Repin and the “Orient”

There remains the question of “the Orient” and where Repin's picture stands in the artistic trend depicting that Orient in the late nineteenth century, which was the heyday of Western imperialism.

But Said injected a new, negative side into the word, associating it with a put-down or disparagement of the East, that is, what he thought those Europeans considered to have been “the other.” Said charged that they did this in order to subjugate and rule that “Orient.” Said's book was an attack on what he saw as “imperialism,” and even “racism” in scholarship and the arts. But he concentrated most of his fire on Britain and France and ignored Germany and Russia, both of which in the late nineteenth century also held large empires of a sort, though “continental” ones, not primarily overseas. So how did Said's thesis apply to the Russian Empire, and to the work of Ilya Repin in particular, who seemed to have painted so many “Eastern” motifs, and also (we might venture to say) “anti-Eastern” motifs, into his Zaporozhians?⁴³

Although in the nineteenth century both Germany and Russia had pro­duced a fair number of “Orientalist” scholars and artists, and Germany was perhaps the scholarly heart of that movement, neither of them had any direct political control of or influence on Said's homeland and con­cern, which was Palestine.

Even less so did Repin fit Said's stereotype. Throughout his career, he had admired Old Masters among the European painters, artists like Rem­brandt and Velazquez, but had no particular affection for the pioneers of European Orientalism such as Ingres, Delacroix, or even Gerome, all of whom ostensibly painted “the other” in the Middle East. Indeed, he was much more concerned with “our own” at home. On a different level, al­though his Zaporozhians wore clothing quite foreign to the West and carried weapons and other artefacts of obviously Eastern origin, they were quite definitely “our own,” and not “the other” for Repin, who was clearly himself of Ukrainian origin.

His great painting in its St Petersburg version depicted both the bag­gy sharovary, or trousers, typical of Cossack attire, and also a kobza, the stringed instrument that was already the Ukrainian national musical instrument par excellence, immortalized in the poetry of Shevchenko (be­loved by Repin), which over numerous, ever-larger editions was, and still is, collected in a volume usually called Kobzar (The Blind Minstrel, or The Kobza Player, 1840). However, both sharovary and the kobza are Ukrainian artefacts and words of “Eastern” origin, and both originated in the Muslim world, which those Cossacks were defying.

These complementary and complicated facts do not seem to support Said's thesis about a hypothesized and iron-clad divergence or conflict between East and West, and they have nothing at all to do with Russian imperialism, from which Ukraine itself, it often came to be said, also suf­fered. Rather, as Repin saw it, those Zaporozhians were defenders of their own homeland against both the imperial power to its south, Ottoman Tur­key, and (perhaps also) Russian imperial circles in St Petersburg, who were suspicious of the rebellious tone of his painting and, despite the tsar's stamp of approval, did not much like it. So Ilya Repin cannot in this sense be con­sidered an “Orientalist” painter. Indeed, Kristian Davies, the influential Western art historian, who thought him one, and produced a beautiful book on the subject, defined that Orientalism in a non-pejorative way that empha­sized the good and the bridge-building character of the nineteenth-century phenomenon, and not its darker side.⁴⁶ And so, although Repin could depict “Oriental” influences on Ukrainian culture, at one point even going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and being, as he wrote, “moved, very moved” by the experience, and although his close friend and advisor Yavornytsky too visited the Middle East and even penned a brief biography of the Proph­et Mohammed, Repin cannot be considered an “Orientalist” painter in the sense so over-confidently postulated by Edward Said.⁴⁷

Of course, within contemporary Ukraine and Russia this question of the perceived “Orientalism” of Repin's Zaporozhians has thus far not found the kind of echo that it had in the West, and one acute English observer of contemporary Ukraine has completely ignored it.

Both are “monumental” pictures, but neither has the immediacy and vivacity of Repin's. The former, in a rather solemn, indeed “sanctified” mood, seems to concentrate principally on the Cossack and clerical elite, with nothing of the egalitarian spirit and spontaneity of Repin's master­piece, and the latter is a purely political and equally posed canvas, in which the central figure, Khmelnytsky, reminds one of the innumerable images all over the Soviet Union of V.I. Lenin with outstreached arm; it commem­orated the treaty's 300^th anniversary in 1954. This canvas lost much of its relevance after the collapse of Communism and the Ukrainian declara­tion of independence in 1991, and all of its meaning after the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian War in 2014. Wilson assures us that while Bohdan Khmelnytsky still hangs more proudly than ever in the Kyiv Museum of Fine Art, Eternal Unity has already been removed from the Museum of National History to its storage places. Meanwhile, of course, Repin's laugh­ing Zaporozhians are still prominently displayed in important museums in both Ukraine and Russia.⁴⁸