Critical Reception

After its first showing in St Petersburg in November 1891 the painting was a great success, and on its initial tour of Europe it was applauded in Stock­holm, Munich (where it won a gold medal), and elsewhere.

Of course, Repin's masterpiece was not to everyone's liking. Presti­gious or powerful art critics like the reactionary nationalist publisher A.S. Suvorin and the cosmopolitan art connoisseur A. Benua (Alexandre Ben- ois) stood back from the work; it was looked on with suspicion by certain elements in official court and government circles, who seemed to fear the bold statement of freedom and independence that it represented; and, of course, some of the painter's contemporaries were envious.³⁰

A few years later, Benua, a scion of old French and Italian emigres long settled in Russia, and the young ideologist of the new Modernist trend in Russian art and “art for art's sake,” published a pioneering history of Rus­sian painting, and, of course, devoted an entire section of it to Repin. But it was scathing. Benua acknowledged that Repin had been “the greatest and most remarkable” Russian artist of the 1870s and 1880s, but he attacked him for what he believed to be his superficiality, lack of method, lack of consequential thought, and “anecdotism.” He particularly disliked what he thought of as Repin's growing reverence for the early-nineteenth-century classicist K.P.

Of course, such scathing criticism of one of Russia's greatest painters, and the person who, like Tolstoy in literature, or even Mussorgsky in music, personified Russian art, did not pass without comment. So in a review of Benua's opinion, the equally young Kornei Chukovsky defended Russian art and Repin in particular. He charged Benua with a superficiality of his own, with being more concerned with “decoration” than true art, and with simply demeaning Russian culture. “I am glad to say that I live in a world in which Repin is [still] alive,” he concluded. Chukovsky was to remain an admirer of Repin's through the Revolution and well into Soviet times, and eventually published an officially approved, Soviet biography of the artist.³²

However, neither Benua nor Chukovsky touched on the Ukrainian as­pect of Repin's corpus, even in his picture of the Zaporozhians. Perhaps they simply did not feel it important. Or perhaps restrictions on Ukrainian culture, including the official ban on printing the language, were gen­erally enforced during the reign of the reactionary Alexander III and inhibited open discussion of the “local,” or national Ukrainian rather than pan-“Russian” character of Repin's epic canvas. For example, the principal ukrainophile journal (purely cultural, of course) in the Russian Empire - Kievskaia starina (Kyivan Antiquity) - which normally would have been quite interested, printed nothing about it.

By contrast, the canvas was discussed in Ukrainian-populated Austrian Galicia, where the censor was no problem.

Also of note was the second major version of the painting, which the art­ist had begun prior to the 1891 Russian Museum version but completed after it and which today hangs in the Museum of Art in Kharkiv. After Repin fin­ished this version, the Ukrainian sugar magnate, I.N. Tereshchenko, wished to buy it, but seemingly he was outbid by the Trekiakov Gallery, and it went to Moscow. In 1933, when Kharkiv was still the capital of Soviet Ukraine, as the country swayed between the earlier purges of the national intelligentsia and the massive purges yet to come, and while the Great Ukrainian Famine was at its worst, this version of the painting was transferred to Kharkiv. It stayed there after Kyiv became the capital, and it survived the Second World War. The work remains an attraction to the present, although it is much less known outside of independent Ukraine.³⁴

Art critics generally agree that the Kharkiv version (Plate 14) is some­what less impressive than the St Petersburg version. It is slightly smaller and lacks the harmony and some of the power of the latter. Repin executed it in part because he wanted a version that was more historically accurate than its predecessor.

There remains one full-scale oil “sketch” (1879) of the picture. Repin eventually gave it to Yavornytsky as a token of his esteem and in recognition of his considerable help. But the impoverished archaeologist had nowhere to hang it, and it remained in Repin's studio for several years. Eventually, it was sold off, and today it hangs in the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.³⁶ Although it is far less sophisticated than the two main versions, the faces being somewhat uniform and stereotypical, this canvas has many of the basic elements, including the structure of the picture, with the Cossacks around the table, the scribe writing, and also many of the vibrant colours, that remained in the painting to the end of the creative process. As such, it forms an important intermediate stage between that very first pencil sketch in 1878 and the finished versions of the late 1880s and early 1890s.

As has been intimated above, the appearance of Repin's Zaporozhians was greeted enthusiastically in Ukraine, where Repin was unequivocally accepted as a native son. Indeed, it was only a few short years after the first exhibition showing this painting that the Ukrainian publisher and patron of scholarship and the arts, Yevhen Chykalenko (1861-1929), invited Repin to take on the mantle of “Ukrainian national artist” in the same way that Jan Matejko had become “a Polish national artist,” who inspired his com­patriots to struggle on for the good of their native land.

Of course, this was only one statement of this time by the artist, and he never seems to have repeated it in correspondence or conversations with others, including those Ukrainians who knew him quite well, such as Yavornytsky. He remained enthusiastic about things Ukrainian throughout his life. Also, his reply to Chykalenko came before the Revolution of 1905, when the Ukrainian national movement really took off. That movement reached full flight during the Revolution of 1917 and gathered strength after the declaration of an autonomous Ukrainian People's Republic later that same year and its declaration of full independence in 1918. Moreover, Ukrainian national consciousness garnered some very real depth in the mid- and later 1920s, when a period of very intense “ukrainianization” occurred under Soviet auspices.

Repin lived through all of this in faraway Finland, and his attitude to­wards Ukrainian independence is not clear. He was an old man (he was born in 1844), with a fully formed identity, and his attitude towards Russia and Ukraine and their inter-relations may not have much changed. But he remained in touch with Yavornytsky and, to the end, continued to paint on those Ukrainian subjects so dear to his heart, especially Cossacks. Perhaps his earlier identity, which, like most Ukrainian intellectuals, contained both Little Russian and “pan-Russian” elements, evolved towards a more clearly Ukrainian one, which accepted independence, and he passed from simultaneously held identities to a more mutually exclusive kind of modern national identity. We simply do not know.³⁸

Abroad, however, except for the Ruthenians/Ukrainians of the Habsburg Empire, especially in the large and populous province of Galicia, the world outside of the Russian Empire still simply saw him as a “Russian” painter.

Over the years, Repin continued to attract some attention in the United States. For example, in 1906, in a well-informed and detailed article in Scrib­ner’s Magazine, Christian Brinton hailed him as “Russia's Greatest Painter,” and a number of years later, after war and revolution, when “Ukraine” was already beginning to appear on certain maps and in the daily news, Louis E. Lord wrote in the American Art Bulletin that Repin still “epitomizes the Russian painting” of the pre-Revolution period. The Kharkiv version of his defiant Zaporozhians was the first in a string of his works to illustrate Brintons article, and the St Petersburg version was printed in Lord's. Al­though neither author fully understood what was going on in Ukraine, both explicitly acknowledged the importance of the Zaporozhians in Repin's corpus and pointed to his roots in what they still called “Little Russia.”⁴⁰

Meanwhile, in Europe too, Repin's magnum opus continued to attract attention. The most notable western European writer to discuss the canvas was the idiosyncratic French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), a cosmopolitan first son of the iconoclastic European “Avant- Garde.” A friend of the painter Picasso, he coined and defined “Cubism,” “Surrealism,” and “Orphism” and helped welcome these revolutionary ar­tistic movements to pre-1914 Europe. In Repin's masterwork, he clearly saw defiance, rebellion, and an attack on propriety, decorum, and classical taste.

He was so impressed by Repin's painting and the rough, rude, and disre­spectful Cossack letter that inspired it that he produced his own version of the letter in his poem La chanson du mal-aime (The Song of the Unwanted), a series of verses that placed personal feelings of desire, anger, and pain on a landscape of vast historical and mythological proportions, where the sultan was again labelled Le Bourreau de Podolie (the executioner of Podolia). La chanson formed the centrepiece of Apollinaire's collection Alcools (Alco­holic Spirits) of 1913. Certainly, it was no coincidence that this revolutionary poet was the son of a Polish noblewoman named Angelika Kostrowecka. Tellingly, his Polish family coat of arms displayed a serpent with an apple in its mouth.⁴¹

A generation later, Repin again came to be discussed by Western art critics, but in a completely different context. By 1939, the Revolution in Russia was over, Benua had fled to France, and the Modernist and Avant- Garde movements that had broken loose in the ussr of the 1920s had come to an abrupt end. War, Revolution, Stalinism, the Great Depression in the Western countries, and, finally, the rise of fascism and Nazism changed the political prospects and cultural landscape of Europe. Concerned by these developments, and the general crisis of their times, certain New York art critics sought to explain the sudden suppression of the Avant-Garde in Germany by Hitler, and particularly in the Soviet Union by Stalin. Some simply thought the socialist state responsible for this change.

But one, a young Marxist by the name of Clement Greenberg, dug deeper and penned a revolutionary article titled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” ex­panding the meaning of the German term Kitsch from simple commercial art to include all art that in some way imitated older times and, in his opinion, restricted the progress of culture and formed a kind of “rear-guard” that was inferior to its progressive counterpart. Greenberg, like Friedman many years later, seemed to have no love for either peasants or Cossacks, and chose Repin for his special target. For him, Repin was not high art and Avant-Garde like Picasso, but rather backward “kitsch”:

Let us see, for example, what happens when an ignorant Russian peas­ant... turns next to Repin's picture and sees a battle scene... That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator - that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased with the wealth of self-evident meanings that he finds in the picture: ‘It tells a story.' Picasso and the [peasant] icons are so austere and barren in com­parison. What is more, Repin heightens reality and makes it more dramatic: sunset, exploding shells, running and falling men. There is no longer any question of Picasso or icons. Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin.

Greenberg then goes even further: this type of kitsch also exists in North America and western Europe and is sweeping everything before it. It serves country folk who have invaded not only Russian cities but so too American cities to form the working classes, “the masses,” for whom there is no time or money to appreciate higher art forms, the Avant-Garde. It is they who reject Picasso, and it is they who turn to lower art forms, to “kitsch” in art, architecture, and literature. And it is they to whom the Nazis and the Communists were now appealing.⁴²

Greenberg's analysis was extremely influential in its day and later. But it had its problems. It was suitable for its time, when movement from the coun­tryside to the cities was commonplace, indeed, massive, but less relevant afterwards. It was terribly elitist, and ipso facto restricted the apprecia­tion of art to a select few. And, finally, its example from Repin was completely erroneous: Repin never once painted warfare with running and falling men, and the exploding of shells, at least in battle! In fact, as a portraitist, he almost never painted movement, and hardly ever touched on war itself. The closest that he ever came to it was that picture of his Zaporozhians writing their defiant letter, with smiles, fun, and belly-shaking laughter in the foreground, some exotic weapons and even a musical instrument scattered around, and only the suggestion of the aftermath of some great battle in the distant background! (The fizzing grenade dimly depicted in that painting - most likely as a mischievous afterthought - may well have been launched by the Cossacks themselves in their victory celebration!) The composition points to a certain rough strength, reckless bravado, and the firm confidence of victory over enemies, but does not openly depict blood or violence, only suggesting sure triumph. Greenberg had certainly heard of Repin's popularity in the ussr and did not like it. But perhaps in some strange way he also mixed up that unfortunate Cossack enthusiast with the anti-war artist V.V. Vereshchagin (discussed further below), who indeed painted the horrors of war, but fell out of favour in Stalin's time, especially after June 1941.