Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

The topically oriented Wanderers could not bypass something as sensational as the revolutionary nihilists. Repin devoted a cycle of paintings to them, the best depicting a priest with a cross visiting the prison cell of a condemned terrorist sitting on an iron bed.

His revolutionary refusing final confession is a man of enormous spiritual strength, suffering but righteous. We see a contemporary Jesus Christ, arms crossed, prison jacket open at his sunken chest. This was Repin’s response to his fellow Wanderer Kramskoy’s controversial painting Christ in the Wilderness (1872), where the same question of moral choice was interpreted in a much more conventional vein.

Repin had a complex relationship with the leader of the Wanderers, the charismatic Kramskoy. Kramskoy was both teacher and older comrade. It was Kramskoy who initiated a conversation with Repin one evening about Christ and His temptations: “Almost every one of us has to solve the fateful question, to serve God or mammon.”

Repin was stunned by Kramskoy’s profoundly personal reaction to the Bible. “Of course, I’ve read it all before, I even studied it with boredom and listened to it in church, sometimes without any interest … But now! Can it be the same book?”⁹

That made all the more bitter Kramskoy’s transformation from fiery advocate of artistic independence into a fashionable portraitist, who charged 5,000 rubles for each work and used his newfound fortune to build a luxurious two-story dacha and studio near St. Petersburg with vast grounds, strawberry patches, greenhouse, bathing pool, and a large staff.

Wealth and fame ruined Kramskoy, Repin thought. “Among his friends, Kramskoy had long lost his charm … They called his portraits dry, officious, his painting old-fashioned, colorless, and tasteless.” It reminded Repin of the sorrowful tale of the fall of an artist, described by Gogol in “The Portrait.” Kramskoy gained entrée to the highest government circles, and painted the coronation of Alexander III, but he never could finish the work he had planned ten years earlier, Rejoice, King of Judea.

Kramskoy developed an addiction to morphine, aged rapidly, grew gray, and whenever anything upset him, he would clutch his heart, breaking off the conversation, cautiously sinking to his Persian ottoman in his chic St. Petersburg apartment. “Nothing left of the passionate radical,”¹⁰ Repin concluded bitterly. Kramskoy died of a heart attack before reaching fifty, during a portrait session, brush in one hand, palette in the other, without a cry or moan.

Just a month before Kramskoy’s death, the composer Alexander Borodin, fifty-three, also succumbed to a heart attack. Borodin was one of the most important members of a group of Russian composers (which also included Modest Mussorgsky, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev, and César Cui) dubbed the Mighty Bunch, known in the West as the Mighty Five. The received wisdom was that there was a lot in common between the Mighty Bunch and the Wanderers: both artistic associations were traditionally described as outsiders rebelling against official art and espousing “realism” in their works.

It was more complicated than that. The Wanderers were trained at the Academy of Arts, receiving a superlative professional polish. The Bunch, on the other hand, learned from one another (under the supervision of the strict and suspicious Balakirev). This had a negative effect on their technical prowess and hindered their composing (especially for Mussorgsky and Borodin).

However, freedom from the routine conservatory methods allowed the Bunch to make bold artistic breakthroughs that subsequently influenced Puccini, Debussy, and Ravel, and made their music admired in the West. The Wanderers, on the other hand, remained a local Russian phenomenon.

It is true that both the Wanderers and the Mighty Bunch were nationalists and proponents of social relevance for art. But several of the pillars of the Wanderers (Repin, Vassily Surikov, Victor Vasnetsov, especially in their later years) moved away from the naturalistic approach that originally brought them national fame. The Bunch was always marked by an attraction to fantasy and vivid exoticism. Mussorgsky could even be called a proto-expressionist.

Alexander III was also a nationalist, perhaps the most sincere and consistent of all the Romanovs beginning with Peter I (only two women could rival him in that regard—Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great). Under Alexander III the imperial court, which used to communicate in French and German, suddenly spoke Russian. They stopped drinking French wines, which were replaced, to the dissatisfaction of many courtiers, by “Crimean vinegar.”