Barely known in the West, Repin is familiar to virtually every Russian through his large historical and genre canvases in a realistic style. Energetic, animated, a somewhat eccentric man and a productive painter (he left over a thousand works), Repin was always attracted to topical subjects. The art critic Abram Efros called him the greatest “political commentator” of Russian art.
Repin was also probably its greatest portraitist at a time that, in Stasov’s worried words, was “not at all conducive to the development of portraiture: photography has almost killed the portrait and all Russian talent for it has quieted down, suddenly leaving the stage.” Not Repin: rich and famous, he was welcome everywhere—in the Winter Palace and in a nihilist commune. Repin’s portraits were psychologically penetrating and artistically masterful. In them he immortalized the tsar’s family, high government officials, and the leading writers, actors and actresses, scholars, professors, jurists, and clergy of the day, as well as Russian peasants. Repin was genuinely interested in and attracted to people of all classes and convictions—the elite of Petersburg, its bureaucrats and technocrats, its conservatives, liberals, revolutionaries, and simple folk.
Repin’s portrait gallery of Petersburg intellectuals and cultural figures remains the most interesting and significant of any Russian. The deathbed portrait of Mussorgsky holds a special place here. It is a unique document, capturing the artistic personality on the verge of collapse, the moment when the great composer and the
Mussorgsky is depicted carelessly wrapped in a green hospital gown with raspberry lapels. Sitting in the light, his figure looks particularly pathetic; the sun ruthlessly reveals his crumbling, puffy face of a bluish tint with “a red potato nose,”44 in Repin’s words, unkempt reddish-brown hair, and tangled beard. But the same light draws the viewer’s attention to the composer’s huge, bottomless gray-blue eyes, the magnetic center of the portrait. Those eyes, expressing hidden torment, are nevertheless pure and quiet. Mussorgsky seems to be obediently awaiting death while listening to the sounds fading in his head. It is the humility of the
Mussorgsky’s corpse was still warm when Stasov brought Repin’s portrait to an exhibit of the Wanderers in Petersburg, where it was attacked furiously by the reactionary press for its “cruel realism.” It also elicited praise. The head of the Wanderers, the golden-tongued Kramskoy, sat down before the portrait, as if glued to his chair, and, bringing his face almost even with Mussorgsky’s, devoured it with his eyes, exclaiming, “It’s incredible, it’s simply incredible!” And in fact, the only nineteenth-century depiction of a composer that rivals Repin’s is Delacroix’s portrait of Chopin.
The year 1881 began unhappily for Russian culture. In February fifty-nine-year-old Dostoyevsky died in Petersburg. After that the death of forty-two-year-old Mussorgsky deprived the country of another of its greatest creative geniuses. Petersburgers were well aware of the significance and tragedy of those irreplaceable losses. But even those deaths were overshadowed by an event perceived by most Russians as a national catastrophe. On March 1, 1881, revolutionary terrorists killed “Tsar Liberator” Alexander II.
Alexander II’s basically liberal rule was distinguished by several important reforms, including the historic emancipation of the serfs in 1861, two years before the slaves were freed in the United States. Russia acquired a jury system, limited self-rule for cities and provinces, a more or less independent press (including publications of a fairly radical bent), and universities open to the lower classes. The rights of women and minorities were expanded and certain kinds of corporal punishment, such as flogging, were abolished.
But as had happened before in Russian history and would happen again, liberal reforms did not bring their initiator the deserved popularity. The country was convulsed by change. In Petersburg the attitude of many intellectuals toward Alexander II was rather condescending. Nihilist students thirsted for radical reforms. Officers and bureaucrats openly gossiped about the emperor’s liaison with Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukova, his junior by twenty-eight years. Still, when the nihilist Dmitri Karakozov tried to shoot the emperor in the Summer Gardens on April 4, 1866, the news of the unsuccessful attempt rocked Russia. The newspapers reported that a peasant accidently had bumped into Karakozov, spoiling the shot; they also indicated, incorrectly, that the terrorist was Polish.
