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RA Magazine Spring 2008

Issue Number: 98

Local heroes

Eminent historian of Russia Professor Orlando Figes traces the origins of Russian primitivist art to the home-grown folk art of the peasant communities and spots the signs of unrest revealed in the paintings of the decades before the Revolution

In 1887, the painter Ilya Repin visited Leo Tolstoy on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana to paint the first in a series of portraits of the writer. Tolstoy was famously attempting to renounce his aristocratic background and live the simple life of a peasant, but he could not bring himself to break entirely from his privileged existence. During the day, he would put on peasant garb and labour in the fields, only to return to his manor house for dinner served by waiters in white gloves. A man of genuinely humble origins, Repin was disgusted by the count’s behaviour: ‘To descend for a day into this darkness of the peasantry’s existence and proclaim, “I am with you” – that is just hypocrisy.’

In 1891, a year of widespread famine in the countryside, Repin visited the writer once again. Tolstoy insisted on showing him the ‘peasant way’ to plough a field. ‘Several times,’ recalled Repin, ‘some Yasnaya Polyana peasants walked by, doffed their caps, bowed and then walked on, as if taking no notice of the count’s exploit. But then another group appears, evidently from the next village. They stop and stare for a long while. And then a strange thing happens. Never in my life have I seen a clearer expression of irony on a simple peasant’s face.’

The scene encapsulates the ambiguous encounter between Russia’s artists and its peasantry – 80 per cent of the country's population – in the decades prior to the 1917 Revolution. In the summer of 1874, thousands of student ‘populists’ had left the lecture halls of St Petersburg and Moscow and travelled to the countryside to dedicate themselves to the ‘people’s cause’ – by learning crafts and trades, teaching peasant children how to read and organising them for the revolutionary struggle against tsarism. Like Tolstoy, these young missionaries were riddled with the guilt of privilege. They sought to free themselves from their parents’ sinful world, whose riches had been purchased by the people’s sweat and blood, and set out for the villages in a spirit of repentance and hopeful expectation of founding a new nation with the peasantry. The students were met by a cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasants, who were wary of their learning and their urban ways, and reported them to the police.

What had given rise to the students’ idealistic hopes was the Emancipation of the Serfs. Writers such as Dostoevsky compared the decree of 1861 to the conversion of Russia to Christianity in the tenth century. They spoke about the need for the landlord and the peasant to overcome their old divisions and become reconciled by nationality. The Emancipation presented a new challenge to Russia's artists and writers: to recognise the peasant as a fellow citizen and explain his nature to society. The peasants lived in a world apart from the educated classes of the towns. ‘The study of the people is the science of our times,’ declared the folklorist Fedor Buslaev in 1868.

Ethnographic museums were set up in Moscow and St Petersburg, their aim being to ‘acquaint the Russians with their own nation’, with the way of life of the peasantry, according to one of their founders. The public were astounded by the peasant costumes and utensils on display, as if they were looking at the artefacts of some exotic colony. Suddenly, the old accursed questions about Russia’s destiny and national character were entangled in the question of the peasant’s true identity. Was he good or bad? Could he be civilized? What could he do for Russia? And where did he come from? No one knew the answers, for in the famous lines of the poet Nikolai Nekrasov:

Russia is contained in the rural depths
Where eternal silence reigns.

The identity of the Russian peasant was a central quest of the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), the group of realist painters (Repin among them) who broke away from the Imperial Academy of Arts in the 1860s and sold their more typically Russian art through travelling exhibitions in the provinces (from which they derived their name). Repin was a ‘man of the Sixties’ – a decade which saw a rebellious questioning in the arts as well as in society.

In the democratic circles in which he moved it was generally agreed that the duty of the artist was to focus the attention of society on the need for social justice by showing how the common people really lived. In paintings such as Repin’s Bargemen on The Volga from 1873 or Ivan Kramskoi’s The Peasant Ignatii Pirogov from 1874 - the first named portrait of a peasant in the history of Russian art – there is an intense focus on the ethnographic details of the peasants’ dress and physiognomy and a new emphasis on their human dignity.

Earlier painters had portrayed the peasant as an agriculturalist. But Kramskoi, for example, painted him as an individual human being, usually against a plain background. He focused on the face, drawing viewers in towards the eyes and forcing them to enter the inner world of the peasant. There were no implements or scenic landscapes, such as those depicted by Isaac Levitan, no thatched huts or other details to distract the viewer from the peasant’s gaze or reduce the tension of the encounter. This intense psychological concentration was without precedent in the history of art, not just in Russia but in Europe, too, where even artists such as Courbet and Millet were still depicting peasants in the fields.

By the 1890s, the need to capture the peasantry through art assumed a greater urgency. Industrialisation was undermining the old peasant handicrafts, and millions of peasants were abandoning the village for a new life in the towns. Peasant Russia appeared to be losing its identity as railways brought it closer to the modern urban culture of the industrial world.

This was the concern of the artists’ colony established by Elizaveta Mamontov, the wife of one of Russia’s biggest railway magnates, on her estate at Abramtsevo near Moscow in the 1870s. It was a project that would lead directly to the Ballets Russes, according to its founder Sergei Diaghilev, who later claimed that the Ballets Russes had its intellectual origins in the art world of the Russian peasantry. ‘In objects of utility (domestic implements in the country districts), in the painting on the sleighs, in the designs and
colours of peasant dresses, or the carving around a window frame, we found our motifs, and on this foundation we built,’ he declared.

At Abramtsevo the Mamontovs established a carpentry workshop to keep the old peasant crafts alive. Artists such as Elena Polenova took their inspiration from this peasant art. Under her direction, new workshops were set up at Abramtsevo to cater to the growing urban middleclass market for pottery and linen in the ‘Russian style’. Polenova and her artists would go around the villages copying the designs on window frames and doors, household utensils and furniture, which they would then adapt for the stylised designs of the craft goods manufactured in the colony’s workshops.

Urban fans of this ‘neo-national’ style, such as Diaghilev, saw it as a direct expression of authentic peasant art. But in fact it was a fantasy – an abstraction of certain elements (colour, form and iconography) of the Russian folk art tradition, from which artists developed the Art Nouveau style championed by World of Art-, the influential magazine established by Diaghilev and Alexander Benois in 1898. The folk-like use of bright colours, such as the reds of Malyavin’s _Dancing Peasant Woman from 1913 became a visual model for the exotic ‘Russian’ stage designs of the Ballets Russes and primitivist painters such as Goncharova, Malevich and Chagall.

The word for ‘red’ in Russian (krasnyi) is connected to the word for ‘beautiful’(krasivyi) which explains, among other things, the naming of Red Square. Red is also the colour of fertility, a sacred gift, in the folklore of the Russian peasantry. In textiles, by contrast, this peasant style was increasingly adapted to the subtler tastes of the urban middle class. Instead of the gaudy colours favoured by the peasants in their own designs (orange, red and yellow), the craft goods manufactured at Abramtsevo or in the textile workshops at Talashkino (Princess Tenisheva’s artistic colony) used the more subdued colours – dark green, cream and brown – that appealed to urban tastes.

The Russian primitivists Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, Goncharova and Larionov also took their inspiration from the art of the peasants – and in Kandinsky’s case from the pagan tribal cultures of Eurasia. They saw a type of classicism in its simplicity, in its close connection to peasant daily life and ritual, and in its antiquity. Whereas Gauguin and other Western artists had to travel to exotic far-off lands for their primitivist inspiration, for the Russians, their ‘primitives’ were to be found in their own backyard.

It gave their art an extraordinary freshness and significance. Goncharova was inspired by icon painting and by old folk art such as the lubok, a type of woodcut print. Their influence can be felt in Peasants from 1911, one of four surviving fragments from The Grape Harvest, a composition in nine parts. The figures have an epic quality, a spiritual calm, in harmony with the biblical motifs of the composition as a whole. Yet the raw physical power of these monumental figures is threatening, as if their viewers – like the fate of Russia, or the grapes balanced on the peasants’ heads – could be thrown and crushed beneath their heavy boots.

There is a similarly threatening atmosphere in Larionov’s portraits of soldiers. For example, in his Soldier Smoking, 1910-11, the young lad’s rather cocky smile, his relaxed manner, the way he drapes his coat over his shoulder and smokes his cigarette in front of us, all reveal the body language of a social revolution, a change in attitude towards authority which would see power pass to soldiers such as this.

The failure of the 1905 Revolution and the mood of violence that it left behind explain this growing sense of threat from the dark masses. Repin’s October 17th, 1905 captures the high hopes of the 1905 Revolution, when mass demonstrations in St Petersburg and other cities of the Russian Empire forced the tsar, Nicholas II, to concede political reforms in the Manifesto of October 17th. Like everyone else in the democratic intelligentsia, Repin hoped that these reforms would end autocracy, liberate the people and unite Russia as a modern European state. Painted in 1907, the picture shows, according to Repin’s description, ‘a procession of the Liberation Movement by Russian progressive society – mostly students, professors, workers with red flags, all enthused and singing revolutionary songs!’

Banned at first by the censors, by the time the painting was finally displayed, at the 41st exhibition of the Wanderers in 1912, the mood in the country had darkened. The reforming Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin had been assassinated by a revolutionary terrorist in 1911; liberal reforms were no longer on the cards. Repin’s hopes of national unity, of students and workers marching arm in arm for the ‘people’s cause’, were now a distant memory as militant workers abandoned their political alliance with the Liberation Movement of 1905 and turned increasingly towards the Bolsheviks, whose calls for social revolution matched their growing impatience.

In 1912, St Petersburg was paralysed by violent workers’ strikes. The agrarian violence that had threatened to drive the gentry off the land in 1905 was threatening to erupt again. The benign image of the peasant that had filled the canvases of painters such as Repin in an earlier age was now replaced by darker visions of the people. The Symbolist poet Alexander Blok summed up the sense of imminent catastrophe when, in 1913, he described Russia as living on a volcano:

And over Russia I see a quiet
Far-spreading fire consume all.