We crossed the river on an unsteady raft (1) made of three logs tied together (2) and went to the right (3) keeping (4) closer to the shore. We crossed the river on a rickety raft (1) made of three tied logs (2) and went to the right (3) holding on (4)

Ilya Efimovich Repin was born and spent his childhood and the first years of his youth in Ukraine, near Kharkov, in a suburban settlement of the small town of Chuguev. Once Chuguev was a cheerful green town on the mountain, with narrow lanes, orchards, with front gardens near white huts. By order of Tsar Alexander I on military settlements, Chuguev was declared a settlement city - there were many such military settlements in old Russia.

In the central part of Chuguev, fruit orchards were cut down, pavements were paved with cobblestones, new streets, squares and new identical houses appeared - so identical that even pigeons made mistakes and flew into other people's yards. And around the Chuguev military settlement there were villages, peasant huts, sheds, wattle fences ...

Military settlers were obliged to carry out military service and engage in agriculture - to plow the land, drain swamps, build roads. From the day they were born, boys were assigned to the regiment, and then they were sent to cantonist schools. Girls were given in marriage only with the permission of the authorities. Even their outfits were strictly monitored by the authorities, and if a girl happened to wear an elegant silk scarf on a holiday, then some non-commissioned officer - a warden - without any embarrassment, pulled it off her head and immediately tore it to shreds.

All life in the military settlements obeyed the orders of the military authorities. The title of a military villager was “very despicable, only serfs were considered lower than the villagers,” said Repin. The Repin family remembered how in the early years of military settlements the Chuguev people filed a complaint with Tsar Alexander I when he came to Chuguev.

“I don’t accept petitions today,” the king said.

Then the Chuguevs lay down on the road. There was nowhere to turn. A voice came from the carriage: “Go!” Several people were crushed, the rest were beaten to death.

Even after being beaten and tortured, the Chuguev people, when asked whether they agreed to be military settlers, answered invariably: “We can’t!” (We can't!) The locals called them “nemogyoms” like that. But no matter how indignant and rebellious the Chuguev people were, they had to be military settlers for more than forty years, until military settlements were abolished in 1857.

Repin's father, Efim Vasilyevich, was a military settler. Already in the first years of military service, he could not stand it, he was rude to his superiors in some way and ended up in penalties. As a penal, he was not eligible for promotion and served as an ordinary soldier. He was well versed and knew a lot about horses, and the officers who were entrusted with the purchase of horses for the regiments sometimes took him with them to the Donshchina, to the Caucasus.

“... We were both poor and boring, and I often wanted to eat,” Repin recalled. “Black bread with coarse gray salt was very tasty, but it was also given little by little.”

Repin had three children. The eldest daughter Ustya, followed by Ilya and a small son. Repin's mother, Tatyana Stepanovna, as the wife of a military peasant, was driven to government work. Repin's memory forever remained that hot, sunny day when he first brought her lunch in a bundle. She, along with other women, kneaded clay with manure and straw to cover the new barracks. The boy had to go past a terrible moat, where packs of stray dogs ran. They said that the day before they tore a calf to pieces.

Ilyusha walked carefully, as he was taught. Scary. Just to go a little more, and then run to the barracks.

Here is mama. She is wearing a large black scarf, pulled low. The face is red, the hands are covered in clay, in blood.

“Is it difficult, mother? I whisper. - Can I work for you?

Mommy laughed through her tears and began to kiss me. I never liked kissing.

Mom, - I push off, - maybe the villagers shouldn't kiss? No need...

Mamma began to cry, looked at her hands, and went to the common tub to wash them.

Then we sat; Mommy ate dinner...

Well, it will be for you, lady, to cool off, it's time to go to work! Sereda shouted at mother. - What are you staring at? he approached me. - If you come here, we will force you to help knead the clay. Look, lady, she couldn’t take dinner with her - carry it for her!

At home, the mother sewed fur coats to order in order to earn at least a little money, took care of the meager household, and as soon as she had free time, she read poems by Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Ilyusha to children, long before she learned to read, learned and fell in love with these poets.

The mother really wanted her children to study, and even set up something like a small school at home. In addition to their children, there were several other children in this school. The mother taught literacy, and the deacon taught arithmetic.

Little Repin was very fond of his mother's stories about the lives of the saints. Somehow, having heard enough of these stories, he decided to become a saint and flee into the desert, but the flight failed, and he returned. Sometimes they went to their church in Osinovka. The church was beautifully painted. Mother herself loved and understood painting, she liked these paintings, and Ilyusha forgot everything with delight.

Despite her poverty, her mother sometimes bought paintings. The seller will come - he is both a glazier and sells paintings - carefully takes out a picture from a pack, shows it and looks at everyone with satisfied eyes. How I would like my mother to buy a picture in which Polish gentlemen tie Mazepa to a horse. But the picture is expensive and the mother does not like it, she buys another one, and Repin recalled many years later: “And what colors were on the coats of the Poles! .. What a horse! Miracle! I was so annoyed that I did not buy ... "

Repin began to draw very early. “It used to be that all the fences were drawn in chalk by Ilyunka. I also drew videos. We often went to dinner in the Old Believer Forest. He always took papers and a pencil with him and kept sketching beautiful places ... Our company was more and more girls. Ilyunka did not like children - they were pugnacious - and he hung out more with us girls, ”recalled a friend of Ustya's sister. She also told how Ilyunka, when he became older, painted a portrait of her. He put me down and didn't tell me to move. "Natalka, sit down! Natalka, sit down! And I did not want to sit, and I laughed and twirled all the time. And then, when he finished, he gave me a piece of paper ... He also painted other girls and boys.

My father served somewhere very far away. From time to time news came from him, but he came home only once and was somehow miserable, a stranger. Mother continued to be driven to government work, the children were often sick. One winter they were all shaking with a fever. Repin especially remembered this winter. Every morning, until the fever began to shake, he set to work - he made a large horse out of rags, sticks and planks, so big that he could ride on him, of course, carefully so that his legs would not move apart. The horse had a real tail of hair, with ears and a mane of fur scraps. Someone else advised to fashion a horse out of wax. Ilyusha asked his mother for a piece of wax, stubs of wax candles from images, and began to sculpt a head, ears, nostrils ... He worked with a thin stick for a long time, with enthusiasm, and fashioned two magnificent little horses. Then he decided to cut horses out of paper and got so good at it that, starting with the hoof of the hind leg, he cut out the whole horse.

Ilyusha carved only horses, and her sister Ustya was especially good at people - boys, girls, women in fur coats. They glued everything they cut out onto the glass of the windows - an exhibition turned out, and passers-by, children and adults, crowded at the windows, admired this exhibition, laughed.

Children's drawings, modeling and carving were the first joys of creativity, "... the simple beginning of my artistic activity," said Repin.

On holidays, cousin Tronka often came to the Repins. He worked as an apprentice to a tailor and had a passion for drawing. Tronka brought with him many drawings; almost all of them were the same and depicted Polkan - a large-headed, bearded monster with a club, half-man-half-dog from the tale of Bova the Prince. Tronka proudly showed his drawings and immediately drew new Polkanovs. He necessarily signed each drawing: “Trofim Chaplygin”, then carefully folded each Polkan into four and hid it at the bottom of the cap.

Once Tronka brought paints with him. “He took a clean plate, turned out a brush from a piece of paper, put a glass of water on the table, and we took Ustin's alphabet so that he could paint her unpainted pictures with paints. The first picture - a watermelon - suddenly turned into a living one before our eyes; what was marked on it with a barely black line, Trofim covered with green stripes, and the watermelon charged into our eyes with a living color; we opened our mouths. But there was a miracle when Trofim painted the cut half of the second watermelon with red paint so vividly and juicy that we even wanted to eat a watermelon; and when the red paint dried, he made black seeds here and there with a thin brush over the red pulp - a miracle! miracle!

These days of holidays with Tronka flew by quickly. We didn’t go out anywhere and didn’t see anything but our colored pictures, and I even started crying when it was announced that it was time for Tronka to go home.”

As a consolation, Tronka left Ilyusha several of his Polkans and paints, and most importantly, he infected the boy with his violent love for drawing.

“It is possible that if it were not for him, I would not have become an artist,” said Repin.

For days Ilyusha sat at the table with his paints, with difficulty tearing himself away from them. Many years later, he recalled: “... I passionately wanted to draw a rose bush: dark green leaves and bright pink flowers, even with buds. I began to remember how the leaves were attached to the tree, and I could not remember at all, and began to yearn that summer would not be soon, and maybe I would no longer see the dense greenery of bushes and roses.

Ilyusha nevertheless drew a rose bush, and when one day a cousin, a friend of Ustya, came, she liked his drawing so much that she began to ask him to draw the same one for her chest. At that time, it was fashionable for Chuguev girls to cover the lids of their chests with pictures.

This was the first order in Repin's life. This order was followed by orders from other Ustin's friends.

After serving the service, the father finally arrived - my friend, as the children called him. Life went completely different. My father was engaged in buying and selling horses. Every spring he brought wild, unbroken horses from the Don and resold them. He usually came at night and always unexpectedly.

Early morning. There is a large samovar on the table, and mother and father are already sitting at tea. The father is not the same as before. He is clean-shaven, his mustache curled up, his hair neatly combed. He is cheerful. Gives the boy a string of figs. And then he lifts a pair of new boots high: “Put on: aren’t they small?”

Father was doing well. It was decided to send Ilyusha to study at the school of topographers. Topographers carried out surveying and drawing work in Chuguev and were considered the most enlightened people in the city. They were also the most attractive gentlemen for local young ladies: they often arranged dance evenings-balls together and danced until dawn to the regimental band. In summer, balls were held in the city garden, in winter at one of the local residents. The Repins' house, as one of the largest, was often occupied for these dance evenings. Ilyusha and sister Ustya, who was already fifteen years old, loved them very much. True, Ilyusha was most captivated by music.

Everyone in the Repin family loved music and singing. I would always remember how my mother's sister, Aunt Grunya, used to sing some old song and the whole family would pick it up in unison.

It was difficult to get into apprenticeship with topographers, but dancing evenings helped here. Once at the evening, the mother managed to beg one of the teachers of the school to take Ilyusha to be her student.

But Ilyusha did not study long at the school of topographers. In 1857, when military settlements were abolished, topographers left Chuguev. After the departure of the topographers, he was left without a teacher. He secretly dreamed of St. Petersburg, of the Academy of Arts, although he understood that before going to the academy, he still had to study a lot.

Once - Ilyusha was thirteen years old - his mother asked the best Chuguev painter Persanov to see how her son was painting. The boy copied the drawing of the English master: in a shady green park, the tower of the castle is reflected in the water. Persanov looked good-naturedly at the drawing for a long time, then led the boy to the window, pointed to the Donets, beyond which the forest began, and said:

You see - water and a forest above the water, that's how you should draw - right from nature.

Since then, Repin has visited Persanov more than once, looked at his work and understood what it means to “draw from life”. Many years later, he recalled what an irresistible impression Persanov's paintings made on him: landscapes, portraits, still lifes, church painting. And although he was not a student of Persanov, he considered him his teacher and inspirer.

Soon Persanov left Chuguev, and Repin went to study with a good master of icon painting and portrait painter Bunakov, he went mainly because Bunakov was a student of Persanov. Repin stayed in Bunakov's workshop for about two years. By the age of sixteen, having learned to paint images and portraits, Repin became an independent master, left Bunakov and began working in icon-painting artels that roamed around Ukraine. He liked to paint large wall images, he wanted to paint picturesquely, in his own way. His work was praised. It happened that people came for him for a hundred - two hundred miles. Before that, he had never traveled further than Chuguev, and now, working with strangers, in different places, he looked closely at a lot, got to know life and people closer. In between trips at home, he drew a lot, painted with oil paints. He painted portraits of his father, mother, relatives, acquaintances. He also painted custom-made portraits for three or even five rubles per portrait. The son's earnings were very useful: the Repins became impoverished again. In one week, from some epidemic, all the horses that my father bought fell, and he returned home poor.

It would seem that it was no longer possible to dream of St. Petersburg, of the Academy of Arts - it was necessary to help the family. But somewhere in the depths of my soul there lived a certainty - he would be in the academy! Some of his acquaintances got him the charter of the academy with a new program, and he decided, in spite of everything, to prepare for the exams. He wrote out an art album "Northern Lights", where paintings by Russian artists, scenes from Russian history, views of different cities were printed. With interest I watched the views of St. Petersburg, studied its sights, dreamed of seeing Bryullov's painting "The Death of Pompeii", about which Chuguev artists told miracles.

In the summer of 1863, Repin worked in the Voronezh province, in the village of Sirotino, - he painted images of a high iconostasis right on the stage. Not far from Sirotin is the town of Ostrogozhsk, the birthplace of Kramskoy. Comrades at work, natives of Ostrogozhsk, who knew that Repin was dreaming of St. Petersburg, talked about how Kramskoy left Ostrogozhsk, entered the Academy of Arts, and became an artist. These stories excited, excited Repin: dreams turned into a firm determination to go to St. Petersburg at all costs.

In the fall, Ilya Repin left for St. Petersburg with the money he earned.

“Oh, this is a dream!.. It can’t be that it wasn’t a dream: like this, in the outer place of a huge stagecoach I’ve been sitting for more than a day and I’m driving, driving endlessly ...”

He had long since lost count of days and nights. And suddenly, on a dark morning, the conductor says:

Why don't you watch: Moscow has begun!

One-story houses, wooden fences, narrow streets stretched out. Then the streets went wider, the houses taller, and the stagecoach drove into the station yard. The passengers dispersed, and Repin went to the station - I wanted to see how the cast-iron goes without horses.

A few hours later, the cast-iron rushes him to St. Petersburg.

2

Petersburg! The first minutes - a strange city, strangers, and there are so many of them that Repin suddenly felt lonely. It even became scary. But here he sat in the sleigh. The driver is a young guy. Snow falls in white flakes and melts. Anichkov bridge, Nevsky prospect. The public library, Kazan Cathedral, St. Isaac's... He recognizes all this from the engravings that he saw in the Northern Lights album. The heart beats with delight. The driver asks: "Where to take?" - "Yes, to some hotel cheaper." We drove up to the hotel "Deer". There are rooms in one ruble. Repin enters the room, orders a samovar, drinks countless amounts of tea with rolls, and for the first time in many days falls asleep blissfully in a clean bed.

In the morning he woke up early, it was still dark. I counted the money - only forty-seven rubles. On them you will not live long in the "Deer". The hotel clerk advised me to look for a room on the notes pasted to the gate.

Repin left the hotel. “But I was irresistibly drawn to the embankment, to the sphinxes, to the Academy of Arts ... - he recalled many years later. - So here she is! This is no longer a dream; here is the Neva and the Nikolaevsky bridge ... An enthusiastic oblivion took possession of me, and for a long time I stood at the sphinxes and looked at the doors of the academy, if an artist would come out of there - my deity, my ideal.

For a long time I stood alone; it was probably still early, and I did not notice any artist close. Sighing from the depths of my soul, I went to Maly Prospekt to look for a room.

On Maly Prospekt, following a note on the gate, I climbed up to the fourth floor, or attic, and the nimble hostess showed me a small room with a half-vault; she would have given it for six roubles. I liked the room, I began to bargain, offering five rubles, because it's quite far from the center.

Why, you are probably a student, so it is even more convenient for you, if only you are closer to the university.

No, I am embarrassed, extremely flattered by her suggestion that I am a student, no, I stammer. “I intend to enter the Academy of Arts,” I immediately blurted out.

Oh, how good! My husband is an artist-architect; and my nephew also enters the Academy of Arts.

I tremble with joy, and we agree on five rubles and fifty kopecks per room per month.

I wanted to immediately move into this room with an attic window and start writing something.

But first of all it was necessary to think about earnings. The next day, Repin went in the morning to look for work: he was in icon-painting workshops, in workshops for signboards, and with photographers. Everywhere they wrote down the address, they promised to tell if it was needed. Tired, he went into the kitchen for lunch. Lunch cost thirty kopecks - a fortune! We'll have to give up these meals. In a petty shop he bought two pounds of black bread, tea and sugar were still left from Chuguev. “After all, this is what you can eat!” And he was so delighted with his discovery that the fear of the possibility of starvation also passed. And since then, for a long time, the old housewife bought him three kopecks worth of black bread every morning.

The owners of the room turned out to be simple, kind people. The owner, the architect Petrov, looked at Repin's drawings, and they seemed to him interesting and talented. With great participation, he asked Repin about where he studied, what he read. When Repin said that he would probably have to go back to Chuguev, Petrov became agitated:

What are you, what are you! .. After all, you have done the most important thing in life: you have crossed the Rubicon ... There can be no turning back!

Repin knew what Julius Caesar's "Rubicon" was, and he liked how well Petrov said about it. And Petrov also advised him to enter the Drawing School at the Exchange, where he would have to pay only three rubles a year.

Repin came to life, cheered up and the next day he enrolled in school. But there were only two evenings a week and on Sunday mornings. He decided to pursue the academy; plucked up courage, or, as he himself said, "insolence", and went to the academy - to ask how they act there. He was told that he needed to find out about this from his superiors. After much hesitation, he finally decided to knock on the door, on which hung a plaque with the inscription: “Conference Secretary F.F. Lvov. Lvov received him coldly:

Ah, the academy? Where did you prepare? Ah, these little drawings? Well, you are still far from the Academy of Arts. Go to the Drawing School: you have neither ink nor drawing yet, go, get ready, then come.

The drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists was located in the Exchange building, and it was simply called the “School on the Exchange”. Repin began to study at this school. The first months passed for him in some kind of state of anxious delight, and the first drawing - a plaster model of burdock - which he made in the first class of ornaments and masks, brought him the joy of creativity, and despair, and happiness. He looked at samples of drawings on the walls, saw how his comrades draw this burdock - cleanly, with thin strokes, as they print. And his burdock is rubbed, and he extinguishes it with dirty spots, achieving only the transfer of the form of gypsum, its texture.

I had to submit this drawing.

The Christmas break has arrived. For about three weeks he did not go to school; sometimes, however, the thought of burdock gnawed, but Petersburg, the Hermitage, oil paints in real tubes - all this consoled me. He spent paint sparingly and painted a self-portrait with these new paints during the holidays. He wrote smoothly, in an iconic way. A nineteen-year-old youth looks at us attentively, thoughtfully. Is there something waiting for him?

The holidays are over. At the school, lists of students with marks were hung on the wall. Repin did not find his last name in the lists - he was looking for her in the last rows. From resentment and grief, he was ready to cry. Finally I decided to ask one of the students:

Why are they excluded from the list?

Probably for bad drawings. What is your last name?

Yes, my surname is Repin, I entered recently.

What are you, what are you? After all, Repin was recorded first - read.

It seemed to Repin that his comrade was laughing at him, and he was finally convinced that he had received the first number only when the attendant gave him a folder with drawings and he saw the first number and the teacher's signature on the burdock drawing.

By the end of winter, Repin was transferred to the next class - the class of plaster heads. One of the teachers of the Drawing School was Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy.

Nine days after Repin's arrival in St. Petersburg, an event took place at the Academy of Arts that made a lot of noise. Fourteen students graduating from the academy refused to participate in the competition for a large gold medal. They did not want to paint pictures on a mythological theme and sought the right to freely choose subjects for their competitive works. The professors considered this demand unheard of insolence and refused to comply with it. And the students refused gold medals, from going on a business trip abroad and left the academy.

The inspirer of this "rebellion of fourteen" was one of the competitors for the big gold medal - Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy. At the Drawing School, he taught classes on Sundays.

With excitement, Repin was waiting for this day. “It's Sunday... There is a lively excitement in the class, Kramskoy is not yet. We are drawing from the head of Milo of Croton... Suddenly there was complete silence... And I saw a thin man in a black frock coat, entering the classroom with a firm step. I thought it was someone else: I imagined Kramskoy differently. Instead of a beautiful pale profile, this one had a thin high-cheeked face and black smooth hair instead of shoulder-length chestnut curls, and such a shabby thin beard is only for students and teachers.

Who is this? I whisper to my friend.

Kramskoy! Don't you know? he wonders.

So that's what he is! .. Now he looked at me too. Seems to have noticed. What eyes! You can’t hide, even though they are small and sit deep in sunken orbits; grey, luminous. Here he stopped in front of the work of one student. What a serious face! But the voice is pleasant, sincere, speaks with excitement. Well, listen to him! They even abandoned their work, they stand around with their mouths open; it is clear that they are trying to remember every word ... Here he is behind my back; I stopped in excitement.

Ah, how good! Wonderful! Are you here for the first time?

3

Repin did not stop thinking about the academy. To become a volunteer - you have to pay twenty-five rubles a year, which he does not have. Petrov suggested a way out: you need to find a patron who would pay for him. A patron was found: Fyodor Ivanovich Pryanishnikov, a member of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, a collector of paintings, the same one who once bought The Major's Matchmaking from Fedotov.

From the end of January 1864, Repin became a volunteer at the Academy of Arts. The first day spent at the academy was remembered forever.

The morning was just dawning when, after his usual breakfast of brown bread and tea, he left the house. Lanterns burned dimly in the deserted streets, the snow crunched underfoot. Here and there at the gate stood janitors with brooms.

Classes at the academy started at eight o'clock. He walked along a dimly lit narrow corridor to an auditorium where the professor was reading mathematics. Two hanging lamps dimly illuminated the huge auditorium, the professor's chair, the blackboard. There were few listeners. Repin sat down in the first free seat and was all ears. He did not understand much from this lecture, but the thought that he was studying with a real professor delighted him.

After the lecture he went to the sculpture class. He went in hesitantly - what if they drive him away? After all, he entered the painting department, but he was very fond of sculpture and wanted to sculpt. The class was large and there was not a single student in it. The sleepy attendant brought clay, put down the machine and moved the plaster head, which Repin pointed out to him.

Sculpting was not so easy. Repin did not know any tricks - he had never sculpted before. Clay did not obey, crawled, head fell to the side. At that moment, a tall, curly-haired youth with quick black eyes entered the classroom. He went to the bench, on which lay the torso of Laocoön, covered with wet rags, skillfully and deftly removed the rags, wiped the stacks and began to work. Worked with passion, seriously; often went away and looked at his work from afar. I also looked at Repin. And Repin continued to fight with clay. He really wanted to take a closer look at how the curly-haired stranger works, but he did not dare. And suddenly the young man himself approached him and spoke. Then he helped to strengthen the head of Antinous and advised in the future to start each sculpture from the frame. He himself had recently entered the academy, and his name was Mark Antokolsky.

Repin did not notice how Antokolsky left. “I forgot the whole world, I was wet through and through, and only the minister reminded me that it was almost three o’clock, he would close the class and shouldn’t I have some lecture?”

Of course it's time! Repin rushed to run to the second floor. With reverence he entered the audience. The audience is full. Lecture on world history. The professor speaks of the Egyptian papyri found in the graves, speaks in a monotone, drawling voice. Repin strains with all his efforts, but he feels that he is weakening and he is irresistibly sleepy. He tries his best to listen. He falls asleep, shakes himself, falls asleep again and suddenly wakes up from a terrible noise. Half past five! At five o'clock the fun begins - the drawing class!

There is already a crowd at the door of the classroom. At five minutes to five minutes the door opens, and everyone rushes to take their seats. There are not enough numbered seats; The “placeless” students, having stocked up on logs, burst into the classroom, rush through all the benches of the amphitheater down to the round pedestal for nature and sit around on the logs. Draw a plaster head. Repin burns with admiration, draws selflessly.

Two hours pass unnoticed - the drawing class is over. For this drawing, Repin received one of the first numbers.

“Full of happiness and warmth, breathing in the freshness of the street, I go out into the air. Here is a wonderful day: from seven o'clock in the morning until seven in the evening I was so completely and so variously occupied with my favorite subjects.

The fact that he understood almost nothing at the lecture did not upset Repin very much. You have to study and study, but he is self-taught in everything, he still knows so little ... He had not eaten anything all day and now he felt how very hungry he was. But all this is nonsense. Most importantly, his dream came true - he is in the academy!

I want to sleep, my eyes are glued together, the book is not readable... People, clay, Antinous - everything comes up in my memory, in fragments. And a new acquaintance... Who is he?

How could Repin then think that only a few weeks would pass and they would become the closest friends? How could he know that years would pass and the poor Jew from Vilna - Mark Matveyevich Antokolsky would become one of the greatest sculptors of Russia, and he, Repin, the son of a military peasant, would be the glory and pride of the Russian people?

In the spring of 1864, an announcement was posted at the academy that all volunteers who wanted to become real students could take the exam directly for the second year in the fall. Repin dropped everything and began to prepare for exams. The first exam was in geometry.

You have no idea about geometry, - the professor said after the exam and gave him one.

Repin passed the rest of the subjects well, and in the drawing exam he received the first numbers.

Due to geometry, he did not get into the second year, but was enrolled in the first. “From this happiness, I ran to the apartment like crazy,” Repin recalled.

Classes have begun. Science was difficult, and life was difficult. He took on all kinds of work - he painted roofs, carriages, even buckets; it happened that some "urochishko" came across, or one of the comrades took out an order for portraits. Several times during the years of his studies, he submitted a request to the council of the academy for an allowance, at least for canvas and paints, but he was always refused. Twisted in every way. Sometimes the academy's permanent sitter Taras came to the rescue, who, for some sketch, provided him with a blank canvas for the next work. At one time, Repin even thought of offering himself as a model for the academy: fifteen rubles a month and a free apartment in the basement seemed very tempting. But the comrades to whom he told about this laughed at him, and Antokolsky “even severely, sadly condemned me ... God alone knows how I existed at that time,” he recalled.

Despite such a difficult life, Repin carefully completed all academic assignments, wrote sketches for biblical, gospel, and ancient subjects, as was customary at the academy, carefully attended lectures, passed exams, and received medals.

Increasingly, he began to visit Kramskoy. Ivan Nikolaevich soon realized how talented this provincial youth was, closely followed his development, asked to be shown not only academic works, but everything he did outside the academy. Repin first brought a portrait of an old woman, who painted when he lived in his first apartment with an architect, then he began to bring other portraits and "pictures". It seemed to him that these works of his were no good. Compared to how the comrades at the academy wrote, they were too simple, they did not have any beautiful highlights, deft strokes of the brush. "I must be mediocrity," he sometimes thought bitterly. But Kramskoy liked all his portraits and “pictures”, and Repin did not understand why for a long time.

But here the topic is set at the academy: "The Flood". Repin worked on the sketch for two weeks, and it seemed to him that he "produced an unprecedented": in the foreground of the sketch, people, reptiles, animals were piled up. In the middle, a woman writhed in agony. Lightning flashed through the whole picture. With a feeling of some modest pride, he carried his sketch to Kramskoy. Kramskoy, as always, greeted him very cordially.

“- How, and is it you? - he said, lowering his voice, and his face instantly lost a cheerful expression, he knitted his brows. - Here, I confess, I did not expect ... Why, this is the “Last Day of Pompeii” ... Strange! .. No, this is not it. Not so... After all, it does not make any impression, despite all these thunders, lightnings and other horrors. All this is made up of the pictures you have seen, of common, hackneyed places.

Kramskoy spoke for a long time, spoke passionately, with conviction. And then only Repin, as it were, regained his sight. He suddenly saw his sketch, and everything that seemed to him strong, spectacular, appeared before him in all its wretchedness. He left Kramskoy disappointed by the failure, but, as it were, renewed. Let the sketch fail. It doesn't matter. There are still many new tasks ahead. We must try not to imitate anyone, to bring our own, living principle into each task, to write in our own way, as you think and feel. Thoughts crowded in my head, confused. I wanted to see Antokolsky as soon as possible, to tell him everything, to discuss it.

And in the academy after the "rebellion of the fourteen" little has changed. The President of the Academy of Arts was still the daughter of Tsar Nicholas I - Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, and, as always, only "high" art was recognized. Meanwhile, both in the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and in the Moscow School of Painting, young artists grew and developed, and the sprouts of Russian national art made their way. But the professors of the academy did not attach any serious importance to this. They did not attach any importance to those paintings that occasionally appeared in their own exhibitions at the Academy of Arts. True, when in 1861 Perov's painting "The Procession of the Cross at Easter" appeared at an academic exhibition, it was rushed to be removed from the exhibition "for obscenity." But “Sermon in the Village” remained hanging, and next to it was “Halt of Prisoners” by V.Ya. Jacobi - a picture of the brutal reprisal of the tsarist government with the best Russian people, political exiles, "Last Spring" by M.P. Klodt...

“These are not yet great and lofty works of art that remain forever the property of the people. These are only samples of young, emerging talents. But you feel some kind of happiness before these tests. Where these samples already exist - and with such truth and power - there art goes uphill, there a wide future awaits it ... ”- this is how Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov wrote in an article dedicated to the academic exhibition, and he wrote this article almost two years before the "revolt of the fourteen".

For Repin and for many young artists, the true academy was that artel of artists headed by Kramskoy, which was created by the rebels after leaving the academy. Members of the artel and guests gathered there every Thursday. Repin, shortly after his acquaintance with Kramskoy, began to visit the artel and became his own man, even sometimes helping the artel workers in working on orders. On artel "Thursdays" he met the "grandfather of the forests" - Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin and the brilliant young artist Fyodor Alexandrovich Vasiliev and always said that together with Kramskoy they had a great influence on him.

For the summer, many members of the artel left for their native lands and in the fall they brought drawings, sketches, and sometimes paintings. “What a general holiday this was! Repin recalled. - Countless visitors, more and more young artists and amateurs, went to the artel, as if to an exhibition, to see the new items.

It’s like they brought something alive, sweet, expensive and put it before my eyes!”

4

In the drawing class of the academy, the Ukrainian Nikolai Ivanovich Murashko usually sat next to Repin. He entered the academy at the same time as Repin and somehow immediately liked him. He liked that Murashko knew a lot, read a lot, remembered everything he read - his memory was excellent. They quickly became friends, and these friendships lasted a lifetime.

Once, on April 4, 1866, in the drawing class, Murashko mysteriously whispered to Repin: “Do you know what happened today?” - and told him about the attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II in the Summer Garden.

On the third of September, the execution of Dmitry Karakozov, who had shot at the tsar, was scheduled. Repin and Murashko decided to go to the place of execution on Smolenskaya Square. It was very early. Crowds of people walked quickly through the streets, almost running. Here is the field. The gallows is visible. Friends pushed forward. The black cart with the bench on which Karakozov was sitting moved slowly. Repin had time to examine his pale face with a grayish tint, huge gray eyes, tightly compressed thin lips. He saw how Karakozov ascended the scaffold, how he bowed to the people on all four sides, how they put a death shirt on him ... It's all over!

This is how Repin painted Karakozov when he returned home exhausted and shocked by all the experiences of the day.

A few days after this, Murashko persuaded Repin to go to the Golodaevo field to see, and maybe sketch the place where Karakozov was buried. We walked for a long time, finally reached the field. The field is flat, and only in one place was a freshly dug grave. Without agreeing, they decided that this was Karakozov's grave. They did not draw. We stood in thought and already wanted to move on. Suddenly they saw a thick red mug with a short mustache running straight at them.

Stop! Why did you come here? Do you know what this place is? Whose grave did you stand on?

No, we do not know, but whose grave is this? Murashko asked imperturbably.

Ah, you don't know! Here I will show you whose grave it is! Come with me to the station: they will tell you whose grave it is.

At the precinct, the district policeman threateningly interrogated:

Why were you on the Golodaevo field? What kind of people are you?

Students of the Academy of Arts. We go with sketchbooks, in different places we draw what we like ...

The district police officer ordered the official to make inquiries. The artists were taken to the academy, where their identities were verified, and then they were told that they were free.

And only when the friends entered the room did they feel tired. Goosebumps stretched out on the floor, Repin lay down on his bed. Both remained silent, overwhelmed by everything that had happened. Suddenly Murashko pulled out a thick stack of photographic cards from his pocket. There were Kosciuszko, and Polish insurgents, and Chernyshevsky, and other exiled and executed "politicals."

Three years have passed since Repin entered the academy, and he has never been to his homeland in Chuguev - there was still no money. Finally, in the spring of 1867, he managed to pack up and go home. Chuguev, in which he spent his childhood and first youth, has not changed at all. The same street overgrown with grass, the same log house with a porch, the yard, and in the yard the same water barrel on a two-wheeled cart. The mother is the same. She wept with joy when she saw her son. Repin was struck by brother Vasya - so he grew up and changed. A few days later, Ilya was already painting his portrait: I wanted to paint it the way I suddenly saw him on the first day of my arrival - curly, pensive, he is sitting in an armchair upholstered in patterned silk. He is wearing a red, deep tone shirt, an unbuttoned vest. The portrait is wonderful and is considered one of the best portraits painted by Repin before 1868.

In the home, everything stood in its place and the people were still the same. But how he has changed! How boring the Chuguev people seemed to him! “... Now I will cherish every minute of the divine life in St. Petersburg. All that was best in life is all there!” he wrote to friends.

A few months later, Repin returned to St. Petersburg, joyfully met with Antokolsky, without whom he was very bored. It was difficult for both of them, both were lonely in a strange city, both were “burning with art”, tormented by the fact that they knew little, had no education. Together they read, went to museums, and occasionally went to the opera. Imperceptibly, without any preamble, they switched to "you", then Repin moved to Antokolsky's room, which he rented from the hostess.

Soon Repin met and became friends with many students of the academy. Sociable, hot-tempered, he studied with passion, played games with his comrades in the academic garden with passion. In drawing classes, not noticing anyone and nothing, he selflessly painted from plasters. There was no arrogance in him; he was even somehow perplexed with surprise when he received the first numbers for his drawings and his comrades crowded at student exhibitions near his works. Everyone felt at ease with him.

Gradually, a circle of comrades formed around Repin and Antokolsky. We decided to meet twice a week after academic studies in turn at each. Up to fifteen people packed into a small room. Coats, fur coats, hats fell into a heap in the corner. There was nowhere to turn. The heat was unbearable. Usually the owner of the room was fussing about the samovar, preparing a treat - tea with rolls. He was sitting "in nature" - he posed for all his comrades, however, sometimes they posed for each other. The drawings were immediately subjected to severe criticism - it was not supposed to be offended. From these "evenings of arts", as young artists began to call their gatherings, very few drawings remained, and Repin had two portraits of Antokolsky, a portrait of Murashko, a portrait of the artist Makarov.

While drawing, someone would certainly read aloud, most often university students who liked to go to "art evenings" to look at drawings, read some scientific article, talk, argue. They argued tirelessly, and the arguments were always interspersed with jokes and witticisms.

The evening usually ended with choral singing, and after the chorus someone would certainly sing:

Black fear runs like a shadow
From the rays that carry the day;
Light, warmth and fragrance
Darkness and cold are quickly driven away;
The smell of decay is getting weaker,
The smell of roses is more audible ...

This song by the English poet Thomas Hood, translated by Mikhail Illarionovich Mikhailov, who was arrested and exiled in 1861, ended Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?

This novel was then banned by the censors, and tattered, read out copies of it, torn from the Sovremennik magazine, were brought by students along with other forbidden literature.

From a large group of participants in the "evenings of arts" another, small one, stood out. They gathered almost every evening at Repin's: Antokolsky, Murashko, student Adrian Prakhov, very "developed and thinking", who, according to Repin, was their "reader and diligent developer." They read aloud, and each new book resonated in the hearts of the listeners, answered the important questions of life. The comrades helped each other to prepare for exams in the sciences, and Prakhov was still studying German with Repin.

Repin worked hard. He said that he "reveres the sciences", he grabbed knowledge everywhere - in books, at lectures by academic professors, in the Hermitage, at exhibitions ...

Somehow, at the beginning of September 1869, Antokolsky, returning from Stasov, whom he had recently met, said to Repin:

You know, Ilya, Stasov wants to meet my comrades, asks to call close friends and will come to us in the evening. What do you say to that?

Really? That terrible Stasov? Repin was surprised. - It's interesting to look at, it's even scary.

It was decided to meet Stasov with due honor. In addition to ordinary visitors, V.M. Vasnetsov, who entered the academy a year ago, and V.M. Maksimov, the future artist-itinerant. They decided to serve tea in Repin's room closest to the exit. On the appointed evening, they gathered early. Antokolsky ran out into the street every minute to meet the guest. Finally, a loud voice was heard in the corridor, and an enormous man in a black frock coat, with a large gray beard, entered the room. Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov was twenty years older than Repin and his comrades. His first article was published during Belinsky's lifetime. Brilliantly educated, speaking almost all European languages, he wholeheartedly loved art and literature. In his very first articles, he sharply criticized the academy as a reactionary institution, and already two years before the "revolt of the fourteen" he wrote that it was impossible to impose on students for their paintings themes from mythology, far from life. He enthusiastically greeted the artistic artel of Kramskoy.

Less than ten minutes later, an argument broke out. Semiradsky, a convinced academician, was eager to fight with a real critic - an opponent of the academy. And the battle was fierce. Many years later, Stasov recalled: “The conversation in the rooms of Antokolsky and Repin was one of the brightest and liveliest scenes of that time ... The dispute came out very lively, hot and lengthy ...”

5

On one of the holidays, a friend and neighbor in the academic workshop, Konstantin Savitsky, persuaded Repin to go on sketches up the Neva on a steamer. Repin reluctantly agreed.

Go. The weather was wonderful. By noon we were already passing by luxurious dachas located along the banks of the Neva. The bright sun illuminated the smart festive crowd and flocks of cheerful young ladies who went down to the river. They seemed to Repin some kind of unearthly creatures, "wonderful creatures of beauty." And suddenly:

What's that moving over there? Here is that dark, greasy, some kind of brown spot - what is it crawling on our sun?

BUT! These are barge haulers pulling a barge, - said Savitsky.

The haulers came closer. Dirty, ragged, faces gloomy, brown from sunburn. The leading burlak lifted the line with his black, tanned hand. Multicolored ladies ran downstairs. There was no trace of Repin's enthusiasm, his heart ached:

Horrible! People instead of cattle are harnessed!

The artist was struck by the contrast: the pure fragrant flower garden of the gentlemen - and barge haulers, like a dark cloud that obscured the cheerful sun.

Returning home, from memory he began to make sketches of the whole group of barge haulers, then of individuals, and then sketched out a sketch of the entire scene. For a long time he could not rid himself of the thought of barge haulers; it haunted him relentlessly.

Somehow the artist Fyodor Vasiliev came to him and saw a sketch of barge haulers.

“- Ah, barge haulers! .. Here are these young ladies, gentlemen, a dacha setting, something like a picnic; and these grimy ones are somehow artificially “attached” to the picture for edification: look, they say, how unfortunate we are ... Oh, you will get confused in this picture: there is too much rationality. The picture should be wider, simpler, as they say - in itself ... Barge haulers are barge haulers! If I were you, I would go to the Volga - that's where, they say, the real traditional type of barge hauler, that's where you need to look for it; and the simpler the picture, the more artistic.

Repin was unpleasantly offended by this patronizing tone of the young artist, but in his heart he understood: Vasilyev was right. But he still cannot go to the Volga - there is no money. Vasiliev somehow cheerfully, lightly, and, as it seemed to Repin, too self-confidently said that he would get the money. He himself dreamed of such a trip.

Two weeks later, Vasiliev appeared again and said that he had arranged everything, and a week later Repin was already on his way. Four of us went: Repin with his brother, who lived with him and studied at the conservatory, the artists Vasiliev and Makarov. We started our trip from the upper reaches of the Volga, from Tver. The steamers crept at a snail's pace; the travelers got acquainted on deck with all the passengers, played chess, drew. Spectators always stood behind the backs of the artists and loudly discussed each drawing. Repin's brother, who during the preparations said that for complete happiness he needed only a flute, received it and all the way delighted his fellow travelers with playing the flute. Repin simply could not understand how his brother learned to play the flute so quickly and well.

Vasiliev was also very musical and excellently whistled favorite parts of a familiar tune. At almost every stop, with a sharpened pencil, he quickly made amazing sketches in an album. “... Less than a week later, we slavishly imitated Vasiliev and believed him to the point of adoration ... He was an excellent teacher for all of us,” recalled Repin.

The second teacher was nature - the Volga, which, next to Vasiliev, Repin began to see in a new way. The wide expanses of the Volga, the smoke from the chimney of a steamer, some bushes on the shore, a kite in the sky - everything, everything I wanted to sketch, transfer to paper, to canvas.

On the way, the artists asked experienced people where the most beautiful places on the Volga were, and they all unanimously called the Zhiguli. We decided to land on the pier against the Zhiguli. Landed. They lived there for a short time and sailed further, under the Tsarev Kurgan. We settled for the whole summer in the village of Shiryaevo: both beautiful landscapes for Vasilyev, and barge haulers for Repin!

Every morning, with their sketchbooks, the artists dispersed in different directions. Repin hurried to the banks of the Volga "to hunt for barge haulers," as he said jokingly. Barge haulers usually rested on one of the shallows of the coast. One group of barge haulers replaced another. When the barge haulers left after a rest, Repin walked next to them, looked closely, observed.

And suddenly, “as if it struck in the heart” - so one of the barge haulers, Kanin, struck him. “... This one, with whom I caught up and keep up,” Repin said, “this is the story, this is the novel! Yes, all novels and all stories before this figure! God, how wonderfully his head is tied with a rag, how his hair curled up to his neck, and most importantly, the color of his face!

There is something oriental, ancient in him... I walk beside Kanin, not taking my eyes off him. And more and more I like him: I fall passionately in love with every trait of his character and with every shade of his skin and his linen shirt. What warmth in this color!

The haulers are gone. For a whole week, Repin "raved about Kanin", often ran out to the banks of the Volga, waiting for the barge haulers to return. “And so,” Repin says further, “I got to the top of this my barge epic: I finally wrote a sketch from Kanin! It was my big holiday. In front of me is my favorite subject - Kanin. Hooking a strap to the barge and climbing into it with his chest, he hung down, lowering his arms. This is how the barge hauler Kanin entered the picture of Repin.

In addition to Kanin, at the same time he painted sketches of other barge haulers on the Volga: the boy Larka, a soldier, a barge hauler standing at the wattle fence, the head of a barge hauler with a pipe, a barge hauler from Shiryaev gully ... With what persistence he painted these people in the open air - in the open air , - solving a new task for yourself! How many sketches, drawings, watercolors, oil studies from the Volga and its banks he made - all the materials for the future picture, the thought of which haunted him.

Summer was coming to an end. The days were gray and overcast. I had to return to St. Petersburg, and my heart sank at the thought of the way back - I didn’t want to leave!

Everyone has a lot of work. Large canvases, watercolors, albums with drawings were carefully packed, lined with popular prints, tied with ropes. Farewell, Volga!

6

And here is Petersburg. “The soul is already full of awe of academic life: scientific lectures will soon begin, competitions for a large gold medal will soon come ... I again became scared in front of a big city, like the first time ...” - Repin wrote.

The next day, upon arrival, Repin was offered to show the academic authorities the work created on the Volga. The authorities approved the work, and the artists were delighted with them.

“This picture did not yet exist, and already everything that was better among St. Petersburg artists expected something extraordinary from Repin: the large studies in oil paints he brought from the Volga were amazing. Whatever the canvas, then the type, then a new person, expressing a whole character, a whole special world, - wrote Stasov. “I vividly remember even now how, together with others, I rejoiced and marveled, examining Repin’s sketches and sketches on the board of the academy: it was like a walk there, so artists went there in droves ...”

Pavel Petrovich Chistyakov was also at this exhibition, about whom Repin had already heard from his senior comrades. Chistyakov was a pensioner of the Academy of Arts, lived in Italy and had just returned from a trip abroad. In one of the academic halls, the works he had brought were already standing. All of them were from Italian life: "The Roman Beggar", "Children-Beggars", "Italian Stonecutter". Almost on the first day after his arrival, Repin went to see Chistyakov's work. He was struck in these paintings by the extraordinary confidence of the drawing, and the power of painting, and the simplicity that - he knew it well - is given to the artist with great difficulty. I also liked the themes of the paintings taken from the life of the Italian people.

There were rumors around the academy that Chistyakov would be appointed teacher of the academy, but Chistyakov was invited to teach only two years after his arrival, although he was awarded the title of academician of painting for Italian paintings.

Very soon, Repin met Chistyakov through one of his comrades, and, as he later recalled, Chistyakov immediately fascinated him with "his poetic temperament and such a depth of understanding of art that we did not dream of." Small in stature, lean, with a "big skull of a true sage", he looked more like a peasant than an artist - his father was a serf. A very peculiar man, an eccentric, as many called him, with an independent, bold character, he was not held in high esteem by the authorities of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Having brilliantly mastered the academic school of high skill and taking from the academy everything that was supposed to help the growth and prosperity of the new Russian art, he devoted all his strength to teaching, even to the detriment of his painting. He was an excellent teacher. Young people always crowded around him.

From his students, he demanded, first of all, professionally competent work. He taught drawing strictly, demandingly, he believed that the basis of mastery should be a thorough and systematic study of nature.

Repin, who always expressed his enthusiasm very vigorously, said: “There is one bright spot in the academy, this is Chistyakov, and this one will soon survive. And so the teacher is the teacher! The only one!!"

Repin studied with Chistyakov for only one year. At the same time, Polenov also studied with him, with whom Repin was friends, but he saw less often than with other comrades. Polenov entered the academy at the same time as Repin and, in addition to the academy, he also studied at the law faculty of the university. Both Vasnetsov and Surikov were students of Chistyakov, and he brought up Russian artists of the next generation - Serov, Vrubel, Korovin and many others.

“I have trained everyone since 1872,” said Chistyakov. And there was not a single artist among his students who would not keep a bright and kind memory of him.

Before graduating from the academy, Repin had a little more than a year. All this year he worked on two large paintings: on the last graduation program "The Resurrection of the Daughter of Jairus" and on "Barge Haulers".

When at the beginning of 1871 the painting "Barge haulers" appeared at the exhibition of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, it amazed everyone. “In a few years,” wrote Stasov, “this artist took a step forward, one might say, enormous, and for nothing that he is still only a student, but he will probably argue with many of our fully mature artists.”

For this picture, Repin received the first prize, but he did not consider it finished. In the summer of the same year, he was again on the Volga, reworked the picture, rewrote much on the same canvas, and yet did not consider that he had finished working on it. And it will take another two years before he exhibits those "Barge haulers on the Volga", which are still the pride of Russian art.

Work on the program picture "The Resurrection of the Daughter of Jairus" went poorly. Repin began it before his trip to the Volga, took a long time to arrange the picture and, as he recalled many years later, "rearranged the figures, changed their movements and mainly looked for beautiful lines, spots and classical forms in the masses." And after the trip, after the barge haulers, I felt even more acutely that I was doing something wrong. Painting a picture on the gospel story, depicting the miracle of the resurrection from the dead seemed boring. He even decided to leave the academy - so barge haulers filled him. But the comrades persuaded him to stay, they were sure that he would do an excellent job with the picture. Kramskoy, with whom Repin established good, friendly relations, spoke about the same.

Look for your interpretation of the plot, - said Kramskoy. - Talent, and you have it, can cope with a treasury, hackneyed topic. Try...

And Repin tried, fell into despair and tried again. Perhaps we should forget that the plot is evangelical, as Kramskoy says. Here Kramskoy paints the picture "Christ in the Desert", and how he speaks of Christ! How many of his thoughts, feelings, experiences he puts into the picture!

Once, Repin said, “on the way from Kramskoy to myself (a lot of good new thoughts came to me on the way, especially if the path was long), I suddenly overshadowed by the thought: is it possible that the same topic -“ The Death of Jairus’ Daughter ”- on the same on a large canvas now, that is, tomorrow, and begin in a new way, in a lively way, how does this scene seem to me in my imagination? I remember the mood when my sister Ustya died and how it struck the whole family. Both the house and the rooms - everything somehow darkened, shrank in grief and crushed.

Is it possible to express it somehow; what will be, will be ... Hurry morning.

The next morning, in the academic workshop, Repin, first of all, without any regret, wiped everything that had been done with coal in four months with a rag. He worked all day without noticing the time. He seemed to be reliving the deep shock of childhood - the death of his sister. By evening, the picture, according to Repin, was so impressive that he had some kind of trembling down his back. And at home in the evening he could not calm down and kept asking his brother to play Beethoven. The music carried him to the workshop, to the painting.

The picture was written quickly, with inspiration. Working on it, Repin forgot about the competition, about the academy. The gospel plot was filled for him with vital, real content. He simply “wrote” human grief and, together with his parents, experienced the death of their daughter. Here they stand aside, in the twilight of the room, submissive, mournful. At that moment Christ entered the room. He went to the bed on which the girl was resting. She seemed to be sleeping. A touching, tender face, thin arms folded across his chest. Lamps are burning at the head, their yellowish flicker illuminates both the girl and Christ, who has already touched her hand. Now a miracle will happen - it cannot fail to happen: so tensely, with such torment of expectation, parents, girls look at Christ.

On November 29, 1871, the first traveling exhibition opened in St. Petersburg. It was a big event in the life of artists. In the artel, they prepared for it as for a big holiday. Both artists and students graduating from the academy were worried - the traveling exhibition coincided in time with the annual student exhibition and also opened in the halls of the Academy of Arts.

Repin and his comrades finished their competitive programs and now almost every day they went into the halls of the academy, where there was a cheerful, noisy work of unpacking and hanging pictures. Repin helped the workers, artists, looked at the pictures, listened to what was said about them. Here are Muscovites: Perov's new paintings - "Hunters at Rest", "Fisherman"; paintings by Pryanishnikov - “Empty”, “Fire victims”; Savrasov "The Rooks Have Arrived". Here are the Petersburgers: “Peter I interrogates Tsarevich Alexei in Peterhof” - a picture of Professor N.N. Ge. Portraits of Vasiliev, Antokolsky, painted by Kramskoy, look somehow more formal at the exhibition. And Kramskoy's "May Night"? Gogol comes to mind, and Repin decides to re-read his Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

Finally the exhibition is open. First day. The audience filled the halls, and everything arrives. Kramskoy walks around the exhibition preoccupied. He sees everything, keeps pace everywhere, talks to artel workers on the go, goes into the next hall - the student's room. Stops at Repin's painting "The Resurrection of the Daughter of Jairus". He had already seen her, but here, at the exhibition, she somehow especially captures him with her significant, deep mood, excellent technique, and especially with how miraculously Repin managed to “catch” the lighting. He smiles, remembers how he himself "caught" the moon for "May Night". Repin's heart grows cold from this smile. Why is he smiling? And Kramskoy comes up to Repin, shakes his hand: “Great!” One word - and Repin has a mountain off his shoulders.

A few days later, an enthusiastic article by Stasov about the first traveling exhibition appeared, and it ended like this: “We have no doubt that many thousands of people visit the current exhibition, and we are firmly convinced that the majority will every time go into the next room, where the students of the Academy are at the exhibition Mr. Repin's wonderful program flaunts: "The Resurrection of Jair's Daughter", surrounded by a whole crowd of talented comrades."

For the painting "The Resurrection of the Daughter of Jairus" Repin was awarded a large gold medal along with the title of an artist of the first degree and the right to a six-year business trip abroad.

7

Academy is over. A business trip abroad is ahead, but Repin asks for permission to postpone the business trip and live for the first three years at home. The main thing that prevents him from going is the painting "Barge haulers", which, although it was a great success, he knows that he still needs to work on it for a long time and a lot, that he did not do everything the way he wanted. The comrades were surprised at his decision, and Polenov, who also received a gold medal and the right to travel abroad, persuaded him to go together. But Repin, who seemed so soft and compliant in life, when it came to work, did not listen to anyone and firmly stood his ground.

Permission to stay and "travel around Russia to study folk life" was received. Repin stayed. The first month after graduating from the academy, as usual, passed in a joyful fuss, in preparation for work. Everything smiled at Repin: a painting was waiting in the studio, and Vera Shevtsova, whom he knew as a girl, agreed to become his wife.

And suddenly, perhaps even unexpectedly for himself, he accepted the first big order: to paint a picture-panel for the concert hall of the Moscow hotel "Slavyansky Bazaar" - a group portrait of Russian, Polish and Czech composers. Until now, Repin did not paint such grandiose paintings. The place for the painting was prepared above the stage, high, therefore, it had to be painted with the expectation of a distance, decoratively. Perhaps Repin was fascinated by this new task, and the 1,500 rubles offered by the hotel owner were very handy and seemed to Repin a huge fortune.

The list of composers was compiled by the pianist, conductor, founder and director of the Moscow Conservatory - Nikolai Grigorievich Rubinstein. The list includes both composers who have died long ago and those who are alive. Most of the figures had to be made from portraits, photographs, and only M.A. Balakireva, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, E.F. Napravnik and N.G. Rubinstein was painted by Repin from nature. The idea of ​​such a picture seemed ridiculous to many, and Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, having learned about the picture, wrote to Stasov that it would be "a cold vinaigrette of the living and the dead."

But Stasov thought differently. Just a few years ago, when delegates from the Slavic peoples of the West came to St. Petersburg and in honor of the guests a big concert of Slavic music was held under the direction of M.A. Balakirev, Stasov published an article in the newspaper the very next day, in which he spoke of the special significance of this concert for strengthening ties between the Slavic peoples. He wrote about this more than once, and now he could not help but welcome Repin's painting, which, in his words, served the same purpose. Interestingly, in the same article, he first called the young talented Russian composers Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, Mussorgsky "The Mighty Handful", and this name was established behind them and went down in history.

Of course, Repin read this article, talked with Stasov more than once about Slavic composers, and the theme of the picture somehow did not bother him - he looked at it through the eyes of Stasov. “... V.V. and I Stasov, - wrote Repin, - they loved this picture and made every effort to make it both artistic and significant.

The customer hurried Repin, literally bombarded him with letters and telegrams. Two months after Repin began working on the painting, he already demanded it. Repin's reply letter to the owner of the hotel has been preserved. “Dear sir, Alexander Alexandrovich! he wrote to him. - How much blood you spoiled me with your prodding! After your last telegram, I simply cannot work. Is work under duress possible for an artist?.. A nag is driven with a whip, but not a trotter... I'd rather destroy the painting and return your money. Anyway, no one would have fulfilled you by such a deadline. I give my head if someone in Russia writes faster than me and works harder.”

After this letter, the customer left Repin alone. Repin worked on the picture for about six months, and it is simply incomprehensible how he could cope with such a huge and complex picture in an incredibly short time. She is beautifully put together. In the center - Russian composers: M.I. Glinka, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, M.A. Balakirev, A.S. Dargomyzhsky... On the right at the piano - brothers Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein, A. Serov... Behind them is a group of Polish composers: Frederic Chopin, Stanislav Moniuszko, violinist K. Lipinsky... On the left side of the picture - Czech composers.

In early spring, the almost finished painting, which Repin painted in an academic workshop, was transported to Moscow. On June 10, 1872, the grand opening of the "Slavianski Bazaar" took place. “And, imagine,” Repin recalled many years later, “after all, my picture shone as the main center here: “persons” and even foreigners were attracted to her, and she attracted their enlightened attention for a long time. There are talks, conversations and questions in different languages...” Among the guests there was even some overseas prince with a whole retinue. The customer of the Porokhovshchikov beamed with smiles and happiness, met the guests, bowed, looking for Repin.

Where are you? After all, you can’t imagine what a success! Everyone is asking you... Come quickly, I'll introduce you...

And Repin, probably, in the depths of his soul understood that here in the "Slavianski Bazaar", his success was rather a success "in the light", and he spoke about this with a slightly perceptible sneer at himself. But Stasov, Antokolsky and many artists spoke approvingly of the picture, called it "expressive, excellent in colors", "wonderful".

Currently, the painting "Slavic Composers" hangs in the Great Hall of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Many are perplexed: the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and there is no Tchaikovsky in the picture, which depicts Slavic composers. Why did N. Rubinstein not include him in the list? Rubinstein was very fond of the works of Tchaikovsky, performed them excellently, but when Repin painted the picture, Tchaikovsky was still little known as a composer - fame came to him later.

8

Four years have passed since Repin first saw barge haulers on the Neva. All these years, the picture "Barge haulers" was his main concern, and even six months of hard work on the order of Porokhovshchikov could not tear him away from his beloved "Burlaks". They were in the same studio as the Slavic Composers, and he devoted every free minute to them.

And now a commissioned work has been handed over, the hectic days at the Slavonic Bazaar have passed, and Repin and his young wife left for the Volga. This time he limited himself to Samara. They settled in a small house with windows on the Volga. Repin spent whole days on the banks of the river with barge haulers - he painted, painted sketches from them. They did not stay in Samara for long, rather they wanted to go to St. Petersburg, to the workshop for work. How many sketches, drawings, sketches have been made over the years, how many sketches - almost finished paintings! Here is the last option - "Barge haulers wading"; he is working on it, having returned to St. Petersburg. But all this is only preparatory material, it is needed in order to reveal the topic more deeply, to better, more truthfully show each barge hauler who enters the picture.

Time passed, work on the picture was coming to an end. And, as happened with Repin always at the end of the picture, the work moved more and more slowly. “Remember, when I finished Barge Haulers, I put everything off for a week,” he said to Stasov. Doubts overcame him, otherwise violent joy would suddenly rush in and it seemed that he had found her, his picture.

Bank of the Volga. Endless Volga expanse, bottomless sky, hot sun. Far, far away, the smoke of a steamboat spreads, to the left, closer, the sail of a small boat froze ... Barge haulers are slowly, difficultly moving along the damp shallows. Harnessed to leather straps, they pull a heavy barge. In the front row are barge haulers: the sage and philosopher, according to Repin, Kanin and, paired with him, the same mighty hero, all overgrown with hair. Behind them, Ilka the sailor bent low to the ground, pulled on his strap. Gloomy, point-blank, this strong, resolute, battered sailor looks directly at the viewer. And here is the Stall in a pink tattered shirt - an impatient, mischievous boy who almost drowned when he and his brother Repin fell under the wheel of a steamer. He is just beginning his life as a hauler, but how much fire, enthusiasm, how angrily his eyes look, how high he raised his head - he is not afraid of anything, even though he is the youngest of all! And behind the Stall - an old man, stocky, strong, leaning against the shoulder of a neighbor and in a hurry to fill his pipe as he goes; and then a retired soldier in boots, then a huge bearded hauler looked back at the barge... And only the last old man lost strength, lowered his head, hung on the strap.

Eleven people... Faces scorched by the sun, brown-red, hot tones of clothing, sandy shallows, reflections of sunlight on the river... And the picture is so well expanded in breadth that the viewer sees each barge hauler individually, with special features of his character and how would read the story of his life and, at the same time, the life of this entire barge gang.

On March 15, 1873, Repin wrote to Stasov: “Finally! I finished my painting and put it on display yesterday.

You cannot imagine, Vladimir Vasilyevich, what a pleasant feeling I am experiencing now. Like a high school student who passed the exam. Notebooks are still lying on the floor, everything is in disarray, and he, happy, is waiting from day to day for horses to go to his relatives for the holidays.

Indeed, I have only now completed my academic course; only now I will say goodbye to the government bench in my barracks workshop. Well, enough.

Now I'll be walking for a week, and then: at this moment I'm looking at your two photographic cards and I'm talking exactly to you, and then remember, didn't you promise me something? They promised to sit for a portrait. Keep, for God's sake, your promise."

So, having barely finished the picture, Repin is already on fire with a new work and in just a few sessions he paints a magnificent portrait of Stasov.

Later, in different years, he would write several more of his portraits, but Stasov himself considered the first portrait to be the best. Unusual in strength and truth of expression, this portrait, according to people who knew Stasov, surprisingly conveyed that tense and perky expression of the eyes, that manner of throwing up his head with which Stasov rushed into battle with his opponents.

And these days at the annual exhibition at the Academy of Arts, where the "Barge haulers on the Volga" stood, something unimaginable happened. It was difficult to break through to the picture, it was literally besieged. Loud exclamations, stormy enthusiasm of the public, artists, students...

Academic professors took the picture very reservedly, and the rector of the academy F.A. Bruni even believed that Repin's painting "Barge Haulers on the Volga" was "the greatest profanation of art."

A few days later, Stasov's article about the Burlaks appeared in one of the St. Petersburg newspapers. Stasov wrote: “Just take a look at Mr. Repin’s Barge Haulers, and you will immediately be forced to admit that no one has dared to take such a plot from us and that you have not yet seen such a deeply amazing picture from Russian folk life, for nothing this plot and this task have long been before us and our artists. But isn't this the most fundamental property of a powerful talent - to see and put into your creation that which is truthful and simple, and which hundreds and thousands of people pass by without noticing?

But Stasov is not entirely accurate. Artists worked on paintings about barge haulers much earlier than Repin, and at the same time as him, but none of them really created such a stunning picture as he did. The artist Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin, for example, when he saw Repin, said to him: “Your Barge Haulers are much better, and I even threw my work on the same plot; and after all, he had been preparing for it for quite a long time, collecting sketches.

Tretyakov failed to acquire the painting "Barge Haulers on the Volga". Currently, it is in the Russian Museum in Leningrad, and in the Tretyakov Gallery you can see the sketch painting “Barge haulers wading”.

9

In May 1873, Repin went abroad with his wife and little daughter. According to the instructions of the Council of the Academy in the first year of the artists' stay abroad, they were not required to paint. They were invited to travel, see new cities, study works of art. Repin decided to go to Italy. On the way, I stopped for a few days in Vienna, where the World Art Exhibition opened at that time. In the Russian section of the exhibition, he saw his "Barge haulers", and soon read the reviews of foreign critics about the picture - they approved it, they said that it was written excellently and that there was no other such sunny picture in the art department of the exhibition.

And Repin thought with chagrin that the picture could have been better, that its coloration was reddish ... It always happened to him: the picture would leave him, he would see it at the exhibition, and he would be overcome by a feeling of excruciating dissatisfaction with his work.

The Repins spent about four months in Italy, and in the fall they moved to Paris. The first weeks we ran in search of a workshop, looked at the city, went to museums, art galleries. Finally found the workshop. “... Never before have I been visited by such a multitude of all kinds of plots: they climb into my head, they don’t let me sleep. So far, no painting has begun on this occasion; I don't know where to stop. The day after tomorrow I start sketching, it’s time, I haven’t painted from life for a long time, ”he writes to Stasov.

But it's scary to start a big picture - there is no commissioned work, and little money is sent to pensioners of the academy. Stasov rescued. His brother, an art collector, bought "Barge haulers wading". Repin sighed more freely. Under the deepest secrecy, he told Stasov the theme of the planned picture: Sadko, a rich guest at the bottom of the sea, chooses a bride for himself. Beauties of Italian, Spanish, Greek, French women pass by him ... But no beauties can compare with a Russian girl - a black girl, whom Sadko is looking at.

It seemed to Repin that the theme of the picture was close to him, which she expressed his then longing for his homeland. He asks Stasov to send him an epic about Sadko, a book about costumes from different eras, as many drawings of marine plants and fish as possible. Stasov sends him everything he asks. Repin studies materials, makes sketches, writes sketches... When V.M. Vasnetsov, he persuaded him to pose for Sadko. By chance, Repin managed to get a fur coat with a fox collar and a boyar hat from a visiting merchant's wife. The sketch is excellent. The underwater kingdom is also beautifully written - sea plants, monsters, fish, greenish water, all penetrated by sunlight. Repin painted the seabed in the famous Parisian aquarium from nature. He worked on the painting for a long time. The picture tortured him, “didn’t work out”: there was something tasteless, provincial in it, and Repin himself understood this well.

Next to this painting, which had so tormented Repin, in the studio on the easel was another one - “Paris Cafe”. It was difficult for a Russian artist to paint a picture from someone else's life, unfamiliar to him, but it seemed that this difficulty fascinated Repin. He worked hard - he made sketches on the streets, painted sketches from life, changed, cleaned, corrected, and although he once said that the “Paris Cafe” turned out to be funny and immature, ”he didn’t really believe it.

In the summer, the Repins left for Normandy, in the small seaside town of Veul. And this summer was, perhaps, the most joyful and significant time abroad. In Völ there was a whole colony of Russian artists - Polenov, Savitsky, Bogolyubov ... "Red Hats" - that's what the locals called them, because when they came to Völ, they all stocked up on red hats that protected well from sea winds and the sun. Repin was delighted with Wöhl; everything captivated him: the sea, rocks, fields, high wheat, poppies. For the first time in many years, except for trips to the Volga, he came into such close contact with nature. For the first time, with such passion, he painted in the open air, stubbornly achieving the most accurate transmission of sunlight.

At the end of the summer, Repin took many sketches to Paris, and among them is a charming sketch of a fisherwoman girl: under the direct rays of the hot southern sun, among soft grass, cornflowers, poppies, there is a fisherwoman girl in a torn, patched jacket, with a fishing net in her hands. And this figure of a girl, so wonderfully coordinated with the pale blue sky, makes an irresistible impression.

Bogolyubov's "Tuesdays" have already begun in Paris. Aleksey Petrovich Bogolyubov, Radishchev's grandson, a talented landscape painter, had long lived in Paris and was appointed by the Academy of Arts to "supervise" pensioners. He was in constant trouble, getting orders for Russian artists, helping to look for workshops, getting settled in a new place. And his workshop was the center of the Russian art colony, where all Russian artists who came to Paris met and where artists, musicians, and singers gathered on Tuesdays.

At the evenings at Bogolyubov's and in the Russian library of Paris, Repin met with Russian students, with prominent revolutionary figures in Russia - V.N. Figner, N.A. Morozov, A.I. Ivanchin-Pisarev. “... Please write where I can get here Russian books by authors expelled from Russia, and write down what is especially interesting from their works,” he asks Stasov, and Stasov tells him the Parisian bookstore where these publications are available.

Paris - the city where the Paris Commune was recently defeated, where the memories of the Communard artist Gustave Courbet, who fought on the barricades, were still alive - is increasingly attracting Repin. “... Is there anything detailed in Russian about the revolution of 48 here and about the latest affairs and the movement of the communists?” he asks Stasov again.

Ten years will pass, and Repin will come to Paris again. On the day of remembrance of the executed Communards, which is celebrated annually in France, he will go to the Père Lachaise cemetery to the famous Wall of the Communards, and then, under the fresh impression of the grandiose mourning demonstration, in a few days he will paint a wonderful little picture "Rally at the Wall of the Communards."

10

Repin lived abroad for three years. In July 1876, the Repins returned to St. Petersburg. Violent delights from everything that is dear, the joy of the first meetings with friends, and after that bitterness from their harsh sentence to the paintings brought from Paris. Friends and acquaintances were perplexed: how could Repin, after "Barge Haulers", paint such unimportant pictures? Was it worth it for him to live abroad? .. It's a shame that Stasov and Kramskoy did not want to see what progress he made in painting, how he tried to solve the problems of color in a new way in his sketches from Vöhl. And as if to prove the “height of performance” that he achieved and achieved abroad, in just a few days he painted a wonderful picture “On a turf bench”. She wrote at a dacha near St. Petersburg, in the garden of his wife's relatives. On a turf bench - the Shevtsov family; Repin's wife is sitting to the left, his daughters Vera and Nadia, who was born in Paris, are playing on the grass nearby. Behind the trees - a distant sky with light clouds, a field. The general tone of the picture is silvery-greenish, and all of it is, as it were, filled with sunshine and warmth. This group portrait is painted with brilliant skill, fresh, elegant.

He, Repin, is reproached for having succumbed to the influence of French artists ... And he, as before, believes that art should be ideological, combative, truthful. Only such art is close and understandable to people, only such art is called upon to serve the people.

Repin was going through a difficult time. It seemed to him that his friends had ceased to believe in him, and that it was only out of pity for him that they did not tell the whole truth. He decided to leave. And in the fall, with the whole family, I gathered in Chuguev.

Repin was not in Chuguev for about eight years. And now, after Paris, after the hustle and bustle of St. Petersburg, after meeting with friends, which left a bitter aftertaste in his soul, he drove up to the city of his childhood with joyful excitement.

It was a gray autumn day. How familiar! And how the city has aged! The houses seemed to have grown into the ground, the gates squinted. Dirty, deserted. The silence is such that it seems that the whole city is sleeping. The forest outside the city, with which so many childhood memories are associated, has been cut down, and instead of the forest there is bare land covered with stumps ... And in the Repins' house, nothing seems to have changed, only everything seems small. Both father and mother seem small, aged.

Chuguev's life began. Never before had Repin felt so keenly his connection with his native land, with his homeland. I wanted to quickly plunge into the life of the people, to work with all my might. He looked at everything, noticed everything, put everything together in memory. For a long time I wandered around the outskirts of Chuguev, visited weddings, bazaars and fairs, inns, taverns, churches. “... What a charm, what a delight! I am not able to describe this, but what I haven’t heard enough, and most importantly, I haven’t seen enough ... ”he wrote.

His albums are filled with sketches, notes, sketches. Plans for more and more new works are swarming in my head. He paints portraits of peasants: “A timid peasant”, “A peasant with an evil eye”, “A lad from Mokhnachi” ... Immediately he manages to make a double portrait of the daughters of Vera and Nadia, a portrait of Tronka - Trofim Chaplygin, several portraits of his Chuguev acquaintances, a portrait academic friend N.I. Murashko, who came to visit him. And one of the most remarkable portraits is the portrait of the Chuguev protodeacon Ivan Ulanov... Quickly, with inspiration, with a bold brush, Repin painted this "clergyman" - a drunkard and a glutton. And, having painted a portrait, he gave him such an excellent description: “This is an extract of our deacons, these lions of the clergy, in whom nothing spiritual comes across a single iota, - he is all flesh and blood, pop-eyed, yawning and roaring, a meaningless roar, but solemn and strong...” It must be said that the portrait was first of all to the taste of Archdeacon Ulanov himself, and he was immensely proud of his image.

In the spring of 1877, the "Trial of the Fifty" began in St. Petersburg - a court case of populist revolutionaries accused "of a state crime of compiling an illegal community and distributing criminal writings." According to Chuguev, rumors spread that many were being sent to hard labor and to Siberia for a settlement. They said that the most important revolutionary, who made a speech at the trial for the workers and against the government, would be taken through Chuguev. Rumors were believed. The boys ran to the high road, which ran across the street past Repin's house, to look at the exiles - "unfortunate ones," as they were called. But the exiles were not taken along this road, but somehow Repin, during his wanderings around the outskirts of Chuguev, met a cart drawn by a trio of peasant horses. In the cart sat a prisoner, apparently a "dangerous revolutionary criminal." It was guarded by two gendarmes with drawn sabers. The coachman drove the horses along a muddy, rain-soaked road. The fields darkened, telegraph poles went away... The cart passed, and Repin's heart sank sadly.

A cart trudges along a muddy road,
Two gendarmes are sitting in it ...

Repin stood by the road for a long time, and, perhaps, at the same time he had the idea to paint a small, deep, experienced feeling picture “Under the gendarme escort”. It was Repin's first painting about a Russian revolutionary and his first painting that the tsarist censors did not let into the exhibition.

11

In September 1877, Repin and his family moved to Moscow. They already had three children - their son Yuri was born in Chuguev. It was necessary to arrange a family in a new place, and Repin arrived sick, caught a fever in Chuguev, and she shook him mercilessly. Overcoming his illness, he decided to leave for St. Petersburg for a few days, to see Stasov, to dispel that bad sediment that still remained in his soul.

In St. Petersburg, he stayed with the artist Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi. After being ill all week and not seeing anyone, he returned to Moscow. But the patient, too, could not resist and made a beautiful portrait of Kuindzhi. When Kramskoy visited Kuindzhi a few days after Repin's departure, he was literally shocked and immediately wrote to Repin that the portrait “belongs to those who have risen far beyond the level. For the first time in my life, I envied a living person, but not with that unworthy envy that distorts a person, but with that envy that hurts and at the same time is joyful ... that it exists, it’s done, therefore, the ideal can be grasped for the tail. And then he was captured ... Oh, how good! If you only knew how good!”

In early March 1878, the sixth traveling exhibition opened. Repin was going to put on it "Protodeacon", portraits of peasants. Now that his academic retirement was over, he could put his things on any exhibition, and most importantly, he could become a member of the Association of Traveling Exhibitions, which he had long dreamed of.

People were standing at the exhibition at the Protodeacon of Repin from morning till night, and there were no indifferent among them. The God-fearing and well-intentioned public was indignant: how could an artist depict a clergyman in such a way! Is this a work of art? This "Protodeacon" must be removed from the exhibition!

But there were many more spectators who understood the full power of the artist's talent and the full significance of such a portrait. Repin himself, who always knew what he succeeded and what did not, was very pleased with his "Protodeacon". The artists congratulated him, Kramskoy wrote: “Deacon ... this is the devil knows what! Yes, and only! Repin was especially pleased with Stasov's attitude. He somehow immediately calmed down for Repin and no longer doubted that both the “Protodeacon” and all of his Chuguev works were “samples of his new, mature brush”, that they were higher than those sketches that he brought from the Volga, that Repin went ahead ...

"Protodeacon" was bought by P.M. Tretyakov for his gallery. Repin knew Tretyakov for a long time. Once, when he was still working on the painting "Barge Haulers", someone knocked on the door of the studio. A tall man with a bushy dark blond beard entered.

Will you be Repin? - he asked.

And I'm Tretyakov.

Tretyakov looked at the sketches hung on the walls for a long time. He liked the sketches written from the academic watchman Yefim and the seller of the academic shop. He bought them, and these were the first works by Repin to enter the Tretyakov Gallery. Five years have passed since then. Tretyakov immediately realized what a great artist Repin was, fell in love with him with all the contradictions of his passionate, addictive nature, believed that his paintings in the future would take one of the first places among the works of Russian artists. Later, he eagerly collected all the works of Repin and, if it happened that they got to someone else, “jealously reproached Repin,” said Tretyakov’s daughter.

During the opening days of traveling exhibitions in Moscow, Tretyakov sometimes arranged dinners, invited exhibitors, discussed paintings, and talked about how best to arrange exhibitions, how to improve the life of artists.

Savva Ivanovich Mamontov, a major industrialist and railway builder who patronized people of art, also attended these dinners. A talented sculptor, musician, singer, actor and director, he had a special ability to find talents, infect everyone with his passionate love for art. Repin met him abroad and now began to visit him in Moscow. Literary readings were held every Sunday in his large, noisy and hospitable house. There were about twenty people. Usually they read dramatic works of Russian and foreign classics by roles, sometimes they devoted the evening to music, preparation for home performances, which everyone was equally fond of - both adults and children. It was not supposed to refuse to participate in reading, in the performances of the Mamontovs. Repin somehow perfectly read the role of the Pretender in Pushkin's Boris Godunov, played the role of Bermyata together with Vasnetsov and Surikov in Ostrovsky's play The Snow Maiden ...

For the summer, the whole life of the Mammoth house was transferred to the Abramtsevo estate near Moscow. A small house was built not far from the estate for the artists visiting Abramtsevo in the summer. The Mamontovs' daughter, little Verusha, called this house her own, and since her nickname was "Yashka", the house began to be called "Yashkin's House". Repin moved to this Yashkin house for the summer with his family and with his paintings; the Vasnetsovs and the Polenovs lived in it, the Serovs, a mother and son, the sculptor Antokolsky, came to visit Abramtsevo. Everyone worked very hard, gathered in the big house in the evenings, read aloud, sang, prepared for home performances. “... Life is very easy, good and not boring ... and most importantly, there are villages nearby where peasants, starting with the guys and ending with the old men and old women, do not shy away from me and pose willingly ...” - Repin wrote in August 1878 of the year.

By the fall, Repin brought to Moscow many sketches, sketches, and sketches. Friends also moved to Moscow - the Vasnetsovs, Polenov. Surikov also lived in Moscow. All of them settled close to each other, wandered around Moscow and its environs together. Sometimes they gathered at Repin's for drawing evenings. All four were fond of antiquity. Polenov painted sketches of the Kremlin's cathedrals and towers, Vasnetsov began the painting "After the Battle of Igor Svyatoslavich with the Polovtsy", Surikov painted his "Archers". He became especially close in Moscow with Repin and, perhaps, infected him with his interest in the Petrine era. Repin suddenly caught fire with the idea of ​​​​painting the painting "Princess Sophia", rushed to study the history of Peter the Great's time, the archery riots. The Repins’ apartment was not far from the Novo-Devichy Convent, and Repin’s daughter said: “Walking beyond the Devichye Field, we listened to the stories of the pope, how Princess Sophia languished behind the lattice window of the monastery and at the window of her cell hung an archer hanged by Peter.”

Repin studied literature about the time of Peter the Great, went to the Historical Museum, the Armory, the Novo-Devichy Convent. In the Historical Museum, he met the scientist-historian, archaeologist, researcher of Moscow antiquity I.E. Zabelin, painted his portrait.

So in the workshop of Repin, next to the paintings brought from Chuguev, a new painting appeared - “The Ruler Princess Sofya Alekseevna a year after her imprisonment in the Novo-Devichy Convent during the execution of archers and the torture of all her servants in 1698.” Letters flew to Stasov in St. Petersburg: “... Be a benefactor, send me a costume for Princess Sophia! Get it from the bottom of the sea!.. Get it in the wardrobe of the Mariinsky or Alexandrinsky Theatre. There, the new costumes are built quite correctly ... Everything that concerns her, please save for me: everything, all the portraits that I have, I need; and I will be happy for every scrap you dig up.” And Stasov sent portraits, got costumes and willingly fulfilled all the instructions of a friend. But the theatrical costumes did not fit. I had to sew at home a muslin shirt with narrow sleeves and a sundress made of silver brocade trimmed with pearls. But most importantly, in addition to costumes, Repin needed people, living nature, without which he almost never wrote. The search began. He painted sketches for Sophia's head from different people, but he felt that all this was not the same, not the Princess Sophia, whom he already knows, sees in his imagination. And here the case helped. V.S. arrived in Moscow. Serova with her son. Several years have passed since the boy Serov studied with Repin in Paris, and now his mother again asks to be his teacher. Repin, of course, agrees. He leafs through the albums, rejoices at the boy's success, meeting him, looking at his mother ... How could he forget about her! After all, this is where the “nature” for his Sophia is, perhaps, the most suitable! Valentina Semyonovna agrees to come and pose. And, starting from all the previously completed studies of Sophia's head, from the study that he does with Serova, he paints his Sophia and his picture.

In 1879, at the seventh traveling exhibition, viewers saw Princess Sophia, the elder sister of Peter I, who was the ruler of the Moscow state, raised archers to rebel against her brother, and then was captured, tonsured a nun, imprisoned in the Novo-Devichy Convent. Here she stands at the table, leaning back, arms crossed over her chest, defeated, but unconquered. Evil, irreconcilably burning eyes on the pale face, compressed lips, hair scattered over the shoulders. Sadly, perplexedly, a young blue-maid servant looks at her. Nearby, behind the bars of the window, is the head of a hanged archer, and a search is still going on in Moscow, the execution of archers ...

Stasov, Tretyakov, Mussorgsky and some other friends of Repin reacted negatively to the picture. The audience was divided into two camps: some praised the picture to the skies, others sharply condemned it. Soon, negative reviews appeared about her in the press. Repin was upset, but he liked the picture, he considered it successful and was not going to redo it. “I did everything I wanted here, almost as I imagined,” he said. In these difficult days for him, he received a letter from Kramskoy: “My dear Ilya Efimych! Brace yourself! You are going through a bad time: almost all the criticism is against you, but that's okay. You are right (in my opinion)…” At the same time he wrote to Tretyakov that the painting “is not to the taste of many, but this is because we still do not know our old life. After all, what happened then? What could be Sophia? Here is exactly the same as some of our merchants, women who keep inns, etc. It’s nothing that she knew languages, translated, ruled the state, at the same time she could tear off a girl by her hair with her own hands, etc. One with the other quite coexisted in our old Russia.

Along with the work on the paintings, there was no less intense work on portraits, which were often painted by order of Tretyakov, who decided to collect in his gallery portraits of remarkable Russian people - writers, scientists, artists, composers. Repin, who took to heart everything that concerned the gallery, helped Tretyakov in every possible way and never refused to work. True, when one day Tretyakov suggested that he paint a portrait of the reactionary Katkov, he was indignant. “Your intention to commission a portrait of Katkov and put it in your gallery,” he wrote, “gives me no peace, and I cannot but write to you that with this portrait you will put an unpleasant shadow on your beautiful and bright activity ...” Tretyakov obeyed Council, and the portrait of Katkov was not commissioned to anyone.

Work on portraits has always attracted Repin. He wrote them in childhood and youth, and when he studied at the academy, and abroad, and now in Moscow. He seemed to rest behind the portraits from large, complex paintings. He painted portraits quickly, with an invincible desire to give not only an external resemblance - it was easy for him - but to capture and convey the hidden inner world of a person, the innermost of his soul. I wanted to find him alone the inherent facial expression, movement, gesture. He didn't like it when they "posed". During the sessions, he called for conversations, disputes. “When they pose very impeccably, patiently, the portrait comes out boring, lifeless, and vice versa: when sitting impatiently, successful surprises of life are obtained. So, for example, with P.M. Tretyakov, who sat with extraordinary diligence, the portrait came out bad.

But the portrait of Tretyakov cannot be considered a failure of Repin, although he himself said that the portrait was bad. True, later he changed his attitude towards the portrait and wrote to Tretyakov: "... Your portrait satisfies me, and many artists praise him." Tretyakov refused to pose for a long time. According to his daughter, he was unpleasant that the visitors of the exhibition "would know him by sight." And Repin believed that in Russia and throughout the world they should know Tretyakov - a wonderful person, the creator of the first national art gallery. He painted it in the same black frock coat, in the usual pose, when, clasping his left hand at the shoulder with his right hand, Tretyakov listens intently, attentively to the artist - he visited the Repins almost every Sunday.

At the beginning of 1881, Repin learned about the serious illness of the remarkable composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. Repin bowed before him, loved him enthusiastically. “How I admire Modest Petrovich! That's so rich! That's ours!!!" - he once wrote to Stasov. Mussorgsky was in the hospital, he seemed to be a little better. Repin came to him, Mussorgsky was delighted, talked about his recovery, about new musical works ... But Repin knew that his position was hopeless, and understood that he must write it, must leave to future generations of Russia a portrait of one of the greatest composers of Russia.

Modest Petrovich was sitting in an armchair in an embroidered Russian shirt, in a dressing gown with crimson velvet lapels. The March sun generously illuminated the hospital ward, the figure, the face of Mussorgsky. It suddenly became clear to Repin: this is how it should be written. He brought paints and a canvas with him, but did not take an easel and somehow sat down at the table. The heart sank with longing, and the brush with a thin layer of paint confidently sculpted the image of a beloved friend. Three more short sessions... The portrait is over...

Two weeks later, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky died. His portrait, draped in black cloth, stood at the ninth traveling exhibition. When Stasov brought this portrait to the exhibition, he witnessed the admiration and joy of many of the best artists. Kramskoy, seeing the portrait, simply gasped in surprise. He took a chair, sat down in front of the portrait, right point-blank to the face, and for a long, long time did not leave. “What this Repin is doing now,” he said, “is simply incomprehensible! .. How everything is drawn, with what hand of the master, how it is molded, how it is written! ..”

12

March 1, 1881 Repin was in St. Petersburg at the opening of the ninth traveling exhibition. The “Great Three,” as Repin, Surikov and Vasnetsov were called by the Tretyakovs, were brilliantly presented at the exhibition: portraits and the painting “Vechornish” by Repin, “Alyonushka” by Vasnetsov, “Morning of the Streltsy Execution” by Surikov. There were many people. The mood of both the artists and the guests is festive. Repin had been shocked by Surikov's painting the day before and now stood for a long time, unable to tear himself away from it. Someone came up behind, put a hand on his shoulder: “Did you hear? The king is dead!" Repin did not immediately understand what he was being told. Looked around the room. Bewildered, frantically, visitors left the hall ...

The tsar was killed by a bomb thrown by Grinevitsky, a Narodnaya Volya member. His son Alexander III, who ascended the throne, from the first days led a decisive struggle against the revolutionaries. Some of the participants in the assassination attempt were executed, others were imprisoned in the casemates of the Peter and Paul Fortress or exiled to hard labor. A decree was issued according to which political criminals were to be judged according to the laws of war. Tsar Alexander III with "the faithful watchdog of the autocracy" - Pobedonostsev raged. One drastic measure followed another. The country was worried.

Repin was never a revolutionary, he was not associated with the Narodnik revolutionaries, but with all the strength of his soul he hated the autocratic system and all his life spoke of autocracy with disgust and contempt. “With all his insignificant strengths,” he wrote during these years to his friend N.I. Murashko, - I strive to embody my ideas in truth; The surrounding life worries me too much, does not give me rest, it asks itself to be painted on the canvas; reality is too outrageous to embroider patterns with a clear conscience - let's leave it to well-bred young ladies.

And in the workshop, Repin's paintings surrounded him from all sides - barely outlined and almost finished. Month after month, he worked hard on these paintings, giving preference to one or the other. For almost the entire second half of 1881, he worked on the painting "The Procession in the Oak Forest", which he conceived and started in Chuguev. One summer, he wandered through the Chuguev forest and suddenly stopped enchanted, along the forest road in the oak forest there was a religious procession - they were carrying a miraculous icon. A motley crowd, golden robes of priests, bright greenery - and all this in the gold of beautiful sunspots ... The decision to paint just such a picture burned in my soul. At the same time, under a fresh impression, a sketch was made, a picture was started, but something in it did not satisfy Repin. In the summer of 1881, he left for the Kursk province to "refresh himself with the living facts of life", to watch the procession in the Root Hermitage.

Root Desert - this was the name of the area about thirty miles from Kursk, where, according to a legend composed by monks, at the root of a tree near the source "an icon appeared." The source was declared sacred, the water was healing, the icon was miraculous. In dry years, the icon, which was kept in the church, was “raised”, and crowds of people in. led by the clergy, they carried her in procession to the Root Hermitage. There, the priests served a prayer service for "sending rain", and the first miracle was performed there: the water in the source began to rise and this holy water was enough for tens of thousands of pilgrims.

Repin was happy. Shortly after his arrival, he witnessed the procession. Together with the crowd, he went to the desert, looked, thought, made notes and sketches in his album. Returning to Moscow, he turned to the wall the started painting "The Procession in the Oak Forest" and set to work on a new painting - "The Procession in the Kursk Province." He was in a hurry to write it - he wanted to put it on the tenth traveling exhibition. And most importantly, I wanted to finish it before moving to St. Petersburg, where he dreamed of moving with his family for permanent residence. Working on such a huge painting in the studio was difficult. Tretyakov offered to transport her to the empty, recently rebuilt halls of the gallery.

And so we enter the hall, and an innumerable crowd moves towards us along the high road on a hot summer day, past the hills covered with stumps. It buzzes, sways, crawls... The peasants, in festive clothes, with serious and sedate faces, carry a huge, gilded lantern, all decorated with colored ribbons, in which the flame of candles flickers. Behind them is a choir of singers. Red-haired deacon with a censer. Two women with humble reverence bent over an empty icon case from under the “miracle-working icon”, and the icon itself is in the hands of a low fat lady - a local landowner in a luxuriously tasteless dress, with an expression of stupid arrogance on her face. Near her all the "nobility": a military man in uniform, a merchant with a gold chain on his stomach, priests in robes ... This is a "clean" audience. From two sides it is cordoned off by mounted policemen, with badges on their chests. Leaning from the saddle, the gendarme swung at the crowd, in the distance two more turned the horses directly into the crowd, and in front, to the left of the spectators, the bailiff rides, akimbo. Witnesses, holding hands, form a chain to prevent the simple people from reaching the “powerful of this world”, who, with blind faith, are waiting for mercy and a miracle from the “manifested icon”. A beggar hunchback on a crutch burst forward, his face is inspired and concentrated, and the witness blocks his way with a club. This is the hunchback who often walked around Abramtsevo and its environs and whom Repin painted and painted many times for his picture. Yes, and not just him - many of the characters in the picture are written from nature and so amazingly that it seems that you know each participant in the procession.

Nothing in the picture is invented, everything is life-truthful and everything is subordinated to the main idea, which Repin himself so accurately defined: "... The main plot in the center of the picture is a lady carrying an icon under the escort of the sotsk."

Repin finished this picture already in St. Petersburg and put it on the eleventh traveling exhibition. The reactionaries raised an angry hype around her. They scolded her in the press for "unfair denunciation", for being "drunk with social poison". But these people did not express public opinion; advanced youth, students, female students understood it and accepted it with enthusiasm. And the artist only chuckled: “After all, I’m not used to becoming: it seems that no one else has been scolded like me.”

13

In September 1882, Repin and his family moved to live in St. Petersburg. He lived in Moscow for five years. Over the years, about sixty portraits have been painted, and among them are such excellent ones as portraits of the composer M.P. Mussorgsky, writer A.F. Pisemsky, surgeon N.I. Pirogov, composer and pianist A.G. Rubinstein, artist P.A. Strepetova, portraits of fellow artists - Polenov, Chistyakova, and many others.

In Moscow, the paintings “Princess Sofya”, “Seeing the Recruit”, “Vechornitsi” were created - a girl with a lad dancing a trepak. The "Religious procession in the Kursk province" is almost finished. The "Arrest of the Propaganda", "Refusal of Confession", "They Didn't Expect", "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan", "The Cossacks" and several other paintings were conceived and launched. And how many sketches have been made! What a lot of first-class drawings! “My head is on fire with wonderful thoughts, artistic ideas,” Repin wrote about those years.

Friends remained in Moscow - Surikov, Polenov, Vasnetsov. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy also remained - more than a friend. He himself once came to Repin, and this evening of the first meeting with the "great Lion", as Stasov called him, forever remained Repin's dearest memory.

Repin left Moscow without regret, and just as he lavished praises on Moscow several years ago, now he admired Petersburg. The Repins settled near the Kalinkin Bridge. Around spacious, strictly, stately. Repin walked around St. Petersburg, climbed far. “I remember a lot; I haven’t been to some places for 15 years and now I’m definitely in my homeland ... "

Having looked around and settled down, Repin plunged headlong into work: “I’m working so much now, I’m so tired that even my nerves are shaking ...” Back in Moscow, he began the picture “The Arrest of the Propaganda”. He worked on it painfully, for a long time and bitterly admitted to himself that the picture did not work out. In Petersburg, he again took up her. I changed the composition, made many new sketches, gradually removed everything superfluous that prevented the main idea from being revealed. Instead of twenty people who were in the first version of the picture, he left only fourteen. The arrested propagandist is no longer surrounded by peasants, among whom were sympathizers, but he stands face to face with his enemies in a hut, by a pillar. His hands are tightly bound, and he himself is held understood. Nearby - sotsky. To the left on the bench sits, according to Repin, “a local tavern keeper or a factory worker and stares at the prisoner. Isn't it a scammer? Maybe the informer is the person who stands at the window and, with his hands behind his back, looks at the propagandist - this is probably the owner of the hut. To the right, at the door, the bailiff sits, reading papers that have just been taken out of the suitcase. Obsequiously bent over the bailiff detective, behind him another - triumphantly holds out his hand with a bunch of books. There is a girl at the door; she alone sympathizes with the propagandist and looks anxiously at the detective...

What about the propagandist? He was ready for the fact that sooner or later the day would come and he would be arrested, thrown into prison. And yet how difficult it is to come to terms with it! He knows that he is not alone, that others will come to take his place. How much strength, determination in his face, with what hatred he looks at his enemies!

From the first sketch made for this picture in 1879, eleven years will pass before Repin finishes it and shows it to the audience.

And on the easel there is another picture dedicated to Russian revolutionaries. It was also begun in Moscow almost simultaneously with the "Arrest of the propagandist" ... Once Repin, on one of his visits to St. Petersburg, was visiting Stasov. As always, Vladimir Vasilievich was glad to see him. His mood was heavy: his two brothers were arrested for possession of prohibited literature. And yet, he saved for Repin an illegal issue of the newspaper Narodnaya Volya, where an excerpt from the poet Minsky's poem "The Last Confession" was printed.

I'm not completely powerless - to die
It remains for me, and a formidable weapon
I'm on the enemy from this death ...
How to live, I did not teach people,
But I'll show you how to die...

The impact of the lyrics was amazing. “I remember how you and I, ten years ago, read the Confession and how we rushed about, as if stung and almost mortally wounded,” Stasov wrote many years later. And perhaps at the same time, when Repin listened to these verses, he mentally imagined the future picture and, under a fresh impression, made the first sketch. But the first sketch did not satisfy him - it was more of an illustration for poetry than an independent picture. And only after a long work, endless alterations, the picture was finished.

Single camera. Iron bed, table. Mold on the walls. There is a peephole in the heavy doors, and you never know who is behind the door, whose eyes are looking at you. A priest has just entered through this door with a crucifix in his hands. He came to forgive sins, to confess a man sentenced to death. A revolutionary condemned to death sits on a bunk in a prisoner's robe. With what contempt, how proudly he looks at the minister of the church. He does not need remission of sins, he refuses confession. He will die as his comrades die.

And how the picture is solved in color! The dark, tragic general coloring of the picture, everything seems to be drowning in the darkness of a loner, and only the face of a man is illuminated - a revolutionary, confident in his innocence. “Ilya, I am beside myself - not only from admiration, but from happiness! .. Finally, finally, I saw this picture. Because this is a real picture, what a picture can be!!!” - so Stasov wrote when he saw the picture. It is clear that the censorship did not let the “Refusal of Confession” into a traveling exhibition, and the audience saw it only ten years later.

And next in line for Repin is the next picture, also conceived in Moscow, - “They didn’t wait.” He wrote it at a dacha near St. Petersburg. Members of his family and acquaintances posed for him.

For the first time he painted a picture directly from nature, without preliminary sketches. After the first version of the painting, painted on a small canvas, where a student girl returns from exile, after alterations, searches, he began a new painting on a large canvas on the same topic.

The room of a poor intelligent family. Everyone is busy. Grandmother sews or knits something, mother plays the piano, children prepare their lessons. Suddenly the door opens and a man enters the room. He is wearing a dark peasant coat, in his hands is a hat. The face is infinitely tired and at the same time joyful and anxious - how will it be accepted? He goes straight to his mother. We do not see her face, we do not see with what eyes she looks at her son, but her whole figure in a black dress, her hand slightly resting on an armchair, suggests that she recognized her son, that she always waited for him in her soul. Now the confused and delighted wife will rush to him. The boy also recognized him, all reaching out to him, and the little girl looks frightened, frowning - she does not remember her father. The maid is still standing at the door, letting in a man - an exile who was remembered, but who was “not expected” in the family ... Outside the window is a summer day. Diffused light on the bluish-greenish wallpaper, on the maid's lilac dress, on the floor... The room is full of light, air, and the painting is fresh and clear.

The picture did not need any explanation - everything in it was clear, vital, truthful. When the twelfth traveling exhibition after St. Petersburg and Moscow went to other cities, the artist accompanying the exhibition wrote that the painting was received warmly everywhere and spoke of it "enthusiastically."

“The arrest of the propagandist”, “Refusal of confession”, “They did not wait” - paintings dedicated to the struggle of the populist revolutionaries against the autocracy - Stasov considered Repin's most significant paintings. “This is history, this is modernity, this is real contemporary art, for which you will be especially highly rated later.”

“... I love art more than virtue, more than people, than relatives, than friends, more than all the happiness and joys of our life ... Wherever I am, no matter what I have fun with, no matter who I admire, whatever I enjoy ... it is, always and everywhere, in my head, in my heart, in my desires for the best, most intimate. The hours of the morning that I dedicate to him are the best hours of my life,” said Repin, and this all-consuming love for art illuminated everything, gave birth to new and new thoughts about the paintings. He seemed to feel uncomfortable if there were not several different paintings on the easels in the studio, if thoughts of new and new works did not boil in his head. Not quite finishing one picture, he immediately grabbed another, already begun, already thought out. So it is now: before the end of the picture "They Did Not Wait" there were several months left, and he was already raving about the picture about Ivan the Terrible and Tsarevich Ivan.

Once he was at a concert where Rimsky-Korsakov's "Revenge" was performed. “She made an irresistible impression on me,” Repin said. - These sounds took possession of me, and I thought whether it was possible to embody in painting the mood that was created in me under the influence of this music. I remembered Tsar Ivan. This was in 1881. The bloody event of March 1 excited everyone. Some kind of bloody streak passed through this year ... ”At the same time, he made two sketches of the future picture - in pencil and oil paints. Since then, the picture has firmly taken its place in Repin's soul. But he took up it closely only in 1884 in St. Petersburg.

Preparatory work has begun. Two figures were assumed in the picture: Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan, and the main position of these figures was already outlined in the first sketches. I had to look for nature. Once a laborer met in the market, from whom he immediately wrote a sketch for Grozny, then went to Tsarskoye Selo to Chistyakov, who recommended him some old man who looked like Tsar Ivan, wrote a sketch from the artist Myasoedov. And the writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin posed for the prince. Repin recently met him and at first glance "smoldered with special tenderness for him." He wrote it twice: a study in profile and a magnificent portrait - Garshin is sitting at his desk, sorting through manuscripts; someone enters the room, Garshin raised his head, his eyes are sick, melancholy ... “In the face of Garshin, I was struck by doom: he had the face of a doomed to die. It was what I needed for my prince, ”wrote Repin.

Repin did not work on the painting in his studio, but in a separate, specially furnished room. He himself cut out costumes for Grozny and his son - black, in the form of a cassock for Grozny, and pinkish, with a silvery sheen for the prince. He painted high boots with curved toes with curls.

So the artist collected individual strokes, dashes - everything that could be useful to him for the picture. “I worked spellbound,” he said. - I was scared for a few minutes. I turned away from this picture, hid it. Sometimes, after a whole day of work, it suddenly began to seem to him that the picture was weak, unsuccessful. Reason prompted: it is necessary to take a break, "But something drove me to this picture, and I again worked on it."

And finally, the painting is finished. On one of the Thursdays - the evening when friends and acquaintances gathered at the Repins - he decided to show the picture. I was very worried while installing it, lighting it with lamps, adjusting the curtain. And then, until the arrival of the guests, he sat alone in front of his creation for a long time. What hard work it was! How many disappointments he experienced, how much happiness, from which his heart became cramped. And how dead tired he was!

The guests have gathered. The artists Kramskoy, Shishkin, Yaroshenko and others came. Repin pulled back the curtain... The twilight twilight of the royal chambers, the gloomy walls in dark crimson and dark green checkers, the floor covered with red patterned carpets, an overturned chair, an abandoned rod and in the center two illuminated figures: father and son. A murder had just been committed, and at that very moment the king realized that something irreparable had happened. And now he is no longer a formidable king, he is a father: he convulsively hugs his son, clamps the wound, tries to stop the blood. And in the eyes of unbearable torment, pity, love ...

For a long time everyone stood in anxious silence, shocked by the picture, then they spoke quietly, congratulating Repin.

In February 1885, Repin's painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan. November 16, 1581" appeared at the thirteenth traveling exhibition. Petersburg was agitated, all the talk was about Grozny. A crowd of thousands literally besieged the exhibition, and a cavalry detachment of gendarmes stood outside the building.

The painting was a fierce controversy. The audience either enthusiastically admired or no less violently indignant: how can this be exhibited! After all, this is regicide!

The chief adviser to the Tsar Pobedonostsev arrived at the exhibition in person. After the exhibition, he wrote to the tsar: “Letters began to be sent to me from different directions, indicating that a painting was exhibited at a traveling exhibition that offended many government feelings: Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son. Today I saw this picture and could not look at it without disgust ... "

There were rumors that the picture would be banned. Indeed, when the exhibition moved to Moscow, P.M. Tretyakov, who bought the painting, received an order to remove it from the exhibition. He had to put her in a separate room closed to visitors.

Many knew that Tretyakov had bought the painting and rushed to look for it in the gallery, but Tretyakov was silent, and the gallery workers were also silent. And only a few months later, after increased efforts, the ban was lifted and the painting was hung in the Repinsky hall, where it hangs to this day.

14

Repin lived in St. Petersburg for eighteen years. The first ten to twelve years were years of intense creative work, when the work conceived and begun in Moscow was completed. All these years, Repin did not lose touch with Moscow, corresponded with Polenov, Vasnetsov, occasionally with Surikov - he knew that he was not a fan of letters. Almost every year I visited Moscow, either during exhibitions, or on my way to the Kuban, to the south of Russia for materials for the painting "Cossacks". Every time he certainly went to the Tretyakov Gallery, to the Tretyakovs, met the Mamontovs, Moscow artists, went to Yasnaya Polyana. “I just returned home yesterday. And do you know where I've been? In Yasnaya Polyana. He lived there for 7 days in the company of the venerable Leo. He wrote, by the way, two portraits from him. One failed, I gave it to the countess. Another will be sent to me in two weeks, ”he wrote to Stasov in August 1887. In addition to these two portraits, Repin also made a portrait drawing of Tolstoy in his grandfather's armchair, several sketches depicting Tolstoy plowing.

The portrait, which Repin considered a success, was painted quickly, in three sessions, against a light background. Tolstoy sits in a mahogany armchair in his dark sweatshirt. The face is concentrated, the eyes calmly look under the overhanging eyebrows.

From the time this portrait was painted until Tolstoy's death, Repin's "hands were on fire", he could not resist, and as soon as he happened to meet Tolstoy, he painted and painted him endlessly, discovering everything new and new in what had changed over the years. appearance of Tolstoy. About seventy works dedicated to Tolstoy have come down to us, and how many of them have been lost, how many have gone from hand to hand!

In the same 1887, an excellent portrait of V.I. Surikov. Surikov always and in everything admired Repin. Very different people and different artists, they were great friends.

The year in which these portraits were painted was very difficult in Repin's personal life - he divorced his wife. This gap was all the more painful because Repin was very fond of children. The elders - Vera and Nadia - stayed with him, and the younger ones - Yura and Tanya - moved with their mother to another apartment. Repin yearned without children. He often painted them, and how much soulfulness, touching tenderness are in these portraits! Here is a dark-haired little Nadia in a pink dress, on a white pillow, and she is already a young girl, all flooded with sunlight, under an umbrella in the garden. Here sits on the perch, Vera's favorite - "Dragonfly", squints from the sun. Little Yura against the backdrop of a carpet and Yura as a teenager in Venice, where his father took him...

And Petersburg life went on and on. Repin made many new acquaintances, renewed contacts with St. Petersburg artists, among whom were old comrades from the academy. He visited Stasov at musical evenings, did not miss interesting concerts, went to the theater. On Wednesdays, friends, acquaintances and even unfamiliar people came to Repin, who wanted to look at the famous artist. “I doubt that he enjoys these Wednesday gatherings, which are rather boring. It's a pity for him - he's lonely - I don't like his girls more and more ... they absolutely neglect everything that comes from their father, which upsets him inexpressibly. He is very sad and hard,” wrote Valentin Serov, who lived for many years in the Repin family.

On Sundays, young people - Serov, Vrubel and others - worked in Repin's studio with watercolors, and he enthusiastically said: "I'm learning from them!"

But every morning he is steadily alone in the studio with his paintings. Soon after the thirteenth traveling exhibition, which showed the painting "Ivan the Terrible", Repin came to grips with a great work - "Cossacks composing a letter to the Turkish Sultan." This painting has a long history. Somehow in the summer of 1878 in Abramtsevo there was a conversation about Zaporozhye antiquity. Historian N.I. Kostomarov read a letter written in the 17th century by Zaporizhzhya Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan in response to his bold proposal to transfer to Turkish citizenship. The letter was so mischievously, so mockingly written that everyone literally rolled with laughter. Repin caught fire, remembered the Chuguevs - the descendants of the free Zaporozhye Cossacks, and he immediately sketched the first pencil sketch of the picture.

Since then, the violent Cossack freemen settled for a long time not only in the workshop, but also in the Repin family. “Almost every day, dad read aloud about the Cossacks ... and talked about the Sich ... - Repin's daughter Vera recalled. - So, being carried away, dad also carried us away with his stories and reading. Often we played Cossacks... They shaved my little brother Yura's head and left a forelock; on his round head, at first, hung a small one, and then a long "seed" curled, which he wrapped around his ear. And a suit was made for him: a yellow jacket with folding sleeves, when his godfather Murashko brought him a Little Russian shirt and trousers. Zhupan was given to bring it in so that it looked more like a real one.

In the spring of 1880, taking Valentin Serov with him, Repin left for Ukraine; visited the places where the Zaporizhian Sich once stood, examined the ancient fortifications, searched among the people for types of the old Cossacks ... In the autumn he brought about forty sketches, many drawings, and he didn’t want to think about anything but the Cossacks. When Tolstoy visited Repin for the first time, he saw a sketch of the Cossacks. “In the Zaporozhets, he suggested to me a lot of good and very plastic details of the first importance, lively and characteristic details,” Repin told Stasov. “It was evident here that the master of historical affairs ... I realized that he imagined the Zaporozhets in a completely different way and, of course, immeasurably higher than my scribbles ...” And Repin decided to completely abandon the picture. But less than a month later, he wrote to Stasov: “Until now, I could not answer you, Vladimir Vasilyevich, and the Zaporozhians are to blame for everything, well, the people! Where to write here, my head is spinning from their din and noise ... I completely accidentally turned away the canvas and could not resist, took up the palette and now I live with them for two and a half weeks without rest, you can’t part - cheerful people ... No wonder about them Gogol wrote, all this is true! Damn people! .. No one in the whole world has felt so deeply freedom, equality and fraternity!

But the further, the more clearly Repin understood that the picture was difficult, an adviser was needed, a person who knew the Zaporozhye Cossacks well. Stasov always helped without fail, but he was not an expert on Ukraine and did not really approve of his idea.

Having moved to St. Petersburg, Repin in 1887 met Professor D.I. Yavornitsky, a specialist in the history of Zaporozhye. Yavornitsky liked both the idea of ​​the picture and the fact that it was painted by such a great artist as Repin. He willingly began to help him; arshin...

Repin traveled twice more, first to the Kuban, then to the south of Russia - for materials for the picture. Dozens of albums were filled with drawings, hundreds of sketches were made from people most suitable for the conceived figures in the picture. Trips, communication with the descendants of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks, from whom sketches were written, the very things that once belonged to the Cossacks, enriched Repin, helped him get used to the distant seventeenth century. It is possible that not a single sketch entered the whole picture, but on the basis of many sketches, the artist created a generalized image of one or another person. “Having conceived a picture, I always looked in my life for such people whose figure and facial features would express what I need for my picture,” said Repin. But usually these people got into the picture transformed.

In the world of cheerful and violent Cossacks, Repin lived for twelve whole years. True, very often he had to part with them - there were other paintings and portraits in the queue, but invariably, with a feeling of deep joy, he returned to them. “What a job it is! .. I work until I drop ... I get very tired,” he wrote in those months when he finished the picture.

And finally, the painting is finished.

The day is burning down, the smoke of bonfires is winding, a wide steppe is spread far, far away. And the Zaporozhian Cossack freemen gathered around the table to write an answer to the Turkish Sultan. A clerk writes, a smart man and respected in the Sich, but everyone composes - everyone wants to have their say. The ataman of the entire Zaporozhye army, Ivan Serko, bent over the clerk. He is the sworn enemy of the Turkish sultan, more than once he reached Constantinople himself and "he let such smoke go there that the sultan sneezed, as if he had sniffed tobacco with grated glass." It was he, probably, to the general laughter, said a strong word, akimbo, lit a pipe, and in his eyes the laughter and enthusiasm of a man ready for action. Nearby, clutching his stomach with his hands, a mighty gray-moustached Cossack in a red zhupan laughs - quite Taras Bulba. Exhausted from laughter, the grandfather leaned against the table with a forelock on his forehead. Opposite, on an overturned barrel, is a broad-shouldered Cossack - only the back of his head is visible, but it seems that his thunderous laughter is heard. A half-naked Cossack relishes the ataman's strong word, and another, with a black mustache, in a hat with a red top, slammed his fist on his back with delight. A slender handsome young man in rich clothes is smiling - isn't this Andriy, Tarasov's son? .. But the "didok" opened his mouth wide, grimaced with laughter; a young student squeezed his way through the crowd, grinning, peering into the letter; behind him is a hero in a black cloak with a bandage on his head ...

And all this crowd, all this gathering of Zaporizhzhya “knights”, lives, makes noise, laughs, but at the first call of its chieftain is ready to give up everything, go to the enemy and lay down his soul for the Sich, because for each of them there is nothing dearer than the fatherland and nothing holier than fellowship.

Along the edges of the picture, two figures, as it were, close the composition. Repin did not immediately come to such a decision, he still could not assemble the picture, it all fell apart with him. And when he was reproached for spoiling the picture by placing a faceless figure with his back to the audience, he was indignant, objected: “What was not here! There was also a horse's muzzle; there was also a back in a shirt; there was a laugher - a magnificent figure - everything did not satisfy until I settled on this hefty simple back - I liked it, and with it I quickly brought the whole picture into complete harmony ... And now at least a hundred thousand correspondents of The Times they smashed me to smithereens, I would have remained with my own; I am deeply convinced that now in this picture it is not necessary to add or subtract a single stroke.

15

In the spring of 1891, as usual, the nineteenth traveling exhibition opened. There was not a single work by Repin at the exhibition - he left the partnership with which he had been associated for many years. He did not like that the Wanderers closed in on themselves, that they almost did not accept new members, especially young ones. “Since the partnership has become more and more drawn into bureaucracy, this atmosphere has become unbearable for me. There is no mention of comradely relations: some kind of department of officials is becoming, ”he wrote to the artist K.A. Savitsky.

Stasov considered Repin's departure a mistake, a great loss for the partnership. "... This loss is incomparable, unrequited, immeasurable ..." - he wrote in an article dedicated to the exhibition.

Repin did not succumb to any persuasion and intensively prepared for a solo exhibition, which opened in the late autumn of 1891 in the halls of the Academy of Arts ... The exhibition was an anniversary one - twenty years of work, twenty of the most brilliant years of Repin's life. There were about three hundred works in the exhibition. Paintings "Cossacks composing a letter to the Turkish Sultan", "Procession in an oak forest", "Arrest of a propagandist", "Skhodka" ... Portraits of the artist Zvantseva, sculptor Antokolsky, scientist Sechenov, historian Kostomarov ... thirty-four portraits in total. Many sketches, sketches, sketches with a brush, a pencil - the whole laboratory of the artist, all his enormous work from the first thought about the picture to the last stroke of the brush.

Both in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, where the exhibition moved, it was warmly received; a lot was written about her, and almost everyone noted that the first place in the exhibition belongs to the painting "Cossacks".

Not without malice, of course, on the part of those "artistic wise men" and "experts" whom Stasov so hated. At first he himself did not approve of Repin's undertakings with the Cossacks, and now he attacked everyone who dared to speak out against the picture.

Repin was pleased that there were many students, female students, and artisans among the spectators at the exhibition. He listened to conversations, easily entered into disputes, and when someone scattered in excessive enthusiasm about his talent, he answered with a good-natured, slightly sly smile: "I'm not talented, I'm hardworking."

The exhibition fever has passed, the creative tension of recent years has subsided. Repin felt infinitely tired, devastated, he said that he had no interesting “undertakings”. With the money received for the painting "Cossacks", he unexpectedly bought an estate for everyone - he believed that proximity to the earth would refresh him, restore his strength. He moved his old father and older girls to the estate, and from early spring 1892 until late autumn he lived in the countryside, enthusiastically doing housework. In subsequent years, he repeatedly visited Zdravnevo - that was the name of his estate - but even there his work did not go well. He painted portraits of his daughters - Nadia in a hunting suit, a charming portrait of Vera with a large bouquet of flowers against the backdrop of an autumn landscape, a Belarusian peasant boy ... and did not paint a single picture that would satisfy him. He seemed to have ceased to see life broadly; he did not have the previous bold thoughts, daring plans, without which his paintings could not be written. More and more occupied him now questions of professional skill.

In the autumn of 1893, Repin went abroad.

Returning from abroad, a few months later he became the head of the painting workshop of the Higher Art School at the Academy of Arts, which was recently opened in connection with the reform of the academy.

And now he is a professor at the Academy of Arts. He is fifty years old. Small in stature, skinny. Thick graying hair thrown back, a sharp beard, clear, keen eyes, wrinkles on the temples and around the eyes from constant squinting during work. Movements are fast and jerky. He looks much younger than his years.

On the first day, getting acquainted with the students of his workshop, he said: "We did not come here as professors, but as your senior art comrades." And he was the senior comrade, who protected every talented student, until the end of his teaching career. He behaved with his students not at all like an important official - a professor of the academy, and the order in his workshop was not academic. Once a week evenings were held in the workshop - conversations about art: exhibitions, creative plans of students were discussed. These conversations were also attended by artists - Surikov, when he came to St. Petersburg, Kuindzhi and others. Together with his students, he went to the Hermitage, advised to study the legacy of past centuries, copy the works of great masters.

Having become a professor, Repin did not at all seek to destroy all the traditions of the Academy of Arts. He himself managed to take from the academy all the best that it gave, and above all the solid foundations of drawing, painting, and composition. He demanded the same from his students. He hated the carelessness of the drawing, did not tolerate any "panache", any "talented upstarts". Work and work, incessantly draw from life, constantly observe a variety of forms, never part with an album ... “And with a brilliant talent,” he said, “only great workers can achieve absolute perfection of forms in art. This modest ability to work is the basis of every genius.

The visual lessons that Repin gave to his students, working with them in the studio, were incomparable with anything. These days, all students quit their classes, recalled the People's Artist of the RSFSR A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedev, “and watched with bated breath as he worked... He paints with very large brushes, but he is such a virtuoso! The brush unusually obeys him... He puts a glare in the eye with it or draws the shape very subtly, and she does whatever he wants... Having finished the work, he leaves, leaving her for some time in the classroom; then we all flock to the sketch, look at it closely, almost smell it, touch the brushes, palette, paints ... "

But as soon as Repin noticed that one of the students took the path of external imitation of his methods, he became angry: “Go your own way, look for your own handwriting, do not imitate anyone, art does not tolerate stencils,” he said. There were no imitators among Repin's students. B.M. Kustodiev. D.N. Kardovsky, A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, I.E. Grabar, I.I. Brodsky, A.A. Rylov and many, many others found their way in art and became great artists of Soviet Russia.

16

By the end of the nineties, Repin became the most famous artist in Russia; the pinnacle of his fame was then the "Cossacks". But how difficult it was for him in the role of a great artist to endure national recognition when he did not leave his feeling of acute dissatisfaction with himself. At times it seemed that his best years had passed, that he would not be able to do anything more.

Several years have passed. In Repin's life, in these troubled years for him, events took place that he had not yet told anyone about. In 1900, he remarried, left St. Petersburg, settled with his second wife, Natalya Borisovna Nordman, in Finland, in a small town called Kuokkala, in a dacha called "Penates".

Few people knew how Repin lived during these years. He did not see anyone, he hid from everyone. But in fact, Repin had not worked with such bitterness, so excitedly, as in those years, for a long time. He was completely engrossed in the new picture: "The ceremonial meeting of the State Council on May 7, 1901." The painting was ordered to him in connection with the centenary of the Council of State. The order was royal, and he could not refuse it. For a huge multi-figure painting (more than sixty figures), a very short time was given. It was not possible for one to cope with the picture, and Repin invited two of his students as assistants - V.M. Kustodieva and N.S. Kulikov. The picture, as Repin intended it, was supposed to depict the moment when Nicholas II had just finished reading the letter and the secretaries were delivering commemorative medals to members of the council.

Repin was present at this anniversary meeting of the State Council, received permission to attend all other meetings, ensured that the members of the council on days when there were no meetings would pose for him in the meeting room in the appropriate places and in the pose that he would need for paintings.

By the beginning of January 1904, the painting was ready and exhibited for several days in the palace. The dignitaries who watched her treated her generally favorably and, blinded by their own significance, found nothing reprehensible in her.

In the spring, at the thirty-second traveling exhibition, preparatory works for the painting appeared - sketch portraits of members of the State Council. Repin, who had a wonderful gift to capture and convey the most essential in a person, very rarely sinned against the truth of life. He didn't make a mistake this time either. Everyone who knew how to look and see was struck by the accusatory force with which, how cleverly, subtly, venomously, he revealed the true face of all this nobility, all these, according to Repin, “crowned dwarfs” and “court donkeys”, headed by “his vysokoderzhidie" by Tsar Nicholas II.

“In the whole world of painting, they have no equal in strength and magic of the brush ... They are not only not inferior to the works of the best time of the artist’s work ... but even surpass them ...” - this is how Repin’s student wrote about sketch portraits for the “State Council” I.E. Grabar, Honored Artist of the RSFSR.

On January 9, 1905, by order of the tsar, a peaceful demonstration of workers was shot. On the same day, the first barricades were built in St. Petersburg, and in response to Bloody Sunday, a wave of strikes and demonstrations swept through Russia - the first Russian revolution began.

Repin followed the events with excitement; all his life he hated the autocracy and now wrote to Stasov: “How good it is that with his vile, greedy, predatory, robber nature, he (Nicholas II) is still so stupid that perhaps he will soon fall into a trap, to the general joy of all enlightened people! .. How unbearable to live in this criminal, disenfranchised, oppressive country! Will this blatant abomination of the power of ignorance soon collapse?

In the summer, not far from Repin, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky settled in Kuokkala. On January 9, he was among the crowd of workers on the streets of St. Petersburg and on the same day he wrote an appeal in which he called on all citizens to fight stubbornly against the autocracy. For the appeal, Gorky was arrested, was imprisoned, and now he was again completely absorbed in the affairs and concerns connected with the revolution. He visited the Penates and, perhaps, suggested to Repin the topics for his future paintings. Stasov was also very worried, he could not allow Repin, the artist, to remain aloof from the revolution. “What if Repin had found in his place, somewhere in the corner, those brushes that wrote “Confession”, “Did not wait”, “Arrest”, - that would be a triumph and a historical page, ”he wrote to Repin’s wife . And later reminded himself. Repin: “Do you think, do you still remember what we talked about the huge composition “Free Russia”?”

Repin thought, remembered all the conversations, eagerly listened to all the rumors, literally pounced on the newspapers that came to the Penates in large numbers. With all the vehemence characteristic of him, he began one after another painting dedicated to the revolutionary events of 1905: “Red Funeral”, “Shooting of a Demonstration”, “At the Tsar's Gallows” ... But all these were sketches that never became paintings .

Repin continued to live in the Penates. In the studio, as always, there were begun canvases, many sketches everywhere, in the cabinets albums of various sizes in canvas bindings - thousands of watercolors, drawings, sketches that Repin rarely showed to anyone. He said that this was only rough, auxiliary material for large compositions, that they were of interest only to him. Of course it wasn't. No wonder Serov, a brilliant student of Repin, called him "the most faithful draftsman."

Every day, Repin invariably spent many hours in the studio. He did not interrupt communication with St. Petersburg, which was only an hour away; attended theaters, concerts, literary evenings; visited meetings of the Wanderers, at exhibitions.

Every Wednesday - a day of rest - by three o'clock guests came to the Penates. Scientists, writers, musicians, artists gathered around the round table - V.V. Stasov, F.I. Chaliapin, Academician V.M. Bekhterev, artist I.I. Brodsky, composer A. Glazunov and many, many others, often unfamiliar, random people.

During these years, one of Repin's closest friends was K.I. Chukovsky. They met after 1905. Chukovsky lived not far from Penat and saw Repin almost daily. He witnessed how the artist worked, how he “tormented himself with work to the point of fainting”, how he rewrote each picture ten to twelve times. “Sometimes it seemed to me,” Chukovsky later recalled, “that he conquered not only old age, but even death itself with his passion for art.”

For a long time, even after the Zaporozhians, Repin's right hand began to dry, and he learned to write with his left hand and continued to work hard. He started all new pictures, and each of them caused him unbearable torment. After the painting "The State Council", which was the last truly "Repin" work, he did not create a single one equal to his former illustrious works.

Somewhere in the depths of his soul, Repin could not help but understand that his powers as an artist were drying up, his painting was weakening.

As before, he painted many portraits - his interest in a person did not fade away until the end of his life. “My misfortune is that I put my whole soul into every, most empty portrait,” he said. But less and less often the portraits painted during these years conquered the audience with their life truth, pictorial skill.

Year after year passed. Friends came to the Penates less and less often, and there were fewer and fewer of them: Stasov died, Valentin Serov passed away, and Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was no more ... struggle, victories.

The year 1917 came - the Great October Socialist Revolution. Beyond the border line remain the Penates. Only an hour's drive separates Repin from his homeland, and he lives in a country hostile to young Soviet Russia. He is surrounded by strangers and people alien to him in spirit. He believes in all the malicious fabrications that they spread about Russia: the Hermitage burned down, the Academy of Arts was destroyed, paintings were thrown out and burned from museums, the Bolsheviks do not need Repin's art ... Daughter Vera, who moved to the Penates, hates Soviet Russia and does everything to father did not learn the truth about his country.

From time to time, letters from friends reach, letters “from the other side, which one thinks about only with fear and anxiety - everything is lost,” wrote Repin in 1922. Every year his letters become more and more dreary: “You live in captivity, you live in exile ... Now I recall Dostoevsky’s words about the hopeless situation of a person who “has nowhere to go.” I've been here for a long time completely alone ... "

In 1926, a delegation of Soviet artists arrived in the Penates: I.I. Brodsky - a student and friend of Repin, E.A. Katsman, P.A. Radimov, A.V. Grigoriev. They brought him letters from fellow artists, Soviet books, told about exhibitions, about museums, and, on behalf of the Soviet government, called him to his homeland. “We are authorized to say that your arrival will be a holiday for the whole country. You will be greeted with honors as your favorite artist.” Repin was unspeakably moved. “This day is historic, the happiest day of my life,” he said.

But Repin did not return to his homeland, he could not return. He was eighty-two years old, he was weak, ill and did not dare to go alone, and none of his relatives wanted to go with him.

Years passed again. Repin was languishing in a foreign land, and only art gave him strength and the will to live. “... I did not give up art. All my last thoughts are about Him,” he wrote in his last letter to Chukovsky.

And with insane persistence, exhausted from weakness, every day he went up to the studio, where he painted and endlessly rewrote his last picture: the cheerful Cossack dance "Gopak". He dreamed of giving it to his homeland, dedicating it to the memory of M.P. Mussorgsky. But Repin did not have to finish this picture - he died on September 29, 1930.

Notes

Cantonist schools - the lowest military schools in the 19th century.

Ozhina - blackberry.

Chugunka is the old name for the railway.

In the "lantern", or "ark", a "miracle-working icon" was kept. During the procession, she was taken out of the "lantern" and carried in her arms.

Kyoto - glazed cabinet for icons.

Sotsky - in tsarist Russia, a peasant who was appointed to help the village police.

Oseledets - a long strand of hair on a shaved head.

Zhupan - outerwear of the Cossacks.

Practice. Editing and evaluating essay.

Write an essay based on the text you read.

Formulate and comment on one of the problems posed by the author of the text (avoid over-quoting).

Formulate the position of the author. Write whether you agree or disagree with the point of view of the author of the read text. Explain why. Argument your answer based on knowledge, life or reading experience (the first two arguments are taken into account). The volume of the essay is at least 150 words.

A work written without relying on the text read (not on this text) is not evaluated. If the essay is a paraphrase or a complete rewrite of the source text without any comments, then such work is evaluated by zero points. Write an essay carefully, legible handwriting.

Text.

(1) Once, starlings flew to me on a watch, October, autumn, rainy. (2) We raced in the night from the coast of Iceland to Norway. (3) On a ship illuminated by powerful lights. (4) And in this foggy world, tired constellations arose ...

(5) I left the cabin on the wing of the bridge. (6) Wind, rain and night immediately became loud. (7) I raised the binoculars to my eyes. (8) The white superstructures of the ship, rescue whaleboats, covers dark from the rain and birds fluttered in the windows - wet lumps fluffy by the wind. (9) They rushed between the antennas and tried to hide from the wind behind the pipe.

(10) The deck of our ship was chosen by these small fearless birds as a temporary shelter on their long journey to the south. (11) Of course, Savrasov remembered: rooks, spring, there is still snow, and the trees woke up. (12) And everything in general was remembered what happens around us and what happens inside our souls when the Russian spring comes and rooks and starlings arrive. (13) You can't describe it. (14) This brings back to childhood. (15) And this is connected not only with the joy of the awakening of nature, but also with a deep feeling of home, Russia.

(16) And let them scold our Russian artists for the old-fashioned and literary plots. (17) And the names of Savrasov, Levitan, Serov, Korovin, Kustodiev hide not only the eternal joy of life in art. (18) It is Russian joy that is hidden, with all its tenderness, modesty and depth. (19) And how simple the Russian song is, so simple is painting.

(20) And in our difficult age, when art world painfully searches for general truths, when the complexity of life necessitates the most complex analysis of the psyche of an individual and the most complex analysis of the life of society - in our age, artists should all the more not forget about one simple function of art - to awaken and illuminate in a fellow tribesman a sense of homeland.

(21) Let our landscape painters not know abroad. (22) In order not to pass by Serov, one must be Russian. (23) Art then art when it evokes in a person a feeling of albeit fleeting, but happiness. (24) And we are arranged in such a way that the most piercing happiness arises in us when we feel love for Russia. (25) I do not know if other nations have such an indissoluble bond between aesthetic feeling and feeling of home?

Composition 1.

This article is devoted to a number of topical issues, the main of which is the question of what is happiness that arises in us when we feel love for Russia.

In my opinion, the theme of the article lies in the idea that in the works of many authors "hidden not only the eternal joy of life in art, but Russian joy". The focus is on the thoughts and feelings of the author on this issue. The author sets essentially one task - to explain that the most penetrating happiness arises in us when we feel love for the motherland. The position of the author is very convincing and true. She inspires confidence. (?) This article is very interesting. I completely agree with the author, since love for the motherland is the most important feeling that arises in a person. But I would especially like to highlight Konetsky’s idea that “the Russians have such (?) inextricable link between aesthetic feeling and feeling of home".

An excerpt from Konetsky's article is a journalistic style text. The main function of the text is to influence the reader. This passage is a discourse text. The beginning of the text is a thesis that is convincingly proved. At the end, the author draws a conclusion that, as it were, unites the beginning and the end. The sentences in the text are connected sequentially. The undoubted advantage of the article is the use of personification ("the trees woke up"), which makes the reasoning more figurative, emotional. In order to make the argument more vivid, the author uses the epithet ("piercing happiness"). In order to draw the most attention to the issues raised, the author uses a rhetorical question ("I do not know if other nations have such an inextricable link between aesthetic feeling and feeling of home?").

I would like to end the work with Konetsky's statement that "in our age, artists should not forget about the simple function of art - to awaken and illuminate the feeling of homeland in fellow tribesmen."

Composition 2.

What is art for? What does it wake up a person? What are its functions? Such questions are put before the readers by the author of this text, V. Konetsky.

To answer all the exciting questions of this topic, the author reflects, shares his impressions, and gives examples. For example, he says that behind the names of Savrasov, Levitan, Serov, Korovin, Kustodiev lies not only eternal joy in art, but also Russian joy, with all its tenderness, modesty and depth. And also that one of the functions of art is to awaken and illuminate the feeling of the homeland in a fellow tribesman.

I absolutely agree with Konetsky that art inspires a person, brings him happiness when you see the paintings of our Russian artists, especially landscape painters, admire their talent to convey the beauty of our nature: Russian forests, fields, quiet lakes, and it seems that there are no more beautiful places in the world than in Russia, you involuntarily begin to be proud of it.

Every Russian person should love Russia, admire its nature, art, language, and then it will become brighter in his heart. And most importantly, he will be happy with everything that surrounds him.

Composition 3.

Art… What is its purpose? Is there a connection between aesthetic feeling and feeling for the Motherland?

V.Konetsky reflects on these eternal questions in his article. Based on personal experience, he gives an example of the perception of national art far from both the art itself and the Motherland. The association with Savrasov's painting "The Rooks Have Arrived" was caused by "small fearless birds". From the memory of the picture came nostalgia for home, Motherland, Russia. The feeling of home for the author is synonymous with a feeling of joy and happiness. Therefore, Konetsky considers one of the functions of art to be a “simple” formula: “to awaken and illuminate ... a sense of homeland”, means to evoke “in a person feeling ... happiness". The connection between the "aesthetic feeling and the feeling of the homeland", according to V. Konetsky, is inextricable and eternal.

One cannot but agree with the author. Art as a source of goodness and light should not only promote spiritual growth, but also develop a person aesthetically. Far from the native hearth, feelings are aggravated, the need for a loved one is growing. Art can give, albeit fleeting, a feeling of happiness from being close to home.

"Art is the mediator of what cannot be expressed", - wrote Goethe. It is always difficult for a person to express his feelings, for this you can use this or that art. For example, love for the Motherland.

It can be expressed through a canvas, as Savrasov or Levitan did, or through a piece of music, as Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov expressed. But is the "indissoluble bond between aesthetic feeling and feeling of home"Maybe only Russian? Remember the Dutch painters. When you look at their canvases, the seaside coast of the Netherlands appears before your eyes. And when the Scottish bagpipes sound, do the fields of England appear before you?

Any art, if it is created with soul and deep feeling, has no nationalities and borders. Penetrating into the consciousness of a person, it becomes one with him, inseparable and native. And thanks to such an eternal connection, art and man become one goodness and light.

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For a long time I could not understand why stars appeared in the rainy sky, in rain and fog. And why the outlines of the constellations are so unfamiliar to me. And why the constellations are tired, they cannot keep their rightful places in the Universe.

We raced through the night from the coast of Iceland to Norway.

Motor ship illuminated by powerful lights.

And in the cold cabin, as always, it was dark. Only the rudder position indicator, tachometers and red fire alarm lights were lit. And a myriad of particles of water shone in front of the windows of the cabin with a slightly noticeable, unsteady, cemetery light - fog and rain. And in this misty sea, weary constellations arose. They trembled and sometimes flashed brightly. And they rushed along with us.

I left the cabin on the wing of the bridge. The wind, rain and night immediately became loud. Eyes watered. I turned the back of my head to the wind and raised the binoculars to my eyes. White superstructures swayed in the windows, rescue whaleboats, covers dark from the rain and birds - wet lumps fluffed by the wind. They rushed between the antennas and tried to hide from the wind behind the pipe, behind the whaleboats, on the deck.

They really were tired constellations. And the sailor on duty was already running towards me with birds in both hands.

“Starlings,” he said. We tried to feed them, but they don't eat.

So starlings flew to me on a watch, October, autumn, rainy. Of course, Savrasov remembered, spring, there is still snow, and the trees woke up. And everything in general was remembered what happens around us and inside our souls, when the Russian spring comes and rooks and starlings arrive. You can't describe it. It brings back to childhood. And this is connected not only with the joy of the awakening of nature, but also with a deep sense of the homeland, Russia.

And let them scold our Russian artists for the old-fashioned and literary plots. Behind the names - Savrasov, Levitan, Serov, Korovin, Kustodiev - hides not only the eternal joy of life in art. It is Russian joy that is hidden, with all its tenderness, modesty and depth. And how simple a Russian song is, so simple is painting.

And in our complex age, when the art of the world is painfully searching for general truths, when the intricacies of life necessitate the most complex analyzes of the psyche of an individual and the most complex analyzes of the life of society - in our age, all the more, artists should not forget about one simple function of art - to awaken and illuminate in compatriot a sense of homeland.

Let our landscape painters not know abroad. In order not to pass by Serov, one must be Russian. Art is then art when it evokes in a person a feeling of happiness, albeit fleeting. And we are arranged in such a way that the most piercing happiness arises in us when we feel love for Russia.

I don't know if other nations have such an inextricable link between the aesthetic sense and the sense of the homeland.

So, we hurried to the northeast, home, to the pier of Murmansk. And suddenly the starlings flew in, huddled in different secluded places to rest. And since we already missed home, we thought about Russia and the quiet drunkard Savrasov. And then, when you see a small land bird over the sea, you somehow become limp in your soul. After all, from childhood I read about lighthouses, in the light of which birds fly and break. And remember the pictures in the textbook. True, you already know that a flight across the ocean is an exam for the right to be called a bird. And the one who does not pass the exam will die and will not give weak offspring. And you know that there is nothing special about long flights for birds, generally speaking. For an ordinary summer day, the swift flies a thousand kilometers to feed the family. Workout. It is already known that birds are guided by the magnetic lines of force of the Earth. In flight, they cross them at different angles, and the current induced in the conductor when the conductor moves in a magnetic field depends on the angle. And the birds can somehow measure the strength of the current, and according to them the angle of movement relative to the magnetic poles of the Earth.

There are birds that live forever in the light of the sun, that is, they never live in the night. They fly around the planet in such a way that the sun always shines on them. They always live in the middle of the day, light and joy. And they die if the night catches up with them even once.

I have already learned a lot, but when you see a bird struggling with the wind, tumbling over the waves, your heart will ache from tenderness for it.

Seabirds are another matter. They cause admiration and envy for their perfection. It is very rare to see a seagull flapping its wings in the ocean. It is on the rivers and near the banks that they wave as much as they like, like some kind of market pigeons. And in the ocean, you can look at a seagull for tens of minutes, and it will still rush over the waves in front of the bow of the ship - at sixteen miles per hour - and not flutter its wings. Her flight is eternal fall, eternal planning.

When it storms, seagulls rush in the hollows between the shafts. There, in the water gorges, between the water mountains and hills, they take shelter from the wind.

First officer Volodya Samodergin appeared, delicately, imperceptibly checked whether everything was fine on my watch, felt the sea with a radar, said, of course, the same thing that I had just been thinking about:

- It's a pity for the birds, isn't it, Viktorych?

– Do you know that the ancient Normans carried ravens with them across the seas instead of a compass? I asked to show off my erudition. But there was no need to brag.

“I know,” Volodya said. - They released birds to determine the direction to land, to the near shore. Even Noah did this. Only he had a dove, right? .. Shall we go to the concert?

On the last day of the flight, through the efforts of the pompolit and many activists, an amateur concert program was created. And it was always interesting, talented and funny, although a little naive.

We in four hands prepared the watch for surrender. He took coordinates, instrument readings - I wrote it down in a journal. I called the car and gave a report for the watch, and he again and again felt the inclement sea with a radar. We have learned to work well with him in four hands. And he repeatedly caught me making mistakes, and in all the joint voyages I could never catch him on anything.

He had an amazing, bird-like instinct, intuition. He turned on the radar exactly when the mark appeared on the screen. In a calm drift, he ordered the cars to be ready ten minutes before the iceberg tucked under our stern. Moreover, such an iceberg, which was almost completely in the water, which was not taken by the radar and which was not visible in the fog.

His funny surname comes from a peasant grandfather who pulled his own beard all his life.

We handed over the watch, had dinner and went down to the music room. The polished wood of the saloon walls gleamed nobly from daylight chandeliers. The inlays of ancient caravels shimmered in the wooden walls. The caravels sailed and sailed, inflating their pot-bellied sails.

The salon was packed. Our seats were empty, waiting for us in the center. At last our captain arrived, the captains of the trawlers whose crews we carried from the shores of America, and their pompolites.

And the evening before parting began. In a day we will be at the Passenger berth of the Murmansk port. The fishermen will go down the ladder. And maybe we'll never meet again. And maybe we will meet, but no one knows.

Our girls, excited and pretty with excitement, in dazzling white blouses and black skirts, banged their heels with impatience. But the radio engineer Semyon confidently took over the evening. It was a professional entertainer. He came out to the microphone with a cheeky gait, checked the tension of the ropes with which the musical instruments were tied, and said:

Dear fellow fishermen! Now I will read a poem by Simonov about an unfaithful wife. This poem refers to the war, but you are fishermen, and this topic is familiar to you, since you are away from your families for a long time!

And in deathly silence, howling and making gestures, he read the “Open Letter”: “... We didn’t read yours for good, now we are secretly tormented by bitterness: what if you weren’t the only one who could, what if someone else gets it? ..” And so on and so forth. I thought for a moment that the fishermen, in response to delicacy and sensitivity, would throw cans at Semyon, but nothing happened. On the contrary, he was applauded loudly. And once again I realized that I do not understand anything in the psychology of today's people.

In general, the melodrama turned out to be the highlight of the program. Our baker-radio operator, who once cried in the radio room, also shook with antiquity. She came to the forefront, striding broadly and resolutely, like Mayakovsky. She was wearing black stockings and had red spots on her cheeks.

- "Boatswain Bakuta"! Reality! - The baker folded her heavy, dough-weary hands on her chest and led the story: - Once our ship entered Naples. Boatswain Bakuta went ashore. Near a luxurious hotel, he saw a ten-year-old beggar woman of extraordinary beauty. None of the bourgeois served a wonderful Italian. Boatswain Bakuta took the girl to the ship and listened to her songs with emotional excitement. Then the boatswain collected money from the crew and took the beggar girl to the store. He dressed the baby like a princess and arranged for the famous professor of singing. Then we took off from Naples, carrying the image of Janina in our hearts - that was the name of the girl. Ten years have passed. The ship, on which the boatswain Bakuta sailed, came to Marseille. The city was plastered with posters of the famous Italian singer. The boatswain recognized Janina. He burned with impatience to see her. With the last money he bought a ticket and went to the theater with a modest bouquet of spring flowers. After the performance, he entered Janina and gave her a bouquet. "Who you are? she asked dismissively and tossed the bouquet back to him. “I don’t accept such flowers!” The boatswain Bakuta returned to the ship and wrote Janina a letter: “I remember an orphan angel on the streets of Naples ... has a rich life really spoiled her so much?”

When the ship was already giving up, a huge car flew into the pier. Janina jumped out. She was veiled in black and stood at the edge of the dock like a statue. But it was too late - Marseille melted into a haze ... And just recently we heard songs of extraordinary beauty on the radio. Then the announcer announced: “Janina Bakuta sang!”

Believe it or not, but tears welled up in my eyes. And the fishermen, who had killed millions of fish and seen the devil knows what species, also tried not to turn their heads to each other, so as not to betray excitement, an unworthy man. And I thought that the most win-win plot is “The Lady of the Camellias”. Melodrama transcends centuries and borders and without a miss strikes the most diverse hearts.

Then our girls came out, hugged, blushed, stepped over the slowly swaying deck with their heels and sang: "The girls are standing." This song talks about the fact that the girls stand near the walls in the club and do not dance, because there are only nine guys for ten girls. We sang with mood and sadness, but it turned out funny, since we had four dozen guys for each of them, and they couldn’t complain heartily about this.

Because the hall frankly neighed.

And the appearance on the stage of a black Caucasian man with the inevitable black mustache and jigit habits turned out to be handy.

He spoke about an old Kabardian who carried his wife in a basket behind his back all his life so that she could not cheat on him.

Snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, he showed how the old man puffed when he had to climb the mountain. And how he opened the basket on the top of the mountain and saw his old woman in it, along with an old neighbor.

The hall rolled and from delight sometimes exploded with abuse.

Of course, such a loose plot had to be balanced. And this balancing act was built into the program.

The root cook came out and read the poignant verses of the famous contemporary poet: “Let love begin, but from the soul - not from the body!” And let there be passion too, but “passion, but not dogs and not cats”! She read the cookbook from a piece of paper, often lost her way, but they also patted her. And I proudly thought of our poets. These guys can write whatever they want. They don't have police. These are guys of desperate courage. They can only be envied.

Then the dancing and the game of "mail" began.

In Murmansk, we took four musicians from the Arktika restaurant on a flight. At first, of course, they swayed and lay vomited for several days, and it was not possible to raise them so that they would clean the cabin.

Then they departed.

The idea was this: professional musicians will raise the level of our amateur performances. In addition, they had to play at dance parties. Everyone knows that dancing to live music is more interesting than dancing to a tape recorder.

Musicians first came to play in white shirts and ties.

Then they got bold.

The soloist trumpeter sat in a deep armchair, his loose belly dangling between his knees, his bare toes sticking out of tattered slippers.

His name was Harry. All restaurant vulgarity thickly anointed his puffy face, which had forgotten the sunlight.

The drummer, in a pullover worn directly over his naked body, and also in slippers, effeminate, plump, youthful, ruddy, with curls at his temples, often closed his eyes and threw back his head, habitually expressing musical ecstasy.

The double-bass player shone with slicked-back, weak hair and was mortally depressed by his stupidity. These guys, of course, did not know at the time of hiring that there would be no restaurant here, no tips either. That they have to swing in the ocean for two months for an ordinary salary. Their official title was “music worker”.

The most respectable impression was made by the pianist. He had a badge of the Kyiv Conservatory. He sat with his back to the audience, wide - from pitching - with his legs splayed. He was probably talented and despised both himself and his Labuh friends, and fishermen, and everyone in general.

Dancing couples tottered on the leaning floor of the music room, stumbling over the folds and holes in the old carpet. The carpet was torn by the legs of the chairs when they watched a movie here in a storm.

The fishermen were stylishly sticking out their well-fed backsides, covered - in fashion - with tight-fitting trousers. Muscular paws protruded powerfully from the rolled up sleeves of the shirts. The non-dancers, as expected, sat under the bulkheads, chewed the girls with greedy eyes and exchanged appropriate remarks about them.

Suddenly, Harry got up from his chair and invited his fishing friends to play drums or sing themselves. There were no applicants. Then Harry decided to sing himself.

... The night is cold, and fog, and dark all around.
The little boy does not sleep, dreams of the past,
He stands in the rain
And it looks a little bit humpbacked,
And sings in his native language:
"Friends, buy cigarettes!
Come, infantry and sailors,
Come on, don't be shy
Warm up my orphan
Look, bare feet...
Friends, I don't see at all;
Merciful I will not offend you, -
So buy for God's sake
Cigarettes, matches too -
By this you will save the orphan!.."

The ship rocked, waves thumped under the side, spit-filled urns clogged with cigarette butts swayed in the corridor. The fishermen stomped around and listened, Vaclav Vorovsky listened sternly and sadly from the golden frame. And it was time to go to bed. But I listened to the song. She created a strange, painful impression.

I am a boy, I am an orphan, I am sixteen years old,
Help for God's sake, give me advice,
Where could I pray, where could I take shelter,
I don't like white light anymore...
My father is in a fierce battle
The death of the brave fell.
German in the ghetto with a gun
Shot my mom
And my sister is in captivity,
I myself am wounded in an open field,
Why did I lose my sight...
Friends, buy cigarettes!
Come, infantry and sailors...

Hoarse, voiceless Harry perfectly conveyed the intonation of a blind carriage singer. Suffered suddenly wagon smell - windings, hunger and military makhorka. And all this was somehow connected with the ugly stomping on the tattered carpet of young, women-starved men and with the stern face of Vaclav Vorovsky.

For some reason, I thought that the sentimentality of an amateur concert and what will happen tomorrow at the Murmansk pier somehow do not fit.

Never so casually did I return from the sea and so casually go into it, as on these voyages to Georges Bank with the fishermen.

There are sailors, captains, who pull the horn drive three times when parting with another ship or port, but they do it because it is supposed to. And there are sailors who swim all their lives for the sake of these three horns, for the sake of the excitement that arises in a person at the words of gratitude, farewell or meeting.

Three times we moored in Murmansk, and the pier was almost empty. A small handful of people met the fishermen who fought back with the ocean for four months.

It is impossible to convey in words how the silence and silence of the pier crushes when you approach it. How you want revival, waving of hands, women's happy faces, children raised in their arms.

Probably, Murmansk is a harsh city. Silence and few people he meets the fishermen, if they have not done something super-wonderful, super-planned.

But most likely, this is how it should be. After all, floating people always have one thing in front of them - a long and long road ...

Past France

In the Square of the Star, in the rain, a negro swept fallen leaves from the sidewalks. The Negro was in rubber boots ... "The purple Negro gives you a mantle ..."

On the corners of the streets, flower sellers sat quietly in pavilions... "Violets of Montmartre..."

The sidewalks were deserted, and thousands of cars raced around Zvezda Square... Cars?.. Something of Mayakovsky.

Motorcyclists writhed between the cars in capes, buttoned around their necks and on the steering wheel.

There was a triumphal arch. Beneath it lay the Unknown Soldier.

At the pedestrian crossings, red traffic lights were lit: “Attande!” - Dangerous! Wait! Ah, this is where our childish warning cry comes from: “Atanda, boys! Milton! Our childish cry arrived in distant Russia from the banks of Place de l'Etoile in Paris. And someone told me that this is the exclamation of a banker, stopping the bets of the players.

At the Avenue Foch, a gentleman approached me with a wet map in his hand:

“Monsieur, perle merle ale?”

I rarely laugh, but then rolled. I was mistaken for a Frenchman and asked for directions! Why not frolic a little?

“Perlet henri junk,” I explained, pointing my finger into nowhere.

- Merci, monsieur!

– Sil wu ple!

Rain like a bucket.

Obviously, the transition to the Arc de Triomphe is somewhere underground.

I bank around the square.

About fifteen fifteen-year-old boys pounce on me from around the corner, hit me in the back, slap me on the shoulders, grab my jacket, and thrust a rattling iron box with a slot up my nose. And not a single cop! Mom, help! Atanda!

- Arles! Murle! Kurle! Vietnam!

Lord, glory to you! They are going to Vietnam!

I put a franc in the slot. They stop beating and pounce on the girl with the ponytail. She behaves like Joan of Arc - with her handbag from right to left - bang! bang! Either she is a potbelly stove, or they managed to cuddle her in between. Everyone laughs. One covered himself with a tricolor French flag. portraits of Che Guevara. An extremely courageous bearded face - the idol of French youth. Down with de Gaulle! Viva revolution in Latin America! Viva Castro! ..

It was raining and plane-tree leaves, like maple leaves, but harder, noisier.

At the descent into the underground passage stood, hugging and swaying, kissing a couple. I passed a couple and dived down. Fallen leaves lay densely on the steps of light stone, and I picked up a whole branch of a plane tree with two prickly cones.

The lamps illuminated the underpass with light reflected from the ceiling. It was deserted, my steps solemnly sounded through the underground. And suddenly I realized that I was going to the tomb.

Azhan, in a black cape with red aiguillettes on his left shoulder, was freezing in the damp draft. My jacket was also black from the rain, my cap was dripping, my trousers were soaked on my knees, I had a branch of a plane tree with cones in my hands. Ajan followed me with an incredulous look. I have long been accustomed to such views.

In the four spans of the Arc de Triomphe, wet Paris looked out, the Champs Elysees went into the lilac from the exhaust gases.

The Unknown Soldier had wreaths of roses - pink, red, pale, tender, rough. The Eternal Flame was burning, the wind was pulling at the roses in the wreaths, the fire and smoke were rushing over it.

I looked up, and my head swam softly - the vaults of the Arc de Triomphe closed above me so high. Its walls are covered with golden, solemn, incomprehensible words.

I stood by the Eternal Flame, thinking only about the fact that perhaps it is supposed to take off your hat here. But for some reason it was inconvenient to take it off.

From the Place de l'Etoile I sail in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.

The rain stops, and the quiet sun immediately shines in transparent puddles. Streams flow along the sidewalks, washing the tires of resting cars. Roofs of cars in patterns of fallen leaves. At the entrances there are garbage cans, they are full, there are also heaps of garbage around. The cleaners are on strike. There are magazines with such seductive covers lying in the rubbish heaps that one just wants to steal them and leaf through them.

I walk alone along Avenue Kleber. The mansions of very rich people are fenced off with metal cast bars. Trimmed bushes, unfamiliar huge trees. Desert. Silence. Sunday. And for some reason it becomes sad. I turn somewhere off the avenue, I look at the windows of expensive shops. And I think about how good it is that my dear women do not see these shop windows. Women are not men, they need things more. Perhaps an elegant trinket or fashionable underwear can prolong a woman's life.

Women's underwear and all sorts of women's things are everywhere in Paris. They coexist peacefully with the bearded Che Guevara on the fences.

On the sides of the buses, comfortably leaning back, lies a naked Parisian, only her breasts are slightly covered with lace. The subway tunnels are decorated with girls in very short blue shirts, the girls are hugged from behind by a young man. The meaning of advertising is this: "Buy shirts that are equally pleasing to the body of a woman and the rough hands of a man!" In the tram car above the stop sign there are two legs in seductive stockings, they say about such legs that they grow right from the ears. Sometimes wild, sometimes affectionate, sometimes submissive, sometimes mysterious female eyes look from shop windows, from the walls of houses, from canning labels, from magazines and newspapers. And with respect you remember the wisdom of our great compatriot, who briefly said that it is impossible to embrace the immensity. That is why we probably do not decorate cities with beautiful women, so as not to get upset in vain, so that we, men, are calmer, so as not to wag men's nerves, not to shorten our lives.

Without a goal, without haste, I circle the narrow streets, I smoke cigarettes. Jena Street... Kepler Street... Baudelaire Street... Some kind of boulevard turned into a market, into an endless still life.

Colors and smells hit the eyes, the nose, caress, rattle, wriggle under the transparent plastic roof of the boulevard market.

Pineapples, oranges, apples, shells, pink chickens with blue labels, cucumbers, onions, asparagus, butchered hares and rabbits, garlands of fur legs around vendors, bananas, strange fish, nuts, colorful juice cans, meat, meat, meat, mountains carnations to the very roof, pounds of roses, centners of double daisies, fountains of cannes, again oysters, sea urchins, shrimps, lobsters, dazzling aprons and caps; female economic noise-talk, as in all markets of the world...

The end is not in sight. I'm going out to the square to make up my mind. I'm drawing a plan. It turns out that the market is President Wilson Avenue.

The President must be delicious in the next world.

The Eiffel Tower is within easy reach - just cross the Seine ... In his dying delirium, Maupassant claimed that God from the Eiffel Tower declared him his son, his own and Jesus Christ ... Maupassant dreamed of beautiful landscapes of Russia and Africa in his delirium. Why Russia? We never had it... The Eiffel Tower crushed Maupassant's sick brain with its metallic vulgarity. Today, Maupassant is hardly remembered in France, they are not published, they are surprised if you name him among your favorite writers: “Listen, what kind of stylist is he?” And why the hell be a stylist, if Maupassant is not a stylist already?

I cross the Seine on a bridge gaudily decorated with plywood snowflakes. Snowflakes crown the lampposts - in a month the New Year.

It's raining again. The hay is gray-blue. Steamboats and barges are blue and white. The Seine, of course, is not the Neva, but a muscular river, strong, and firmly held by its stone embankments. However, as in any river, it has a soul and a special river mood. The flow of the river is unconsciously associated with the passage of time, it awakens something lyrical and light-sad in the soul.

Walking to the right of the Concord bridge along the Seine. The Eiffel Tower is already very close. But between her and me, cars are rushing in five rows. I stand at the semaphore for a minute, five, ten. The semaphore stares thoughtlessly at my forehead with red fire. Spoiled? Here is the center of Paris! Cars are rushing by in a continuous stream. Spend the night here, right?

A long, aristocratic-looking old man approaches from behind. And a hefty dog ​​on a belt. Great Dane under a mackintosh... Mackintosh is a French general... The mackintosh is buttoned under the sunken belly of the dog.

The old man approaches the semaphore pole and presses the button. The yellow light comes on. Jackal-cars slow down. Lights up green.

The old man chapa majestically across the embankment. Then a dog in a mac. Then I. Well, why stop traffic if no one wants to cross the embankment? And you need to press the button. Even the dog looks contemptuously.

I sit down on a wet bench in the square in front of the tower. Pigeons and dogs roam around - there are in capes, and in fur coats, and in miniskirts. And naked pigeons are evicted from Paris to special reservations, like Indians in America. Pigeons carry the disease. The last Parisian pigeons roam around in the puddles. Farewell, doves!

What does the power of authorities mean! The Eiffel Tower also seems vulgar to me. Old-fashioned heavy structures, massive rivets, and unclear design. Although a hefty tower - the cap falls. The summit, of course, floats, because the clouds float.

Four huge hooves rested on the Parisian soil - northern, southern, western and eastern hooves. Pavilions with souvenirs are in the hooves, flags and balloons flutter. The polygon of the emerald lawn under the center of the tower. Old weeping trees and young, with variegated, bright, wet autumn foliage.

Lots of old men and women. They walk between huge hooves, no one raises their heads, they forgot about the tower, they graze dogs. Quiet and deserted.

Wind. Freshly.

And somehow I do not feel the strangeness of what fate has brought here. I want to evoke strangeness in myself, I want to be shocked, and - it doesn’t work.

With the air of a careless Parisian, I walk back to the embankment in order to indifferently and confidently press the traffic light button. Be it wrong! Not a single car. Obviously, someone upstream stopped them. But for the sake of interest, I still press the button. Obediently lit yellow, then green. I am walking in pleasant green rays, but it is a little disappointing that I could not stop the avalanche of metal, rubber, glass and gasoline.

Then I rise high above the Seine along a narrow footbridge, stop in the middle, lean on the wet railing.

Grey, autumn water in bridgehead whirlpools. A boat flooded under the shore - only the bow sticks out.

Quiet, mother-of-pearl, deserted, and again somehow abandoned, and again sad. Why? From what? For what? For your stupid, lazy life? For a youth that has gone so suddenly, staggeringly suddenly?

And suddenly I realize that I'm saying goodbye to Paris all the time. I am not happy to meet him, but I say goodbye. I cover, of course, the sadness of farewell with external cheerfulness, as everyone does on the platform, but it is in me. I must have reached the banks of the Seine late. The sadness of farewell came with me down the ladder from the plane in Bourges. I started saying goodbye without saying hello.

And this prosaic thought: if time is short, if you still don’t see a thousandth of what you can see in Paris, then why bother to strive somewhere, to fulfill the program? I'd rather stand like this, over the gray Seine. The self-propelled gun, bubbling and rumbling, will rush under a narrow footbridge, will flash among the mother-of-pearl, autumn Paris with a brand new, bright tricolor flag, will remind you of the Neva bridges, the quiet waters of the Svir, the muddy expanses of the Ob Bay. And the Louvre, the Grand Opera - God bless them ... And forget about the temptation to join the chic life of celebrities - you suddenly envy them, then you laugh at yourself for being envious. All this chic limousine life is as far from the truth as the cover of an illustrated magazine is from a Van Gogh painting.

I go down to the water. A stove is burning under the bridge support, three repair workers are frying shrimp, the smell of fried fish and resinous smoke are drawn in.

Upstream is a clean white-and-blue boat "Petrus", holding on to the frames of the embankment with neat mooring lines.

Gray water flounders in the flooded boat. The high embankment wall hid the city. No Paris. The smell of river water and the faint splash of a wave.

A girl in a black coat comes towards me, climbs the gangplank aboard the Petrus, opens the superstructure door, and immediately a huge dog jumps out, runs ashore, sniffs me. The girl says something. Probably reassures me so that I am not afraid that the dog does not bite.

Perhaps this is a harmful thought: if you cannot see everything, then there is nothing to strive for this. Then why live at all? And to stand all his life on the bridge across the river?

I board a small motorboat. The boat hibernates on keel blocks, it is covered with a tarpaulin cover, but the tarpaulin is poorly covered - the canvas has sagged, rainwater has collected in it, fallen plane tree leaves float in the water. On the blunt stern of the boat it is written that he was born in France and belongs to the Lyceum Espadon, under the inscription an enamel dolphin frolics.

The Seine flows quickly, in a day the water that I see will pass Rouen, quietly, imperceptibly dissolve into the English Channel, become salty ocean water, meet real dolphins. I remember the black night at Boulogne, the little French sparrow, the warm xue wind... Then the shadows of a forgotten children's book appear in my memory. History of the Franco-Prussian War. The boy leaves to fight the Prussians. Defeat. He hides from his enemies in the forest, goes hungry, finds a dead chicken, roasts it on a fire, eats it half-baked, without salt... Etienne! Etienne was his name! - I remember and I am glad that I remembered the name, the picture in which he is with a knapsack, with an old gun. I remember that in my distant, pre-war childhood, I envied the knapsack, bayonet and gun of this Etienne. And he cried when the French were defeated by the disgusting Prussians.

The Seine and my Parisian time are running fast. The black dog ran back to the steamboat. The girl in the black coat left. Workers have eaten shrimp and are gathering scaffolding under the bridge. The workers put on their helmets and looked like firefighters.

Rain again. Drumming on the tarpaulin of the boat cover.

Paris is beautiful, although one always wants to find a flaw in it, to convict those who praised Paris in exaggeration, in the lack of praise of their own opinion, in their fit for traditional statements. But all this does not work. Perhaps it's the beautiful sadness of farewell? Or that he returns to the forgotten, childish? God knows, but Paris is beautiful. And all the artists of the world who painted its embankments, houses, trees, sky and women are beautiful.