Painting People and Places

So exactly who was Ilya Repin, and where does his corpus stand in the history of Russian and most especially Ukrainian art and culture? And again, what should a Western art enthusiast know about his great picture of those Zaporozhian Cossacks, who wrote that scandalous letter to the Ottoman sultan?³

Repin, as we saw, was a native son of Sloboda Ukraine, which began west of Kharkiv and extended eastward across the contemporary borders of Ukraine and Russia into the Kursk and Voronezh provinces of the Rus­sian Federation.

Repin himself was born into the family of a military colonist and from his youth knew well the local “Little Russian” (as he called it) or Ukrainian population, the “Little Russian” language, and Ukrainian Cossack history. Many years later, while living in the Russian North, he did his best to teach that language to his “half-Russian” children (if we may use that term). And in his prime, he was to paint those local people and depict their faces and their customs with great accuracy. In locales ranging from his hometown of Chuhuiv in western Sloboda Ukraine to the province of Kursk in the east, he vividly painted people and places, from a fleshy church deacon to colourful, crowded, and confused religious processions.

In 1863 he went to study at the St Petersburg Academy of Art, where he came under the strong influence of his slightly older countryman from Kursk, Nikolai Kramskoi/Mykola Kramsky (1837-1887), who had attracted him to the capital, and a little before had led a revolt in the Academy against its classical forms and academic disciplines.

From St Petersburg, Repin went west to study in Paris, played with the impressionism that he found there, but shortly returned to Russia and even­tually settled in the artistic colony at Abramtsevo just outside Moscow. There he briefly came under the influence of the local slavophilism that was so strong in Moscow, that old capital of the Muscovite state. But he did not much like the place and could never quite forget his Ukrainian roots. Sadly, his paintings on Muscovite themes are filled with darkness, anger, violence, and even ugliness. These include his graphic depictions of Tsarina Sophia (1879, tg) confined to a nunnery while her supporters are being executed outside her window; Ivan the Terrible (1885, tg), who had just murdered his own son in a furious fit of rage and was appalled by what he had done; and even Choosing the Grand Prince’s Bride (1884-87, State Picture Gallery, Perm), in which the candidates are anything but beautiful.

The contrast of these dark works with his Ukrainian paintings was absolutely striking; and of all these, his happy Zaporozhians writing their satirical letter was by far the most important. Most of those canvases are filled with light and laughter, happiness and exuberance, and clearly reveal his attitude towards all things Ukrainian. Not only is his Zaporozhian Cossacks a study in laughter and joy, but so too is his Evening Party (1881, tg). The latter depicts a jovial peasant gathering in a cottage, with a young couple dancing in the middle and folk musicians and common people around them smiling, laughing, and clapping to the music, clearly delighted by the young dancers.

However, Dontsov was an extremist and only half right. Repin was primarily a portrait artist, and his portraits as opposed to his historical pictures do not reveal such a dichotomy. His portraits of Russian women are on occasion just as attractive as those of Ukrainian ones, his vision of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy just as dignified as that of the writer from Ukraine Vladimir Korolenko, who was of mixed Polish and “Little Russian,” or Ukrainian parentage, and his depiction of the statesman Petr Stolypin, who was assassinated in the Kyiv Opera House in the presence of the tsar, just as dignified as that of Dmytro Bahalii, the historian of Sloboda Ukraine and president of Kharkiv University.

Moreover, in contrast to his dark view of old Muscovy with its autoc­racy and violence, his view of the imperial capital at St Petersburg and its surroundings is much brighter, as for example in his painting What Free­dom! (1903, rm), which depicts an enthusiastic young couple (probably very much in love) wading into the waves on a Finnish beach in Kuokkala (now, aptly, Repino) on the Baltic seashore just outside the then-Russian capital, where for many years Repin taught and worked, including on many of his Ukrainian canvases. His impressions of St Petersburg seem to lack the usual dreariness, dampness, and mists of that city. It seems that he absorbed not only certain semi-conscious “national” differences between Ukraine and “Russia” (for Ukraine was then still very much a part of Imperial Russia), but also the very clear civic differences between western-looking, newer St Petersburg and self-absorbed and restrictively slavophilic old Moscow, where the autocracy had its roots.⁷