St Petersburg полностью

The estimable generals, deeply offended by what they saw, accused Vereshchagin of defaming the honor of the Russian military. They were particularly outraged by his painting Forgotten, which depicted the body of a dead Russian soldier abandoned by advancing troops. Next to the corpse lay his rifle, and a cloud of hungry vultures swirled over him. “It is impossible for Russian soldiers to be abandoned on a battlefield, unburied!” one of the generals shouted at the artist. Vereshchagin, who had gone through the entire Turkestan campaign in the front ranks of the fighting, was “half-crazed with anger and indignation,” Stasov reported. The painter removed Forgotten and two other canvases that had provoked particular criticism and burned them.

“Vereshchagin came to me and told me what he had just done,” Stasov recalled. “He was furious, pale and shaking. When I asked ‘Why did you do it?’ he replied that he had ‘slapped those gentlemen with it.’”62 With this gesture, unprecedented in Russian art history, the artist created a furor (as well as great publicity for his show). Meanwhile, the conservative press continued to attack with a vengeance Vereshchagin’s “antipatriotic” paintings. They preferred the also extremely illusionistic but pro-imperial and promilitary war panoramas so popular in Russia in the late nineteenth century.

One of these panoramas, exhibited in a specially built round structure on the embankment of the Catherine Canal where Alexander II was soon to be assassinated, was described by Alexander Benois. The panorama depicted the capture of Kars (commemorated by Mussorgsky’s orchestral march), and the boy Benois spent hours on the viewing platform, especially enjoying the “just-like-real” foreground: models of fortifications, bushes, cannons, scattered guns, and corpses of the defeated foe.63

Petersburg’s cultural elite was involved in a fierce debate to resolve several fundamental questions that might arise in any aggressively expanding state that had not only a strong army but an independent intelligentsia. Among them were the following: what is more important, patriotism or humanism? Is the game worth playing? Do military victories only strengthen the oppressive state machine and enrich the top, or do they bring some benefits for the Russian “simple people” as well? And what about the conquered nations, their culture and customs? Should they be preserved, or is Russification inevitable and “progressive”?

The antiwar feelings among the Petersburg intellectuals was strong enough to guarantee Vereshchagin’s show great success. But naturally, the pro-imperial forces were extremely active too, at the imperial court, in the newspapers, and in artistic circles. If the horrors of war must be depicted, they said, let it be the cruelty of the enemy, shown to the public for educational purposes, like, for instance, the popular painting Turkish Atrocities, a work of Konstantin Makovsky, a bon vivant favorite of the Petersburg aristocratic salons. They began talking about Makovsky’s canvas after none other than Alexander II broke into tears upon seeing it. The artist had painted two fearsome Turks attacking a half-dressed Slavic girl. Among the small minority that did not like Makovsky’s canvas was little Benois, who even as a child had rather independent tastes. As Benois later recalled, he thought the poor girl in the painting was simply drunk.64

Vereshchagin’s burning of his antiwar paintings truly shocked the liberal segment of Petersburg society, which had great sympathy for the artist and was outraged by the military’s pressure. Everyone understood that the artist had done something very important, creating a precedent and determining the positions of liberal culture vis-à-vis imperial Petersburg. Among those who reacted strongly to that symbolic act of defiance was Mussorgsky, who immediately decided to “resurrect” in sound Vereshchagin’s lost painting, Forgotten.

That desire actually reflected some important ideals of the Mighty Five. First, they aspired to integrate music, word, and image, making them equal participants in the projected all-powerful union of the arts with literature. Mussorgsky was deeply convinced of the legitimacy of such a union. (And it was typical of the times that Vereshchagin also wrote prose and poetry, and even tried his hand at composing.) Then there was the passionate desire for music’s active involvement in Russia’s political and civic life. The expression of that desire was Mussorgsky’s aphorism: “Art is a medium of conversing with people and not a goal.”