Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Alexander III and his entourage did a lot to attract cultural figures: they met with writers, composers, and painters, awarded them subsidies and state pensions, and commissioned music, sculptures, and paintings, as well as monumental frescoes in churches. A good example is the friendly, albeit inconsistent, policy Alexander had for the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, the members of the 1870 Association of Traveling Art Exhibits.

The roots of the movement go back to 1863, when fourteen of the most talented students of the Imperial Academy of Arts, led by Ivan Kramskoy, refused to take part in the diploma exam and created an independent Art Artel, which functioned as a quasi-socialist commune: the artists rented a large apartment in St. Petersburg and lived and worked there together.

Outrage was the authorities’ initial reaction to this bold step. The Academy of Arts was an official institution, under the supervision of the emperor, who personally decided which artists to encourage and which to punish. The rebellion against the academy was therefore seen as rebellion against the monarchy. The “communal” lifestyle also raised suspicions.

The young rebels proved their métier rather quickly, organizing art exhibits independent of the academy and government. The leading Wanderers—Kramskoy, Vassily Perov, Nikolai Ge, Ilya Repin, and Ivan Shishkin—became famous and commercially successful artists. Grand Duke Vladimir, vice-president and then president of the academy, used the carrot-and-stick approach: he would threaten them with official punishments and then try to lure them back into the academy fold.

Still, it was Grand Duke Vladimir, twenty-four years old, curly-haired, handsome, with gray-blue eyes, who commissioned twenty-six-year-old Repin to paint The Volga Boatmen, a large work depicting a colorful group of eleven bedraggled muzhiks hauling a barge. This canvas made Repin’s reputation as a leading national painter. Volga Boatmen hung for many years in the billiard room of Prince Vladimir, who jokingly complained to Repin that he rarely got to see the painting: it was continually on loan to various European exhibitions.

The painting’s reception was a vivid illustration of the Wanderers’ position in Russian culture. According to Repin, the minister of transportation gave Repin a serious scolding for “showing Europe” the miserable wretches slaving under the broiling sun when “I have reduced that antediluvian method of transport to zero.”⁷

The liberals were also certain that Repin’s painting was hated “in the highest spheres” for its theme and “exposé” character. But at the same time, the grand duke, in love with the painting, would sometimes act as museum guide for his guests, lovingly explaining the background and psychology of each character in the work.

For all their intuitive preference for order and hierarchy, Alexander III and his entourage gradually realized that the official Academy of Arts, with its outmoded classicist norms, was out of touch with Russian life. The Wanderers, on the other hand, exhibited vivid scenes from provincial life, like Repin’s Procession of the Cross in Kursk Province, or topical works like Vladimir Makovsky’s Bank Failure, which revealed the vibrant, motley, and dramatic world of contemporary Russia.

The Wanderers interpreted even traditional religious subjects in a new way. Ge’s painting What Is Truth?, depicting Christ and Pontius Pilate, projected their conflict onto the contemporary world, so that Tolstoy, for example, saw them as a Russian governor and his prisoner. Conservatives, however, found Ge’s works on Christian themes repugnant, because of their excessive naturalism and contemporary allusions.

An indignant Pobedonostsev complained in 1890 to Alexander III,

I cannot avoid reporting to Your Imperial Highness about the general outrage elicited by Ge’s painting What Is Truth?, exhibited at the Wanderers’ show. People are angry not only at the painting but the artist, as well. People of every rank, returning from the exhibition, wonder: how can it be that the government permitted the public exhibition of a blasphemous painting, deeply offensive to religious feeling and at the same time unquestionably tendentious … And we must not forget that the traveling exhibition, after St. Petersburg, usually goes around cities in Russia. We can imagine the impression it will make on people and what—I dare to add—censure of the government, since our folk still believe that everything permitted by the government has its approval.

Alexander III, who sympathized with the Wanderers, in this case shared the orthodox emotions of his closest adviser, and wrote his resolution on the memorandum: “The picture is disgusting, write about this to I. N. Durnovo [the minister of internal affairs], I believe that he can ban it from traveling around Russia and remove it now from the exhibit.”⁸