St Petersburg полностью

Pisarev, a confirmed nihilist, saw little use in classical art, which, in his opinion, was far removed from life. He insisted that Pushkin’s work was “somniferous,” hopelessly out of date. Pisarev wrote that Pushkin was merely a “frivolous versifier, shackled by petty prejudices,” a useless and even harmful “parasite,” a definition that would be applied a hundred years later, first by the Soviet press, then by the courts to another poet, at the time a Leningrader and future Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky.

The views of the energetic young literary nihilist, which found broad support among the Petersburg students of the sixties, were shared by many aspiring artists of the capital as well. Journals with articles by Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and other radicals were greeted in the Petersburg art world with avid interest, circulated, and read until the pages wore out. Many took delight in Pisarev’s anarchistic call, “What can be broken should be broken, what can take a blow is useful, what smashes to smithereens is garbage.”

And so the privileged Academy of Arts, for a long time the dominant factor in the artistic life of Petersburg and all of Russia, received its first unexpected blow from within in 1863. Fourteen of the most talented students of the academy quit, refusing to obey what they considered old-fashioned and meaningless rules.

“The rebellion of the fourteen” provoked a clash between the official, ossified art of Petersburg and the young nationalist talents, who were feeling their strength. This was an unheard-of collective—and therefore, for the cultural establishment, an especially dangerous—protest against the bureaucratization of Russian art, which had been turned by Nicholas I into an office department, where the rewards were generous and the demands severe.

The young rebels formed the Petersburg Artists’ Cooperative, headed by the charismatic twenty-six-year-old Ivan Kramskoy. In imitation of the heroes of Chernyshevsky’s popular novel, What Is to Be Done?, they organized a “commune,” renting a large house in Petersburg where they lived, worked, and ate; the household expenses and income were shared. There would be up to fifty guests at the inexpensive but lively dinners held at the cooperative; articles about art were read aloud and discussed, someone would sing or play the piano, and sometimes they even held dances. The Artists’ Cooperative quickly turned into a flourishing enterprise: word of the rebels, despite the official ban on mentioning their departure from the academy in the press, spread far and wide, and there were enough people in Petersburg who wanted to have a fresh Russian landscape, or a busy genre scene, or a realistic portrait done by one of these young talents, to sustain them.

After conquering Petersburg, the young rebels’ next big step was taking over the inert Russian provinces. In 1870 the cooperative was transformed into the Brotherhood of Wandering Art Exhibits. The idea was to move paintings all over the country that would otherwise be available only to residents of the capital. The general public would see and have an opportunity to buy original art. The painters, besides expanding their audience and potential market for their works, also collected the modest entrance fees to the exhibits.

The exhibits of the Wanderers, as they were called, were held annually, and each became an event that was discussed for the rest of the year. Astonished viewers crowded in front of the pictures, expressing outrage or delight that instead of the mythological, conventional heroes and idealized still lifes and landscapes they were being shown genre scenes involving clerks, merchants, or—horrors!—drunken peasants.

If the Wanderers did exhibit a historical painting, it would be from the Russian past. They rejected the tradition of Briullov, whose once-famous Last Day of Pompeii was now mocked by the outspoken ideologue of the Wanderers (and of the Mighty Five), Stasov, for its “superficial beauty,” “melodrama,” and “Italian fake declamation instead of honest feeling.” Briullov’s oeuvre had to wait until 1898 for its “rehabilitation,” when the hundredth anniversary of his birthday was marked by opulent banquets (with some of the leading Wanderers present) and rapturous speeches.

The paintings of the most important Petersburg Wanderers—Ivan Kramskoy, Nikolai Ge, Ilya Repin, Arkhip Kuindzhi—sold like hot cakes. A rich merchant wanted to buy a landscape by Kuindzhi, and the artist told him an amusing story. When that landscape was just finished, the paint still not dry, an unassuming naval officer looked into the artist’s studio: could they sell him that painting?

“It’s beyond your means,” the artist replied.

“How much do you want?”

“Nothing less than five thousand,” the painter said, naming an incredible sum just to get rid of his uninvited guest.

The officer responded calmly, “Fine, I’ll take it.” It was Grand Duke Konstantin.