Isaak Levitan

sheds set against the background of the domes and spire of a monastery, with two small blond children in the foreground, the whole bathed in brilliant sunlight. Here is Russia as Arcadia, but painted totally without sentimentality or unreason: all is truth, though it is only one truth. By contrast, in the Tretyakov, there is a big picture, one of a series which Levitan did to celebrate that other monstrous Russian phenomenon, the Volga: he called it Eternal Rest, and the painting shows a little church on a high bluff overlooking the immense waters, under a huge and threatening sky. What Levitan did here, and on other occasions during the 1890s, was to use both the immensities and the intimacies of the Russian landscape to hint or suggest—there is no tendentiousness or ideology—that Russia was a country where the dramas and mysteries of human life were played out on an unusually heroic scale, and against a background of unrivalled grandeur. Or was it unrivalled? One thinks again of the United States, and is led to compare Levitan's work with Church's, to contrast it and also to wonder that the Earth could contain two such gifted and monumental artists at the same time, each seeking to use sublime natural phenomena to uncover human depths.

Levitan was a close friend of Anton Chekhov and it is tragic that he did not provide us with a portrait of the enigmatic playwright. It is not surprising that first-class portraits of the ruling elite during the nineteenth century are so scarce, for after the Decembrist revolt of 1825, a gulf opened between the Russian governing class and its intelligentsia. But good portraits of the cultural elite are rare too, compared with the record in France and Britain and even in America. There are some exceptions. In 1872, Vasily Perov produced a fine head and shoulders of Dostoevsky. Then, in the Tretyakov, there is a fascinating small oil painting, done in 1887, of Leo Tolstoy Ploughing. The novelist has a massive beard, not yet entirely grey, and he wears a white peaked cap, to match his two white horses. He is bent to his task, concentrating hard, his face weather-beaten and determined. The artist was Ilya Repin (1844—1930), who along with Isaak Levitan is Russia's most significant painter. He did a number of sketches and watercolours of Tolstoy, and he also painted more formal portraits of Mussorgsky (1881, Tretyakov), Borodin (1888) and Rimsky-Korsakov (1893; the last two in the Russian Museum, St Petersburg).

Repin came from the Ukraine, and was a citizen of the Russian Empire rather than Russia itself, spending his last years (after the Revolution) in what had been the Russian province of Finland, now safe and independent. But there can be no doubt about his attachment to the higher values of justice, freedom and fairness. He was first trained as an iconist, in St Petersburg, and his early works were religious in theme. It was when he became one of the Wanderers, and met other fierce intellectuals, like Modest Mussorgsky, that he turned to secular subject matter and began to speculate in paint on Russia's plight and her future. In the years 1870-73, he worked on, and finally unveiled, a large and carefully prepared painting, The Boatmen of the Volga (Russian Museum), which immediately established his position as a serious and formidable artist. As with Surikov, the theme is large, the conception heroic, there are many figures and the mood is dramatic. There is also much of Surikov's dynamism. But the subject is contemporary: the hardships and plight of a depressed class. The authorities chose to ignore this work; instead, they rewarded a Repin 'duty-picture', as he called it, Raising the Daughter of Jarius with a six-year bursary, much of which the artist spent in Paris. There he adopted open-air painting and did various landscapes but there is no other evidence that French art had any influence on his work.

Almost immediately on his return in 1876, Repin painted a striking picture, On the Road of Mud, under Guard (Tretyakov), showing a political prisoner, in a cart rilled with straw, and with helmeted soldiers, their swords drawn, on either side of him, being driven to the station to board a train which will carry him into Siberian exile. It is a study in misery. The horses are exhausted, for the mud is axle-deep; the carter flogs and curses them; the soldiers are bored and cold, the man himself sunk in despair. The colours are brown and black, with a touch of gold in the helmets—all the shame of Mother Russia is here displayed, as she sends another of her children to solitude and death. Yet Repin painted other sides of the country too. In the years 1880-83 he produced what many judge his finest work: A Religious Procession in Kursk Province. It is huge, nearly 6 by 9 feet, with a multitude of figures, some garishly apparelled in vestments, others in rags, carrying high banners and immense golden reliquaries, scuffling up the dust under a brazen sun. All traditional Russia is there: madmen, cripples, insolent priests, credulous old women, ascetics, holy monks, the components of the fanatical mob which, Repin hints, follow God today but may turn to other leaders tomorrow. This great painting moves; it progresses, irresistible, almost menacingly.

Having finished this monumental work and taken it to St Petersburg for showing, Repin now openly associated with the opposition intelligentsia, and produced a monumental series of directly political paintings, which included The Agitator's Arrest, The Refusal to Confess and Secret Meeting. These fine works are highly per­sonal, direct, beautifully painted, not at all documentary—impressions, rather—yet also with an icy edge, as of carefully controlled anger. Their great merit, springing from a skill which Repin possessed to a higher degree than any of his contemporaries (and which strongly reminds one of Caravaggio's best paintings), is the way in which the viewer is made to participate: he or she is actually in the room in which the events take place, or persuaded to feel so.

This feeling is particularly strong in the great work which Repin painted in 1884 (in its second version at the Tretyakov), They Did Not Expect Him. Here is the all-inclusive image of Tsarist Russia, an almost square (63 by 66 inches) painting which says it all. It is the drawing-room of a comfortable middle-class house. The servants have just admitted a ragged, emaciated, unshaven figure who advances into the centre of the room. His wife, facing us, looks up in astonishment. His children, doing their homework, are amazed, awed, beginning to shine with delight. In the centre is his elderly mother—is it, perhaps, the personification of Mother Russia?—who rises from her chair and fixes her gaze on her son. He has returned from Siberian exile. Characteristically the chaotic, hopeless and grotesquely inefficient state has given his family no warning and they, having had no news of him for years, had given up hope. So here he is, raised from the dead like Lazarus; but there is no Christ to thank, and there is shock, surprise, bafflement, almost dread in the reactions—gratitude and happiness will come later. This is one of the greatest paintings produced in the nineteenth century—perhaps the greatest—which needs to be looked at again and again. The viewer is present behind the mother at the back of the room, and partici­pates in this deep entry into the Tsarist state and society. It is a work people will turn to in hundreds of years' time, for an answer to the question 'What was it like?', as resonant in its own way as Tchaikovsky's Symphonic Pathetiquc or Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

Having created this masterpiece, Repin concentrated on teaching and portraits. His later political works lack fire. It was as though the sheer hopelessness of doing anything effective to make Russia a happier and juster place had overcome him; he spent more and more time in Finland, where he bought a little estate and found a congenial companion, the writer Natalia Severova. A sketch of 1905 shows the kind of life they led: Maxim Gorky reading to a circle of friends his play Children of the Sun. Repin wisely stayed in this haven when the long-awaited deluge swept old Russia over the cataract of history—he had done his share. The house, 'Penaty', became a museum of his art.

TASKS