights in Spain (see, for example, Ekaterina Allenova, Il'ia Repin [Moscow: Belyi Gorod, 2000], 56). For more on Repin's historical research, see Mut'ia, Ivan Groznyi, 244-46. 32. N.M. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva Rosiiskogo (kn. 3, t. 9, gl. 5) (St. Petersburg: Tip. Aleksandra Smirdina, 1830-1831), 386-87. 33. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva Rosiiskogo, 386-87. 34. Valkenier, Ilya Repin, 121-23, and Platt, Terror and Greatness, 115-19. 35. Art historian Grigorii Sternin considers the particular attention to "psychology of characters" to be one of the qualities that distinguishes Repin's history painting from that of his contemporaries. See G. Iu. Sternin, Il'ia Efimovich Repin (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1985), 90. 36. Peter Brooks, History Painting and Narrative: Delacroix's 'Moments' (European Humanities Research

Centre, Special Lecture Series 2) (Oxford: Legenda, 1998), 30. 37. Repin had expressed his admiration for Delacroix as early as 1873. See 0. Liaskovskaia, "K istorii sozdaniia kartiny I.E. Repina 'Ivan Groznyi i syn ego Ivan 16 noiabria 1581 goda';' in Gosudarstvennaia

Tret'iakovskaia galereia. Materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1956), 1:195. 38. Repin's daughter Vera writes of her father's preparatory research for Ivan the Terrible in the unpublished manuscript of her memoirs (Nauchnobibliograficheskii arkhiv Akademii khudozhestv, fond "Penaty;' A-1, K-1, op. 54, XVII, cited in Liaskovskaia, "K istorii sozdaniia kartiny;' 191). 39. Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 13. 40. Fried, Menzel's Realism, 139. 41. Mut'ia, Ivan Groznyi, 249. Incidentally, Mut'ia herself subscribes to the belief that Repin's picture possesses little if any reference to his contemporary moment. Instead, she claims that the painting is an "atemporal tragedy of a sovereign's personality" (251). 42. Voloshin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:333-34. 43. A.N. Benua, Russkaia shkola zhivopisi (1904) (Moscow: Art-Rodnik, 1997), 80. 44. Platt, Terror and Greatness, 121. 45. Platt, Terror and Greatness, 122. 46. Platt, Terror and Greatness, 127. 47. For more on Repin and Iavornitskii, see I.S. Zil'bershtein, "Kak sozdavalas' kartina 'ZaporozhtsY:" and D.I. Iavornitskii, "Vospominaniia;' in Khudozhestvennoe nasledstvo: Repin (Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia nauk, 1949), 2:57-106. 48. I am indebted to Michael Fried's analysis of Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic (1875) for inspiring me to uncover this dimension of realist representation and the "real allegory" in Repin's Ivan the Terrible. In Eakins's painting (and others), Fried discerns a "double 'spatiality'": "Indeed it may be said[ ... ] that the 'spaces' of writing/ drawing and of painting interpenetrate without losing their separate identities, that they coincide through and through but do not merge" (Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane [Chicago and London: UniversityofChicago Press, 1987], 77). For more on the "real allegory;' see also Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990 ), and Fried, The Art of

Embodiment.

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49. Fried's analysis of Eakins's The Gross Clinic also turns on a bloody hand at the center of the composition that epitomizes, in his words, realism's "tactics of shock:' It is "an image at once painful to look at (so piercingly does it threaten our visual defenses) and all but impossible, hence painful, to look away from (so keen is our craving for precisely that confirmation of our own bodily reality), and that it is above all the conflictedness of our situation that grips and excruciates and in the end virtually stupefies us before the picture" (Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, 64-65). 50. For more on the relationship between Repin and Garshin, see S.N. Durylin, Repin i Garshin: Iz istorii russkoi zhivopisi i literatury (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia Akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk, 1926); Leland Fetzer, "Art and Assassination: Garshin's 'Nadezhda Nikolaevna;" Russian Review 34, no. 1 (January 1975): 55-65; Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, "The Writer as Artist's Model: Repin's Portrait of Garshin;' Metropolitan Museum ]ournal28 (1993): 207-16.

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The Contemporary Reception of Ilia Rep in's Solo Exhibition of 1891 GALINA CHURAK

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n 26 November 1891 a solo exhibition of the work of Ilia Repin opened in the halls of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Exactly twenty years earlier, in November 1871, Repin had received a gold medal for his submission, The Raising of ]airus's Daughter (1871, GRM), in the final student examinations held in the Academy that year. The exhibition of 1891 thus marked the twentieth anniversary of his artistic debut. In early February 1892 a slightly different, smaller version of the exhibition traveled to Moscow, where it was shown in the halls of the Historical Museum at the north end of Red Square. By the early 1890s, Repin was undoubtedly a central figure in Russian painting. His authority was at its height, as attested by the fact that in March 1890 Anton Chekhov wrote to Modest Tchaikovsky that the painter occupied a position comparable to that of Petr Tchaikovsky in music and Lev Tolstoy in literature. 1 His work had featured in every single Peredvizhnik exhibition, and became a prime focus of consideration for the art press. As the young modern artist Mikhail Nesterov wrote of Repin's impact at that time: With every year, and with every contemporary art fair staged by the Peredvizhniki, so the name of Ilia Efimovich Repin became dearer and dearer to us artists, and to Russian society. People eagerly awaited his paintings, and he-aware that his great talent obliged

him to make every painting, every portrait not just a personal triumph, but a glorification of his native arthe with patient persistence nurtured every piece. [. .. ] For every picture, every portrait by Repin was an event. Decades would pass, and people still remembered not only the very painting and the year of its appearance, but the exact place it occupied at the exhibition. They would say, "That was in the year of They Did Not Expect Him, or of St. Nicholas:'2

But the 1890s were also an important transitional period for Repin, heralding serious changes in his creative activity, in his self-image as an artist, and in his contemporaries' perception of his work. By then, the periodical press was already mentioning the names of young artists, foremost among them Valentin Serov, who would soon be able to compete with the likes of Repin and Vasilii Polenov. From the late 1880s certain disagreements had also started to appear between Repin and the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, and in September 1887 Repin issued a statement announcing his resignation from the Association, whose shows he would henceforth take part in as an exhibitor alone. As he wrote in his request to the Association's governing board to remove him from its membership, "I differ in opinion from my colleagues more and more:' 3 The day after this announcement, in a letter to Konstantin Savitskii, his old friend and a member of the Association's

governing board, Repin confirmed that his intention was "firm and unchangeable;' as what he considered to be an "intolerable atmosphere of bureaucratism'' had transformed the Association into "some sort of department of civil servants:' 4 Repin's disapproval here concerned not only the bureaucratization of the Association, but also changes in the content and character of the Peredvizhnik exhibitions. The flood of Salon art allowed into their shows and, conversely, the limited participation of young artists, had made the quality of the Peredvizhnik exhibitions ever more questionable. It was increasingly felt that the exhibitions needed to open their doors more widely to young artists in order to give art the opportunity, in Repin's words, "to move towards the discovery of new paths:' It was in this highly charged atmosphere of complex interrelationships within the artistic community that Repin conceived the idea of mounting a solo show. Significantly, this was the only full-size exhibition the artist staged in his lifetime, and it gave him new focus in his work. In contrast to his contemporaries Ivan Aivazovskii, Vasilii Vereshchagin, and Konstantin Makovskii, whose exhibition activity had focused on solo events, Repin, for all his participation in numerous group expositions, had avoided staging personal shows. With a profound understanding of the responsibility facing art, he therefore prepared meticulously for this first solo event. We get a good sense of the atmosphere surrounding the exhibition, and of the concerns, anxieties, and doubts that gripped the artist, from his correspondence with Pavel Tretiakov, his artist-friends, and the critic Vladimir Stasov. In particular, Repin's letters to Tatiana Tolstaia and Elizaveta Zvantseva-his regular correspondents at the time-reveal his inner state. His mood was one of spiritual fatigue and anxiety that plummeted at times to despair, all of which seems to have been out of step with Repin's optimistic view of life. "I have become so hardened, so cross with everyone and everything, that I see only the worst in everything;' he admitted to his student Zvantseva in September 1891. 5 Slightly earlier, Serov had written to Ilia Ostroukhov, "I was at Repin's, which was very sad and difficult. I feel sorry for him; he is lonelY:' 6 Just a few days before the opening of the exhibition, Repin wrote in a letter to Dmitrii Iavornitskii, "with this exhibition I have put everything, and I mean everything, including my savings, at stake-and what for?!" 7 The main task that Repin set himself was to exhibit only those works that had never been shown before, and were unfamiliar to the viewer-a condition he rigorously

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observed. In assembling the exhibits, he turned first of all to Tretiakov, the main patron of his work. As always, the Moscow collector played an active, sincere, and practical role in the artist's affairs, taking pains over the loan of paintings by Repin, which Tretiakov himself owned, but also those in other collections. They discussed in letters the advisability of including this or that work in the forthcoming exhibition, with a keen eye to the overall impression that each would give. The catalogue listed 298 items, though in fact just over 300 works were on show, as for one reason or another Repin did not include certain paintings in the printed list. The works on display demonstrated the most significant and, at the same time, the most varied aspects of the artist's oeuvre. In many respects they were entirely new to contemporary viewers, who saw aspects of Repin's work that they had not known before. But as we will see, the art press, engaging actively and at times controversially with the exhibition, did not always share the contemporary public's appreciation of the scale and quality of Repin's work. The exhibition began with two seminal works that Repin had completed just before it opened: Religious

Procession in an Oak Wood. The Appearance of the Icon (1877-1891, 1924, Regional Gallery of Art, GradetsKralove, Czech Republic), and The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880-1891, fig. 7.1). The artist also included one other painting completed just prior to the opening, Following the Trail (1890, Kharkov Art Museum). However, the main focus of the exhibition was portraits, with thirty-three of them on display, representing an idiosyncratic anthology ofRepin's work in the genre. The series began with the artist's SelfPortrait of 1863 (location unknown), one of his earliest and most tentative forays into a genre that was to become increasingly important and definitive in his work. This early effort was followed by works from the 1870s, when Repin's paintings had flooded into the Peredvizhnik exhibitions and inspired talk of the artist as a worthy competitor to Ivan Kramskoi. Of particular interest among the paintings of the 1870s that had not been exhibited before were a portrait of the artist's wife which had been painted in Paris "a Ia Manet'' (1876, GRM); Family Portrait at the Dacha (now known as On the Turf Bench, 1876, GRM), a highly impressionistic painting completed the same year, though after Repin had returned to St. Petersburg; a portrait of Pavel Chistiakov with his penetrating stare (1878, GTG), a friend and teacher of Repin and of many other Russian painters; a portrait of Arkhip Kuindzhi (1877, GRM) which Kramskoi so admired that, after seeing it, he was unable to commit

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to portraying "the wise Greek" himself; and portraits of Poliksena Stasova (1879, GRM) and T.N. Rachinskaia (1882, GTG), infused with a delightful grace and lyricism. Mature works of the 1880s were also on show-a portrait of the sculptor Mikhail Mikeshin (1888, GTG), and a portrait study of the actress Pelageia Strepetova ( 1882, GTG), which was notable for its expressivity. Portraits ofElizaveta Zvantseva (1889, Athenaeum, Helsinki), General Mikhail Dragomirov (1889, GRM), and Cesar Cui (1890, GTG) attracted attention, too, for their painterly resolution and expressive power. The portrait section then culminated in two portraits of Lev Tolstoy that were completed just before the exhibition openedTolstoy Resting in the Woods (1891, GTG), and Tolstoy in His Study at Iasnaia Poliana (1891, Pushkin House, St. Petersburg). Nothing had been left to chance in this selection, as the full extent of Repin's portraiture was put on display: the psychological depth and range of individual characteristics; a highly distinctive take on the parade portrait (which he approached as part artist, part psychologist); the portrait study; and, finally, Repin's plein-air experiments. The latter had begun in the 1870s and continued in the following decades, strengthening in the 1890s until they found their most brilliant realization in the years immediately after the exhibition. This progression was to culminate in the plein-air portraits of Repin's daughters, and in a whole series of portrait studies carried out at Zdravnevo, the small estate in Vitebsk province, Belorussia, which Repin bought on the back of the sale of The Zaporozhian Cossacks at the exhibition of 1891. The largest section of the exhibition was devoted to sketches and studies, with approximately 250 on display. Rep in approached the formation of this part of the exhibition with great care, arranging the sketches and studies in specific groups. The first grouping comprised studies for large paintings that were already well known from previous exhibitions. Most extensive here were the studies for The Zaporozhian Cossacks, The Appearance of the Icon, Ivan the Terrible, and Seeing Off the New Recruit. A separate section of approximately one hundred landscape studies followed. Completed at various times, these studies related to the Volga journey of 1870, to Repin's Abramtsevo period (see chapter 4), and to his sojourn in Paris, and marked the first time that the full range of Rep in's landscape interests was displayed to contemporaries hitherto oblivious to such concerns. The majority of the studies and sketches were bought directly from the exhibition. Repin noted with

pride in a letter to Tatiana Tolstaia that many had been sold, but added that "they are so necessary" and some were valued so highly by the artist himself that he "would pay three times as much to have them back:' 8 Notwithstanding such sentiment, the sketches and studies were dispersed into many different collections. Some of them later began to come to the attention of researchers, but many are known only from the exhibition catalogue, which remains a vital source of information on Repin's work. For example, only five of thirty-one studies listed for The Zaporozhian Cossacks are now identified in various museum and private collections. The location of eighteen of the twenty-two studies for Seeing Off the New Recruit is unknown. And of the twenty-two landscapes at the exhibition that Repin had painted in Paris or at the French seaside resort ofVeules, we now know of just four. Repin's exhibition became one of the major events of the artistic life of St. Petersburg and Moscow at the start of the 1890s. Among the many art exhibitions taking place in those months, it elicited by far the greatest response in contemporary opinion and press reviews. One can sense the excitement with which the artistic community greeted the event in the letters of Rep in's close friends. Immediately after the exhibition opened in St. Petersburg, Aleksandr Kiselev wrote to Ilia Ostroukhov in Moscow, "The exhibition is making a completely magnificent impression:' Sergei Vinogradov in a letter to E.M. Khruslov called it "wonderful:' Tatiana Tolstaia also recorded her father Tolstoy's impression of the event: "He returned from it amazed by your portraits and by The Nihilist, which he finds outstanding. [... ]though to my surprise, he remained indifferent to The Zaporozhian Cossacks:' By contrast, Tatiana herself singled out The Zaporozhian Cossacks, which, she wrote, "astonishes me more and more. What else on earth could one need, if one could paint like that!" 9 The artist Petr Neradovskii, for his part, recalled impressions of the Moscow version of the show: The success of the exhibition was completely extraordinary! Everyone was swept up with enthusiasm for it all! People talked endlessly about the pictures they had seen at the exhibition, and about the stunning portraits. Everyone admired the artist's talent[ ... ] they became animated, and on meeting acquaintances would hasten to share their views. Rep in himself was there the entire time, and acquaintances and complete strangers alike would flock to him to say a few words. [... ] He was clearly celebrating and enjoying the success. This was his triumph! 10

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7.1. Ilia Repin, The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan, 1880-1891. Oil on canvas, 203 x 358 em, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Press coverage of the exhibition was extensive, with practically none of the newspapers or thick journals failing to voice an opinion. The first significant articles appeared the day after the opening, with the journals Khudozhnik (The Artist), Russkaia mysl' (Russian Thought), Severnyi vestnik (The Northern Herald), Zhivopisnoe obozrenie (Pictorial Review), Niva (The Grainfield), Kosol'ia (The Spikes), and Nabliudatel' (The Observer), as well as the newspapers Novosti (News), Novae vremia (New Age), Grazhdanin (The Citizen), Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), and Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (St. Petersburg News), among others, all publishing lengthy reports. The well-known art critics and commentators Aleksandr Remezov, Petr Polevoi, Aleksandr Diakov, Vladimir Chuiko, and of course Vladimir Stasov became regular writers on the event, and a number of substantial anonymous reports also appeared. As was so often the case with Repin, two fundamental and antithetical points of view emerged in the press coverage. The first affirmed the exceptional talent of the artist, and underscored his place in Russian art alongside the writers Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky. The second, expressed in louder and more vociferous terms, saw the exhibition as a new tool with which to accuse Repin of tendentiousness and caricature, even of artistic barbarity. More moderate and measured appraisals were made of the portraits. Indeed, the authority of Rep in as a portraitist was largely uncontested. "If Repin painted nothing but portraits;' one of the reviewers wrote, "then he would enjoy a solid reputation in the realm of painting. Looking at these portraits is akin to finding yourself in the company of enlightened and talented people:' 11 Nonetheless, within the generally positive appraisal one could still hear the echoes of opinions voiced ten years previously about the crudeness ofRepin's painting and the artificiality of his portrait heads. The artist was even advised at times to abandon portraiture completely. To Repin's dismay, reviewers focused their ire on the two portraits of Tolstoy. "Tolstoy Resting in the Woods attracts attention primarily because the viewer is unable to tear himself away from that long white gown in which the count is portrayed:' 12 In the other portrait, Tolstoy in His Study, Repin was criticized for the fact that "the attention of the viewer is distracted by the depiction of the surroundings, which detracts attention from the writer's face:' 13 Stasov was annoyed that Tretiakov did not acquire Tolstoy in His Study for his collection. Repin, too, had placed great store by Tretiakov buying this portrait, and was deeply offended

by the collector's refusal to purchase the painting, which Tretiakov considered to be some sort of publicity stunt for Tolstoy. The artist wrote irritably to his patron, "I will never agree with you that the paintings of Tolstoy at work or resting constitute publicity for him. As if he is some sort of novice ingenue?!" He added, "to be consistent, you should return Tolstoy Plowing to me. I will happily take this painting back and return what you paid for it, thereby saving you the pain of having to look at this advertisement for the writer:' 14 It is possible that Tretiakov, always so independent in his judgments, appraisals, and actions-especially concerning his patronage of art-was nonetheless either consciously or unconsciously influenced here by the loud mutterings that the name of Tolstoy provoked in the press. This was especially the case in the newspaper Grazhdanin, which was particularly exercised by Repin's portraits of the writer, and by the food kitchens in famine-stricken areas of Russia organized by the Tolstoy family, both of which were construed as nothing more than a publicity stunt. For all this criticism, however, the main consensus in the reception and evaluation of the portraits echoed the views ofVasilii Mikheev in the journal Khudozhnik-namely, that ifRepin's precursors Perov and Kramskoi "had wonderful draftsmanship, but the coloring of the former and the painting style of the latter left something to be desired [... ] Repin, by contrast, gives a painting his all: drawing, and color, and life. His portraits are astonishingly bright and profound and, as a result, vividly alive:' 15 As far as the other paintings were concerned, neither Religious Procession in an Oak Wood nor In Their Tracks attracted particular attention in the press, and largely remained outside any critical exchange. Religious Procession in general brought about a reprisal of those earlier criticisms of Repin for his tendentious approach. A few critics alone noticed the successful and highly poetic evocation of a deep, shady wood, "wonderfully lit by the rays of the sun:' 16 Together with Procession of the Cross in Kursk Province (1880-1883, GTG), the painting represented an idiosyncratic engagement with one and the same theme, allowing for a highly personal approach to both the iconography and the painterly plasticity of the task. For Stasov, both paintings needed to hang in the same gallery and "never be separated:' 17 Tretiakov offered to buy Religious Procession in an Oak Wood, but failed to come to an agreement with the artist on the price. The painting instead remained in Repin's studio and was subject to many changes by the artist, which greatly altered its original state.

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The Zaporozhian Cossacks provoked intense interest, with extensive commentary on the painting long before it was complete. When, in spring 1891, Vladimir Mikhnevich's story on Repin's work appeared in the St. Petersburg newspaper Novosti and provoked fierce debate on the painting, the anticipation surrounding its appearance reached fever pitch. 18 "The publicity Mr. Mikhnevich whipped up in Novosti caused me such anxiety that I had to hole myself up and not admit anyone;' wrote Repin irritably. "It is only possible to finish something when one can command particular peace and self-control:' 19 When the exhibition opened, it was precisely The Zaporozhian Cossacks that became a prime target among critics, as much for those who saw in the painting "a new triumph" of Repin's talent as for those for whom the picture represented nothing more than "exhaustive physiognomy" or "a subject painting about sharovary alone" (sharovary being the trousers worn by Cossacks). Suvorin's paper Novoe vremia, with an article by Diakov, and the journal Nabliudatel', with a wideranging piece by Chuiko, both became a sort of printed tribunal in which negative views of the exhibition were condensed. They rejected not only the significance of The Zaporozhian Cossacks, but placed a question mark over the qualities ofRepin's painting as a whole. The criticism of the painting, for all its severity, was far from universally accepted. Nonetheless, it caused Repin intense personal and moral anxiety, despite the artist's conviction that he had given his paintings his all. At times, the critical bent of the reviews even purported to teach Repin what he should and should not paint. "He paints some sort of landscapes, and paints many of them, as well as subjects relating to current affairs;' fulminated Diakov, "but he is looking for his business in the wrong place and should discard all of this, even the portraits-Repin is squandering his talents here on trifles. The artist should study Russian history, types, and accessories, and paint historical dramas, as everything else is child's play:'20 The critics included among the "child's play" that was "not worthy of attention'' the exhibition's large section of studies and sketches. Indeed, it was this section that proved to be the most surprising for the public and critics alike. Along with The Zaporozhian Cossacks, it attracted the greatest volume and variety of press attention, not to mention a powerful wave of adverse reviews. While acknowledging that this sort of exhibition, with its considerable component of preparatory material, could serve as a useful

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pedagogical tool for the younger generations and for developing artists, critics nonetheless reserved their attention for the unfinished nature of the works. "The public seeks pleasure, but their beloved artist appears before us here as if in his dressing gown;' wrote ChuikoYThe review in Moskovskie vedomosti echoed such thoughts. "I do not think that it was in the artist's best interests to show the public his studies and sketches. [... ]They simply blurt out, 'what's with all this daubing?'" 22 As Diakov summarized in his review, "In this respect one cannot blame the public, which has no idea of what happens in an artist's studio:m Similar ideas about this section of the exhibition resounded in almost all of the reviews, even those that were well disposed toward Repin. Even when the reviewer acknowledged that he himself enjoyed these small masterpieces, the same critic would still concur with the public that Repin should not be exhibiting such material. Behind the rejection of the studies' significance, the disapproval of their inclusion in the exhibition, and a failure to understand the very point of this vast component of Repin's creative work that he was placing on view for the first time, lay a general inability among his contemporaries to appreciate the independent worth of preparatory sketches and studies. It would take some time before a younger generation would affirm the significance of such artistic explorations. They would begin to appreciate the study not just as preparatory work for a painting, painted from life (as was the case on the whole at Repin's exhibition, and more generally with the older generation such as Polenov and Shishkin), but would see in it an immediacy of engagement, and an artist's often momentary impression of nature that would acquire the same significance as finished paintings. In this respect, Repin's exhibition of 1891 played a vital part in heralding the independent value of sketches and validating interest in them. He acted decisively, even selflessly, metaphorically admitting a broad public to his studio, and revealing to them the secrets behind the conception of a painting. The exhibition made manifest the fundamental methods of the artist's work, the very essence of the process behind the initial creative thought and its realization. Repin complained in his letters that the public in St. Petersburg walked listlessly through the exhibition; that few people came; and that the event "was of greater specialist interest for artists:' But even artists of the older generation were not always fulsome in

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their reception and praise of the event. Chistiakov, for example, betrayed a certain guardedness and doubt in a letter to Konstantin Soldatenkov, calling the exhibition "risky:' One must give credit to Stasov who, with his characteristic passion, threw himself to Rep in's defense and support and, moreover, understood the value of the small-scale works. Gentlemen! What is this madness that our critics and reporters are writing? [... ] The artist's studies and sketches are a dainty dish that brings intense pleasure to anyone with even the slightest sensibility towards art. [... ] Here it is a matter of vivid sketches from nature, from life, from reality, from living people, from the living world-sketches that are always painted with the sort of passion and fire that an artist alone can express. In many cases the sketches and studies are more talented and valuable than the paintings themselves, finished as they may be with every possible care. 24

Those visitors who were most sensible to the changes taking place in the art world reacted unanimously, and acquired some of the studies directly from the exhibition. Tretiakov expanded his gallery by buying several sketches there, among them Pavlov in the Operating Theatre, The Little Courtyard, The Railway Guard, Khotkovo (1882, GTG), and various other examples. The collector asked Rep in to draw his attention to the most important works, as "they are all without exception interesting to a greater or lesser degree, and I would take them all were I not anxious about questions of space:' 25 Ostroukhov bought from the exhibition works that would become the jewels of his collection-the sketches for Receiving the District Elders and a whole series of outstanding studies for Ivan the Terrible, as well as The Annual Meeting in Memory of the French Communards at the Fere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (1883, fig. 7.2), a superb little painting that Repin considered a sketch. Ostroukhov was beginning to assemble his collection more actively at this very time, and the acquisition of study material would become a priority for him. The twenty-year-old Sergei Diaghilev also bought several ofRepin's studies from the exhibition, while the young Alexandre Benois acquired a preparatory work for Procession of the Cross entitled An Old Woman on Her Knees. Most evident in these small canvases was the artist's fascination with plasticity and form-those very aspects of painting that most exercised the younger generation of artists as they began from the late 1880s to form an aesthetic

conceptualization that differed from that of the older Peredvizhniki. Indeed, as early as 1883, Mikhail Vrubel, speaking of Procession of the Cross, had given Repin his due for the sheer power of the painting and considered it the most "capital" work at the Peredvizhnik exhibition; but he nonetheless compared his impression of Repin's painting to that of standing "before an unfolded printed page:' Musing on the "independent;' self-contained business of an artist, which for Vrubellay in a "cult of profound nature" and in the study of form (which he considered the most important task of painting), he wrote to his sister: "Studying nature from morning to night, greedily devouring her endless curves and yet at times sitting drearily before our canvases with drooping hand-we went to the Peredvizhnik exhibition and saw rows of paintings which mocked our fervor, torment, and labor. [... ]The artists there have not been carrying out impassioned conversations with nature, but grappling with how best to imprint a particular idea on the viewer:' 26 For the young Vrubel, even the masterful Repin was guilty of ignoring the importance of nature to an artist's work. Repin was without doubt an artist whose talent was best realized in large, finished paintings. A study for him was always the means with which to resolve a particular idea, rather than the fundamental or sole aim of his work. Yet the extent to which he depended on and valued studio work, and the importance that he attached to the direct engagement with nature, is evidenced time and again-by the scale of the section of studies at his exhibition, and his many thoughts and comments on the subject in his letters; by the watercolor sketching sessions that he organized in his studio, and which even Vrubel frequented; and by the fact that just a few years after his solo show, in 1896, Repin again turned to a similar project, organizing a display of his and his pupils' studies and sketches, which he called the Exhibition of Experiments in Creative Art. 27 The artist had high hopes for this project, suggesting that it could open up new directions in art in an epoch-changing way. The organization of this exhibition, too, was no simple task, running as it did counter to artistic practice at the time, and in particular to the regulations of the Academy exhibitions, where only finished works could be shown. Repin was undoubtedly influenced by young artists in this respect. Looking at the scope and development of his students-Serov especially, as well as the students in his studio at the Academy-certainly had

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7.2. Ilia Repin, The Annual Meeting in Memory of the French Communards at the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, 1883. Oil on canvas, 36.8 x 59.8 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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an impact, and forced him to analyze and juxtapose, to seek answers to the questions that naturally arose. Here, Repin's responsiveness, his natural sensibility and sensitivity, underpinned not only the day-to-day practice of his work, but also a certain dissatisfaction that seized him around this time. "I am unable to settle down seriously to any of my undertakings. Everything seems trivial, not worth the effort:' 28 He keenly felt the need to achieve some ideal, absolute, aesthetic beauty in these years, and underwent a complex inner development as he attempted to modify his views on the creative act. Indeed, the early 1890s saw the appearance of his Letters on Art (1893), which bore witness to his desire to comprehend the profound change that was taking place in artistic practice at the turn of the twentieth century, and to establish his own relationship to these new developments. If the artist's strength of character and particular talent meant that his own creative work could notindeed, should not-be anything other than what it was, and that it knew its own limits, his interest in artistic form or, in Repin's own words, in "art as art;' in many ways matched that of younger artists. One should not see in Repin's letters on art pretentions to a coherent system of aesthetic thought. The artist made no such claims. The letters are mentioned in the context of the exhibition here simply to underline the broader connections Repin was making during this transitional period of the early 1890s. The 1891 exhibition focused attention on Repin's art and its underlying traditions; it compelled people to think about what linked him to the younger generation, and what put distance between them. At that time, Repin remained, in Benois's words, "undeniably great" for those young artists who would become stalwarts of Mir iskusstva (the World of Art group), even if in future years they would become firm opponents of the fundamental principles of the Peredvizhniki, and of what they saw as Repin's moral orientation and tendentious approach (see chapter 9). They found in him the most compelling response to many preoccupations of the time, and saw that, with the onset of maturity and advancing age (to a twenty-year-old youth, the artist, at forty-seven, seemed an old man), there was still a freshness about him, an alertness to everything that life and art exposed him to, an immediacy to his work. His creative powers remained intact. Sharing her impression of Repin's exhibition in a letter to her husband, Natalia Polenova wrote, "Repin is such a powerful artist that the very artist in

him excludes everything else. This is why people are more attracted to him, and set him apart from the Peredvizhniki:'29 A few years later Diaghilev would note the very same quality in Repin's work. In an article on the latest Peredvizhnik exhibition in which he sarcastically dismissed the decrepit Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, he singled out Repin for being much closer to contemporary practice "than to the highest citadels of the Peredvizhnik cemetery, closer in artistic feeling to the young generation:' 30 The star of this generation, Alexandre Benois, recalled years later that, "with the onset of old age, [Repin] in no way lost his freshness and sensibility; he continued to talk about and paint everyone and everything with his earlier youthful immediacy, and with complete sincerity." 31 The younger generation seized on the painterly elements of Repin's work: the expansive and free draftsmanship; the pictorial extent of his genre scenes; the brilliant resolution of his plein-air projects; the unique characterization of each portrait. Standing in front of Repin's portrait of him, Serov declared, "we can draw like this, but we are unable to fix and seize the entire person in this way:' 32 Benois, for his part, wrote that he derived his greatest pleasure at the 1891 exhibition from The Zaporozhian Cossacks, with its medley oflively and characterful faces, but that what attracted people to the painting most was the noble composition of paints "which, for all their restraint, shone in all their brightness as if from some great depth;' so that "even the unfortunate white felt cloak on the back of the standing Cossack succeeds in its painterly relationships:m Above all, young artists were won over by Repin's legendary productivity, by his extraordinary capacity for work. As Sergei Ivanov wrote to Elena Polenova a few days after the opening of the exhibition, "Here is the irrepressible Ilia Efimovich Repin: irrepressible in what way? With three hundred items [on show]. The devil knows what it must be like to paint and paint in this way, without the desire to know anybody. Does he never have any disappointments or doubts?" 34 Within just a few years, however, this same generation would be making very different aesthetic judgments of Repin's work. With the audacity of youth, Benois declared of the artist in his History of Russian Painting in the Nineteenth Century, "There is nothing more to expect from Rep in. He has said everything:' He nonetheless added, "all the same, there is not yet sufficient historical distance to judge the true greatness of Repin:' 35 As Janet Kennedy discusses in chapter 9 of this volume, such

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comments are typical of Benois's tendency throughout his History of Russian Painting to dismiss the work of the Peredvizhniki while still acknowledging the potential historical significance of their art. Repin's relations with new ideas in art, and with their young champions, were far from straightforward. However, for all the misunderstandings and irritations, the central elements of his work triumphed. One of the most important qualities for which people respected Repin was the artist's conviction in the rectitude of his work, and in the honesty of those ideals that he followed in his art. Speaking of this quality, Elena Polenova called Repin an "idealist": "Precisely for the power with which he believes in his mission[ ... ] of artistic realism, he was and is an idealist, that is to say a man who believes in a particular idea, and in the way in which he can express this idea as well and as clearly as possible:'36 Diaghilev echoed this at the very moment when a deep rift was appearing between Repin and the Mir iskusstva group: "Repin cannot and should not fear his realism;' for his "greatest merit is that he is not afraid to be himself' 37 Konstantin Korovin, too, recalled of the artist, "He was a splendid artist and painter, pure of heart and thought [... ] a genuine painter, a painter-artist. In Repin's works there is a power, a great expressive strength; new form, strong rhythmic drawing, and a fiery temperament:' He was, Korovin added, "A painter pure as water at all times:' Yet here Korovin also conveyed Vrubel's assessment of Repin: "He garlanded Russian art with the most authentic of flowers, but I prefer other things:' 38 AFTER H r s soLo sHow of 1891, over seventy exhibitions of Repin's work opened in the course of just over a century (1891-2011). These exhibitions started to take place during his lifetime, beginning in 1919. In the organization of these exhibitions Repin was assisted by Vasilii Levi (1878-1953), a lawyer, collector, and artist who was empowered to act for Repin from 1910 to the 1920s. Exhibitions organized by Levi opened in Helsinki, Stockholm, Prague, Hamburg, The Hague, Cannes, and other European cities. At the same time Repin, living away from Russia at his dacha Penaty in Kuokkola, Finland, felt a driving need to create new works. Particularly significant among the exhibitions were those that marked anniversaries in Repin's life. One to celebrate his eightieth birthday and sixty years of creative activity opened in the Tretiakov Gallery in 1924, and in the Russian Museum in Leningrad the following year. The exhibition differed slightly in each venue in terms of the number and selection of

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exhibits, but the organizers took as their aim the first systematic compilation of the artist's creative output. As the preface to the Moscow version of the catalogue remarked, ''At the present time it is still difficult for us to appreciate fully everything Repin has produced, as far from all of his work has been compiled in any systematic account:' 39 On the very day of the opening of the exhibition in Leningrad, Kornei Chukovskii, a young friend of Repin's, wrote to him in Kuokkola: "I have just this minute returned from your opening ceremony. What a titanic impression. It is impossible to believe that this abundance of faces and figures is all the work of one man. The vast hall was overflowingwith 340 works by I.E. Repin:'40 Repin longed to go to the exhibition in Leningrad, but his age and other circumstances prevented him from fulfilling this wish. 41 The following exhibition took place in 1936-1937, opening successively in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Minsk, and enjoying the status of an "all-Union'' (Vsesoiuznyi) exhibition. It aspired to unearth and exhibit as many works by Repin as possible from every museum collection in the Soviet Union, as well as from certain private collections. The catalogue included 892 works of painting, drawing, and sculpture. 42 Despite such a volume of entries, the catalogue did not exhaust the complete corpus of Repin's oeuvre, though it did give serious momentum to the study of his creative work. In 1957-1958, the Russian Museum and the Tretiakov Gallery jointly organized an exhibition that aimed to display a selection of outstanding works by the artist. Along with exhibits from museum collections in Russia, the exhibition included others from the National Gallery of Prague and the Ateneum Museum in Helsinki. The organizers deliberately limited the display to Repin's canvases up to 1915, even though the artist had worked productively for a further decade and a half, and had created a considerable number of serious and significant works. In this respect Repin's exhibition of 1994 stood apart from its predecessor in its intent to provide a new reading of the great artist's creative legacy. 43 Here, the organizers broadened the geography of the painted and graphic works of the artist by displaying many works from foreign museums and private collections for the first time in Russia. These works included the portrait of the writer Vsevolod Garshin (1884) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the portrait of Anna Andreeva, widow of the writer Leonid Andreev (1921), from the Kustaa Hiekka Foundation in Tampere; and the portrait of Akseli Gallen- Kallela (1920), as well as Finnish Celebrities (1922),

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from the Ateneum Museum in Helsinki. They were joined by late works by Repin from museums in Sweden and private collections in Finland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. The exhibition also included many landscape works, attesting to Repin's unquenchable, if volatile, interest in landscape motifs, even if the artist himself often said that he was no landscapist. This revelation of Repin's fascination with landscape countered the view formed in the Soviet period of Rep in as an artist exclusively devoted to social and political concerns, and redressed the Soviet emphasis on his work of the 1870s and 1880s, all of which had greatly hindered any presentation of the full extent of his creative work. Another important aspect of the 1994 exhibition was the inclusion of Repin's works from the second half of the 1910s and the1920s, which epitomize the little-studied tendencies of his late period. Indeed, the event compelled a serious reappraisal of Igor Grabar's insistent thesis that Repin's work went downhill from the 1900s. The exhibition included not only known works of this period, but also fundamental paintings that had disappeared from the view of researchers for decades~ works such as Portrait of Emperor Nicholas II (1895), Portrait of Aleksandr Kerensky (1918), and The Morning of Christ's Resurrection. Noli me tangere (19201922), as well as The Incredulity of Thomas (1920s)~all of which attest to the inextinguishable creative potential of the artist, and to his continual search for new themes and new modes of artistic expression. 44 Vladimir Stasov's words that Repin was inexhaustible have been confirmed not only by every exhibition, each of which has brought new works to light, but also by the passage of time, which has brought unexpected encounters with little-known works by this most tireless of artists. The 1891 exhibition, therefore, not only introduced new paintings to a public hungry for Repin's work, generated intense critical debate, and instantiated the sketch as a key part of the artist's oeuvre; it also inaugurated more than a century of solo exhibitions that have dramatically expanded our understanding of this extraordinary artist's work.

This essay was translated by Rosalind P. Blakesley and edited by Margaret Samu. 1. Anton P. Chekhov to M.I. Chaikovskii, 16 November 1890, in A.P. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii,

vol. 11, Pis'ma 1877-1892 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1963), 404-5. 2. Mikhail V. Nesterov, Davnie dni. Vstrechi i vospominaniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1959), 316. 3. S.N. Gol'dshtein et al., eds., Tovarishchestvo

peredvizhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystavok: pis'ma, dokumenty, 1869-1899 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), 1:331. Elizabeth Valkenier discusses this chapter in Repin's life, including his solo exhibition, in Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art, Studies of the Harriman Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 127-56. 4. Il'ia E. Repin to Konstantin A. Savitskii, 28 September 1887, in Gol'dshtein et al., Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystavok, 1:331. 5. Il'ia E. Repin to Elizaveta N. Zvantsevo, 1 September 1891, in Mir iskusstv. Al'manakh (2001), 719. 6. Valentin A. Serov to Il'ia S. Ostroukhov, 25 December 1888, in Valentin Serov v perepiske, dokumentakh i inter'viu, ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein i VA. Samkov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1985), 1:133. Serov is referring here to Repin's personal life, as he was in the throes of separating from his wife Vera Alekseevna, which placed a great strain on his family life and made a distinct mark on his creative work. 7. Il'ia Repin to D.I. Iavornitskii, 20 October 1891, in Il'ia E. Repin, Pis'ma k khudozhnikam i khudozhestvennym deiateliam (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952). Repin used advice and information provided by Dmitrii Iavornitskii (Evarnitskii, 1855-1940), the Ukrainian historian and ethnographer, in his painting

The Zaporozhian Cossacks. 8. Il'ia E. Repin to Tatiana L. Tolstaia, 10 January 1892, in Il'ia E. Repin, I.E. Repin i L.N. Tolstoi. Perepiska s L.N. Tolstym i ego sem'ei (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1949), 1:46. 9. Tatiana L. Tolstaia to Il'ia E. Repin, 7 March 1892, in Repin i Tolstoi, 1:122. 10. PetrI. Neradovskii, Iz zhizni khudozhnika (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1965), 48-49. 11. Kolos'ia, no. 1 (January 1892): 266-73. 12. Moskovskie vedomosti, 26 January 1892. 13. Moskovskie vedomosti, 26 January 1892. 14. Il'ia E. Repin to Pavel M. Tret'iakov, undated, 1892, in I.E. Repin, Perepiska s P.M. Tret'iakovym, 18731898 (Moscow/Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1946), 156-57. 15. V.M. Mikheev, "Repin. Kharakteristika;' Artist, no. 29, book 4 (1893): 100. 16. Vladimir V. Stasov, "Vot nashi strogie tseniteli i sud'i;' Severnyi vestnik, no. 1, section 2 (1892): 98. 17. Stasov, "Vot nashi strogie tseniteli i sud'i;' 98.

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18. V.O. Mikhnevich, "V masterskoi Repina;' Novosti, no. 69 (1891). 19. Il'ia E. Repin to G.P. Alekseev, March 1891, in Il'ia E. Repin, Izbrannye pis'ma, 1867-1930 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969), 1:378. G.P. Alekseev was a collector who owned many artifacts associated with the history of the Zaporozhian Sech'. 20. Zhitel' [A. A. Diakov], Novae vremia (27 November 1891): 159. 21. V Chuiko, "Khudozhestvennye vystavki gg. Repina i Shishkina;' Nabliudatel', no. 2 (February 1892): 53-61. 22. Cited in Stasov, "Vot nashi strogie tseniteli i sud'i;' 92. 23. Zhitel' [A. A. Diakov], Novae vremia (27 November 1891): 159. 24. Stasov, "Vot nashi strogie tseniteli i sud'i;' 92-93. 25. Pavel M. Tret'iakov to Il'ia E. Repin, 17 January 1892, in Repin, Perepiska s PM. Tret'iakovym, 154-55. 26. Mikhail A. Vrubel to his sister, A.A. Vrubel, 4 February 1883, in E.P. Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, Iu. N. Podkopaeva, and Iu. V Novikov, eds., Vrubel. Perepiska. Vospominaniia o khudozhnike (Leningrad/Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963), 59. 27. On this exhibition, see Alison Hilton, "The Exhibition of Experiments in St. Petersburg and the Independent Sketch;' The Art Bulletin 7, no. 4 (December 1988): 677-98. 28. Il'ia E. Repin to Elena P. TarkhanovaAntokol'skaia, 7 August 1894, in Il'ia E. Repin, Pis'ma k E.P Tarkhanovoi-Antokol'skoi i I.R. Tarkhanovu (Leningrad/Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1937), 33. 29. N.V Polenova to Vladimir D. Polenov, in Vasilii Dmitrievich Polenov. Elena Dmitrievna Polenova. Khronika sem'i khudozhnikov, ed. Elena V Sakharova (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), 488. 30. Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo: stat'i, otkrytye pis'ma, interv'iu, perepiska, sovremenniki o Diagileve, v 2-kh tomakh, ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein and VA. Samkov (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1982), 1:126. 31. Aleksandr Benua, Moi vospominaniia v piati knigakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 4:50. 32. Valentin Serov v vospominaniiakh, dnevnikakh i perepiske sovremennikov, ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein and VA. Samkov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1971), 2:206. 33. Aleksandr Benua, Istoriia russkoi zhivopisi v XIX veke (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 273.

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34. Sergei V Ivanov to Elena D. Polenova, 8 December 1891, in Vasilii Dmitrievich Polenov. Elena Dmitrievna Polenova, 475. 35. Benua, Istoriia russkii zhivopisi v XIX veke, 265-66. 36. Letter from Elena D. Polenova to Sergei V Ivanov, 15 December 1891, in Vasilii Dmitrievich Polenov. Elena Dmitrievna Polenova, 476. 37. Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo, 1:126. 38. Konstantin Korovin, Konstantin Korovin vspominaet, ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein and VA. Samkov (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1990), 133, 135. 39. Il'ia Efimovich Repin, 1844-1924. Katalog Iubileinoi vystavki proizvedenii (Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery, 1924), 4. 40. Il'ia E. Repin and Kornei Chukovsky, Perepiska. 1906-1929 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 202. 41. Repin lived from 1917 until his death in 1930 in exile in Finland, as the boundary settlement made after World War I left the dacha where he lived in Kuokkala in independent Finland, which had been an autonomous part of the Russian Empire since 1809. On this chapter of Repin's life, see Valkenier, Ilya Repin, 185-99. 42. Katalog vystavki proizvedenii I.E. Repina (Moscow: OGIZ IZOGIZ, 1936). 43. Il'ia Efimovich Repin, 1844-1930. K 150-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia. Katalog iubleinoi vystavki (Moscow: Krasnaia ploshchad: 1994). 44. See Galina S. Churak and David Jackson, "A newly-discovered portrait of Tsar Nicholas by Ilya Repin;' Apollo (October 1997): 32-37; Galina Churak, "Noli me tangere;' Russkaia Galereia, 1 (2001): 62-65; Galina Churak, "Vstrechi s 'novym' Repinym;' Sobranie, 1 (2004): 20-29.

T H E C 0 N T EM P 0 RARY REC E P T I 0 N 0 F I LI A REP I N ' S S0 L0

EXH I BI T I0 N 0 F 18 9 1

Pavel Tretiakov's Icons WENDY SALMOND

"What for some is the heights, the depths, enchantment, perfection, for others is decline and disintegration:' - A. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi 1

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etween 1890 and his death in 1898, the Moscow art collector Pavel Tretiakov acquired sixty-two icons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With this comparatively late entry into the world of icons, Tretiakov laid the foundation for one of the world's greatest collections of medieval Russian paintings. Why is it, then, that Tretiakov's icons are today so rarely mentioned and so hard to find? The most practical explanation is that they were simply swallowed up into the vast repositories of the reorganized State Tretiakov Gallery in 1930, along with thousands of icons from churches and private collections nationalized after 1917. As a result, locating them in the gallery's catalogue is a painstaking task and finding images of them a challenge? A more complicated reason is that the icons that Tretiakov chose- the very best money could buy in the 1890squickly became old-fashioned and aesthetically devalued in the next century. Beginning around 1905, as fifteenth-century icons were discovered and cleaned, icon painting's Golden Age was moved several centuries back in time, from the court culture of the Muscovite state and the first Romanov tsars to Republican Novgorod. Tretiakov's icons were caught up in this process of reevaluation, victims of a revolution in aesthetic criteria fought along generational lines.

Creating the Collection (1890-1898) In the early 1890s, when Tretiakov made his first acquisitions, Russia was full of medieval icons, but for most educated people they were for all intents and purposes invisible. The devotional practice of periodically repainting icons and adorning them with new metal covers (oklady) meant that beneath an image of quite recent production, several much older versions of the same subject might well be concealed. Even in this disguised form, however, icons of any appreciable age had long since begun to disappear from daily use. In many churches (particularly in urban centers and on gentry estates) and in private homes, it was increasingly unusual to find any dating back earlier than the eighteenth century. Peter the Great's importation of Western cultural values from around 1700 had made it an act of enlightened piety and good taste to replace old iconostases with shiny new Baroque ones, to whitewash over frescoes, and in general to improve the grandeur of churches by a process of continued renovation. Rather than being destroyed, decommissioned church icons were typically left by a pious clergy to molder in bell towers and outbuildings, remaining there until the massive collecting boom that began after 1905. But in the nineteenth century many smaller icons became the jealously guarded property of the Old Believer community. Patriarch Nikon's reform

of Russian Orthodox Church ritual in the 1650s split the population into those who followed the official, reformed Orthodox Church and the adherents of the so-called Old Belief, who rejected its authority. In the wake of these reforms, this second group filled their prayer rooms with icons painted before the world as they knew it came to an end (fig. 8.1). Old Believers became the guardians of all extant knowledge about the icon's history, while their icons became the most visible symbols of Old Rus. Skilled in emulating the many styles of pre-Nikonian icon painting, they were the logical choices to repair or restore important old icons for the official church and often used the opportunity to "rescue" them, leaving an exact copy in their place. Old Believers also dominated the antiquarian trade, which flourished during the nationalistic nineteenth century, and their reputation as both connoisseurs and con men willing to fleece unwary collectors was celebrated in the popular stories of Nikolai Leskov and Pavel MelnikovPecherskii. 3 Over time a distinctive Old Believer aesthetic developed that profoundly influenced the first collectors and historians of icons in the mid-nineteenth century. Of necessity their icons were small and often took the form of miniature portable iconostases and triptych shrines; as they were forbidden to worship in their own churches and were periodically in flight from official persecution, Old Believers had little use for large icons. The fifteenth-century icons produced in Novgorod the Great or attributed to the monk Andrei Rub lev were revered, but only dimly understood beneath their layers of overpainting, and so it was almost entirely Muscovite icons that shaped Old Believer taste-icons that had witnessed the reigns oflvan the Terrible (r. 1533-1584) and Boris Godunov (r. 1598-1605), the ensuing Time of Troubles, and the creation of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. Favored subjects and styles were those in vogue during this turbulent period of Russian history: complicated scenes of many figures, abstruse didactic and allegorical themes, miniature painting of great virtuosity and decorative beauty, somber in color but enlivened by gold highlights and patterns, with frames and adornments of chased silver, filigree, and enamel, studded with pearls and precious stones. Icons made for the wealthy Stroganov family, inscribed with the patron's and often the artist's name, were especially prized by Old Believer connoisseurs, since this wealthy family from Solvychegodsk was reputed to have collected icons as precious works of art as well as devotional images.

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It was thus a market dominated by Old Believer taste, expertise, and values that Tretiakov encountered when he decided to add a group of icons to the encyclopedic collection of Russian easel painting he had spent four decades acquiring (mentioned in chapters 5, 6, and 7). The only contemporary account we have of how Tretiakov bought his first icons comes from his fellow collector, Aleksei Bakhrushin. In his gossipy little book, Who Collects What, Bakhrushin described Tretiakov's visit to the exhibition of church antiquities that accompanied the Eighth Archaeological Congress of 1890. 4 Held in the Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow, the exhibition assigned six of its eleven halls to icons from leading Old Believer collections, including those of the rival Moscow antique dealers Nikolai Postnikov and Ivan Silin. Bakhrushin reported: Wishing to have in his magnificent collection examples of ancient Russian art, which could only be found in icons, [Tretiakov] wanted to buy a few representative old icons of good workmanship. For this purpose he approached N.M. Postnikov at the Archaeological Exhibition, but Nikolai Mikhailovich said that his straitened circumstances obliged him to sell his collection only in its entirety. Tretiakov didn't want this and turned instead to I.L. Silin, from whom he bought [five or six good icons for 20,000 rubles]. 5 Afterwards Postnikov said (and I believe him completely), "''m very glad that Tretiakov bought these icons, I'm glad because he started collecting them, and also because he bought really good worthy icons, and paid a good price for them, but at the same time he took the very best things Silin had:' 6

The most striking part of this account is the amount Tretiakov was willing to spend on highquality icons, on a par with or exceeding what he was accustomed to pay for contemporary paintings. Thus, for a little sixteenth -century icon of the Igorevskaia Mother of God in a silver enamel frame he paid Silin 5,000 rubles, the same amount he had negotiated with Vasilii Surikov in 1883 for his monumental history painting Boiarynia Morozova. 7 He gave 9,000 rubles for an icon of the Complete Resurrection, when just six years before the 10,000 he paid Repin for his Procession of the Cross in Kursk Province was "the highest sum [he] had yet paid for a single canvas:' 8 And he gave a staggering 25,000 rubles for his first acquisition, a portable "church" or iconostasis-1 0,000 more than he would pay Viktor Vasnetsov for his Tsar

8.1. M. Dmitriev, Photograph of the interior of an Old Believer prayer room, ca. 1900, Nizhnii Novgorod.

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Ivan the Terrible in 1897. Between 1890 and 1892 alone, he spent over 100,000 rubles to purchase some thirty icons. 9 Yet while we know a good deal about Tretiakov's criteria for buying contemporary art, thanks to his voluminous correspondence with artists, all we can say for certain about his motivations for buying icons so late in his career comes from a paragraph in his will of 6 September 1896, in which he made clear his intention that these should form part of the public collection he was developing. On his death, he wrote, "The collection of early Russian painting (icons) and books on art that remain in my apartment ... are to be transferred to the Tretiakov Brothers' Moscow Civic Art Gallery:' 10 Just what the "patron of the Peredvizhniki" was looking for in his icons remains a matter for speculation and even controversy. In broad terms Tretiakov's goals were self-evident. Clearly, he was intent on buying some big names for his gallery, exceptional individuals in a largely anonymous field, who would be a worthy match for the giants of contemporary Russian painting like Repin, Surikov, and Vasnetsov. At the top of any icon collector's wish list was at least one work by Andrei Rub lev, whose name had long been synonymous with the finest traditions of Russian icon painting. 11 Four of Tretiakov's icons thus came with assurances that they were by this legendary and elusive figure. 12 Two more bore the inscription "painted for Maksim Iakovlevich Stroganov;' in itself considered a guarantee of the highest artistic quality. One of these, a small folding triptych of "In Thee Rejoiceth" framed by eighteen feasts, bore the signature of the painter Vasilii Chirin. 13 Another rare "named" Stroganov icon was signed by Nikifor Savin. 14 At some point in the 1890s Tretiakov also acquired a pair oflarge allegorical icons attributed to Simon Ushakov, the great court painter of the mid seventeenth century. 15 The impulse to think in terms of individual artists reflected both the collector's mission of acquiring works by "all Russian artists" for his gallery, and the contemporary scholarly interest in compiling dictionaries of all known named icon painters. 16 Where other icon collectors of his generation aspired to the greatest possible completeness and range of styles and periods, Tretiakov was discriminating. 17 His acquisitions had all the hallmarks of a top Old Believer collection. Age was of course highly prized-three icons in his collection were from the fifteenth century 18 and three more from the first half of the sixteenth. 19 The high price of the "traveling church'' no doubt reflected the fact that it was an unusually early example of the small

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folding iconostases that became commonplace a century later. More generally, his purchases-which included seven icons of the hymnal icon "In Thee Rejoiceth;' as well as eight more in which the central icon is framed by scenes or feast days-captured the contemporary taste for artful composition and virtuosity displayed in icons with multiple figures, scenes, and eye-catching details. There were also examples that included rare and unusual subjects and figures, such as three Russian saints among the "usual figures" in the bottom deisis row of the traveling iconostasis, real historical figures whose presence signaled the preferences and allegiances of a specific patron. An otherwise unremarkable icon of St. Gerasim ofJordan would have attracted Tretiakov, it has been suggested, because he recognized in this obscure saint the hero of Leskov's moralizing tale, Father

Gerasim's Lion. 20 Beyond these observations, Tretiakov's motivations remain elusive and open to interpretation. Was he collecting icons as works of art, and thereby ushering in an entirely new attitude toward them, as Igor Grabar and others later claimed?21 Or was he a typical representative of the liberal intelligentsia, for whom icons were ethnographic artifacts reflecting Russian life? In her introduction to the State Tretiakov Gallery's first icon catalogue in 1963, Valentina Antonova insisted that there was "absolutely no enthusiasm for Russian icon painting as art" discernible in Tretiakov's selections.Z 2 To impute such motives to the patron of the Peredvizhniki was an anachronism, she argued, since the very notion of the icon's aesthetic value could only emerge when Novgorod icons were cleaned early in the next century. Rather, what Tretiakov appreciated in icons was their ability to tell edifying stories-their povestvovatel'nost'. In support of this argument, Anton ova pointed to the number of triptychs and framed icons whose wings featured scenes and figures that illuminated the central image; of icons framed in zhitie or bytie scenes-episodes in the life of the personage depicted that unfolded sequentially in time and space; and icons with especially complex multifigured compositions that required close reading by the viewer. There were good reasons in 1963 to assert the realist credentials ofTretiakov's icons against the highly formalist approach to early Russian painting that emerged after World War II. This was a continuation of the ideological wars that dominated Soviet art history. But Anton ova also rightly acknowledged the distinctive personality of the collection; the fact that in the 1890s the systematic cleaning of icons had not yet begun; and

Tretiakov's "literary" approach to painting, for which the subsequent generation would so mercilessly critique him. Describing his icons as an "encyclopedia of Russian life;' she nonetheless left unstated what it meant for Tretiakov's new acquisitions to be joining the much greater painting collection, linking together two spheres of national life. Tretiakov was certainly sensitive to the breadth of meanings that icons had acquired by the 1890s. That he appreciated their complexity as signs of Russia past and present is quite evident from the collection of paintings he bequeathed to the nation in 1892 {and to which he planned to add his new icons, as his will attests). As contemporary photographs and catalogues reveal, in room after room of the contemporary painting installation, the icon emerged as a consistent narrative thread within the paintings, a central character even, in scenes of Russian history and contemporary life.23 Like a vast diorama, the collection provided the viewer with an evolving pictorial and conceptual framework that showed the diversity of icons over time, but also a microcosm of the Russian experience. On the threshold between Rooms 6 and 7, for example, the attentive viewer could ponder the complexities of two and a half centuries of Russian history, played out against a background of icons and often featuring icons as active protagonists (fig. 8.2). Flanking the doorway were two large paintings that Tretiakov acquired in 1885-1886, part of a sequence of canvases devoted to the history of the Great Schism, a topic of considerable public interest in the 1880s. At the upper left hung Sergei Miloradovich's The Black Council. Solovetskii Monastery's Uprising against the New Printed Books in 1666, while to the right was Aleksandr Litovchenko's Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and Nikon, Archbishop of Novgorod, before the Relics of Filipp the Miracleworker, Metropolitan of Moscow. Such carefully painted church interiors were a staple of Russian history painting, their iconostases and frescoed walls a widely accessible metonym for the struggle between dissent and the official church. In the wake of the events that Miloradovich and Litovchenko reenacted, the Solovetskii Monastery would become a bastion of resistance to Nikon's reforms, and the Moscow Kremlin's Dormition Cathedral a backdrop for what Richard Wortman calls the Romanov dynasty's "scenarios of power:' 24 In the third painting in this cluster, Vasilii Surikov's depiction of Peter the Great's erstwhile crony in Siberian exile (Menshikov in Berezovo, 1883), icons

played a more dynamic role, standing in for Old Rus itself. Surikov adopted a favorite rhetorical device of Russian realist painters, that of visually emphasizing the tension between conflicting cultural forces. Even at a distance the extreme asymmetry of the composition embodies the gulf separating the old world (represented by the icons, books, and candles at upper right) from the forces of change that the exiled Menshikov and his family represent. Ilia Repin used a similar device in his Tsarevna Sofiia in the Novodevichii Convent (1879), confining Peter's ambitious half sister within a claustrophobic space walled with gleaming icons. So too did Aleksei Kivshenko, in War Council at Pili in 1812 (commissioned by Tretiakov in 1882). Cued by the path of Caravaggesque light, the viewer's eye travels from the warm light pooled beneath the icon of the Smolensk Mother of God to the shadows where Kutuzov debates whether to abandon Moscow to Napoleon. In these and other dramatic scenes from national history, icons were staple signs helping the viewer to understand the forces at work and the lessons to be absorbed. For the Peredvizhniki, dedicated observers of the contemporary Russian scene, the ubiquity of icons in daily life offered innumerable opportunities for commentaries on the way Russians lived now. The public display of miracle-working icons was a readymade panorama of Russian society with unparalleled opportunities for unveiling social disparity and official corruption. Powerful examples of this in Tretiakov's collection were Perov's Easter Procession (1861), Savitskii's Meeting the Icon (1878), and Repin's Procession of the Cross in Kursk Province (1880-1883). Icons also made poignant and pointed backdrops for the petty miseries and injustices of contemporary private life, as the Russian realists took the viewer behind closed doors to reveal an array of social ills. After Firs Zhuravlev's Before the Betrothal was acquired by the Alexander III museum in 1872, Tretiakov commissioned a variant of this commentary on the theme of the unwilling bride (fig. 8.3). In both versions the familial icons in their shiny modern oklads are, if not coconspirators in oppression, at least indifferent to the plight of the oppressed. Zhuravlev gives the little silver-gilt-covered icon of the Kazan Mother of God a key role as instrument of the father's implacable will, placed along the diagonal axis of his gaze and articulating the spatial and psychological gap dividing him from his daughter.Z 5 Even artists uninterested in social polemics gravitated toward the icon corner as the setting for innumerable

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8.2. Unknown photographer, The Tretiakov Gallery, view from Room ?looking into Room 6, showing installation of works by Miloradovich, Litovchenko, and Surikov, 1898.

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8.3. Firs Zhuravlev, Before the Betrothal, 1874. Oil on canvas, 99 x 134 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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scenes of popular life. In The Sick Husband (1881) Vasilii Maksimov invited viewers to contemplate the shelf of modest icons above the dying man's bed, in the spirit of a sympathetic ethnographer rather than an indignant Populist. Artists whose sole interest was to entertain and amuse were also magnetically drawn to the icon corner, where the family icons were served up as local color and a benign commentary on the sheer banality of human affairs. Vladimir Makovskii's Nightingale Fanciers (1873) and Vasilii Meshkov's Tooth Pulling (1891) draw our attention to scenes so ordinary that the icons have the same status as the samovar, so familiar that they fade into the background like wallpaper. Such images defined Tretiakov's collection as an encyclopedia in pictures of Russia past and present, its scope encompassing both the iconostases of the Kremlin cathedrals and the cheap mass-produced images of the peasantry, with all that this implied. By the 1890s, however, Tretiakov was also extending his patronage to a younger generation of artists whose view of the past and the current Russian scene was colored by new aspirations to breathe life into the past and find poetry in the present. His first icon purchases thus coincided with his patronage of a new direction in religious painting that to many promised a renaissance in the practice of icon painting itself. Since 1885 Viktor Vasnetsov and Mikhail Nesterov had been engaged in painting the interiors and icons of the new St. Vladimir's Cathedral in Kiev, and in 1893 Tretiakov bought a set ofVasnetsov's cartoons for his galleryimages of the Mother of God, Christ Pantocrator, The Only Begotten Son, and enormous ecstatic scenes of the Last Judgment. At the Peredvizhnik exhibition in 1890 he also bought Nesterov's Vision of the Youth Bartholomew, a highly controversial work among the older generation of Peredvizhniki precisely because it smacked too much of icon painting. This work can be glimpsed through the doorway into Room 6 (see fig. 8.2), together with two other canvases on the life of St. Sergius of Radonezh that Nesterov donated to Tretiakov in 1897-1898. Above it is the triptych The Labors of St. Sergius, which the artist described as a skladen or folding icon, a word redolent of Old Believer icons (by this date Tretiakov had acquired eight such triptychs). As he selected icons for his gallery throughout the 1890s, Tretiakov may not have been choosing with an eye to their formal values of color and line, but nor was he seeing them as mere "stories for the illiterate;' as caricatures of Peredvizhnik realism. The addition of icons to Tretiakov's gallery was a much more intentional

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act, allowing the public to visualize for the first time the full sweep of Russian painting's evolution, while at the same time providing the icons with an extraordinarily rich context that brought the full spectrum of Russian history and culture to life.

From Private to Public {1898-1913) It was not until after Tretiakov's death in 1898 that the icons were finally moved from his private apartments to join the main collection, which he had formally presented to the city of Moscow in 1892. A room was found for them on the second floor of the former family home on Lavrushinskii Lane and work began on preparing them for public display. Integrating the icons into the collection was the charge of a council appointed by the Moscow Duma and consisting of the artists Valentin Serov and Ilia Ostroukhov, and Tretiakov's daughter, Aleksandra Botkina. Tretiakov's will stipulated that his painting collection be maintained exactly as it was during his lifetime, with any new acquisitions hung separately. But the icons offered a truly unprecedented opportunity to show how examples of early Russian painting could form part of a single unfolding history of Russian art. Ostroukhov invited the distinguished diplomat, historian, and collector Nikolai Likhachev to catalogue Tretiakov's icon collection according to the most upto-date scholarly criteria. Likhachev had started to collect icons shortly after Tretiakov, when he bought a large chunk of Nikolai Postnikov's collection at auction. By the late 1890s he had embarked on a grandiose project to construct a full history of the icon's stylistic evolution based on the greatest possible number of examples. 26 Organizing Tretiakov's collection was thus a preliminary opportunity for him to publish "his ideas on the history of icon painting and miniatures:m The issue that most concerned Likhachev was devising reliable stylistic criteria that could be used to fit icons securely into a chronological structure, and for this he borrowed some of the fundamental tools of Old Believer connoisseurship. He selected four key visual markers to locate an icon within its period, from the early Novgorod era to the late Stroganov style: the coloration ( vokhrenie) offaces, their shape, the delineation of drapery folds (probelka), and the way mountains were painted.28 In Tretiakov's collection the predominance of icons from the period ca. 1550-1650 meant that Likhachev's central problem was

the identification and dating of so-called Stroganov icons, those highly coveted treasures that epitomized Old Believer taste and the height of virtuosity in the icon's stylistic evolution. Since inscriptions were integral to an icon's meaning and value, he also drew on paleographical evidence, which allowed him immediately to dismiss some of the more optimistic attributions (the Rublev and Ushakov icons). 29 While Likhachev was bringing system to the collection, Ostroukhov commissioned a set of display cases from the carpentry workshop at Abramtsevo (see chapter 4). 30 Designed by Viktor Vasnetsov, one ofTretiakov's favorite artists and himself a collector of icons, the cases were a restrained version of the highly ornamented neo-Russian style that Abramtsevo had made popular (fig. 8.4). Vasnetsov's framing of the icons, together with Ostroukhov's careful symmetrical hanging and generous spacing, gave the Tretiakov Gallery's icon room an ambiance quite distinct from the rest of the galleries, where paintings were packed cheek by jowl, Salon-style. The installation reflected a lingering theatricality associated with workshops like Abramtsevo, together with a desire to preserve some memory of the icons' original context, be it an Old Believer prayer room or the icon corner in a northern izba. In 1904, however, this approach to linking the Russian past and present through the design of space was already losing its freshness and novelty. What really signaled a sea change in public perception, though, was that almost overnight, Tretiakov's icons became oldfashioned. In retrospect, this dramatic change in the perception ofTretiakov's icons seems to stem from various coincidences at the time. In 1904 the Archaeological Institute, under Ostroukhov's direction, cleaned Rub lev's icon of the Old Testament Trinity, revealing the first real glimpse of the legendary artist; in the process, the oklad given by Boris Godunov was permanently removed. The following year, Nicholas II issued the Edict of Toleration, which brought the official persecution of Old Believers to an end and allowed communities to build their own churches furnished with church-size icons. In conjunction with these developments, a boom in private collecting took off, leading to a new generation of collectors, among them Stepan Riabushinskii, Aleksei Morozov, and Ostroukhov himself. Finally, experiments in cleaning Novgorod icons revealed an unsuspected world of color and form that cast the miniature Stroganov icons that Tretiakov had favored in the shade.

In this period of abundant opportunities for acquiring icons from earlier centuries, the Tretiakov collection remained static. Not a single icon was added between his death and 1917, so that with every year the disparity between the taste of the 1890s and the rapidly expanding state of knowledge intensified. It is not entirely clear why the Council of the Tretiakov Gallery held back from what must have been a great temptation to take advantage of the new market, particularly as Ostroukhov, the gallery's trustee until1913, was a passionate collector himself. Perhaps, as Grabar said, it was a purely economic decision, the council's limited acquisitions budget obliging them to make hard choices between rare eighteenth-century classics, icons, and contemporary art. 31 Perhaps it was the inflated prices resulting from the competition among a new set of collectors, or perhaps Ostroukhov's preoccupation with building his own collection played a part. 32 Whatever the reason, it was the only part of the collection not involved in the controversial debates surrounding new acquisitions at the time, and the incorporation of those new pieces into Tretiakov's original collection. 33 Certainly, when Grabar rehung the collection in 1913, Tretiakov's icons enabled him to present the gallery as a collection of Russian artists "from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth centurY:' The visitor, "moving from left to right through the rooms of the second floor, would become familiar with the entire complex process of the organic development of Russian art:' 34 Yet this claim to ever-expanded inclusiveness was hard to sustain with a collection of icons that remained ossified in the Muscovite era. The enforced stasis ofTretiakov's icons is especially noticeable when compared with the rising profile of Nikolai Likhachev's collection. It was Likhachev whom Sergei Diaghilev approached to borrow thirtyfive icons for the Russian exhibition at the 1906 Salon d'Automne in Paris (see chapter 9), which he described as "a look at the development of our art as seen by the modern eye:' 35 Diaghilev insisted that these icons be displayed on a wall of gold brocade-a prefiguration of so many later exhibitions designed to heighten the sensory context of the experience. 36 Equally significant was Diaghilev's omission of the Peredvizhniki from the exhibition, a calculated affront to Tretiakov's legacy and a sign that new histories of Russian art could be written that did not necessarily conform to the model laid out in the halls of the Tretiakov Gallery. One should not exaggerate the speed of this change in critical opinion. Until World War I, at

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8.4. Unknown photographer, Vitrines to house Pavel Tretiakov's icon collection, designed by Viktor Vasnetsov and made at the Abramtsevo Carpentry Workshop, 1904.

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least, Tretiakov's icons were still highly regarded as exceptional examples of the Muscovite and Stroganov styles, and when Matisse visited the gallery in 1911 he spent an enjoyable hour or so with Ostroukhov "opening all the glass doors of the cupboards:m Above all, the taste for icons of the seventeenth century received a huge official boost in court circles during the celebrations for the Romanov Tercentenary of 1913. Yet 1913 was also the definitive year in which the map of the Russian icon's history was redrawn, pushing icons of Tretiakov's era to the periphery.

Demotion (1913-1930) Around 1913 the public discussion of icons took a sharp turn. Tretiakov's icons were drawn into a public forum about icons that became increasingly polemical. Critical in this respect was the exhibition of icons from private collections held at the Delovoi Dvor on Varvarka Street in Moscow, a grand public unveiling of newly cleaned Novgorod icons in all their splendor. Novgorod icons had been dreamed about, but never seen in their original form, covered as they were by the layers of subsequent centuries. Inevitably, therefore, those later centuries began to suffer by invidious comparison. The very act of cleaning involved a decision to sacrifice later historical layers in search of a superior original image. The young critic Pavel Muratov became the most articulate spokesman for this new position. A passionate advocate ofNovgorod icons as "the only manifestation of high art in the entire history of early Russian painting;' Muratov's contribution to volume six of the new History of Russian Art ( 1909- 1916) edited by Igor Grabar was instrumental in reassessing the icon's history in light of recent discoveries, characterizing the Moscow period in general and the Stroganov school in particular as one of slow decline in a great artistic tradition. Icons that had once seemed exquisite, virtuosic, and teeming with interest, invention, and event, were now more likely to seem fussy and overembellished, requiring no aesthetic sensibility to appreciate. "Anyone can be astonished by the painstaking execution of Stroganov miniatures;' Muratov wrote. "This quality is more comprehensible and accessible than any other purely artistic quality of the early icon. Even someone entirely lacking in artistic receptiveness could take delight in the exceptionally fine draftsmanship and

execution of the Stroganov miniature-work (melkaia) icon:' 38 The same theme ran through his catalogue of Ostroukhov's collection, in which he compared the new breed of collector with those of the past, who had focused on "icons small in size and of particularly painstaking execution, unable to comprehend the beauty ofNovgorod painting and acknowledging only their historical value, with a false idea of Rublev as a master of tenderly shaded 'flowing' icon painting and an exaggerated delight in the refined miniatures of the Stroganov schooi:'39 In Grabar's History, Muratov included nine icons from Tretiakov's collection to help illustrate his theory. In Tretiakov's very first purchase, the early sixteenthcentury traveling iconostasis, Muratov believed he could still glimpse "the aesthetic theme shining through the religious theme;' but thereafter a process of decline set in where formal, painterly values were increasingly sacrificed to narrative in Tretiakov's choices. The painter ofTretiakov's Nativity (fig. 8.5) was "not so much concerned with the picture quality and strict coherence of the impression it made, as preoccupied with various picturesque episodes; he sacrifices the proportion of the figures and the rhythm of the composition, but cannot bring himself to sacrifice a single one of the many 'grasses' and the goats nibbling at them:'40 A Crucifixion with two saints on the borders from the time of Boris Godunov (ca. 1570) showed the "illustrative and literary traditions of Godunov's reign, for example in the inclusion of three men playing 'v morru' [a finger guessing game] at the foot of the cross:'41 This process of deterioration culminated in a little icon of Saints Vasilii the Blessed and Artemii Verkolskii, probably painted in the last years of Mikhail Fedorovich's reign (r. 1613-1645), which was essentially "just a magnificent calligraphic pattern. The icon painter who painted it was preoccupied with decoration and utterly indifferent to representation. The artistic center of this work is the beautiful star-shaped golden grasses rising above the feathery patterned mountains:' What was new in Muratov's writings of 1913-1915 was not the chronology of icon painting, but the critical vocabulary he coined for reevaluating its highs and lows. Whereas for the Novgorod icon painter "the theme of the icon was his painterly vision, for the Stroganov master it was only the theme of adornment, where his devotion was measured by the refinement of his eye and the skill of his hand, earned through long and self-sacrificing labor:'42 This virtuosity indicated a "minor art" akin to the jeweled

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8.5. Unknown artist, Icon of the Nativity, second half of the sixteenth century. Tempera on panel, silver and enamel oklad and haloes, 32 x 26 em, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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oklads that framed the images and the adornments that interfered with contemplation of the painting itself. For Muratov (and other young critics like Nikolai Shchekotov and Aleksandr Anisimov), the discovery ofNovgorod icons was Russia's chance to be part of world art, not a mere local variant. Through them lay Russia's true path back to Byzantium and thus to Hellenic culture, rather than the false path to the Italian Renaissance mapped out by older scholars. There may also have been an ideological dimension to these young critics' rejection of Muscovite icons: a distaste for the notion of Republican Novgorod's subjugation to the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century, an emblem of which was the imposition of state controls on icon painters. The last prerevolutionary report on Tretiakov's icons, written by Ukrainian artist Aleksei Grishchenko in 1916, provides an important contemporary document for understanding the Russian avant-garde's embrace of icons. Grishchenko's lively and opinionated account of how he and his generation came to discover icons is equally useful for explaining the polemical necessity of demoting Muscovite and Stroganov icons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the supremacy they enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Along with other kinds of "realism;' they were added to the cultural baggage thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity. Grishchenko quite specifically targeted Tretiakov as the worst kind of nineteenth-century icon collector: far from being a shrewd judge of quality, he was now a man indifferent to the superior beauties ofNovgorod icons (a nonsensical charge, given that the collector had been dead a good decade before the work on cleaning Novgorod icons got underway). Among Grishchenko's thumbnail introductions to Moscow's private and public museum collections, his comments on Tretiakov's icons were dismissive and openly tendentious: It would be a great mistake to judge early Russian

painting by Tretiakov's collection.... The seventeenth century of Stroganov and Moscow styles, the latest and least interesting epoch of early Russian art, is the most fully represented. [... ] The fact that his collection consists for the most part of seventeenth-century Stroganov and Moscow icons, whose principal content is "storytelling;' "complexity;' "correct drawing;' "fine-work;' and "extraordinary execution" is the real reason why the Novgorod icon-the antipode of the Stroganov-did not end up in the late Tretiakov's collection. 43

For Grishchenko, the taste of Tretiakov the icon collector was inseparable from that ofTretiakov the "patron of the Peredvizhniki:' He made a grudging effort to point out the few icons of passing interest-a small Pokrov, for instance, that might be early fifteenthcentury Novgorod ("broadly painted with bright strong colors applied with a feel for color, the rhythm of the composition"). But all the Stroganov icons exemplified a "complete absence of painting and feel for color:'44 In the Complete Resurrection painted for Maksim Stroganov, Grishchenko professed to see merely "an utter confusion of specks and garments, a multitude of faces and gold scrolls, where the dead colors have a faded ochre tinge:' Stroganov icons awakened the kind of almost visceral distress that Salon or Victorian painting elicited in modernist circles-even the green used for the ground and borders struck Grishchenko as unpleasant. From the Novgorod church, full of grandeur and import, furnished with broad-painted icons, we find ourselves in the cramped little prayer-room of the Stroganovs, a sort of house chapel, where miniature icons sparkle with gold and an abundance of assiduously delineated forms, where the eye, sliding at close range over the richly elegant surface, strains to make out the tiniest detail of the miniature figures, where there's more room for astonishment than for the experience of elan, transport, and creative delight. 45

That Muscovite icons were caught in the crossfire of a much bigger campaign was clear from Grishchenko's snide comments directed at Repin, Kramskoi, and Tretiakov himself. "The struggle in Russia for new painterly ideals;' he claimed, "was and is at the same time the struggle to discover new horizons in the evaluation of early Russian painting:'46 If nineteenthcentury realists naturally gravitated toward "everyday life, a specific vulgar subject, and ethnography;' both in contemporary painting and in icons, then it was just as natural to discern an inner resonance between the contemporary art of the French Republic and that of the Novgorod Republic, "united by that facet of artistic culture that was oriented to painterly culture (color, composition, texture):' 47 In Cezanne's paintings and Novgorod icons alike, "the verbal story is reduced to zero:' 4 g "People who approached academic conventions, routine and naked everyday reality with loathing all felt the greatest interest in the art of the early icon painters, they understood and appreciated the artistic side of the icon above all else [Grishchenko's emphasis] :'49

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In developing his history of Russian icons, Grishchenko was developing an idiosyncratic form of reception theory, whereby the aesthetic habits of the present generation enabled it to appreciate what was dismissed before and, conversely, made almost repellant the cultural heights of the past. "[The best period of Novgorod] speaks to our plastic perceptual apparatus, and not our verbal, narrative one ... not by the word but by painterly and plastic means, by colors and composition." 50 Even after they were cleaned, Novgorod icons could only be seen and understood by eyes prepared by exposure to modern French paintingthey remained a closed book to the intelligentsia and the Peredvizhniki ofTretiakov's generation. The laws of generational struggle meant that the patron of the Peredvizhniki was destined to esteem Stroganov icons above all others, because his "perceptual apparatus" was tuned to the verbal and narrative. "Their exclusive aspiration toward the 'subject; to ethnographically correct 'genre paintings; to geographically precise, clumsy landscapes, their leathery dead-blind palette, amateurish 'natural technique' and execution created an atmosphere of extreme contempt for icon painting:'51 By this standard, Muscovite and Stroganov icons were no more "early Russian painting" than the canvases of Kramskoi or Repin were paintings. Both led the viewer along the "long path ofliterary verbal story-telling:'52 Young Russian artists might now be going to Moscow collections of French modernism and ancient icons with equal enthusiasm-but, Grishchenko implied, the Tretiakov Gallery was not on that itinerary. This irascible criticism shows a world of values in flux, a history of Russian art still in the making, the sort of internecine warfare that has become quite familiar in the cubo-futurists' battles against Repin or Alexandre Benois, but that seems rather shocking in the sedate world of medieval painting. Tretiakov's icons could not satisfy the aesthetic criteria of the new school of critics and artists, not only because they were tainted by the collector's Peredvizhnik associations, but because to appreciate them, it seemed, one had to see with Peredvizhnik-trained eyes, attuned to storytelling and trivial earthbound details. To value earlier icons required aesthetic habits shaped by exposure to more recent art. Emblematic of this trend, for Grishchenko, was the role that French scholar Gabriel Millet had played in opening his contemporaries' eyes to the aesthetic qualities of Byzantine art, likening the frescoes at Mistra to the divided tones of impressionist painting. 53

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In this climate of strident black-and-white oppositions, the subtle gradations of the 1890s in which Tretiakov had collected his icons were lost. His icons represented a perfect time capsule of that decade, hermetically sealed in their whimsical Abramtsevo frames, positioned against the panorama of the bigger collection. Like so many other aspects of late nineteenth-century culture, they proved impossible for the next generation to value.

Conclusion The seal on Tretiakov's icon collection was finally broken in 1917, when the Council of the Tretiakov Gallery acquired a thirteenth-century Pskov icon of Selected Saints for 15,000 rubles from Ivan Silin's son.54 After a second major acquisition in 1921, a sixteenth-century icon of the Church Militant, the collection relapsed again into dormancy throughout the 1920s, when the profile of the gallery was confined to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting (between 1924 and 1929 it was the Historical Museum in Moscow that functioned as the capital's central repository of icons and church art). During these years, it seems, Tretiakov's icons were put in storage, until Grabar retrieved a handful to include in the Soviet loan exhibition that toured Germany, England, and the United States from 1929 to 1932. 55 His official rationale for including them was not their quality, but the fact that other icons from private collections might raise problems in emigre circles. He described them as coming from "a collection that had been in storage for a number of years and inaccessible for viewing:'56 In 1929 a shift in museum policy mandated that henceforth the Tretiakov Gallery would serve as the national center for Russian fine art. Hundreds of the best icons were transferred from the Historical Museum and supplemented with hundreds more from the State Museum Fund and the growing number of closed churches. In 1930 the State Tretiakov Gallery's Department of Early Russian Painting was officially opened. Throughout this period of turmoil Tretiakov's original collection retained its integrity, even in the face of unrelenting pressure to sell national heritage abroad in the 1930s. Only one work-an icon of St. Makarii of Egypt and St. Makarii of Alexandria that Tretiakov had acquired as a possible Rublev-was inadvertently released to the trade organization Antikvariat and sold to the Pittsburgh industrialist George Hann in 1936. 57 By 1963,

when the first major catalogue of the Tretiakov Gallery icons was compiled, almost all of the original icons were integrated into the greatly expanded collection, their illustrious provenance quietly downplayed. Though today we can only experience Tretiakov's collection of icons through a process of virtual reconstruction, it is more than just a quaint minor relic of the 1890s. The story of its fall from grace during the avant-garde polemics of the prerevolutionary decade is one that applies to any number oflate nineteenthcentury cultural phenomena, ruthlessly demoted for their storytelling, illustrative tendencies, and the apparent predominance of the verbal over the visual. The strength of the prejudice against Tretiakov's taste in icons can still be seen in the resistance to adopting the miniature, multi-figured style for contemporary icons. 58 Yet in post-Soviet Russia, taste and demand are again in flux. Stroganov icons are in demand among collectors as they were in the nineteenth century, and the miniature technique is now a permissible model for new icons.

Notes 1. A. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi. Vypusk 3-i. Russkaia ikona kak iskusstvo zhivopisi (Moscow: Avtora, 1917), 258. 2. Of the original 62 icons described in Nikolai Likhachev's 1905 catalogue, 47 are included among the 1,053 in the most recent complete catalogue of the State Tretiakov Gallery's collection. See Kratkoe opisanie ikon sobraniia P.M. Tret'iakova (Moscow: Sinodal'naia tipografiia, 1905); and V.I. Antonova and N.E. Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963). To date I have found reproductions of 21 of the icons, most of them in prerevolutionary sources. 3. See the excerpts from these writers and commentaries on them in Valerii Lepakhin, Ikona v russkoi khudozhestvennoi literature. Ikona i ikonopochitanie, ikonopis' i ikonopistsy (Moscow: Otchii dom, 2002), 217-315. 4. On the importance of this exhibition, see G.l. Vzdornov in Istoriia otkrytiia i izucheniia russkoi srednevekovoi zhivopisi. XIX vek (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), 206- 7. 5. Silin's information, presumably based on hearsay, does not tally with the prices cited by Likhachev and Antonova (see below). 6. Iz zapisnoi knizhki A.P. Bakhrushina. Kto chto

sobiraet (Moscow: L.E. Bukhgeim, 1916), 65, 66, 67. All subsequent accounts of how Tretiakov came to collect icons-and they are very few-are based on this brief entry. 7. Letter to P.M. Tretiakov, 4 May 1883, in V Surikov. Pis'ma, Vospominaniia o khudozhnike (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1977), 55. 8. Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 107. Elsewhere Valkenier cites another aspect of Tretiakov's patronage: "the fact that he would pay more for a painting on a religious subject. Thus Perov received 2,000 rubles for his Bird Catcher (1870) and 8,000 for his Nikita Pustosviat (1881), the representation of a saintly hermit:' See Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 68. 9. This means that almost one-eighth of the 839,000 rubles he spent on art between 1871 and 1897 went on icons (Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 65). Even among icon collectors this was an exceptional amount. According to Ivan Zabelin, in 1889 Postnikov asked 700,000 rubles for his 3,000-object collection (1,000 of which were icons), dropping the price to 400,000 in 1895. See Ivan Zabelin, Dnevniki. Zapisnye knizhki (Moscow: Izd. im. Sabashnikovykh, 2001), 141, 190. In 1913 Nikolai Likhachev received 300,000 rubles when he sold his entire collection of some 1,500 icons to the Russian Museum. See L.G. Klimanov, "Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev- kollektsioner 'skazochnogo razmakha';' in Iz kollektsii N.P. Likhacheva. Katalog vystavki v Gosudarstvennom Russkom Muzee (St. Petersburg: Seda-S, 1993), 24. The details ofTretiakov's icon collecting-prices, dates, provenance-are vague. Likhachev provided some information in his 1905 catalogue and Antonova expanded on this in the 1963 catalogue of the collection, drawing on an archival source (TsGALI, f. 646, op. 1, no. 194). From this same document Antonova cited the distribution of his initial purchase as follows: "65,000 to Silin, 35,000 to S.A. Egorov, and the remainder to Nikolai Postnikov:' See Anton ova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, 1:17. 10. "Dukhovnoe zaveshchanie P.M. Tret'iakova;' in Gosdudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia galereia. Ocherki istorii 1856-1917, ed. Ia. V. Bruk (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1981), 306. 11. Nikolai Postnikov wrote that his own collecting stemmed from a desire to preserve the great

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works of"the Rublevs, Stroganovs, Ushakovs and other great artists and teachers of their stamp, working in the knowledge that theirs is a sacred charge and a lofty task, requiring a cheerful mind, chaste thoughts, a sober heart:' See Katalog khristianskikh drevnostei sobrannykh Moskovskim kuptsom Nikolaem Mikhailovichym Postnikovym (Moscow: Kushnerev i Ko, 1888), i. 12. Two came from Nikolai Postnikov, and Tretiakov must have acquired them when the dealer was obliged to sell his vast collection at auction in the 1890s. See Antonova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, 1:17. 13. Nos. 800 and 802 in Antonova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, vol. 2. These icons are two of just thirty icons known to have been painted for Maksim Iakovlevich Stroganov. See M.S. Trubacheva, "'Po poveleniiu Maksima Iakovlevicha Stroganova ... ;" in Ikony stroganovskikh votchin XVI-XVII vekov po materia/am restavratsionnykh rabat VKhNRTs imeni Akademika I.E. Grabaria. Katalog-Al'bom (Moscow: Skanrus, 2003), 359. 14. No. 7931he Good Fruits oflnstruction. 15. Nos. 59 and 60 in the 1905 catalogue. Likhachev dismissed their inscriptions as obvious modern fakes (Kratkoe opisanie ikon, 46.) These icons are not included in the 1963 State Tretiakov Gallery catalogue. 16. A dictionary formed part of Dmitrii Rovinskii's Obozrenie ikonopisaniia v Rossii do kontsa XVII veka (St. Petersburg, 1856). Icon painters were also included in Nikolai Sobko's Slovar' russkikh khudozhnikov, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1893-1899). 17. Compare Tretiakov's 62 icons with Postnikov's 3,000, Nikolai Likhachev's 1,500, and Egorov's 1,300. L.G. Klimanov comments that the definition of "completeness" depends on the collector. For Likhachev, the success of his project depended on having all the styles (pis'ma) of icon painting fully represented, as essential parts of a whole. See Klimanov, "Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev-kollektsioner 'skazochnogo razmakha:' 14. 18. No. 80 King of Kings, No. 265 Igorevskaia Mother of God, No. 269 Four Evangelists. 19. No. 343 Nativity, No. 354 Crucifixion, No. 581 Pokrov. 20. Anton ova points this out in her excellent discussion of Leskov's particular importance for Tretiakov. Other works she cites as sparking Tretiakov's interest in icons as part of Old Believer culture are

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Melnikov-Pecherskii's epic In the Forest and In the Hills and Mordovtsev's historical novel The Great Schism. See Anton ova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, 1:18, 20. 21. "[Tretiakov] was the first among collectors to select icons not for their subject but for their artistic significance and was the first to openly acknowledge them as genuine and great art, stating in his will that his icon collection should be merged with the gallery. For the first time the Russian icon occupied its proper place:' See Grabar's introduction to the 1917 Tretiakov Gallery catalogue, cited in Antonova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, 1:26. Lidiia Iovleva makes the same point in "Galereiia bez Tret'iakova;' Nashe nasledie, 78 (2006). 22. Anton ova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, 1:25. Antonova specifically mentioned claims by Nikolai Likhachev and Igor Grabar that Tretiakov was the first to collect icons as works of art, a role that she attributed instead to Ilia Ostroukhov. 23. This is consistent with the observation that Leskov was "perhaps the only writer in world literature who created a work of art whose main hero is an icon:' See Lepakhin, Ikona v russkoi khudozhestvennoi literature, 282. 24. Litovchenko worked directly in the Dormition Cathedral and the Armory, sketching details for his painting. He allowed himself a lapse from strict accuracy by "painting the interior of the cathedral and the silver coffin as they were in the nineteenth century. The noted critic Vladimir Stasov posed for the figure of Nikon:' The painting was restored and put back on view in the Tretiakov Gallery in 2009. See "Vystavka risunkov I.E. Repina i otrestavrirovannoi kartiny A.D. Litovchenko s 10 fevralia po 30 aprelia 2009;' (accessed 10 October 2011). On the staging of imperial events, see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, 2000). 25. In the first version (1872), the wedding icon of the Kazan Mother of God is already in the father's hand; in the Tretiakov version the icon still stands beside the bread and salt awaiting his blessing. 26. The result was N.P. Likhachev, Materialy dlia istorii russkogo ikonopisaniia. Atlas snimkov, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Ekspeditsiia zagotovleniia gos. bumag, 1906). 27. Quoted in Klimanov, "Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev-kollektsioner 'skazochnogo razmakha';' 23. 28. Likhachev, Kratkoe opisanie ikon, iv-v.

29. Likhachev's skeptical approach to signatures was well founded. See the examples he cites in Tsarskii "izograf" Iosif i ego ikony (St. Petersburg: Ekspeditsiia zagotovleniia gos. bumag, 1897), 12-13. Likhachev's use of paleographic evidence was later dismissed by Aleksei Grishchenko as an example of the "archaeological" approach that ignored the formal evidence in favor of the verbal (Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 174). 30. See Wendy Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries 1870-1917 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15-45; Oleg Tarasov, Framing Russian Art. From Early Icons to Malevich (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 195. 31. Writing on behalf of the council in 1915, Grabar regretted that neither icons nor examples of embroidery had been acquired, since "to our very great regret what we let go during this time is lost to us forever:' See Gosudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia galereia. Ocherki istorii 1856-1917, 324. 32. It was in the library of the Tretiakov Gallery in 1910 that Grabar reported being "a witness to the secret visits of some people bringing and taking away icons in the wee hours;' and in particular to some shady deals pulled off by Ostroukhov, in I.E. Grabar, Moia zhizn'. Avtomonografiia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1937), 216. 33. See Iovleva, "Galereiia bez Tretiakova:' On the controversy surrounding the rehanging and new acquisitions, see Gosudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia galereia. Ocherki istorii 1856-1917, 316-29. 34. Gosudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia galereia. Ocherki istorii 1856-1917,318-19. 35. Serge Diaghilew, [Introduction], Salon d'automne. Exposition de l'Art Russe (Paris, 1906), 7. 36. Alexandre Benois was unimpressed by Diaghilev's "fairly outlandish idea of arranging ancient icons, not on some sort of neutral background, but on a shimmering gold brocade, covering from top to bottom the large hall that began the exhibition:' Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo: stat'i, otkrytye pis'ma, interv'iu, perepiska, sovremenniki o Diagileve, ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein and V.A. Samkov (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1982), 2:233. 37. Yu.A. Rusakov and John E. Bowlt, "Matisse in Russia in the Autumn of 1911 ;' The Burlington Magazine 117, no. 866 (May 1975): 289. 38. Pavel Muratov, "Russkaia zhivopis' do serediny 17 -ogo veka;' in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva (Moscow: Knebel, 1914), 6:37. 39. Muratov, Drevnerusskaia zhivopis' v sobranii

I.S. Ostroukhova (Moscow, 1914), 4. 40. Muratov, "Russkaia zhivopis' do serediny 17ogo veka;' 300. 41. Muratov, "Russkaia zhivopis' do serediny 17ogo veka;' 318, fig. 321. 42. Muratov, "Russkaia zhivopis' do serediny 17ogo veka;' 360. 43. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 212 44. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 213. 45. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 107. 46. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 212. 47. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 240. 48. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 241. 49. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 244. 50. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 42. 51. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 15. 52. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 245. 53. Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 255. See G. Millet, Monuments byzantins de Mistra: Materiaux pour /'etude de /'architecture et de Ia peinture en Grece aux XIVe et XVe siecles (Paris: Leroux, 1910). 54. Inexplicably, since this icon is now acknowledged as one of the Tretiakov Gallery's masterpieces, Grishchenko's evaluation of it was scathing: "why has the Tretiakov gallery, which has spent major capital on acquiring paintings by artists whose work is richly represented in the gallery, still not acquired a single good icon? Wouldn't it be better, instead of a portrait by Levitskii (12,000 rubles), to acquire a real Novgorod icon?" (Grishchenko, Voprosy zhivopisi, 214). 55. On the exhibition see Wendy Salmond, "How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930-1932;' in Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, ed. Jefferson J.A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 128-43. 56. Grabar to Glavnauka (the central administration for scholarly activities 1922-1933), 14-15 January 1929, GTG, f. 106,529. Three icons were reproduced in the deluxe edition Masterpieces of Russian Painting edited by Michael Farbman (London: A. Zwemmer, 1930): Plates XXXIV Crucifixion, XLIV Nativity, XLIV Praise with Festivals. The five others sent on tour were the Pokrov, Vasilii the Blessed and Artemii Verkolskii, Nikifor Savin's The Good Fruits of Instruction, and Aleksii Metropolitan of Moscow. 57. See Wendy Salmond, "Russian Icons and American Money;' in Treasure into Tractors: The Selling of Russia's Cultural Heritage, 1918-1938, ed.

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Anne Odom and Wendy Salmond (Washington, D.C.: Hillwood Museum and Gardens, 2009), 273-304. 58. Thus, a contemporary website reports that, "L.I. Lifshits was one of the first art historians to protest the widely held point of view that contemporary icon painting must orient itself to the art of the ninth through fifteenth centuries as the most theologically justified, able to express spiritual reality most precisely, i.e. he asserted the right to exist of'fine-work' icons with allegorical depictions, the canonical nature of which is still being debated today:' See Moskovskaia ikona kontsa XX veka [accessed 10 October 2011].

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Closing the Books on Peredvizhnichestvo Mir Iskusstva's Long Farewell to Russian Realism JANET KENNEDY

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y any standard, the Exhibition of Russian Art organized by Sergei Diaghilev for the 1906 Salon d'Automne was an ambitious project. Filling twelve galleries of the Grand Palais, the exhibition was a sweeping overview of Russian art from its origins to the present day. Visitors found an entire gallery of icons (see chapter 8), a staggering array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits (twenty-three by Dmitrii Levitskii alone), a sampling of nineteenth-century Russian painting, and a wide selection of contemporary works. Yet of 750 items in the exhibition, there were only a handful to represent the Peredvizhniki, the realist painters who had dominated Russian art in the second half of the nineteenth century. 1 Viewers were catapulted from the early part of the nineteenth century to the fin de siecle with a minimum of intervening material. In the exhibition's catalogue, Alexandre Benois (co-organizer of the exhibition) sounded a note of mild apology, acknowledging that certain well-known painters who had espoused "militant realism with political and social tendencies" had not been included. He attributed the lacuna to practical circumstance: the most representative examples of work by the painters in question belonged to museums that by statute could not allow them to travel. 2 While constraints of this kind undoubtedly existed, the absence of the Peredvizhniki was a calculated

choice. Diaghilev's own words in his brief preface to the exhibition catalogue confirm this: The aim of this exhibition does not consist of presenting in a complete and scrupulously methodical fashion the whole of Russian art throughout the different periods of its evolution. To accomplish such a task would present insurmountable difficulties and would be of doubtful utility... . Many artists, to whom their contemporaries attached an exaggerated importance, seem now devoid of all value, having produced no influence on the art of today. That is the reason for the deliberate omission of the work of many painters who have been too long considered in the West as the representatives of artistic Russia, and who have too long disfigured in the eyes of the public the true character and importance of Russian national art. The present exhibition is an aperfU ofthe development of our art as seen by the modern eye.... It is a faithful image of the artistic Russia of our days with its respectful admiration for the past, and its ardent belief in the future.3

The underlying message is not difficult to read: inclusion of the Peredvizhniki in the exhibition would have reinforced a perception of Russia as both artistically and politically backward. Diaghilev's exhibition proposed a different reading: Russia as a nation looking to the future and already culturally a match for the rest ofEurope.4

Benois took a similar line in an article for the St. Petersburg newspaper Tovarishch (Comrade). Not only was the exclusion of the Peredvizhniki a deliberate choice, but Diaghilev's image control should be regarded as a patriotic service. At an exhibition that allowed French viewers to feast their eyes on paintings by Levitskii, Aleksei Venetsianov, Karl Briullov, Valentin Serov, and others, it would have been inappropriate to include "Perov's instructive bast shoes or [... ] the crude moralizing of assorted other Peredvizhniki:' 5 Paintings of that kind would certainly have spoiled the harmony of the exhibition, and their inclusion was also distinctly undesirable for reasons of national pride. In the wake of the 1905 revolution, when Russian poverty and backwardness had already been lamentably on display, it made no sense to reinforce Russia's negative image by exhibiting paintings of woebegone peasants. As Benois succinctly put it, "One should wash one's dirty linen at home:' 6 Diaghilev's exhibition had been successful, he argued, precisely because it avoided the ethnographic cliches commonly associated with representations of Russia. In the context of this essay, Benois and Diaghilev will serve as spokesmen for Mir iskusstva (the World of Art group) in general. While individual Miriskussniki held a wide range of opinions on a variety of subjects, a desire to see Russian art move beyond Peredvizhnichestvo was a rare area of agreement. Benois and Diaghilev were also the only members of the group to leave a sustained written commentary on the art of their immediate predecessors. With good reason, the hostility that existed between Mir iskusstva and the Peredvizhniki is legendary. Yet when Benois referred to the Peredvizhniki as practitioners of "militant realism with political and social tendencies" as he did in 1906, he was employing a rhetoric at odds with the more measured, even appreciative, assessments that he offered elsewhere. In a polemical context a sharp contrast of past with present was useful, but there were many occasions when Benois and Diaghilev willingly acknowledged the historical contribution made by the Peredvizhniki in redirecting the course of Russian art. A degree of ambivalence runs through their commentary on Peredvizhnichestvo; this is particularly clear in Benois's History of Russian Painting in the Nineteenth Century, where-as Galina Churak discusses with reference to Ilia Repin in chapter 7-barbed remarks about the Peredvizhniki alternate with thoughtful reflections on their historical role and with appreciative remarks about individual paintings.

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For Benois and Diaghilev-indeed for all the Miriskussniki-the Peredvizhniki were a part of their own past. As Benois recalled, the Peredvizhnik exhibitions had been his first exposure to contemporary art of any kind and a discovery made in defiance of his family. Since older members of the Benois clan were staunch supporters of the Imperial Academy of Arts and refused even to set foot in the Peredvizhnik exhibitions, young Alexandre went to see for himself. The experience was a revelation. When, as used to happen, we [Benois and his friends] had visited the faded and ridiculous Academy exhibition and then headed over to the Peredvizhniki, an astonishingly joyous feeling invariably came over us. It was as if we had gone from ... a dark, stinking barracks into a spacious landscape, into fresh air, and amongst the people [k narodu]. At that point we weren't aware of the false notes in their art. If anything jarred on us, it was only the trite little anecdotes of Vladimir Makovskii and the like. At the Peredvizhnik exhibitions we learned life. 7

In the mellow light of retrospect -this was written in 1902-Benois could be positively effusive in describing the positive aspects of Peredvizhnik painting. Diaghilev adopted a more guarded tone in his 1897 review of the twenty-fifth Peredvizhnik exhibition; however, even as he prepared to consign the Peredvizhniki to the graveyard of history, he was careful to give due credit: "One feels that everything that is best-everything live-that has occurred in Russian art always had the fresh, young [Peredvizhnik] exhibition as its source:' 8 In their time Russia's realist painters had performed a heroic service. While aspects of Peredvizhnichestvo were deplorable (the literary and anecdotal qualities of their painting, their insistence on near-photographic fidelity to nature), the group had done important work, not least by creating an environment in which new talent could emerge. The contemporary artists whom the Miriskussniki most valued-Valentin Serov, Isaak Levitan, Konstantin Korovin, and others-had begun life as Peredvizhniki, had been nurtured by teachers who were Peredvizhniki, and had established their professional careers by exhibiting with the Peredvizhniki. As a historical phenomenon the Peredvizhniki clearly deserved respect, but Peredvizhnichestvo was not a fit model for contemporary Russian art. The first two issues of Mir iskusstva issued a ringing challenge to Peredvizhnik values in four manifesto-like

CLOSING THE BOOKS ON PEREDVIZHNICHESTVO

essays that appeared over Diaghilev's signature? One can only imagine the fury of Vladimir Stasov, venerable champion of the Peredvizhniki, faced with a statement like "The great strength of art lies precisely in the fact that it is an end in itself, it is useful only to itself, andthe main thing-it is free:' 10 The four essays overflow with remarks well calculated to alarm a conventionally high-minded reader. "We are a generation that thirsts for beauty;' Diaghilev wrote, "and we find it everywhere, in both good and evil:' 11 To compound the provocation, several reproductions of drawings by the notorious Aubrey Beardsley appeared within a few pages of Diaghilev's bold assertion of artistic freedom. In sober fact, however, the art reproduced in the early issues of Mir iskusstva was considerably less racy than Diaghilev's words would suggest. One of the sharpest moments in these introductory essays was Diaghilev's frontal attack on a cherished principle of Russian realism: the subordination of art to ethics. Not hesitating to be offensive, he referred to Nikolai Chernyshevskii-the philosophical fountainhead of utilitarian aesthetics-as an "unhealthy figure ... who clutched at art with unwashed hands and attempted to destroy or at least to sully it:' 12 Whether articulated by the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or by Russia's homegrown moralists Chernyshevskii and Tolstoy, the view that art could be justified only by its socially beneficial effect was-Diaghilev argued-at odds with the nature of art and artists. Turning for support to outside authority, he quoted Emile Zola's reply to Proudhon on the subordination of art to social principles: "You do not love art, any form of individuality is unpleasant to you, you want to crush the individual personality in order to broaden the path of humanity:' 13 The idea that an abstract, rationalistic socialism was the leveler of individual personality was, of course, a position fiercely voiced by Fedor Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground, and Dostoevsky's name is a recurring presence in the pages of Mir iskusstva; but by invoking Zola and Proudhon, Diaghilev carried the controversy into a broader arena, indicating that the same issues had been discussed and set aside in France, where art had now moved on. The Peredvizhniki, by contrast, stubbornly adhered to "Proudhon's anti -artistic theory of socialism:' 14 Considering the polemical context, it may not be surprising that Diaghilev painted with a broad brush, but it is noteworthy that here and elsewhere he elided the distinction between socialist theory and Peredvizhnik practice as casually as any Soviet commentator of

the 1930s. By exaggerating the radicalism of the Peredvizhniki, Diaghilev played a small role in establishing a view of Russian realism that prevailed until Elizabeth Valkenier provided her skeptical, historically nuanced account in Russian Realist Art. 15 This was not Diaghilev's only occasion for hyperbole. He grossly exaggerated the time lag between Russian and European art when he claimed that Peredvizhnik demands for "truth" had been preceded fifty years earlier by the work ofJean-Fran21 But Serov was more than ready to revive his feeling for antiquity, and the trip he contemplated in 1904 must have taken on new importance for him during the next few years. On 9 January 1905, Serov witnessed the Bloody Sunday massacre of demonstrators by troops commanded by Grand Duke Vladimir, who was the head of the Imperial Academy of Arts (an event portrayed by Vladimir Makovskii, as Elena Nesterova explores in chapter 2). Serov and Polenov wrote a letter protesting the outrage and Serov resigned from his position at the Academy. He produced a powerful denunciation of tyranny in his poster-like tempera drawing "Soldiers, Brave Lads, Where Has All Your Glory Gone?'' (1905, GRM) for the satirical journal Zhupel (Bugbear), and made several other works on political themes that year. Amid all the political turbulence, Serov returned to his interest in the life of Peter the Great and other subjects from eighteenth-century Russian history. Examining Peter I's transformation of Russia two centuries earlier afforded Serov some needed perspective on the revolutionary events he was witnessing, as Dmitrii Sarabianov and other art historians have suggested. 22 In this context, the more expansive and unclouded

perspectives of the ancient world promised a renewal on many levels for Serov. T H E T R 1 P T o G R E E c E B E G AN in early May 1907, lasted a little over a month, and resulted in major innovations for both artists. As Bakst later explained, the "unexpectedness" of their impressions "dislodged the clumsily built mass of preconceptions formed in Petersburg about heroic Hellas;' and they realized that "it was necessary to begin again:' Both artists filled albums with drawings and watercolors, kept notes, and wrote letters home, and Bakst published an account of the trip sixteen years later: "Serov and I in Greece: Travel Notes:' 23 They sailed from Odessa to Constantinople, which Bakst described with enthusiasm as "motley, dirty, picturesque, and eastern:' They were awed by the Hagia Sophia, and they admired the Archaeological Museum, where Bakst found a great deal that was new to him. 24 Serov also enjoyed seeing the highlights of the city, and sent a postcard home about an excursion up the Bosporus to the Sweet Waters of Constantinople, a favorite leisure destination. 25 As they approached the Attic coastline and Piraeus, they were enchanted by the mirror-like clarity of the sea and the undulating contours of the hills against the sky, an effect Serov captured in his sketchbooks. Arriving in Athens, they headed at once for the Acropolis. Serov wrote to his wife Olga Serova: "The Acropolis (the Kremlin of Athens) is simply unbelievable. No paintings, no photographs have the power to convey the amazing effects of the sunlight and light breeze, the closeness of the marbles, and behind them ... the gulf, and zigzags ofhills." 26 He was impressed by the "amazing unity" of the decorative and the intimate. Studies such as The Propylaea (1907, GRM), a watercolor sketch from the middle section of the gates, juxtaposing the columns and tumbled paving blocks with distant hills, convey this spirit. Later that day he and Bakst visited the Acropolis Museum to study the "wonderful archaic female figures with painted decoration:m When the two artists returned to the Acropolis in the evening, Bakst exclaimed at the "strangeness of tones and forms:' He felt that the sensory effect evoked Oedipus at Colon us, embodying a sense of the "colossal" that permeated both Greek tragedy and the natural setting. 28 Serov spent much of the four days in Athens making drawings and watercolors of the sculptures in the museum; he also purchased museum photographs. Both artists absorbed the sights and sketched views of

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Athens, and Bakst used his new camera to record the trip as well. 29 From Athens they sailed to Crete and spent four days touring Knossos, Phaistos, Gortyn, and other sites, then returned to the mainland to make a twelve-day trip by train and boat to Thebes, Mycenae, Argos, Epidauros, Corinth, Delphi, Patras and Olympia, back to Athens, and then to Corfu for a rest before returning home by different routes. 30 In Kandia (modern Iraklion), Bakst and Serov enjoyed the Eastern atmosphere of the city but were most excited by the new Archaeological Museum. They spent more than three hours there, examining and sketching the "amazing and unexpected new things from excavations" that revealed "the secrets of the Greek past:' 31 The highlight was an excursion to Knossos and "the famous labyrinth of Tsar Minos:' 32 This site had been probed unsystematically for roughly three decades before Sir Arthur Evans purchased the land and began excavations in 1900; most of the site was uncovered by 1906 but it was still being worked when Serov and Bakst visited. Bakst's memoir makes it clear that the travelers did all they could to immerse themselves in the ancient world, "the more ancient, the closer to Homer:' They drank Phalerian wine, recited Catullus in Pushkin's translation, and sought out living reminders of antiquity. Serov sketched a Cretan mule, perhaps destined for the Nausicaa paintings. When Bakst spotted an old shepherd and his dog, he exclaimed, "This is ancient Greece, Homer!" Bakst summed up their efforts: "We drew diligently, we searched for a contemporary manner of depicting the Greek myth:' 33 After Crete, they experienced the power of myth and antiquity most strongly in Delphi. They crossed the Gulf of Corinth on a windy, rosy evening. "Before us ... the epic masses of mountain ridges, the narrow road, grey and yellow, leads upward in zigzags all the way to the blue-black, triumphant heights:' 34 Bakst blends his descriptions with musings about the differences between academic classicism and the vital reality of Greece. The people who greeted them at the cliffside hotel seemed like sculptures by Lysippus, and Serov saw one of the young women as the living image of an Acropolis kore. What both were looking for in Delphi was the opposite of conventional classicism; it was the spirit of a severe, myth-bound land. In the evening, as they looked out from the hotel terrace at the "wild romanticism of the landscape;' thunderclouds began to gather. This is the scene that inspired Bakst's painting Terror Antiquus "I [... ] gasped: right at my feet a precipice ... fathomless

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night ... somewhere far below in the ravine, beneath a blinding lilac-blue flash of lightning lie white marble temples- [... ] scattered beneath the monstrous hands of Cyclopes .... Cutting powerfully through the darkness, a flock of huge eagles flies in striving curves, in all directions, in the thick, suffocating air, full of phosphorous and electricity-much too close, now just beneath my feet, the terrifying rustling of powerful wings:' He steps back, reminded of the myth of Ganymede. "A deafening crackle and glitter so strong, that it seems as though the lightning transfixes you, you can barely stand on your feet:' They turn back to the hotel to seek ordinary, human contact and their dinner. For a while they shake off the shock they have just shared. But before going to bed, Bakst opens the shutters, and is struck again by a frightening vision. This rhapsodic passage gives a sense of the sublime and tragic mythology that he strove to convey in Terror Antiquus. "The storm roars and thunders. At times the romantic wind quiets and there is a heavy silence, the precursor of a deafening, epic thunder-unbearable, unbearable like the spasm of a child who, after falling, is silent for three horrible seconds and then suddenly splits the air with a furious cry. [... ] Ceaseless, broad lightning-flashes cut through the eye like a gigantic razor-and make the unplumbed precipice beneath the windows seem all the more dark and wild:' This visceral impression of the power of nature concludes with an imaginative leap from the present to the unmeasured, mythic past: What strange, awesome decoration! ... All around, along the cliffs, just like a Coliseum for Cyclopes [... ] are deep, black hollows, niches-the long abandoned tombs of pilgrims from Hellas and Etruria, the graves of philosophers and priests. [ ... ] Long ago the bones of the stoics and sophists decayed in these niches, the builders of their clever systems, searching for the meaning oflife.... And now, just as he did three thousand years ago-Zeus thunders in the spring amid the flock of eagles frightened by lightning. And every spring, in dark Hades, Persephone, petrified by grief, staring, frightful-on a deep basalt throne, waits evilly to greet from the forbidden, flowering earth, the gullible, fragile children of the sun-human beings.

Close to the picture plane, as if hovering above the horrific landscape, is the archaic kore, the figure

S E R 0 V, B A K S T , A N D T H E R E I N V E N T I 0 N 0 F R U S S I A' S C L A S S I C A L H E R I T A G E

Bakst presents as Persephone, an eternal reminder of the fragility oflife. The image struck a chord with contemporary viewers, who interpreted the scene as the destruction of Atlantis. 35 For the symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov, the kore was the "archaic AphroditeMoira;' an embodiment of cosmic fate and "immortal femininity;' a principle of governance that bound and held in balance the surrounding "apocalyptic catastrophe:'36 Analyzing the unusual composition of the painting, Ivanov understood that the cosmic scope demanded the presence of polar opposites, the extremes of human experience and the untamed forces of nature, the distant, mythical past and the unknown future, all within the space of the canvas. Others noted the modernity of the striking viewpoint, as if from an airplane. In hindsight, the combination of decorative flattening and the compression of time become harbingers of modernism. Bakst had begun thinking about the subject and made his first drawings in 1905, but only during the 1907 trip did he find the key motifs he needed in the Greek landscapes and sculpture. Bakst immediately recognized the famous Peplos Kore in the Acropolis Museum as ideal for his central figure, and he copied it faithfully. But he transformed the archaic directness of her gaze into an alien remoteness. The landscape was probably a composite of observations from Knossos and Mycenae as well as Delphi. The main features suggest a view from the mountains down over the sanctuary of Delphi and out to the Gulf of Corinth, recorded in sketchbooks as well as the memoir. The deliberate alterations, even distortions, indicate that the setting was also a means for conveying symbolic content, an intention that removes the work from the traditions oflandscape painting. 37 The verbal images of the storm, the lilac and greenish flashes oflightning, the harsh contrast of flickering highlights and black hollows, the fantastic shifts in viewpoint and scale, correspond closely to details and to the overall composition of the painting. It seems evident that Bakst wanted to reinforce and even validate the romantic and philosophical elements of his work. Recalling juxtapositions of ancient ruins and turbulent nature in romantic art of the early nineteenth century, Terror Antiquus dramatizes the vastness and violence of nature and history, and even intensifies the fatalism of archaic myth, but simultaneously offers an assurance of the survival of beauty. V ' S 0 D Y S S E US AND N A US I C A A and The Rape of Europa were less philosophical in concept

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than Bakst's painting, but they were equally deliberate

statements of the artist's goals. Based on Homer's Odyssey and on Ovid's Metamorphoses, with visual references to archaic and early classical sculpture and painting in the museums of Athens, Iraklion, and Delphi, the works demonstrate the artist's search for a contemporary form for Greek myth. As a result of the trip, Serov found new ways of combining his keen perceptions of reality with a more expansive sense of the ideal and universal. The experience in Greece was so valuable because it was a logical part of Serov's continuing efforts to give his art "a monumental character:'38 This goal Serov shared with many artists around the turn of the century, including Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse. His encounters with myth and ancient art offered Serov a way of escaping the limitations of easel painting. He eagerly took on decorative projects, including designs for ballet productions, Daphnis and Chloe (unrealized) and Scheherazade for Sergei Diaghilev's production in Paris in 1911. He also began work on a cycle of murals based on Ovid's stories of Diana and Acteon, and Apollo and Diana killing the children of Niobe, subjects that Serov had already considered thanks to the mural scheme for the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts. Commissioned by Efimiia Nosova for the dining room of the Nosov mansion in Moscow, the murals were to be part of a larger undertaking involving Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, Konstantin Somov, and Alexandre Benois as well as Serov. According to Sergei Ernst, the Nosov house was virtually a museum of contemporary decorative art. 39 Serov's sketches in pencil, charcoal, and watercolor, such as Diana and Actaeon (1911, GTG and GRM) and Apollo and Diana Slaying the Niobids (1911, GTG), demonstrate the radical stylization (especially in Actaeon's antlers), reduction of narrative detail, and emphasis on formal parallels that connect figural and background elements. A similar stylization, emphasis on contour, and suppression of illusory space are essential to Serov's independent mythological paintings, Odysseus and Nausicaa and Rape of Europa. Serov had thought of the subject of Odysseus observing and meeting the Princess Nausicaa as early as 1903, when he told Benois that he wanted to paint Nausicaa "not the way she is usually painted, but the way she was in fact:' 40 What he meant by this phrase is not certain, but both he and Benois were working on historical subjects related to Peter the Great and his successors at the time, and both engaged in research at the Hermitage. In a more general sense, Serov's comment may point to a deliberate synthesis ofhis

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usual practice of observation of nature with an element of ritual decorum or even remoteness appropriate to ancient myth. The coastal landscape, with emphasis on the subtle coloration of beach, sea, and sky, recalls the familiar Gulf of Finland in paintings such as Horses by the Seashore (1905, GRM) as much as the Mediterranean. Nausicaa's drive along the shore is a triumphant procession, like a sculptural frieze. Her figure is poised like that of the Delphi Charioteer, the bronze sculpture found just over a decade earlier and displayed in the new Delphi museum, opened in 1903. But the mules, the laundresses, and the ungainly, shrouded Odysseus add the leavening of reality. All five versions of the scene place the observer at a distance, separated from the figures by horizontal bands of sand, reflections, and tidal pools. They have varying dimensions, the largest (1910, GTG) almost square, with the majority of the composition given to the billowing sky, and the figures confined to a narrow strip of sand at the lower edge of the painting. Another (1910, GRM) is five times wider than it is high, laid out in bands of sand, an inlet, and a distant shoreline, with large, rough stones forming part of the figural frieze. In all versions, the play of silhouettes against the wide horizon and the glowing sky create a dreamlike air natural to myth. In Rape of Europa, Serov discarded boundless space for flat patterning. With no shoreline and no visible horizon behind the curves of the waves, the distance is immeasurable. As he did for Odysseus and Nausicaa, Serov combined observation of real models and study of ancient painting and sculpture in preparing for the work. Graphite and sanguine life drawings of a female nude model (1910, GRM), kneeling and leaning forward, with her right arm supporting her body and the left reaching back, show that Serov was already visualizing the strong diagonal of the bull surging through the waves at the center of the composition. Among the studies he made of the archaic korai in the Acropolis Museum are notations of some traces of the original coloring. 41 The Peplos Kore was the model for Europa's lively but serene face and multiple strands of braids, but Serov replaced her long, white, lightly pleated peplos with a short, blue-black tunic to pick up the color of her hair. The dark tone provided an essential anchor for the center of the composition and also served to pull together the strong contours that define the major elements, the bull's horns and spine, the kore's back, the shadowed slipstream around the bull, and the arched forms of leaping dolphins. The

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importance of these contours can be seen in an early graphite sketch for the composition (1909, GRM). 42 The elastic energy of the bull's and dolphins' motion may have been inspired by the frescoes of cavorting dolphins and a bull-leaping scene that Evans and his archaeological team had uncovered at Knossos, displayed in the then newly opened Archaeological Museum in Iraklion. Serov may have referred to another find from Knossos, a rhyton, or drinking vessel, in the shape of a bull's head with golden horns, in addition to making drawings of real bullocks. 43 Instead of the white bull specified in Ovid's account and conventional in painting from the Renaissance on, Serov chose a terra-cotta color like that of the Knossos bull-leaping frescoes and also suggestive of clay sculptures or red-figured vases. Although Ovid's tale of the Phoenician princess seduced by the disguised Zeus and carried off to Crete emphasizes distance and speed, Serov's rendering has no illusion of motion: the foam, reflections, and waves are conventional signs, as are the dolphins, the bull, and the woman. According to the artist's close friend Vladimir Derviz, Serov had immense difficulty finding the right medium for the subject: "he tried oil, tempera, watercolor, and even sculpted her of clay, and still he was never satisfied:' 44 After the artist's sudden death of a stroke on 22 November 1911, friends clearing out his studio found a wooden "icon panel painted in eggtempera using an icon-painting technique;' showing the head of a ''kore" with the sea and dolphins in the background, and "with just the kind of headdress that he had depicted on the head of Europa:' Although the panel cannot be identified, it may have resembled one ofSerov's early studies, a watercolor (1910, GRM) and a tempera and gouache on canvas (1910, GTG), in which Europa wears a headdress with three large, plume-like projections. Derviz believed that Serov was trying to approach a theme that "completely belonged to ancient Greece;' by means of an "icon-painting method;' an art form that "came down to us from deepest antiquity" and indeed had its own roots in ancient Greece. 45 There is no doubt that the stylization and reduction of detail to only the essential forms invested the work with the aura of antiquity. Some of Serov's friends doubted the value of these "decorative" works on Greek themes, considering them out of character. Benois later wrote that he had no feeling for the subjects and he suspected that Serov also sensed that they were "not his thing;' and that this thought tormented him. 46 He added that Rape

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of Europa, "for all its virtuosity;' seemed somehow inadequate or unworthy. Benois's comment confirms Derviz's observations of Serov's struggle to find the right medium and form for Europa. Others considered Serov's departure from his previous styles in a more positive light. Ilia Ostroukhov, who acquired versions of Odysseus and Nausicaa and Rape of Europa for the Tretiakov Gallery (as well as playing a key role in the curation ofTretiakov's icon collection, as Wendy Salmond discusses in chapter 8), explained to the museum's council that because of their themes and "the simplification of their treatment" these works introduced a new, "purely creative" stage in Serov's art. 47 Only a few understood the radical change in Serov's style as the result of two nearly simultaneous and demanding experiences that required effort to assimilate and use. Sergei Goloushev (Sergei Glagol) ascribed the "sharp turning point" in Serov's work to the combination of two stimuli: "the impression of the modernists, before whose canvases one could often see Serov lost in thought;' and "the influence of those impressions he found during this last trip to Athens, where he saw much archaic sculpture:' He specifically mentioned Rape of Europa, Odysseus and Nausicaa, and the Portrait of Ida Rubinshtein (1910, GRM), indicating the applicability of Serov's researches in archaism to more general innovations. 48 In another review the critic lauded "Serov's stride into completely new territory-very close to the very latest explorations of contemporary modernism:' 49 The most detailed assessment of the significance of the trip to Greece for Serov's venture into new, modernist territory appeared in an essay in the journal Apollon by Sergei Makovskii (son of Konstantin Makovskii, the subject of chapter 2). 50 Serov "suddenly started to see as if entirely in a new way, and his artistic goals broadened;' Makovskii wrote. He related the "stylization" of the Greek works to the graphic quality of the portrait of Rubinshtein, "conceived and executed as a poster;' in which the "synthetic contour" sufficiently conveyed the character of the model. Like other writers, Makovskii equated the synthetic and reductive use of line and the flattening of space to the concept of the decorative. He described Nausicaa and Rape of Europa as "decorative panels" and emphasized Serov's interest in the "decorative tasks" of contemporary European art. Makovskii was undoubtedly thinking of the large decorative murals that the Moscow merchant collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov had recently commissioned for their homes: Henri Matisse's Dance

and Music for Shchukin ( 1909-1910, State Hermitage Museum), and Maurice Denis's panels illustrating the story of Cupid and Psyche for Morozov's music room (1908-1909, State Hermitage Museum). While the works were quite different in character-Matisse's shocking for the nudity, the intense colors, and posterlike flatness, and Denis's quite conventional with their clear, pastel colors and neoclassical compositionsboth artists referred to motifs and styles evoking the ancient world in these major decorative works. Makovskii rightly related Serov's decorative treatments of Nausicaa, Rape of Europa, and the portrait oflda Rubinshtein to the traits they shared with contemporary European art, and asserted that Serov's searches for a transformation in art were part of a broader process of transformation in the art world. 5 1 B A K S T, T 0 0, H A D G R 0 W N dissatisfied with the restrictions of easel painting at this crucial stage, and he used his impressions of Greece as guides to new directions. He was eager to bring his fresh views of ancient art to the stage, and his work on Diaghilev's Narcisse (1910-1911) and Afternoon of a Faun (1912) afforded ideal opportunities. For Narcissus, Bakst specified a flat, yellowish makeup and a light wig with stylized ringlets like those of a marble kouros, though most of the costumes were brightly decorated and flowing, the underlying bodies sculptural. Afternoon of a Faun developed the visual lessons embodied in Terror Antiquus on a larger plane. The backdrop (1912, Centre Pompidou, Paris), densely filled with cliffs, a waterfall, and foliage, with no horizon or aerial perspective, confined the action to a shallow stage. The costume designs for the nymphs clearly referred to the draped garments of korai, and Bakst's drawings emphasized silhouettes rather than the full forms in Narcisse. The angular poses ofNijinsky's choreography owed much to Bakst's suggestion that the dancer study bas-reliefs and vase painting. Bakst clearly viewed this ballet as part of the "renewal" of classicism that he proposed at this time. Before and after the trip, Bakst readily shared his thoughts about ancient art. One of his first formal talks, given at the Theater Club in St. Petersburg in April1908, with the ambitious title "The Painting of the Future and Its Relationship to Ancient Art;' developed into a lengthy and contentious article, "Paths of Classicism in Art;' published in Apollon in 1909. 52 The first issue of the journal contained an article by the critic Maksimilian Voloshin, ''Archaism

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in Russian Painting;' which related Bakst's Terror Antiquus to contrasting treatments of the ancient world by contemporaries Nikolai Roerich and Konstantin Bogaevskii. 53 In his frontispiece for this issue, Bakst combined two motifs based on his impressions of Knossos and Delphi. The front plane consists of two thick columns like those reconstructed by Evans for the halls and porticos at Knossos, with the title inscribed in Greek above them; this architectural framework, all in flat white, with barely articulated capitals and letters, contrasts starkly with the densely shaded figural scene of satyrs cavorting in the background and a stiffly erect statue of Apollo at the right margin. This image, as Janet Kennedy states, is in keeping with the art journal's advocacy of Apollonian clarity as opposed to Dionysian chaos. 54 This is precisely the dichotomy Bakst had explored in Terror Antiquus, and that he would elaborate in his article. Bakst viewed the critical situation of art in the early twentieth century as the result of a long decline since the Renaissance that led to the misguided attempts by David and his followers to restore classicism. He contrasted this "false" classicism with "the true classics of the later nineteenth century;' Millet, Corot, Puvis de Chavannes, Denis, Meunier, Rodin, and Bourdelle, and he applauded their reinstatement of "firm, sculptural elements" after the vagueness of plein-airism and symbolism. 55 In the second installment of the article, Bakst referred frequently to the "absolute beauty" of the Parthenon and to Phidias, Praxiteles, and other Greek sculptors, but expressed most enthusiasm for the recent discoveries of"Cretan culture-yesterday almost unknown, and today a new strand in ancient art, close and almost native to us!" Cretan art never attained the heights of classical art, Bakst acknowledged, but for him it was all the more relevant to the new art in its "halfperfection;' and fresh view of the world, analogous to the perceptions of children. 56 Continually linking "the child, the folk, and the uncorrupted artists of archaic art;' with freshness and purity, Bakst identified three modern artists whose searches for an authentic synthesis originated in the "spontaneous, naive art of the barbarian (the folk), the child, and archaic art:' Gauguin, Matisse, and Denis exemplified two valid paths: the notion of the primitive, with bright colors, synthetic forms, and simplicity in the case of Gauguin and Matisse, and the more cerebral efforts of Denis to find fresh inspiration in the archaic period, the quattrocento, and in myth. Bakst concluded that the "art of the future" would become simple in concept, as if

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returning to a cultural childhood, the first steps of every great art. 57 The new art would turn away from mysticism in favor of forms and content that were bright, clear, sensuous, and concrete; its basis would be the human form, nude as in the art of Periclean Greece. But the classical models, interpreted through the new generation's fresh eyes, would generate a "new classical art:' B A K s T ' s R H E T o R I c A L association of classical art, primitive or folk art, and European modernism with the restoration of values for an art of the future complements Serov's more radically experimental synthesis of ancient art, the Byzantine (or GrecoRussian) icon tradition, and modern European art as inspiration for his last works. The synthesis of tradition and modernism was also important for a younger cohort of Russian artists. The art of Gauguin, Matisse, and Denis first, and later Cezanne and Picasso contributed directly to the emergence of the Russian avant-garde, as Camilla Gray and many other scholars have shown. 58 Gauguin in particular confirmed the neo-primitivists' attraction to the nonWestern-European traditions of Russian icons, folk art, and popular culture. Although the avant-garde stance of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova diametrically opposed the values held by Serov and Bakst, all these artists were pursuing new sources for artistic renewal. Larionov became interested in the ancient Greeks and Scythians at the same time that the older artists were turning to ancient themes, and he visited prehistoric sites near his birthplace Tiraspol. In 1907, along with Goncharova and the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk, he organized an exhibition with an evocative Greek title, Venok-Stefanos (Wreath), and he shortly joined the editorial board of Zolotoe runo. 59 Beyond their mutual interests in the ancient world and their appreciation of Gauguin, Matisse, and Denis, a key unifying factor was their attraction to large-scale decoration, and the flattening of forms characteristic of art nouveau and its Russian equivalent stil' modern. Commissioned murals and theatrical decoration with thematic and formal connections with antiquity helped to liberate Serov and Bakst from the confines of easel painting. At the same time, Larionov and Goncharova moved in new directions with their major cycles based largely on folk art motifs: Goncharova's Harvest and Wine Harvest (1910-1911, GTG, GRM and other collections), each comprising nine panels, and Larionov's four-part Seasons of the Year (1912, GTG and various collections). These works, too, addressed

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what Makovskii, Bakst and others understood as the "decorative tasks" of modern art, a unification of clear, simple form and a vision of something universal. The classical element in Russian art at the turn of the twentieth century was a matter of deliberate reinterpretation rather than an emulation of classical models passed down through the academic system. Other artists, such as Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Bogaevskii, and Nikolai Roerich, also treated motifs from mythology and the ancient world in inventive ways. But more consistently than any of their contemporaries, Serov and Bakst concentrated their attention on ancient art with the deliberate goal of changing and renewing their own creativity. The pathbreaking intentions of Terror Antiquus and Rape of Europa exemplify a future-oriented rather than a retrospective interpretation of the classical heritage. The works also show what distinguished the Russian view of the ancient world from the European ideal of a golden age, as presented by Denis. Identification with the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea areas imbued the Russian strain of classicism with more archaic mystery than classical clarity. The mysterious, inwardly directed gaze of the female figures in Terror Antiquus and Rape of Europa reflects a search for placement and identity: in Europa's case, surrounded by sea between Asia and Europe; in Persephone's, hovering amidst titanic storms between earth and sky, and between the realms of the living and the dead, the present and the remote past. The embodiment of archaic remoteness in these works involves distance in time just as much as distance in space. Serov and Bakst thus used forms and themes of the ancient world to attain new perspectives on their own changing world, and on the goals and forms for the art of the future.

Notes 1. Zolotoe runo was published 1905-1907, Apollon 1909-1917. Pan, published 1895-1900, was the model for most of these journals, including Mir iskusstva, 1898- 1904. One of the early title suggestions, Renaissance, suggested similar classical values. See Janet Kennedy, The ''Mir iskusstva" Group and Russian Art, 1898-1912 (New York: Garland, 1977), 23, 149-50. 2. This topic is part of my ongoing project on myth and modern art that began with a series of seminars at Georgetown University. I presented some of the material in different contexts at College Art Association

sessions on Decadence and Renewal in Europe (chaired by K. Porter Aichele and Sara Henry) in 1997 and on The Classical Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century Art (chaired by Roger Diederen and Jamie Johnson) in 2006, and I thank the organizers of the panels for their helpful responses. All translations are my own. 3. The main sources are the two compilations of letters and memoirs with critical notes: Valentin Serov v vospominaniiakh, dnevnikakh i perepiske sovremennikov, 2 vols., ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein and VA. Samkov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1971), abbreviated in these notes as Serov-Vospominanie, includes Bakst's 1923 memoir of the trip; Valentin Serov v perepiske, dokumentakh i interv'iu, 2 vols., ed. Zil'bershtein and Samkov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1985) abbreviated as Serov-Perepiska, is used primarily for Serov's letters. For documentation of Serov's works I use Dmitrii V Sarab'ianov, Valentin Serov, Paintings, Graphic Works, Stage Designs (New York: Abrams and Leningrad: Aurora, 1982). 4. Aida Nasibova, The Faceted Chamber in the Moscow Kremlin (Leningrad: Aurora, 1978), 5-6, 12-16, plates 60, 69, and 70. 5. The Russian Museum held an exhibition in the restored rooms of the Michael Castle in 2008, Antique Subjects in Russian Art. On patronage and westernization of the decorative arts, see the chapter "Russian Patronage and European Culture" and the catalogue section "Classicism and the Enlightenment" in Anne Odom and Liana Parades Arend, A Taste for Splendor: Russian Imperial and European Treasures from the Hill wood Museum (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1998), 68- 81. Rosalind P. Blakesley discusses Empress Maria Fedorovna's role as artist and patron in An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum, ed. Jordana Pomeroy et al. (exh. cat., National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; London: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 2003), 54-60, as well as in "Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts:' in Women and Material Culture, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 71 - 85. Other examples of patronage promoting classical aesthetic education include Princess Zinaida Volkonskaia's project to found a museum at Moscow University. See Rosalind P. Blakesley, "Art, Nationhood, and Display: Zinaida Volkonskaia and Russia's Quest for a National Museum of Art;' Slavic Review, vol. 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 912-33. 6. See Janet Kennedy, "The Neoclassical Ideal in

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Russian Sculpture;' in Theofanis G. Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 194-210. 7. Alla Vereshchagina, Khudozhnik, Vremia, Istoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973) offers a detailed account of academic history painting within and beyond the classical tradition. 8. See Vitalii Manin, Russkii peizazh. Entsiklopediia mirovogo iskusstva (Moscow: Belyi Gorod, 2000), 26-51, for discussion and examples of early nineteenth-century classical landscapes. Aleksei Kurbanovskii relates Briullov's fascination with archaeology and classical themes to Masonic philosophy as well as international romanticism; see A.A. Kurbanovskii, Nezapnyi Mrak: Ocherki po arkhaeologii vizual'nosti (St. Petersburg: Ars, 2007), chapters 2 and 3, 41-142. 9. V.V. Andreev et al., eds., Tovarishchestvo peredvyzhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystavok. Pis'ma, dokumenty 1869-1899 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), 1:286-88, includes the catalogue of the thirteenth Peredvizhnik exhibition. 10. Information on Serov's early training comes from his mother's 1914 memoirs, Valentina S. Serova, Kak ros moi syn, ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein and V.A. Samkov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1968), 62-63, 186 (commentary); in the section on Munich (1872-1874), she emphasizes her care in getting advice from sculptor Mark Antokol'skii, and in finding a suitable teacher: solid, reliable, well educated, and of refined taste. Kopping was a specialist in ceramics as well as an engraver and etcher, and head of the Berlin Academy's engraving department. Although there are no known sketches from Munich, the following year, when Serov studied with Il'ia Repin in Paris, he made studies from plaster models as well as paintings from nature. Elizabeth Valkenier, Valentin Serov: Portraits of Russia's Silver Age (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 18, comments that Serov was probably the only Russian artist of note to have had a "somewhat systematic exposure to a wide range of art;' and that this experience instilled a lifelong interest in travel and in art from antiquity to the present. 11. Serov to Ol'ga Trubnikova, 30 May, 17 August, 1885, Serov-Perepiska, 1:54-63, describe his studies of Velazquez and Rubens in Munich and Antwerp; Serov to Trubnikova, 8 September, 1885, Serov-Perepiska, 1:65, specifically mentions the Dresden Gallery (possibly a forerunner of the Albertinum, built 18841887 and famed for its sculpture collection) and finding

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a similar collection of Greek sculpture in Berlin. 12. "This time I looked at them fondly, and it has been a long time since I have enjoyed such a beautiful, lively mood as these little Greek figures gave me, almost toys, but for these toys, if you will, one could give a good half of the cold Roman sculpture:' Serov to Trubnikova, 5 January 1887, Serov-Perepiska, 1:81. He noted that this collection, assembled by archaeologist and diplomat Petr Saburov, was a new acquisition for the Hermitage. 13. Serov to Trubnikova, 5 January 1887, SerovPerepiska, 1:82, and note 8, 83-84. Serov adds that he had already finished a sketch and would be paid 1,000 rubles for the completed work. This painting is sometimes listed as lost, but according to Zil'bershtein and Samkov it was in the Tula Regional Art Museum in 1989. 14. Polenov to Serov, 25 March 1904, SerovPerepiska, 1:455. The phrase comes from Polenov's later account, published in V.D. Polenov. Pis'ma, dnevniki, vospominaniia, ed. E.V. Sakharova (Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1950), 790-91, reprinted in Serov-Perepiska, 1:456. 15. LA. Antonova, E.S. Levitin, et al., Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel'nykh iskusstv imeni A.S. Pushkina (Leningrad: Avrora, 1989), 5-8. 16. Korovin describes these discussions in a memoir of Polenov, in Konstantin Korovin Vspominaet, ed. I.S. Zil'bershtein and V.A. Samkov (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1990), 97. 17. See Eleonora V. Paston, Vasilii Dmitrievich Polenov (St. Petersburg: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1991) for examples, including this sketch, fig. 29. 18. Serov to Polenov, 26 March 1904, SerovPerepiska, 1:456. Serov did travel to Italy that spring. Polenov later confirmed that Serov intended his Greek trip as preparation for the museum project in a letter to Tsvetaev, 31 August 1908, cited in SerovVospominanie, 1:612n8. 19. Kennedy, The ''Mir iskusstva" Group, 287-88, cites Dmitrii Filosofov's statement and a description of the production by Vasilii Rozanov in Mir iskusstva (1902, no. 12, 239-48). Bakst's early archaism in stage design is considered in a broader context in M. V. Davydova, "Teatral'no-dekoratsionnoe iskusstvo'' in A.K. Alekseev et al., Russkaia khudozhestvennaia kul'tura kontsa XIX-nachala XX vekov (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 2:237-38. 20. Stepan P. Iaremich, "0 Serove" in SerovVospominanie, 1:693-704; quotes Bakst, 697. This memoir is based on Iaremich's articles published in

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1913 and 1914 and a book published in 1936. 21. Iaremich, "0 Serove;' in SerovVospominanie, 1:697. 22. The series on Peter the Great was commissioned by the publisher Knebel in 1907. Dmitrii Sarab'ianov, Russkaia zhivopis' kontsa 1900-kh-nachala 1910-kh godov. Ocherki (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971 ), 3132, and Sarab'ianov, Valentin Serov, 26-27, emphasize the differences between Serov's historical works and the idealized, retrospective approach of the Mir iskusstva members. E.P. Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, "Iskaniia v russkoi zhivopisi 1890-1900kh godov;' in Alekseev, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia kul'tura, 2:96-100, discusses the series on Peter I and the Greek works. 23. L.S. Bakst, Serov i ia v Gretsii. Dorozhnye zapisi (Berlin: Slovo, 1923) in Serov- Vospominanie, 1:562-88. Full of extraneous comments, and occasional annoyance with Serov, the memoir and Bakst's letters nonetheless provide striking images of the artists' experiences of Greece. 24. Bakst to Liubov' Bakst, 10 May 1907, in Serov- Vospominanie, 1:601-2. 25. Serov to Ol'ga Serova, 8 May 1907, in SerovPerepiska, 2:101. 26. Serovto Ol'ga Serova, 11 May 1907, in SerovPerepiska, 2:101-2. 27. Serov to Ol'ga Serova, 13 May 1907, in SerovPerepiska, 2:102. 28. Bakst to Liubov' Bakst, 10 May 1907, in Serov- Vospominanie, 1:601-2. 29. Bakst's comments from four letters to Liubov' Bakst, 11-14 May 1907, in Serov-Vospominanie, 1:602-3. 30. The actual itinerary varied slightly from the reports in letters. Serov, letter from Corinth to Ol'ga Serova, 30 May 1907, in Serov-Perepiska, 2:104; Bakst to Liubov' Bakst, 13 May, 30 May, in SerovVospominanie, 1:603, 604. 31. Bakst to Liubov' Bakst, 20 May 1907, in Serov- Vospominanie, 1:603-4. The Archaeological Museum was founded by pioneer Cretan archaeologists Joseph Hazzidakis and Stephanos Xanthoudidis. Hazzidakis had begun collecting in the early 1880s; by 1900, when excavations by Sir Arthur Evans and others at Knossos and Phaistos yielded major finds, efforts were made to house the collections appropriately. The first display halls, in a Venetian convent, were built between 1904 and 1907, so Serov and Bakst were among the early visitors. See Manolis Andronicos, Herakleion Museum and Archaeological Sites of Crete

(Athens: Ekdotike Athenon S.A., 1975), 5. 32. Bakst to Liubov' Bakst, 20 May 1907, in Serov- Vospominanie, 1:604. 33. Bakst, "Serov i ia v Gretsii;' in SerovVospominanie, 1:579. 34. Bakst, "Serov i ia v Gretsii;' in SerovVospominanie, 1:583. The following quotations from Bakst's description of Delphi are taken from this section of the memoir, 1:583,587-88. 35. Maksimilian Voloshin, "Arkhaizm v russkoi zhivopisi: Rerikh, Bogaevskii i Bakst;' Apollon, no. 1 (1909): 48 relates the sublime scope of Bakst's scene to the destruction of Atlantis. This identification is reiterated in Vereshchagina, Khudozhnik, Vremia, Istoriia, 108-9, and Kurbanovskii, Nezapnyi Mrak, 196-99. Kurbanovskii also notes the popularity of the transparent diorama (optical theater) and such cataclysmic scenes as "The Last Days of Pompeii" and "Earthquake in Messina;' which may have made Bakst's work draw attention at the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1908. 36. Viacheslav Ivanov, "Drevnii uzhas. Po povodu kartiny Baksta 'Terror antiquus;" Zolotoe runo no. 4 (1909): 51-65. Voloshin, "Arkhaizm;' 49, Kennedy, The "Mir iskusstva" Group, 293-95, and Kurbanovskii, Nezapnyi Mrak, 197-98, quote and discuss sections of Ivanov's essay and other interpretations of the work. Kennedy, Kurbanovskii 196-98, and Irina Pruzhan, "Kartina L.S. Baksta 'Drevnii uzhas;" Soobshcheniia gosudarstvennogo russkogo muzeia 10 (Moscow: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1974), 53-57, discuss Bakst's initial ideas and studies for the work. 37. Marrin, Russkii peizazh, 275, uses the term "vymyshlennyi peizazh'' (imaginary landscape) to describe Bakst's treatment of space. Kurbanovskii, Nezapnyi Mrak, 197-98, relates the stylized landscape more specifically to the use of mirrors and screens in early films and to psychological concepts of Freud. 38. Sarab'ianov, Valentin Serov, 28-29. 39. Eleven of the preparatory sketches for the project, held in the GTG, Odessa Art Museum, Abramtsevo Museum Preserve, and private collections, are illustrated, with commentary, in the catalogue of the Tret'iakov Gallery exhibition Valentin Serov: k 125-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Leningrad: Avrora, 1991), 173-75. Many were found in the same album as the first studies for his portrait of Countess Orlova, so they can be dated 1910-1911; one sketch for Diana and Acteon is on the reverse of a study for Nausicaa. 40. "Iz besed Benua s S.R. Ernstom;' Sergei

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Ernst, V.A. Serov (Prague, 1921), reprinted in Serov- Vospominanie, 1:438. ["ne takoi, kak ee pishut obyknovenno, a takoi, kak ona byla na samom dele:'] There is some uncertainty about the dating ofSerov's Nausicaa paintings. Igor Grabar' stated that the first two versions were done before the trip to Greece, though most sources date them 1910; see Sarab'ianov, Valentin Serov, 355. Serov's paintings and graphic works on literary and historical themes during this period (ca. 1900-1910), part of the context for the mythological works, are discussed in Sarab'ianov, Valentin Serov, 26-27, and Alison Hilton, "The Composed Vision of Valentin Serov;' in Roger Anderson and Paul Debreczeny, eds., Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 131-40. 41. Two figure studies are in Sarab'ianov, Valentin Serov, 361, cat. no. 214, 215. Valkenier, Valentin Serov, 184, reproduces a page based on sketches done in Greece showing two views of the head of a kore (1910, GTG) inscribed with color notations. 42. Sarab'ianov, Valentin Serov, 354, cat. no. 563. 43. The Bull-leaping fresco from the central court, the Dolphin fresco from the Queen's Megaron (both c. 1450-1400 BCE), and the steatite rhyton in the shape of a hull's head (ca. 1500-1450 BCE) were among the Knossos finds originally displayed in the Archaeological Museum, Iraklion. Serov does not mention any sources specifically, but my hypothesis is in keeping with Serov's practice of combining many approaches to the realization of his images. The silhouetted forms of the dolphins and the bull might also have been inspired by Greek vase paintings: the well-known kylix by Exekias depicting Dionysus on a ship surrounded by leaping dolphins (c. 530 BCE, Antikensammlung, Munich) or an Attic vase with Europa and the bull (c. 490 BCE, Museo Archaeologico Nazionale, Tarquinia) are examples of works that Serov might have known from photographs. The artist Isaak Brodskii recalled a chance meeting with Serov in one of the museums in Rome in 1910. "Serov was gathering material at that time for his painting Rape of Europa, he was very much absorbed by that theme. He complained that he could not find appropriate models, pedigreed bulls, in order to make drawings of them:' Brodskii suggested going to Orvieto to find large bulls with curved horns, and Serov planned to do so. Serov- Vospominaniia, 2:104; also quoted in the exhibition catalogue, Valentin Serov, 165, with cat. no. 386, study of a bull (1910, GTG). 44. Vladimir Derviz, "Vospominaniia o V. A.

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Serove;' (originally published in Iskusstvo (1934), no. 6) in Serov- Vospominaniia, 1:113-14. 45. Derviz, in Serov- Vospominaniia, 1:114. 46. A. Benua to A.N. Savinov, 28-31 October 1959, in Serov- Vospominaniia, 1:435. 47. I. Ostroukhov, report for the year 1911 to Tret'iakov Gallery Council, unpublished, TsGALI, quoted in Serov- Vospominaniia, 1:613n8. Ostroukhov made efforts to help Serov's family by purchasing works. He discussed the purchase of studies for Nausicaa and his plans to make a bronze cast of Serov's plaster sculpture of Europa and the bull with Dmitrii Tolstoi, director of the Hermitage. Letters to D. Tolstoi, 13 December and 21 December 1911, in SerovVospominaniia, 1:272-73. 48. S. Goloushev [Sergei Glagol'], "Nechto o sovremmenoi zhivopisi;' Zhatva 3 (1912): 320-21, in Serov- Vospominaniia, 1:613. Glagol' connected the Greek works with the portrait of Ida Rubinshtein only tangentially, but other writers-and the overlapping dates of Serov's studies for all three paintings-confirm the relationship. According to Igor Grabar', Serov talked about the qualities of Egypt and Assyria embodied in the dancer, and admired the "monumentality" of her movements, like "an archaic bas-relief come to life:' I. Grabar: Valentin Serov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965), 233, quoted in Serov- Vospominaniia, 1:74. Valkenier, Valentin Serov, 204-10, discusses the portrait in detail and relates the portrait and specifically Rubinshtein's role as Cleopatra to Serov's admiration for the aesthetic of the eastern Mediterranean. For a detailed commentary on the portrait see I.S. Zil'bershtein and V.A. Samkov, "Posleslovie: Ida Rubinshtein i ee portret kisti Serova;' in Serova, Kak ros moi syn, 151-70. 49. Sergei Glagol', "Novye raboty Serova na vystavke 'Mir iskusstva';' Stolichnaia molva, no. 218 (1911), quoted in Serova, Kak ros moi syn, 163. 50. Sergei Makovskii, "Masterstvo Serova;' Apollon, no. 10 (1912): 5-12 is chiefly an obituary appreciation of Serov's art in general; the quotations here are from the section on the Greek trip and its results at the end of the essay, 11-12. 51. Morozov commissioned Denis to paint the Story of Psyche panels in 1908-1909; the artist came to Moscow to install them in January 1909. Shchukin and Matisse corresponded about Dance and Music; the artist painted them in 1909-1910 and visited Moscow to install them in the fall of 1911. See Alfred H. Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), 105-7, on the role of these

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collectors for Matisse, 110 on Matisse's early exhibitions in Russia, and 132-38 on the Matisse-Shchukin correspondence and the commissions and installation of Dance and Music. Serov- Vospominaniia, 1:377-78n2 provides a concise summary of Shchukin's activity and the responses of Russian artists to his collection. Serov knew both collectors and these works. Valkenier, Valentin Serov, 194-203, discusses the collectors and Serov's relationships to them and to Matisse's paintings. 52. "Budushchaia zhivopis' i ee otnoshenie k antichnomu iskusstvu" (1 April1908, transcribed in GRM, Manuscript Department, fond ll5). See Kennedy, The "Mir iskusstva" Group, 292-93, for the citation of this lecture and Bakst's article, "Puti klassitsizma v iskusstve;' Apollon, no. 2 (1909): 63-78, no. 3 (1909), 46-61. The quotations below are from a reprint of Apollon (Slavistic Printings and Reprintings, The Hague: Mouton, 1971). For a discussion of Apollon and other journals, see Janet Kennedy, "Turn-ofthe-Century Art Journals;' in Alia Rosenfeld, ed., Defining Russian Graphic Arts: From Diaghilev to Stalin 1898-1934 (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, and The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1999), 63-77. 53. M. Voloshin, "Arkhaizm v russkoi zhivopisi: Rerikh, Bogaevskii i Bakst;' Apollon, no. 1 (1909): 43-53. 54. Kennedy, ''Art Journals;' 72-75, relates Bakst's interpretations of the Apollonian- Dionysian dichotomy to his contact with Merezhkovskii and Rozanov, who were equally fascinated by Frederich Nietzsche's writings on the origins of Greek drama. Mir iskusstva had published a translation of Nietzsche's essay "Wagner and Bayreuth'' in the literary sections of two issues in 1900, and Bakst was familiar with Wagner's Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft by 1903: see Kennedy, The "Mir iskusstva" Group, 346-47. The multifaceted influence of Nietzsche on Russian symbolism is treated in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 55. Bakst, "Puti klassitsizma;' Apollon, no. 2: 63-68, 69, 71. 56. Bakst, "Puti klassitsizma;' Apollon, no. 3: 48, 51-53, on Cretan art, 54-56 on children's art. Bakst's discussion of naive and children's art overlaps with the interests of Mikhail Larionov and other neo-primitivists around this time, and his relatively few references to the mythology and art of China and India suggest ideas about a universal spirit in art similar to those that Vasily Kandinsky presented in On the Spiritual in Art (19ll).

57. Bakst, "Puti klassitsizma;' Apollon, no. 3: 56-58; 59-61. 58. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, rev. ed. Marian Burleigh-Motley (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986), notes to chapters 3 and 4, 284-86, gives a convenient summary of this scholarship. 59. For Larionov's involvement with Stephanos and Zolotoe runo exhibitions and examples of early paintings of bathers that hint at Black Sea or Mediterranean settings, see Anthony Parton, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 18-21.

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11

~y Between East and West 1he Search for National Identity in Russian Illustrated Children's Books, 1800- 1917 ALLA ROSENFELD

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n nineteenth-century Russia, the question of national identity was an important one in both political and cultural life. Russians in all cultural spheres, including writers and artists, were engaged in a quest for the definition of Russianness-a quest well embodied in the area of children's book design. This study investigates the emergence of children's book design as a recognized art form in Russia in the late nineteenth century. It also explores its subsequent development, including such features as the fusion by Russian artists of native traditions and foreign sources in their children's book designs and illustrations, as well as the ways in which illustrated children's books reflected their creators' efforts to express a sense of Russian national identity. 1 T H E I D E A 0 F D E V E L 0 P I N G a literature aimed specifically at children emerged in Russia around the same time as it did in Western Europe-the mid- to late eighteenth century. Prior to the eighteenth century, only a handful of children's books had been published in Russia, and those that had appeared were solely intended for the young members of the tsar's family. As early as 1574, Ivan Fedorov, the first Russian master printer, was commissioned by Tsar Ivan IV to print an Alphabet for the tsar's children soon after printing his first books. But some scholars consider Karion Istomin, a monk, poet, and Head of the Printing House between 1679 and 1701, to be the first Russian children's writer?

In 1693, he presented his Alphabet in manuscript form to Tsarina Natalia Kirillovna for her grandson, Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich, and went on to produce a pedagogical treatise in verse with rules of appropriate behavior for schoolchildren. 3 In 1694, Leontii Bunin engraved his Alphabet on copper plates, printing as many as 106 illustrated copies of the work. The late seventeenth century saw the development of a special type of Russian history book for children, the Tsarist Chronicle. Produced in the form of a popular print (lubok, plural-lubki) to be purchased by parents along with toys, the Tsarist Chronicle contained educational material on geography, natural history, and history. Much larger in size than Bunin's Alphabet, it functioned as entertainment and as an educational tool, serving as the prototype for all Russian illustrated books and encyclopedias.4 Peter the Great studied science with the help of such lubki when he was a child. Cultural reforms associated with Peter the Great resulted in the development of a literature and a system of education that were both increasingly secular and Western in orientation. Primers developed under his aegis, such as Honorable Mirror of Youth (Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo, 1717) and The First Reader for Youth (Pervoe uchenie otrokam, 1721), advocated moral pedagogy that encouraged highborn young readers to devote themselves to military or civil service. Honorable Mirror of Youth was also published with

the goal of teaching young Russians the basic rules of behavior and etiquette. In the early eighteenth century, various encyclopedias were translated from foreign languages for the children of the nobility. For example, the Russian government ordered the Russian translation of The World in Pictures (Orbis pictus), the first children's encyclopedia of the world, written by the Moravian bishop and teacher Johannes Amos Comenius and published in Latin in 1657. Containing 150 chapters, The World in Pictures introduced its young readers to various concepts such as geography, natural history, anatomy, and history. 5 Most Russian children's books on history, geography, and other science-related topics were initially produced in the European publishing capital of Amsterdam, but Russian publishers gradually began to produce such work themselves. 6 Many of these books, however, did not have any illustrations. The first Russian illustrated book on a scientific topic, Children's Repository (Detskaia teka), was a collection of drawings with explanatory text, created as metal engravings that included images and descriptions of animals, various crafts, and costumes of different nationalities. 7 Russia's continued orientation toward the West under Peter's eighteenth-century successors, especially Catherine the Great, was of vital importance for the development of both children's literature and education. During Catherine's reign, the French system of education was adopted in Russia, and foreign educators found widespread employment. At this time, a sizable percentage of the nation's young nobility-between roughly one-third and one-half-spoke one or more foreign languages (most often French, although some spoke English or German as well). This extended to their reading pursuits. 8 As such readers constituted the primary audience for children's books at this time, it is not surprising that the first books in Russia created especially for children and adolescents appeared in French rather than Russian. 9 The very notion of children's literature in Russia stemmed from the early-childhood theories ofJeanJacques Rousseau, whose writings were translated into Russian from 1768. Until the mid-eighteenth century, children in Russia were essentially seen as little adults, being little or no different from grown-ups. At a time when a twelve-year-old boy could enter military service, a girl that same age could marry, and a fourteen-yearold scion of a noble family could occupy a responsible position, it was deemed unnecessary to restrict the

reading of, and create special books for, the nation's youth. But that all changed following the introduction of Rousseau's educational philosophy in Russia in the 1760s. 10 The philosopher's new, visionary approach to early-childhood development had a far-reaching impact on Russian attitudes toward children, leading to the recognition of children's differences from adults; increased attention to children's particular interests, surroundings, and modes of comprehension; and, consequently, the very notion of children's literature in Russia. Such ideas attracted the attention of Catherine the Great, who, influenced by Enlightenment thought, was deeply concerned with the moral upbringing of a relatively broad stratum of Russian youth, in the hopes of molding an educated and patriotic citizenry. It was at this time that a distinct children's literature began to emerge in Russia. From the outset, this literature had a purely didactic function. Not surprisingly, its intended audience came from the nobility and other privileged classes-the families of the tsar, the Russian aristocracy, and wealthy landlords, as well as those of impoverished army officers. 11 As such, many children's books of the mid- to late eighteenth century focused on instilling in the nation's young nobility class-appropriate norms of behavior, including the aristocratic moral code. 12 Within this newly emergent field, several genres could soon be clearly discerned. They included moralizing discussions (nravouchitel'skie rassuzhdeniia)-literally, conversations between children and adults on serious topics; 13 other "discussions" that took the form of fairy tales or fables; collections of short stories on different moral subjects; historical novels; encyclopedias; and books on popular sciences. 14 Catherine herself contributed to this literature, writing fairy tales, originally intended for her grandchildren, which addressed Christian virtues, as well as citizens' obligations toward their royal and aristocratic masters. 15 An individual who shared Catherine's belief in the inextricable links between the Russian citizenry's well-being, public morality, and children's upbringing, and was likewise influenced by Rousseau, was Nikolai Novikov (17 44-1818). Publisher, journalist, critic, Freemason, and philanthropist, Novikov was the driving force behind the move to develop Russian children's literature in the late eighteenth century. 16 He recognized the vital, initiatory function of children's literature, and was among the first in Russia to discern children as a distinct audience. He published the first Russian children's journal, Children's Reading for the

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at that time. 20 As the same study points out, Russian children often read the same books as adults during this period, namely, works by leading Russian writers such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Lev Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov. Illustrations for works by Pushkin and other authors popular with Russian readers of all ages constitute the earliest examples of Russian book design. Such books often contained illustrations by the best graphic artists of the period-Stepan Galaktionov, I.V. Cheskii, and Mikhail Ivanov, among others-produced in the medium of metal engraving. In the 1830s, the costly, labor-intensive metal-engraving technique was gradually replaced by lithography and wood engraving-a shift that marked the emergence of book illustrations created specifically for children. 21 Paralleling this shift, the proportion of children's books by Russian authors at this time rose to 37 percent. This percentage continued to rise in the following decades. By the 1850s, nearly one-half of all children's books were written by Russian authors. Accordingly, the number of translated books for children decreased dramatically during this period; while translations comprised two-thirds of children's books in Russia in 1800-1830, by the 1850s that figure had dropped to one-third. 22 But despite such developments, the existing books evidently left a great deal to be desired. In a series of articles on the subject that appeared in the mid-1830s, the noted literary critic Vissarion Belinskii bemoaned the fact that there were still virtually no good Russian books for children at the time, and regarded the illustrations in translated books as lacking in artistic qualityY Belinskii also sarcastically remarked:

Heart and Mind (Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma) (1779-1789). Aimed at young readers between the ages of six and twelve, the journal contained instructive articles, original prose, folktales, and proverbs. From 1779 to 1790, Novikov also published thirty-eight children's books-more than half of all children's books published in Russia during that period. 17 Novikov placed particular importance on the educational role of illustration in children's books. His publications often included only exquisite vignettes, frontispieces, and tailpieces-reflecting his belief that illustrations should be of the highest quality and elevate and inform children's tastes, and that it was better not to include any illustrations at all, than present children with unattractive or crass imagery.

Major Developments of the Nineteenth Century The first Russian children's book on a contemporary political and patriotic theme was Gift to the Russian Children in Commemoration of 1812 (Podarok russkim detiam v pamiat' 1812 gada) . Compiled in 1814 by Mikhail Terebenev, a well-known master of portrait miniatures, the book consisted of thirty-four political caricatures on the war against Napoleon's Grand Army (corresponding to the number ofletters in the Russian alphabet), published in the form of copper engravings. 18 These anti-Napoleonic caricatures were created by an outstanding team of Russian artistsengraver and watercolorist Ivan Ivanov, painter Aleksei Venetsianov, and Mikhail's father, the graphic artist and sculptor Ivan Terebenev. 19 For this publication, the senior Terebenev created watercolors accompanied by satirical inscriptions, which were then transferred into engravings, hand-colored and mounted on cardboard. For the most part, however, Russian children's books up till the first few decades of the nineteenth century still largely reflected the dominance of foreign influences. The majority were modeled on examples from London and Paris, with some publishers even borrowing engraved plates from abroad to illustrate their books. As many scholars have observed, in contrast to the great achievements of Russian adult literature in the early nineteenth century, little of distinction was written at that time specifically for children. Indeed, a study of children's reading habits conducted as late as 1927 notes that books intended for children comprised only a small fraction-a mere 10 to 14 percent-ofRussian children's reading material

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Not only our youth but also our children often know passages from Corneille's and Racine's tragedies by heart and can recount dozens of anecdotes about Henry IV or Louis XIV, but they don't have the slightest idea about the richness of their native Russian folk poetry or Russian literature, and they learn only accidentally from their servants and wet nurses that once there was in Russia such a tsar as Peter the Great. 24

Until the 1840s, most Russian books were illustrated in the neoclassical or romantic style, and were often allegorical. Kapitan Zelentsov's A lphabet (Azbuka), dating to the 1830s, featured genre scenes- a rare example in children's book illustration of the time. In Zelentsov's lithographs, each letter of the Russian alphabet was represented not by a single motif, as had previously often been the case, but by a realistically

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rendered scene from everyday Russian life. 25 Another artist of the time who illustrated children's books with genre scenes was Wilhelm Timm (18201899),26 who was renowned for his realistic portrayals of everyday life, depictions of ethnic types of the Russian Empire, and, most of all, for the illustrations in his artistic periodical Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok (Russian Art Bulletin) (1851-1863). As a famous graphic artist of the period whose art was usually intended for adult audiences, Timm played an important role in the history of children's book design in Russia. He created the first Russian children's books that did not merely contain separate images or vignettes, but successfully combined imagery and text into a unified whole. His illustrations for Nikolai Polevoi's 1844 book Tale of Ivan the Fool (Skazka ob Ivanushke-durachke) constitute his most successful work for children. Timm's work was strongly influenced by that of French artist Paul Gavarni, whose caricatures for Le Charivari and I.:Illustration masterfully captured the follies and foibles of French society. At times, Timm even borrowed some of Gavarni's subjects for his own illustrations-a practice that earned Timm the harsh reproaches of Belinskii, who found nothing particularly "Russian'' in Timm's designs.2 7 Starting in the 1840s, Russian artists including Egor Kovrigin, Aleksandr Agin, and Vasilii Rybinskii began to focus more on specifically Russian characters and motifs. In Children's Almanac (Almanakh dlia detei) (1845), Kovrigin, who was known for his drawings of Russian types and genre scenes, depicted such themes in an unidealized and often humorous manner. In 1845 Agin, an illustrator of satirical literature, created lithographs for the book Grandfather Krylov (Dedushka Krylov), portraying the beloved Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov and the characters of his fables. 28 Rybinskii-a serf of Nikolai Sheremetev who was freed by his master in 1846, probably because of his exceptional drawing talent-traveled extensively in the Volga region, making sketches of peasant celebrations, Russian costumes, and national types. He used these sketches in his 1859 album The Life of Vanya, a Young Peasant Who Lives Outside of Moscow (Zhite-byte Vani, podmoskovnogo muzhichka), which he wrote and illustrated. It was in the work of the nineteenth-century painters known as the Peredvizhniki, however, that Russian subject matter really came to the fore. Their depictions of peasants and workers in the unflinching style of critical realism were influenced in part by the democratic views espoused by such writers as Belinskii,

Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Nikolai Chernyshevskii.29 Beginning in the 1860s, these and other like-minded writers called for a new, more egalitarian form of children's literature that would be grounded in realism and convey the hardship of the Russian lower classes?° From the following decade, several of the Peredvizhniki-Ilia Repin, Vasilii Surikov, Valentin Serov, and Mikhail Nesterov among them-duly turned their attention to illustrating children's books. In stark contrast to the sentimentality that had largely dominated earlier Russian children's book illustration, these artists' contributions to the genre represented a sober approach to their subjects, in which even imaginary scenes were rendered with a high degree of realism. In their illustrations, the Peredvizhniki concentrated largely on genre subjects, borrowing themes from everyday life. Taking their lead from Russian literature, these artists often added their own social critique to their convincing but highly narrative re-creations of reality. Repin (1844-1930), one of the leading artists affiliated with the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, created several illustrations for collections of stories by Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy. 31 Appearing in books published in 1883 and 1909, Repin's illustrations embody the graphic tradition of the Peredvizhnik realist style, presenting unvarnished depictions of the lives of ordinary Russians. Intriguingly, these images appear no different from his work for adult audiences-reflecting Rep in's belief that it was not necessary to simplify his drawings to make them understandable for children. Surikov (1848-1916) created three illustrations for the 1883 publication of Turgenev's and Tolstoy's stories as well. Produced around the time when the artist was at work on several of his major history paintings, Surikov's illustrations for the Tolstoy tale "God Sees the Truth, but Waits" ("Bog pravdu vidit, da ne skoro skazhet") explore a theme addressed in many of his paintings, a hero's suffering for his beliefs. In particular, they depict the harsh conditions that convicts had to endure in the tsarist system of penal servitude known as katorga. Surikov's most expressive illustration for the story, entitled Prison ( Ostrog), was omitted from the second edition of the book in 1886, possibly because of censorship. 32 Nesterov (1862-1942), a deeply religious artist, used national historical subject matter as a springboard for digressions into poetic spirituality. He was among the leading artists who worked for the Moscow publisher A.D. Stupin. Nesterov created engravings for a series of

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inexpensive Stupin publications for children, including the three-volume collection ofPushkin stories, Selected

Works for Young People (Sochineniia, izdannye dlia iunoshestva) (1888), and For Schools and the People (Dlia shkol i naroda) (1899). In 1888, he also illustrated Lermontov's Fable of the Merchant Kalashnikov (Pesn' o kuptse Kalashnikove), published by Stupin in 1893 and reissued in 1897. Nesterov attempted to capture his subjects' inner workings in his depiction of Russian characters such as Alena Dmitrievna from Fable of the Merchant Kalashnikov or Masha from the Pushkin tale The Captain's Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka). Frequently dispensing with three-dimensional illusionism, his children's book illustrations deploy flat, decorative designs and compositions populated by stylized figures. Within the realist mode, another approach to children's book illustration was characterized by grotesque humor, as exemplified by the work of Aleksei Afanasiev (1850-after 1920), whose children's book illustrations abandon illusionistic space and use a minimum of descriptive or narrative elements. Afanasiev, who contributed to the Peredvizhnik exhibitions from 1889 and collaborated with various satirical journals, created illustrations in the second half of the 1890s for Petr Ershov's book The Little Humpbacked Horse (Konek-gorbunok). Many of Afanasiev's drawings for this book were published in the journal The Jester (Shut) in 1897 and 1898, and were also exhibited in its editorial office in 1899.33 The literature for children published in the late nineteenth century was extremely diverse. The authors who wrote children's books came from different social classes and espoused a range of political views, and their books varied greatly not only in terms of their literary style, but also in their social content. Accordingly, the most salient characteristic of the prerevolutionary publishing industry was the targeting of different audiences based on their class background. As in the Russian book-publishing industry as a whole, publications intended for the lower classes differed substantially from those intended for the upper and upper-middle classes in terms of content, edition number, and their overall appearance, including size, illustrations, and quality of paper. The I.D. Sytin Publishing House specialized in children's books for the lower classes. 34 Sytin, who was associated with the populist movement, produced large editions of inexpensive children's books that often featured old-fashioned, naturalistic illustrations and

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usually cost as little as seven to ten kopecks. However, Sytin was distinguished by his success in establishing his firm in the two rival marketplaces, the popular commercial arena and the educational market. In the early 1900s, many Russian artists who illustrated Sytin's publications worked under the leadership of the realist painter and Peredvizhnik member Nikolai Kasatkin, whose primary themes included the lives of workers and the urban poor. This group of artist-illustrators included Aleksandr Apsit, who would become one of the first designers of Soviet propaganda posters, and the young Sergei Gerasimov, later a prominent landscape and genre painter. In the 1880s, the publishing house Posrednik was founded at the behest of Lev Tolstoy on the basis of Sytin's publishing house. Posrednik published works by such writers as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nikolai Leskov, and Vladimir Korolenko. Starting in the 1890s, the publishing house produced the series "Library for Children and Youth'' (Biblioteka dlia detei i iunoshestva), which consisted of the best literary works by classic Russian authors. Like Sytin, A.D. Stupin also specialized in inexpensive children's books for the least well-off sector of the population. 35 Occupying a special place in his publishing enterprise was the "Stupin Library;' which contained over one hundred titles in various genres, including fiction, Russian folklore, history, travel, and books on various children's games. The series focused on religious texts written in a didactic, moralizing mode, rather than works of literary merit. However, Stupin paid serious attention to the artistic quality of his publications, many of which were produced in the best Moscow printing shops using high-quality paper. Stupin also employed important engravers of the period, and sometimes even had book engravings produced in Paris. Stupin's books were frequently republished in large editions and were easily affordable, justifying his printing expenses. In contrast to Sytin's and Stupin's books, M.O. Wolf's publications were intended for the children of the Russian aristocracy, high-ranking army officers, government officials, and the bourgeois intelligentsia. 36 The main objective of Wolf's publications was to introduce young readers to Western literature, which comprised roughly 90 percent of his publishing output. The idea of Russianness as defined by personal loyalty to the tsar and faithfulness to the Orthodox Church was strongly expressed in Wolf's publications on Russian subjects, which consisted of ultra-royalist books

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that called for devotion to the throne, the "beloved monarch;' and the Orthodox Church. 37 Elaborate and often excessive ornamentation, medallions, vignettes, and the employment of gold pigment were the main decorative elements in Wolf's publications. Many of A.D. Devrien's books were cheaper than those of Wolf. Aimed exclusively at wealthy audiences, Devrien's publishing house also specialized in largeformat, deluxe children's editions, intended as expensive gifts and notable for their high printing standards. Even those normally able to afford Wolf's books may have found these deluxe editions, which generally cost between 12 and 14 rubles, out of reach. These books usually included many illustrations produced in the form of color lithographs and copper engravings. Among the artists who illustrated Devrien's publications was the graphic artist Sergei Solomko, who worked in commercial areas such as advertising-and whom the painter and art historian Igor Grabar sarcastically dubbed "the General of Symbolism, decadence, and mysticism" 38-as well as Klavdii Lebedev, a history painter and Peredvizhnik, who also illustrated books on Russian historical themes. The Devrien publishing house also employed the artist Nikolai Karazin, who often utilized considerable ornamentation and romantic effects in his illustrations. Finally, Joseph Knebel's children's books were distinguished by high-quality printing and exquisite illustrations, and their production peaked in 19061917?9 Hiring the best graphic artists of the period to illustrate his children's books, Knebel was the first Russian publisher to understand the importance of book design in works oriented toward small children; he believed that, while a child might quickly forget a book's content, its color scheme and drawings would stay with him forever. 40

Children's Book Illustration and the NeoRussian Style, l870s-1880s Throughout much of the nineteenth century, a considerable amount of Russian children's literature was still based on Western models. However, the balance tipped in favor of Russian sources amid the Slavophile movement of the 1870s and 1880s. A reprise (albeit more conservative) of the Slavophile rhetoric of the 1830s, the late-nineteenth-century Slavic revival gave rise to an intense interest in all things Russian, an urgent desire to explore Russia's native traditions in all

their manifestations and elevate them above foreigninfluenced styles, genres, and themes. What this meant for children's literature was the celebration and rediscovery of Russian oral traditions such as epic legends, songs, fables, and fairy tales, which were collected, studied, and reinterpreted anew by scholars, writers, and artists alike. In a letter to the art critic Vladimir Stasov, Elena Polenova, among the first artists of the period to collect and illustrate early Russian folktales, invokes the need for Russian schoolchildren to know these and other forms of their national literary heritage: "I think that it is very important to illustrate our national Russian fairy tales. As of yet, I don't know of any books for children whose illustrations truly recreate the poetry and spirit of Old Russian culture, especially since Russian children nowadays are being brought up on the poetry of British and German fairy tales:'41 Polenova was one of the leading representatives of an artistic idiom closely linked to the Slavic revival of the 1870s and 1880s: the neo-Russian style. Among the leading tendencies in Russian art from the 1870s onward, the neo-Russian style reflected its practitioners' search for a national art form based on the revival of Russian folk traditions and medieval culture.42 Although based exclusively on Russian historical material, the neo-Russian style offered no preferred hierarchy of artistic sources or historical periods to convey what was deemed quintessentially Russian. Elements and motifs from a variety of folk sources were combined to create complex, at times highly eclectic, works. Freely combining forms derived from various historical sources and Russian folk art, proponents of the neo-Russian style concentrated most of their attention on the problem of national selfdetermination, the search for national roots, and the reinterpretation of the past. They sought to transform indigenous Russian folk art into a contemporary artistic language. As its name indicates, the neo-Russian style, which art historian Wendy Salmond has described as "a modernized, highly subjective response to native cultural traditions;'43 was intended to be both new and national. Artists associated with the neo-Russian style played a major role in the rise of Russian book design in the late nineteenth century. These included Elizaveta Bern (1843-1914), who sought to create a unified mode of book design, in which text and illustrations played an equal role. Born into the nobility, Bern lived untill857 at the family estate of Shekeptsovo, where she started

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drawing from an early age. When she turned fourteen, she went to St. Petersburg to study art at the School of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, where her teachers included Ivan Kramskoi, Pavel Chistiakov, and Ludwig Primazzi. In 1864 she returned to Shekeptsovo, devoting her time to drawing animals from life. In 1865, after showing these drawings at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Bern received a Silver Medal, and in 1875 she was recognized for her silhouettes of children. One of the first women artists in Russia to receive a professional art education, she was already a mature artist by the time the neo-Russian style peaked in influence and achievement. The artist's books, print portfolios, postcards, and albums reflect her interest in folk motifs, national Russian costumes, and peasant crafts. 44 She illustrated books by such Russian writers as Turgenev, Tolstoy, Krylov, Leskov, and V sevolod Garshin, as well as Russian folktales. Although some critics of the time criticized Bern's drawings for their sentimentality and sweetness, her books enjoyed great commercial success. 45 Her neoRussian works were highly regarded by two Russian tsars-Alexander III and Nicholas II-and some of her works even entered the imperial family's collection. Devoting over twenty years of her career to the art of silhouette drawing-a simple method of turning realistic illustration into decorative design46 - Bern primarily focused on the depiction of children. She became famous for her illustrations for Silhouettes from the Life of Children (Siluety iz zhizni detei), published in 1875, while her 1881 silhouette drawings for Tale of a Turnip (Skazka o repke) are considered her most successful illustrations. For this book, the artist produced eight expressive silhouettes accompanied by a page featuring text from the tale. On the book's cover, she combined all the depicted characters into a single, unified composition. Another important work by Bern is Alphabet (Azbuka), published by I. Lapin in Paris in 1913-1914, which consisted of thirty illustrations that used Old Russian handwritten letters from the seventeenth century (fig. 11.1). While Bern's work was primarily based in St. Petersburg, the artists' colonies of Abramtsevo and Talashkino were equally important centers for the neo-Russian style (see chapter 4). Both played a major role in fostering the growing interest in peasant crafts among contemporary Russian artists in late-nineteenthcentury Russia. Two members of the Abramtsevo circle, Viktor Vasnetsov and Polenova, made particularly vibrant contributions to the neo-Russian style in children's book illustration.

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The work ofVasnetsov (1848-1926) is characterized by the search for a genuinely Russian pictorial idiom that would embody the humanistic principles of the Peredvizhniki, as well as elements of Russian folk culture. Paralleling the theories of the Russian folklore historian Fedor Buslaev, whose studies of Russian culture were of great importance to Abramtsevo artists, Vasnetsov sought to compare "the present with the past through the affinity of ideas:'47 Many Russian art historians also stress the importance of Vasnetsov's upbringing for his future artistic development; 48 he was born into the family of a village priest and raised in the remote northern village ofLopial in the Viatka province. 49 As he later recalled in a letter to Stasov: "I lived in the village among peasants and loved them not as a 'populist' would, but [... ] as my real friends and acquaintances; I listened to their songs and fairy tales:' 50 Vasnetsov attended the seminary in Viatka, where he became interested in early Russian literature, before studying graphic arts at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1868 to 1874. In one of his letters to Stasov, he summarized his ideological and aesthetic program: We shall contribute to the treasury of world art when we concentrate wholly upon developing our native art, that is, when we can portray, with all the perfection and wholeness of which we are capable, the beauty, strength, and significance of our native imagery: our life today and our past, our dreams and our faith, and succeed in reflecting the eternal and universal through our national reality.... Only the man who is sick of evil does not remember or value his childhood and youth. It is a pitiful nation that does not remember, value, and love its history. 51

At the same time-in the early 1870s-he began illustrating Russian folktales. While initially largely influenced by Western illustration, Vasnetsov soon began employing folk elements widely in his illustrations. His greatest achievement in the area of children's book illustration is his series oflithographs for the Pushkin poem The Song of Oleg the Wise (Pesn' o Veshchem Olege), which was published by the Academy of Sciences in 1899, on the centenary of Pushkin's birth (fig. 11.2). 52 This folding, accordion-like book is reminiscent of early Russian illuminated manuscripts. The text of the accompanying poem was handwritten in the manner of Old Church Slavonic manuscripts by the artist Viktor Zamirailo. A fascinating blend of fantasy

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l l . l . Elizaveta (Elisabeth) Bern, Illustration for Azbuka, 1913. Color lithograph, 27.4 x 14.7 em, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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and reality, Vasnetsov's illustrations are remarkable for their ardent patriotism, heroic spirit, and wealth of poetic imagery. On occasion the artist also introduced genre scenes that he drew from life, including images of peasant labor and Russian landscapes in his illustrations for Soldier's Alphabet (Soldatskaia azbuka) (1871) and People's Alphabet (Narodnaia azbuka) (1872), both by N.P. Stolpianskii, as well as in his Russian Alphabet for Children (Russkaia azbuka dlia detei) (1873). Particularly topical were the images of barge haulers on the Volga River, which he included in his illustrations for N.A. Aleksandrov's Volga of 1874. A major cultural figure in the 1890s, Vasnetsov was especially influential on the work of his fellow Abramtsevo artist Polenova (1850-1898). She often collaborated with him in Moscow, producing costumes based on his drawings, and was especially inspired by Vasnetsov's decor for Mamontov's production of Snow Maiden (see chapter 4). As Polen ova recalled: "I never took any lessons from Vasnetsov, but working with him I always learned to understand the Russian folk spirit:' 53 In charge of the Abramtsevo carpentry workshop from 1885 to 1894, Polenova traveled widely through Russian villages to collect exhibits of folk woodcarvings and paintings for the museum she helped to establish at Abramtsevo in the late 1880s. This involvement played a significant role in her children's book designs, as the objects that she collected often became sources for her illustrations, while the folktales and songs retold to her by peasants who worked in the Abramtsevo workshops or lived in the vicinity also made their way into her books. As the artist commented: "There is a strong connection between my fairy tales and wooden carved objects, since both are inspired by folk art:' 54 Polenova's book designs drew on her travels and folk art collections, bringing together text and illustration to produce a unified vision. The illustration cycle that Polenova produced at Abramtsevo (1886-1889), exemplified by White Duck (Belaia utochka) and The War of the Mushrooms (Voina gribov), 55 recalls the artist's genre and landscape paintings from that period, in which she stressed the singular qualities of the Russian landscape and national types; they also combine handwritten texts and illustrations, a practice reminiscent of the lubki tradition. Polenova's working method was typical of that of the Peredvizhniki. Like them, she was interested in the precise rendering of ethnographic details, as seen in both her illustrations and the numerous oil studies

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she painted directly from nature. For example, Polenova used her study of a particular porch in the village ofKomiagino for one of her illustrations in the tale Morozko, while a chest from the Abramtsevo museum collection served as a prototype for the image of the chest with a rich dowry in that same book. While the Abramtsevo illustrations are marked by the use of intense colors and a painterly mode, those that Polen ova created in Kostroma province between 1890 and 1898 reflect her embrace of a more graphic approach, which deploys a more pronounced outline and reduces the number of subjects in the illustrations. 56 Her palette became more restrained and consisted of cooler shades, as can be seen in her illustrations for Magpie-Thief(Soroka-vorona) and Synko Filipko. In these later illustrations, Polenova gradually moved away from the highly realistic imagery typical of the Peredvizhniki toward more stylized and simplified forms. The richness of ornamentation in Polenova's illustration is clearly taken from the artistic vocabulary of Russian folk art. Working in such diverse areas as painting, book illustration, and the decorative arts, Polenova responded to the demands of the Gesamtkunstwerk-the integral artistic treatment of any artwork, be it a decorative object, building, or book. The theatrical activities of the Abramtsevo artists, characterized by their interest in a stylistic unity of production, were another important source of inspiration for Polenova. She sought to create books that were artistically cohesive, with the illustrations, design, and text all contributing to the total effect. Polenova brought back many studies and photographs of northern Russian architecture from her trips to different villages in the Kostroma province, as well as actual objects of peasant crafts. Her Kostroma fairy-tale illustrations were partly inspired by these sketches and studies. One of her oil paintings depicts a typical interior of a northern Russian cottage, an izba, with a Russian stove and carved and painted furniture; Polenova used this study for one of her illustrations in Synko Filipko, which shows Baba-Yaga by the stove. 57 This interpretation of folklore was closely related to the tradition of Russian realist art. Indeed, there is little evocation of the visually fantastic in her fairy-tale images; even Polen ova's rendering of Baba-Yaga sooner suggests a good-natured peasant woman than a witch. At the same time, her illustrations demonstrate a truly modernized response to indigenous Russian folk art, as if forming a link between the Peredvizhnik tradition and the development of Russian art nouveau (stil' modern).

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11.2. Viktor Vasnetsov and Viktor Zamirailo, Illustrations for Aleksandr Pushkin's Song of Oleg the Wise, 1899. Color lithograph, each sheet 33 x 22.8 em, Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Alexander Aronov, 2005.0191. Photo by Peter Jacobs.

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The poor quality of Russian printing technology in the 1880s made it difficult to reproduce Polenova's colorful watercolor illustrations. Those featured in the one book published during her lifetime, The War of the Mushrooms, were reproduced using the black-andwhite method of phototype; Polenova had to color part of the edition by hand. 58 After Polenova's death in 1898, however, the Moscow publisher Joseph Knebel learned from her relatives of the large cycle of illustrations she had prepared in Kostroma for publication. After seeing the images firsthand, Knebel went on to publish three books by Polenova. Produced in F. Brukman's Munich printing workshop in 1906 under the title

Russian Folktales and Sayings (Russkie narodnye skazki i pribautki) and using the up-to-date method of threecolor zincography, the illustrations looked very close to Polenova's original drawings, and provided a lasting record of her innovative contribution to children's book design (fig. 11.3). 59 Sergei Maliutin (1859-1937), the principal Russian artist at Talashkino and head of the print and woodworking shops there, was also instrumental in the flourishing of book design in the 1890s.60 Maliutin continued and developed Polenova's artistic concepts in his children's book illustrations. As with Polenova's oeuvre, Maliutin's study of folk art traditions helped facilitate his transition from the naturalism of critical realism to the metaphorical language of art nouveau and the decorativeness of the neo-Russian style. Although the artist illustrated only a small number of children's books, including Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Sa/tan (Skazka o Tsare Saltane), published by Mamontov in 1898, two fairy tales by N. Iurin, and a collection of Russian folktales, songs, and stories entitled Ai dudu! (1899), his works are unique and vivid examples of the neo-Russian style. Invited by Maria Tenisheva to Talashkino in 1900, Maliutin stayed for three years, heading the artistic workshops and designing furniture and other objects in the neo-Russian style. His design experiments there bore strong affinities to folk woodcarving, particularly the carving of houses in the area along the Volga, which, in turn, were closely connected to his book illustrations. The primary carving motif in this area was the sunflower, which became one of Maliutin's favorite subjects in his carved decorations at Talashkino. It is the same motif that the artist used in his cover design for Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan. Maliutin's illustrations reflect the artist's tendency to simplify imagery, influenced by the lubok tradition, and to emphasize line over volume.

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Graphic Cohesiveness and Stylistic Eclecticism: Mir iskusstva and Children's Book Design, 1890s-1910s If the illustrators at Abramtsevo and Talashkino initiated the idea of integrating text and image into an artistic whole, then the artists associated with the Mir iskusstva (World of Art) movement took this concept to the next level. Mir iskusstva artists played a vital role in the graphic arts renaissance in turn-of-the-century Russia. Book design was an especially important art form for members of both generations of Mir iskusstva artists, a number of whom, including Alexandre Benois, Ivan Bilibin, Dmitrii Mitrokhin, Georgii Narbut, Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, and Sergei Chekhonin, arrived at a well-thought-out approach to the medium based on the concept of the book as an integrated decorative and graphic whole. In an essay of 1910, Benois captures the holistic approach to book design explored by various members of the group: One should not forget about the architectonics of a book. It is not enough to create a title page, vignettes, and endplates. [. . .]A good architect is capable of drawing a good plan of the building to be erected, of creating clever combinations, stunning details, and a complete "anatomy" of the building. [. .. ] The same applies to the book designer, who first of all should pay attention[ ... ] to the paper's format, quality, surface, and color; to the placement of the text on a page.61

The Mir iskusstva artists were inspired by a broad range of sources, both native and foreign, among them the British illustrators Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Conder, as well as the Germans Thomas Theodor Heine and Heinrich Vogeler, and the Swiss artist Felix Vallotton. Another important source for the graphic style of the Mir iskusstva was the Japanese woodblock print, which appealed to these artists for its expressive lines, unexpected compositions, and rejection of threedimensional illusionism.62 Benois's Alphabet in Pictures (Azbuka v kartinkakh) (1904) represents a milestone in the career of its creator, a painter, graphic artist, art critic, and founding member of Mir iskusstva. 63 For every letter of the alphabet, Benois created an imaginative full-page illustration dedicated to an object or concept described by a word beginning with that letter. 64 The Alphabet in Pictures was also rich in personal significance for the artist. It was dedicated to Benois's son, who turned

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11.3. Elena Polenova, Illustration for Russian Folktales and Humorous Sayings, 1906. Color photo-relief, 32 x 22.5 em, Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art, acquired with the Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund, 1992.1132. Photo by Peter Jacobs.

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three the year the book was completed, while the artist's daughter served as a model for some of the book's illustrations. In The Alphabet in Pictures, Benois rejected the world of everyday objects surrounding children and turned instead to mythology and the past, conceiving of the child as living in a world of fantasy and legends. Executed during the early phase of Mir iskusstva, The Alphabet in Pictures may also be seen as a manifesto of sorts of the group's approach to children's book design. Embodying the Mir iskusstva vision of the book, Benois united the elements of The Alphabet in Pictures in various ways: through color; by enclosing the letters, illustrations, and words in separate decorative frames; and by using the same tripartite division of the page throughout. The Alphabet in Pictures resembles a theater in a book, in which each illustration is organized as a mise-en-scene populated by characters associated with the theater. In his cover design, Benois depicted all the characters found in the book; each angel in the cloud holds a book, including a copy of The Alphabet in Pictures itself or a book by another artist, including Benois's fellow Mir iskusstva member Ivan Bilibin. The State Dispatch Office printed Benois's book using the most advanced printing technique of that time-a four-color process especially suitable for watercolor reproductions-while the contours of the drawings were reproduced using a photomechanical method. Bilibin (1876-1942) became a link between the founders of Mir iskusstva, like Benois, and the second generation of artists associated with this movement, such as Narbut, Chekhonin, and Mitrokhin. A pupil ofVasnetsov, he expanded and enriched his teacher's neo-Russian style. Between 1902 and 1904, Bilibin went on field expeditions to the Russian North, on which he gathered examples of folk arts and crafts and photographed old wooden buildings for the Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum. These experiences would play a significant role in the development of his graphic style, which made extensive use of motifs from lubki, early Russian illuminated manuscripts, peasant embroideries, and carved and painted wooden utensils. Bilibin was also inspired by artwork as varied as illustrations by Beardsley and symbolist paintings by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the Swiss Arnold Bocklin. In their combination of all these diverse sources-elements of Old Russian art, European art nouveau and symbolism, and the stylistics of Japanese woodcuts-Bilibin's children's book illustrations exemplify the eclectic nature of Russian art nouveau.

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For example, one of Bilibin's lithographic illustrations in Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan, published in St. Petersburg in 1905, is highly reminiscent of Katsushika Hokusai's color woodblock print The Great Wave of Kanagawa (1831), from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (fig. 11.4). However, Bilibin added to the image an ornamental border with a design inspired by Russian folk art. Bilibin's illustrations are characterized by the use of silhouette, an emphasis on line, and ornamental decoration. 65 As in the Tale of Tsar Saltan illustrations, the dramatic, almost theatrical compositions of his books are filled with intricate details and surrounded by ornate borders. In his work as an illustrator, Bilibin created all the decorative elements for book design, including a special typeface, initials, and ornamental vignettes. Bilibin's style had a great impact on the field of children's book illustration, setting a standard largely unmatched by many of his peers. Interestingly, in 1925, the early Soviet experts on children's literature Pavel Dulskii and Iakov Meksin analyzed various children's books with the purpose of recommending to parents and educators those books that would be best suited to a child's comprehension. Concluding that in early childhood a child needs simplified drawings, Dulskii and Meksin argued that Polenova was a better children's illustrator than Bilibin, given the numerous elaborate details in the latter's illustrations. 66 Narbut (1886-1920) belonged to the second generation ofMir iskusstva artists who joined the group in the 1910s, when older members, including Benois and Bilibin, already occupied an important place in fin-de-siecle Russian culture. Having studied from 1907 to 1909 at the Zvantseva School under two other older Mir iskusstva figures, Lev Bakst and Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, he joined the movement in 1913. Benois once commented that Narbut's works, for all their refinement, betrayed many influences, which sometimes overshadowed the artist's creative individuality.67 Indeed, Narbut's illustrations fused a range of sources, among them Russian lubki and peasant toys, Russian Orthodox icons, chinoiserie, medieval engravings, Rene Perrout's Images d'Epinal, 68 Japanese woodcuts, and the graphic style of the German magazine Simplicissmus. Unlike Polenova and the Peredvizhniki, Narbut did not paint oil studies from nature or draw sketches of peasants or architecture to use later as preliminary studies for his illustrations. Rather, Narbut often transformed a living being into an elegant, ornamental

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11 .4. Ivan Bilibin, Illustration for Aleksandr Pushkin's The Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1905. Color lithograph, 25 x 32.3 em, Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art, acquired with the Irene Nintzel Memorial Fund, 1992.1113. Photo by Jack Abraham.

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arabesque in his illustrations. His drawings were always specifically intended for printing, and the artist would spend hours in the publishing house, learning various methods of print production (he preferred the relief process to lithography). 69 Although not formally a student of Bilibin, Narbut would often draw under Bilibin's guidance in the latter's studio. He also frequented the studio ofBenois, who offered his support to the young artist. The influence ofBilibin and Benois is evident in Narbut's early illustrations for Vasilii Zhukovskii's How the Mice Buried the Cat (Kak myshi kota khoronili) (1909-1910). Through Bilibin, Narbut met Knebel, the Moscowbased children's publisher who would play a decisive role in his career, ultimately publishing twelve children's books with Narbut's illustrations. 70 In late 1907 Knebel published Narbut's illustrations for the fairy tales Crane and Heron (Zhuravl' i tsaplia) and Bear (Medved')books that Narbut dedicated to Benois in gratitude for the older artist's friendship and support. In 1909 Knebel then commissioned Narbut to illustrate more books, including The War of the Mushrooms and The Wooden Eagle (Dereviannyi orel). In early 1910 Knebel sponsored Narbut's trip to Munich, where the artist gained greater artistic proficiency in the studio of Simon Holl6sy. That same year, Knebel commissioned Narbut to design a book of Russian folk songs and sayings, Dance, Matvei, Don't Spare Your Bast Shoes (Pliashi Matvei, ne zhalei laptei). This work reflected Narbut's interest in wooden and clay peasant toys, which he collected under Benois's influence, and which reappeared as models for another cycle of illustrations, Toys (Igrushki) (1911), for which Boris Diks later wrote poetic text (fig. 11.5). About half of the books that Knebel displayed at the International Book Fair in Leipzig in 1914 were illustrated by Narbut, so successful was their collaboration. In some of his illustrations, including those made for Krylov's fables (1910-1911) and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales (1910-1913), Narbut used black silhouettes influenced by Fedor Tolstoi, a sculptor, painter, and medalist of the first half of the nineteenth century who was celebrated for his silhouettes and illustrations in a neoclassical style. Narbut soon became one of the most successful and skillful masters of this type of illustration. His illustrations for Andersen's fairy tale The Nightingale (Solovei) were also inspired by early nineteenth-century Russian porcelain decorated in the manner of Chinese art. In 1919, articulating the view of many Russian publishers,

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artists, and book lovers, Bilibin proudly called his former student "the most outstanding Russian graphic artist of the time:' 71 Narbut's friend and colleague Mitrokhin (18831973) began associating with members ofMir iskusstva in 1908, when Konstantin Somov and Benois invited him to take part in a joint exhibition. This collaboration prompted him to move to St. Petersburg, where, in 1910, Mitrokhin began exhibiting with the Mir iskusstva group. In 1911, having encountered Mitrokhin's drawings through their frequent publication in the journals Vesy (Scales), Zritel' (Spectator), Satirikon, and Apollon, Knebel invited him to illustrate I. I. Khemnitser's Fables (Basni). Working for Knebel between 1911 and 1939, Mitrokhin illustrated fairy tales by Wilhelm Hauff, Richard Gustafsson, and Hans Christian Andersen, among others. In 1912-1913, Mitrokhin also created an entire series of children's books for Knebel, illustrating nine books for the "Gift Series" (Podarochnaia seriia), all of which were similar in size (approximately 30 by 23 em) and contained eight illustrated pages. The Phantom Ship (Korabl' prizrak) (1912), by Hauff, is typical of the series. The cover includes the title in customized lettering, surrounded by floral motifs executed in the curvilinear art nouveau style. Most of Mitrokhin's illustrations were executed as pen-and-ink drawings or watercolors. Nearing the age of ninety, the artist recalled his career. "Throughout my long life, I've concerned myself first and foremost with book illustration .... Sketches and drawings from nature have always been the basis of all my work. You have to see before you can draw; the more you sketch from nature, the easier it will be to depict something imagined, read, or heard:m As was the case with Narbut, the artistic influences on Mitrokhin were diverse, and included engravings of old European masters, Beardsley's book illustrations, Japanese prints, Russian lubki, painted tiles, and printed fabrics. Suggesting the delicate style of Beardsley's illustrations with their play of black-and-white silhouettes, his illustrations for the fairy tale Little Muk (Malen'kii Muk), published by Knebel in 1913, combine fantastic elements with the minutiae of everyday life rendered with an almost documentary precision. Two other books from the Gift Series, Chalice (Kubok) and Roland the Armor-Bearer (Roland-oruzhenosets) (1913), by Zhukovskii, were inspired by European medieval art, while his designs for Gustafsson's Barzha are similar to Japanese woodblock prints.

RU SSIA N I LLU ST RAT E D C H I LD RE N ' S B0 0 KS

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11.5. Georgii Narbut, Illustration for Boris Diks's Toys (Book II), 1911. Color photo-relief, 29.7 x 22.5 em, Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Alexander Aronov, 2005.0188. Photo by Peter Jacobs.

Alia Rosenfeld

I

183

The children's book designs of Mitrokhin, Narbut, Bilibin, Benois, and their fellow members of Mir iskusstva were spectacular achievements in prerevolutionary artistic culture. Uniting text and illustrations into stunning, integrated wholes, and generally devoted to fairy tales, legends, and fantasy stories, they provided their young readers with effective and eye-catching means of escaping the grim realities of Russian life. Indeed, Benois thought that children's readers would be better served by a Russian literature that, rather than performing a pedagogical function, shielded them from such realities. In an article of 1908, Benois argued against the "socially minded, charitable, humanitarian tendency in Russian literature for children:' He urged writers to "stop teaching our children pity and tears;' and to eliminate "shoemakers, sick mothers, tatters, stench, and dirt" from children's books. 73 The noted children's writer Kornei Chukovskii likewise argued against the treatment of everyday life in children's literature. Chukovskii even faulted children's journals such as Young Reader (Iunyi chitatel) and Young Russia (Iunaia Rossiia) for publishing numerous articles of an educational nature. Isn't the desire to portray for a child the world of our trade and emigration, our railroad construction,[ ...] false; isn't it based on the major misconception that the child is a small replica of an adult [? . .. ] the real child doesn't want a smaller-size world, doesn't want a miniature Lincoln, a miniature Marx, miniature progress, nor miniature astronomy[ . . .] nor reallife? 4

Responding to such sentiment, in a 1916 preview of its forthcoming children's supplement, the pro-tsarist journal Niva (The Grainfield) reassured its readers that its peaceful pages would not be darkened by contemporary worries and hardships, and that "here everything will be full of joy, sunny and cloudless:' 75 The magazine lived up to its promise, maintaining a mood of cheerfulness and complete isolation from the world of 1916-1917-a notably difficult moment in World War I, and the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. But roughly a decade later, following the Revolution, such books would be incompatible with the newly stated goals of children's book publishing. As early as February 1918, the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda published an article devoted to children's literature that proposed that children's books become a significant weapon in the class struggle. As its author, L. Kormchii, declared:

184 1

In the great arsenal with which the bourgeoisie fought against socialism, children's books occupied a prominent role. [... ]In selecting cannons and weapons, we overlook those that spread poisonous weapons. So focused are we on guns and other weapons, we forget about the written word. [... ] We struggle and we die, but before we drown in our own blood, we must seize these weapons from enemy hands? 6

In the 1920s and later, the Mir iskusstva movement was denounced by official art critics as bourgeois and decadent, while the fairy-tale genre was viewed with disdain by Soviet critics for its escapist nature and removal from Soviet reality. In its place, the state proposed a new form of children's literature that would serve as an important form of propaganda and educate its young readership about contemporary developments in Soviet society, such as the Five-Year Plan, new construction sites, and life on the newly emergent collective farms. The heyday of illustrated children's books, which dwelt with such inventiveness in Russia on the magical, escapist realms of fiction, folklore, and fairy tale, had passed.

Notes All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted. The author would like to thank Jane Friedman for her editorial assistance with this essay. 1. This essay is not intended as an exhaustive survey of Russian illustrated children's books, but discusses only some major developments of the period and examples relevant to the topic. For more in-depth studies, see N.V Chekhov, ed., Detskaia literatura: Pedagogicheskaia akademiia v ocherkakh i monografiiakh (Moscow: Knigoizdatel'stvo "Pol'za'' V Antik i K, 1909); A.K. Pokrovskaia and N.V Chekhov, eds., Materialy po istorii russkoi detskoi literatury 1750-1855, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izdanie IMVR, 1927); A.P. Babushkina, Istoriia russkoi detskoi literatury (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel'stvo Ministerstva Prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1948); Robert H. Davis and Robert A. Karlowich, eds., The Children's Book Collection in the Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library, 1768-1860 (New York: Slavic and Baltic Division, NYPL, 1991). On Russian children's book illustration, see P. Dulskii

RUSSIAN ILLU STR ATED CH I LDREN ' S BOOKS

and Ia. Meksin, Illiustratsiia v detskoi knige (Kazan: Shkola poligraficheskogo proizvodstva imeni A.V. Lunacharskogo, 1925); E. Gankina, Russkie khudozhniki detskoi knigi (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1963); E.D. Kuznetsov, "Oformlenie detskoi knigi predrevoliutsionnykh let (1901-1917);' in Kniga: Issledovaniia i materialy, Sbornik VIII (Moscow: Publishing Office of the All-Union Book Chamber, 1963), 135-67; B. Kalaushin, "U istokov russkoi detskoi knigi;' in 0 literature dlia detei, no. 33 (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Detskaia Literatura, 1991); Valerii Blinov,

Russkaia detskaia knizhka-kartinka, 1900-1941 (Moscow: Iskusstvo XXI vek, 2005); Albert Lemmens and Serge Stommels, Russian Artists and the Children's Book, 1890-1992 (Nijmegen: LS, 2009). 2. Babushkina, Istoriia russkoi detskoi literatury, 40. 3. The exact date oflstomin's Alphabet is unclear, though some sources date it to 1692. It exists in several different manuscript versions. Istomin's first version was not illustrated, but contained the names of the objects to be depicted. In keeping with his egalitarian belief in the importance of educating both girls and boys, Istomin's Alphabet was aimed at young male and female readers, a great innovation at the time. In fact, Istomin presented one of his manuscript versions of the Alphabet to Tsarina Praskovia Fedorovna Saltykova, a wife of the Tsar Ivan V, for teaching their daughters. For a thorough discussion on Bukvar' by Karion IstominLeontii Bunin, see: M.A. Alekseeva, Bukvar' Kariona

Istomina-proizvedenie grafiki kontsa XVII veka. Stat'ia k faksimil'nomu izdaniiu Bukvaria (Leningrad: Avrora, 1981); and A. G. Sakovich, "Khudozhestvennoe prostranstvo bukvaria Kariona Istomina-Leontiia Bunina'' in Filevskie chteniia 10, ed. O.P. Khromov (Moscow: Andrei Rub lev Museum of Early Russian Culture and Art, 2003), 163-83. 4. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, fairy tales were often published in the form of lubki, which consisted of engraved pictures combined with text, and were produced as small books of eight to ten pages. 5. For more on Comenius, see S.E. Frost Jr., The Basic Teachings of Great Philosophers (New York: New Home Library, 1942), 245. 6. Russian publications of this type included Atlas (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1737); and Kratkoe rukovodstvo k matematicheskoi i natural'noi geografii (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1739). 7. The full title is Detskaia teka ili sobranie

izobrazhenii s kratkimi opisaniiami drevnego i novogo

sveta narodov, ikh nravov, odezhd i prochago. Takzhe izobrazhenii s opisaniiami chetveronogikh, ptists, zemnovodnykh, ryb, nasekomykh, chervei, proziabenii i prochago (Moscow: Tipografiia I. Zelenshchikova, 1794). 8. Russian children's knowledge of foreign languages resulted from several factors, including teaching methods, the number of foreign languages spoken by people around them, their considerable leisure time, and the lack of Russian books to read. The evidence found in various old journals suggests that as much as 30 to 50 percent of Russian aristocratic children spoke foreign languages. See R.V. Dlugach, "Deti i knigi (1770-1860);' in Pokrovskaia and Chekhov, Materialy, 18. 9. These include Charles Perrault's Histoires au contes du temps passe, published in French in 1697, and translated into Russian by Lev Voinov in 1768. Throughout the eighteenth century, one of the most popular books for children and adolescents was Les Aventures de Telemaque, by Fran