Putting It Together: Laughter and Tears (1880s)
Back in Abramtsevo in September 1880, Repin began integrating his new materials to create a fuller version of his painting. On 6 November he wrote to Stasov:
Ah, forgive me for not writing to you earlier.
I am a man without a conscience. I was not able to answer you, Vladimir Vasilevich, and the lZaporozhians' are responsible for it. What a people! When I try to write about them, my head spins with their rowdiness and noise... I took up the palette and here it is two and a half weeks that I have lived with them without a break. It is impossible to tear oneself away from them, this happy people... Gogol did not write about them in vain and everything that he wrote was true! A devilish folk! No one in the entire earth felt liberty, equality, and fraternity as deeply as they! Throughout its entire life, Zaporozhia remained free, never submitting to anyone. [When the Muscovites tried to put the Zaporozhians down,] they left for Turkey and there lived freely to the end of their days... It may be a mocking picture, but all the same, I will paint it.21Over the course of the next years, Repin's enthusiasm for the Zaporozhians never failed. His daughter, Vera, later recalled how immersed he was in Ukrainian history during this period. “Almost every day, Papa read verses aloud [to us] in Ukrainian: ‘On the Three Brothers' [and other epics]... At that time, he painted his picture... We had gradually come to know all the heroes, Otaman Sirko with his grey whiskers..., Cossack Holota ‘who feared neither fire, nor sword, nor swamp'... There was Taras Bulba with [his sons] Ostap and Andrii, and Vakula the blacksmith. Papa modeled the figures of the Zaporozhians from yellow clay, Taras Bulba and the others. Some have been preserved to this day.”22
However, Repin's conception of the final large canvas was of epic proportions, and it could not be completed in only a few years.
He was to work on it intermittently in three different versions from 1878 to 1891. After a few years, he moved to St Petersburg, but still continued to labour at his masterpiece. In 1885, the year that Kostomarov died, the Ukrainian archaeologist Dmytro Yavornytsky (1855-1940), driven out of his homeland by charges of “ukrainoph- ilism,” arrived in the capital, and Repin made a point of meeting him.After a memorial service in honour of the poet Shevchenko at the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, Repin walked up to Yavornytsky and introduced himself. The two Zaporozhian enthusiasts became immediate friends, and the historian put his extensive collection of Zaporozhian artefacts at the artist's disposal. In turn, Repin drew some illustrations for one of Yavornytsky's books, Zaporozhe v ostatkakh stariny i predaniiakh naroda (Zaporozhia in the Relics of the Past and the Legends of the People, 1888). It may even be that the archaeologist's arrival stimulated Repin to begin work again on his masterpiece. In 1888, possibly at his new friend's suggestion, Repin undertook a new research trip to the Kuban in search of the descendants of the Zaporozhians among the Kuban Cossacks. (At one point Yavornytsky hoped to accompany Repin, together with Tarnovsky, on this trip, but his academic duties prevented it.) Moreover, in 1889, Yavornytsky published an outline history of the Zaporozhians with a special section on the apocryphal letter as a Ukrainian folk motif written especially for Repin's use.23
At this time, the Ukrainian artists and intellectuals in St Petersburg would often gather at evening parties for discussions and song. Repin frequently attended. Ukrainian history, including the raids of the Crimean Tatars, who carried off into Turkish captivity as many younger people as they could, and Cossack reprisal raids even into Istanbul, often came up (see chapter 3). At one such event, the painter Opanas Slastion (1855-1933; see Figures 7 and 8), who played the kobza well, and the artist Khoma Bondarenko, who sang well, performed the famous duma “The Lament of the Poor Slaves in Turkish Captivity.” The company was deeply moved, and Repin himself, as Yavornytsky recalls in his memoirs, “cried more than a single tear.”24 It was this view of Ukrainian history, of the conflict of Christendom and the Islamic power on the Ukrainian Steppe, that forms the background to Repin's Zaporozhians.
On 19 February 1889, at a time when he was most absorbed by his Zaporozhian brotherhood, Repin wrote to the Russian literary figure, N.S. Leskov:I have to say to you that even in the lZaporozhians' I had an idea. I have always been attracted to the communal life of citizens, in history, in the monuments of art, and especially in the architectural planning of cities - most often feasible only under a republican form of government. In each trifle remaining from these epochs, one may observe an unusual spirit and energy; everything is done with talent and energy, and bears wide common, civic meaning. Italy gives us so much material of this kind!!! Up to today, this tradition is alive and well there... And our Zaporozhia delights me with this same love for freedom and heroic spirit. There the brave elements of the Russian people renounced a life of comfort and founded a community of equal members to defend the principles of the Orthodox faith and human personality that they most cherished. Today these will seem like obsolete words, but then, in those times, when thousands of Slavs were carried off into slavery by the powerful Muslims, when religion, honor, and freedom were being desecrated, this was a powerfully stirring idea. And thus, this handful of daring men, of course the best of them... rose up, not only to defend Europe from the eastern plunderers, but even to threaten that civilization and laugh to their very souls at that eastern arrogance.25
Thus did Repin juxtapose the tears of the poor slaves in Turkish captivity to the laughter of his happy Zaporozhians.
Of course, Repin's reference in the letter to the Russkii narod (Russian people) did not imply that the Zaporozhians were “Russians” in the modern sense, or some kind of Muscovite immigrants to Ukraine; rather he used this term, as most people did in those days, in a general way, as we might say “Eastern Slavs” - Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusans. The Zapor- ozhians were central to Ukrainian history, and Repin usually spoke of “Little Russians” when referring to the Ukrainians of his time.
Repin seems to have envisioned a kind of hierarchy or symbiosis of simultaneously held identities, Russian, Ukrainian, and Zaporozhian, which is alien to modern notions of mutually exclusive national identity. This is an important point to which we shall return later in this chapter.Throughout these many years, Repin's enthusiasm for the Zaporozhians never seriously flagged. This was true even though he sometimes feared that certain persons who could expect to enjoy favour at the imperial court would accuse him of spreading Ukrainian “separatist” ideas. In general, Repin was very uncomfortable with Russian nationalist elements, men like the fiery journalist Mikhail Katkov, who helped instigate the official ban on the printing of the Ukrainian language in the empire during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and whom he detested as a hopeless reactionary.26