Vasnetsov’s Reverie

Olga Atroschenko, writing in the Tretyakov Gallery Magazine for the 175th anniversary, dates him 1848–1926 and sets a self-portrait of 1873, seventy-one by fifty-eight centimetres, at the front of the rooms. Yekaterina Vasina, in the same issue, calls him one of the brightest artists of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the man who formed a new folklore trend in the national art. His works, she says, still influence our idea of what the heroes of Russian epic bylinas and fairy tales should look like. That is not a small claim. It means a visitor who has never read a bylina may still know the faces: Ilya Muromets under a hand at his brow, Alyonushka on a stone, a carpet over a river with a firebird in a cage. The self-portrait is earlier weather. A young painter, dark coat, dark ground. The later walls are what the looking was for.

I lived in a village among peasant men and women and loved them not in a populist, narodnik, way, but simply as my friends and pals; I listened to their songs and fairy tales, lost myself in them while sitting on the stove in the light and crackling of the splinter torch.

Fyodor Chaliapin, whom Atroschenko quotes, heard the same origin as a geology: people who seem as if made from ancient Scythian soil, coming out of the spruce forests of Vyatka to the pampered capitals. Massive in spirit and strong in body, such were the Vasnetsov brothers. Dry strength of the old stamp lived in both. The letter to Stasov is the painter’s own version of that soil. He did not love the village as a narodnik loves a cause. He loved songs and fairy tales as a boy loves a stove. Vasina dates his study at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1868 to 1874, not continuously. Upon coming to St Petersburg he was already, he later told Stasov, haunted by historical and fairy-tale reveries. He illustrated alphabets for the people, the Firebird, later Yershov’s Humpbacked Horse. In the first half of the 1870s he made the first graphic sketches of The Knight at the Crossroads and of The Bogatyrs. The stove had already chosen the walls.

He began, Atroschenko reminds us, where the Wanderers began: genre, the poorer dwellers, a pity that knew how to be a picture. Moving House, 1876, in the Tretyakov, had unquestioned success. Then he changed the subject matter. Russian realist painting was dominated by denunciatory intonations and pity for the peasant man. Vasnetsov had those pictures, and left them. The turn looked, to contemporaries, like a desertion of the present. It was, on his showing, a return to the stove. “Although I am only an artist,” he wrote in 1908, “I love my people not only in paintings and genres — I love them through and through, their mighty, if sometimes sweeping, nature, their song and fairy tale, their artistry, and finally their long-suffering history.” The sentence is a programme after the fact. The pictures are what happened when pity was no longer enough and beauty had to carry a bylina.

An important prompt, Vasina says, was France in 1876–1877. Paris was emotional and creative loneliness. He wrote to Vasily Maksimov from Meudon on 20 August 1876 that life was fair to middling, neither boring nor cheerful; work sometimes saved him from storms of sadness and boredom of the heaviest, most desperate kind. In the midst of a foreign life you suddenly feel that all around you is just an empty space with figures without people, with faces without souls, with speech without meaning. The heart cannot attach itself to anything. Alone, alone, and alone. Homesickness, in that letter, is not a souvenir. It is the reason the first sketch of The Bogatyrs was painted there. He returned in the spring of 1877. His daughter remembered that on coming to Vyatka he immediately began The Knight at the Crossroads. Already in March 1878 it hung at the sixth exhibition of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions.

The knight did not meet the requirements of the public. S. V. Flyorov wrote that the rider was too real, the setting too coarse. Ivan Kramskoi, in a letter to Repin dated 26 March 1878, was harsher: “No, not good! … I am very sorry, a thousand times sorry, but it is impossible to say anything to him. And what a motif he spoilt!” Fairy-tale themes were not alien to the Wanderers — Kramskoi himself had shown Mermaids in 1871 — but Vasnetsov’s coarse stone and halted horse were the wrong temperature. He continued. Vasina lists the works the later public would treat as a canon: Alyonushka, 1881, Tretyakov; Ivan-Tsarevich on the Grey Wolf, 1889; The Flying Carpet, 1880, Nizhny Novgorod; The Bogatyrs, 1881–1898, Tretyakov. Ruthless criticism did not cancel the stove. It taught him that a motif could be spoilt in a friend’s eyes and still be the only motif he had.

The Knight at the Crossroads

In 1880, immediately after The Last Battle of Igor Svyatoslavich’s Army against the Polovtsy, he created The Flying Carpet. Both paintings, Atroschenko writes, were negatively perceived, and both became programme-setting. Pavel Tretyakov wrote to Kramskoi that less educated people did not understand the “Battlefield”; educated people said he did not succeed; “The Flying Carpet” was laughed at, ridiculed by both. Igor Grabar, looking later, said the artist’s painting “Slaughter” opened a new era in Russian art because it initiated attempts to capture the ideal of national beauty. The battlefield is not a report from 1185. It is a nineteenth-century steppe of the dead, a Lay that has put on oil. The carpet is the other temperature from the same year: a youth, a river, a caged firebird. Savva Mamontov hung it in the dining room of his Moscow flat, where it became an emblem of the Abramtsevo circle. Laughter in the papers. A hearth in a dining room. Both facts can sit in one career.

Atroschenko quotes Apollinary Vasnetsov comparing the Kremlin with the beautiful dwelling of the Firebird: centuries-long creative work of the people, bylinas and fairy tales told about it. Viktor, in the Mamontov house, formulated the circle’s food. Truth, goodness, beauty is the most necessary and essential food of man; without them man will waste himself and perish. The hospitable home of Savva Ivanovich and Yelizaveta Grigorievna, he thought, sheltered the hearth for serving goodness and beauty. Beauty, he told Stasov in 1902, was not just per se but a reflection of the highest spiritual beauty, inner, therefore supreme. He had heard from Antokolsky that the Greeks expressed the ideal of outer physical beauty, and the Christian era gave the artist the ideal of spiritual beauty. The dining-room carpet is easier to like than that sentence. The sentence is why the carpet is not a toy. A firebird in a cage is a beauty that has to be carried home through air.

The Flying Carpet

Alyonushka, 1881, in the Tretyakov, is one hundred and seventy-three by one hundred and twenty centimetres of a girl who will not get up. Vasina places it among the main folklore-epic works. A later Tretyakov essay on the picture and the gusli players notes that the Gallery received it under the title Alenushka, without a mention of fairy-tale roots, and that Afanasiev’s tale of sister and brother does not match the narrative of the canvas. Viewers supplied the tale anyway. The girl on the stone, the dark water, the aspens, became a folklore they already knew how to feel. Abramtsevo’s landscape is in the studies. The Wanderers’ pity is still in the sarafan. What is new is that nature answers as a mother answers, and the pond pulls like a magnet. She is not a genre peasant who will stand and walk home. She is a stillness the forest has agreed to keep. After her, a Russian pond is never only water. It is a place where a story might drown.

Ivan Tsarevich Riding the Grey Wolf, 1889, two hundred and fifty-two by one hundred and eighty-seven and a half centimetres, is the other Abramtsevo temperature: speed, a dark wood, a blossom Ilya Ostroukhov noticed as a new detail. Yesterday the painting was received for the exhibition, he wrote; whoever he asked liked it, even Yaroshenko. Since he saw it, new details had appeared, all of them adding beauty. One was very large — a wild apple tree blossoming between the Tsarevich and the right edge. The apple is not a still-life. It is the forest consenting to be a fairy tale in flower. Atroschenko sets the canvas with the Snow Maiden designs as a standard for a generation. Alexandre Benois later wrote that only a man selflessly in love with his native country, deeply understanding its special charm, could rediscover the law of Old Russian beauty, having rejected the schemes of superficial nationalists and academic eclecticism. The wolf is that law in motion. The blossom is that law at rest.

Costume and set sketches for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden, 1885, in the Tretyakov, are a different stage in the same love. Vasnetsov told how they were born. The first time he saw the Snow Maiden was on Trinity Day on the Sparrow Hills; the Berendey Chamber came to him while he was admiring a Kolomna Palace model. Artists wondered where he got such colours. The answer, he said, was simple: from folk festivals in Vyatka or on Maiden Field in Moscow, from the iridescent play of pearls, beads, coloured stones on kokoshniks, quilted jackets, fur coats, and other women’s clothes. Rimsky’s opera had been dated by the 1911 Britannica to 1880. Five years later Mamontov’s Private Opera asked the painter to make the tsardom visible. Elena Polenova, using his sketches, made stage costumes. The collaboration is not a footnote. It is folklore moving from a dining-room carpet onto a stage that would sing.

He finished The Bogatyrs in the year of his fiftieth birthday and showed it at his first personal exhibition in St Petersburg in 1899. Vasina gives the oil as 1881–1898, two hundred and ninety-five point three by four hundred and forty-six centimetres, Tretyakov. Atroschenko prints a photograph of the painter against the canvas in 1897, still at work. The three riders — Dobrynya, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich — are the stove’s last large sentence. Buslayev had written that Russian folk epos serves as an unwritten chronicle, an expression of historical self-awareness. Vasnetsov, on that showing, did not illustrate a plot. He painted a chronicle that could sit on a wall. In 1915 the taleteller Maria Krivopolenova walked the Tretyakov tired, then livened in front of the three. “Once upon a time there lived glorious bogatyrs. It’s not a fairy tale or a fable but life as it is.” She began a bylina. The old woman is Atroschenko’s proof that the wall had reached the mouth it came from.

The Bogatyrs

The other late public face is not a rider. Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible, 1897, is a nineteenth-century vision of a ruler in a decorated interior, not a likeness from life. Between the bogatyrs and the tsar sit the church walls: St Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev, where Vasina says he worked from 1885 to 1896, and the other Orthodox decorations of the fiftieth-year years. Grabar’s new era is not only a battlefield. It is a permission for history to include fairy tale, and for fairy tale to include a kind of prayer. Sergei Makovsky wrote that owing to Vasnetsov, Russian painters’ view of the truth of history had changed: the fairy-tale and fantastic element was inseparable from it; everyday reality could be loved without reducing the past to coronations. Diaghilev, organiser of the Russian Ballet Seasons, saw the greatest contribution in a national romantic style. When Vasnetsov walked around the Vatican or in Paris, Diaghilev wrote, he would scrutinise Burne-Jones, then feel with love the beauty of his pristine nationality.

The Tretyakov’s own façade, in a watercolour of 1900–1901 that Atroschenko reproduces, is the civic end of the same looking: a museum asking to be entered as if it were a tale. He organised six personal exhibitions, sat on committees, became a founding member, in 1915, of the Society for the Revival of Artistic Russia. With war and then civil war, commissions ceased. Vasina follows him into The Poem of Seven Tales, 1901–1926, a cycle he knew he would not show, painted while he called himself a man of the old Russia, to whom the new was not to his liking. This page does not have to follow him into every sleeping tsarevna of the 1910s. The stove, the knight, the pond, the wolf, the carpet, the three on the hill are the way in. They are also, already, the national faces later children would meet before they met a bylina. That was Vasina’s opening claim. The walls still make it true.

Repin’s portrait of him is the colleague’s weather: a painter looking at the man who had taken folklore onto the Wanderers’ walls and survived Flyorov’s coarseness and Kramskoi’s regret. Polenova, parting with him when he left for Kiev, wrote that the richness of inner content in this man was striking; every one of the Abramtsevo circle could draw something new. The circle is the dining room, the Snow Maiden, the carpentry, the young who would become Vrubel and Malyutin. The visitor who knows only the three riders has met the visiting card. The visitor who wants the man should make room for the 1873 self-portrait, the 1876 sledge, the halted knight, the girl who will not get up, and the letter about a stove. He is not Repin’s crowd. He is the dream Repin’s crowd still had in its mouth. After him, a Russian fairy tale is never only a children’s book. It is a hill of riders the size of a chronicle.

Begin with The Bogatyrs if you want the reason his name is a bylina word. Stay for Alyonushka if you want a pond that answers. The Knight at the Crossroads is the halt before the reputation, the picture friends thought spoilt. The Flying Carpet is the dining-room emblem the papers laughed at. Ivan Tsarevich on the Grey Wolf is the apple blossom Ostroukhov watched appear. The Snow Maiden sketches are the night the fairy tale learned to be an opera. Moving House is the Wanderer he was before the stove took the rest of the life. He wrote to Stasov that the reveries never stopped haunting him, even when genre was at its highest. The haunting is the career. The Tretyakov still hangs it at chronicle size. A girl at a pond, three men on a hill, a stone with a choice: after those, a Russian childhood knows the faces before it knows the sources. That, too, is a kind of epos.