‘Yes, but in that case, if you will allow me to say what I think ... Your picture is so good that my observation cannot harm it, and besides it’s my personal opinion. With you it’s different. The motif itself is different. But let’s take Ivanov. I think that if Christ is to be reduced to the level of a historical figure, it would have been better if Ivanov had selected a different historical theme, something fresh, untouched.’
‘But what if this is the greatest theme available to art?’
‘If one seeks, one can find others. But the thing is that art doesn’t suffer argument and reasoning. And in front of Ivanov’s painting a question arises both for the believer and for the unbeliever - is he God or not? - and destroys the unity of the impression.’
‘Why so? It seems to me,’ said Mikhailov, ‘that for educated people the question can no longer exist.’
Golenishchev disagreed with that and, keeping to his first thought about the unity of impression necessary for art, crushed Mikhailov.
Mikhailov was excited but unable to say anything in defence of his thinking.
XII
Anna and Vronsky had long been exchanging glances, regretting the clever loquacity of their friend, and Vronsky finally moved on, without waiting for his host, to another smaller picture.
‘Ah, how charming, what a charming thing! A marvel! How charming!’ they said with one voice.
‘What is it they like so much?’ thought Mikhailov. He had forgotten this picture, painted three years ago, forgotten all the agonies and ecstasies he had lived through with this picture, when it alone had occupied him persistently for several months, day and night; forgotten it as he always forgot finished pictures. He did not even like looking at it and had put it out only because he was expecting an Englishman who wanted to buy it.
‘It’s just an old study,’ he said.
‘How good!’ said Golenishchev, who had obviously fallen under the charm of the painting as well.
Two boys were fishing in the shade of a willow. One, the elder, had just dropped his line in and was carefully drawing the bobber from behind a bush, all absorbed in what he was doing; the other, slightly younger, was lying in the grass, his dishevelled blond head resting on his hands, gazing into the water with pensive blue eyes. What was he thinking about?
The admiration for this picture stirred the former excitement in Mikhailov’s soul, but he feared and disliked this idle feeling for the past, and therefore, though glad of the praise, he wanted to distract his visitors with a third picture.
But Vronsky asked if the picture was for sale. Mikhailov, excited by his visitors, now found the talk of money very unpleasant.
‘It was put out to be sold,’ he replied, scowling darkly.
When the visitors had gone, Mikhailov sat down facing the picture of Pilate and Christ and went over in his mind what had been said, or not said but implied, by these visitors. And, strangely, what had carried such weight for him when they were there and when he put himself mentally into their point of view, suddenly lost all meaning for him. He began to look at his picture with his full artistic vision and arrived at that state of confidence in the perfection and hence the significance of his picture which he needed for that tension, exclusive of all other interests, which alone made it possible for him to work.
The foreshortening of Christ’s leg was still not quite right. He took his palette and set to work. As he corrected the leg, he kept studying the figure of John in the background, which the visitors had not noticed but which he knew to be the height of perfection. After finishing the leg, he wanted to get to this figure, but he felt himself too excited for it. He was equally unable to work when he was cold and when he was too receptive and saw everything too well. There was only one step in this transition from coldness to inspiration at which work was possible. But today he was too excited. He was about to cover the painting, but stopped and, holding the sheet in his hand, gazed for a long time and with a blissful smile at the figure of John. Finally, as if sadly tearing himself away, he lowered the sheet and went home, weary but happy.
Vronsky, Anna and Golenishchev, on their way back, were especially animated and merry. They talked about Mikhailov and his paintings. The word ‘talent’, which they understood as an inborn and almost physical ability, independent of mind and heart, and which they wanted to apply to everything the artist experienced, occurred particularly often in their conversation, since they needed it in order to name something they had no idea of, but wanted to talk about. They said that it was impossible to deny his talent, but that his talent had been unable to develop for lack of education - a common misfortune of our Russian artists. But the painting with the boys stuck in their memory and every now and then they went back to it.
