Russian Visual Arts Project

TITLE: 'The Exhibition at the Academy of Arts, 1860-1861' (1)

AUTHOR: F.M. Dostoevskii

There is one picture in the exhibition that has a crowd in front of it all day long. As soon as one person leaves, another arrives. They crowd round and try to work their way in so as to get a closer look, or they worm their way between the crowd and the painting. The crowd is extremely varied in composition. There are some heads in expensive hats and some in head-squares, there are long frock-coats and short military jackets, there are helmets and Siberian caftans and beards. Everyone likes the painting; no other picture has such a crowd constantly in front of it. The public's verdict is in no sense unclear or ambivalent: there can be no doubt about it - they like the painting more than any other in the present exhibition.

The painting can be found in the Second Gallery of Antiquities. The exhibition catalogue informs us that it depicts 'A Group of Convicts at a Halt', that it was painted by Mr Iakobi, (2) that its price is 1500 roubles, and that the artist won a Major Gold Medal for it, i.e. he will go abroad for three or four years at public expense in order to develop his talent further. In addition, just after the exhibition opened a ticket was hung on the painting with the word 'sold' on it. It turns out that the artist's aim was fully achieved: his work was popular, he gained fame and glory, and moreover for him the smoke of glory took on the tangible, material form of a sizeable pile of filthy lucre. And he also has the prospect of living for three or four years in bella Italia. We congratulate the artist on having gained all these benefits; his career has begun splendidly, and we wish him further and even more resoundingly brilliant successes.

But in the name of art, let us say a few words about the painting itself. After all, the tale of The Three Musketeers (3) had a huge number of readers and it brought its author a considerable sum of money. But these circumstances cannot be taken as irrefutable evidence that that Alexander Dumas the Elder's famous tale is the height of perfection. We will not insult the conscientious and truthful painter by further comparison with the famous teller of tales; indeed, we say this only because Russian critics regard Dumas in a very bad light. The famous purveyor of humbug has certain characteristics that redeem many faults, and a totally condescending tone in regard to him is not entirely appropriate. Alexander Dumas has a no less artistic double within the ranks of Russian painters. But we'll turn to that later. (4) In mentioning Dumas, we simply wanted to say that the judgement of the majority is not always identical to the judgement of posterity. The effect of time, like that of true critical appraisal, is to make tinsel lose its lustre and fall away, leaving pure, unadorned truth.

A group of convicts has come to a halt. It is an enforced halt because one of the carts has broken down. A wheel is lying flat on the ground, hub upwards; a peasant in a dreadfully torn caftan is unharnessing the horses. On the cart lies a man whose journey is over. He is dead, but his feet are still chained. His body still counts as a convict and will only cease to be the concern of the Prison Transportation Department when it is finally consigned to the earth. Judging from the expensive ring on his finger, it is obvious that he was not an ordinary prisoner; it is clear that he was not a tramp, a murderer or a thief. The body is lying in the cart, half-covered by an old mat. The hand of the deceased, deathly pale, hangs over the side; the fingers are bent just as they were at the moment of death. On one finger there is the expensive ring. Perhaps this is the final symbol of what was most valuable to the dead man: possibly a cherished gift from the woman he loved, a memory of a friend. He kept it to the end, even when he was in chains.

Another convict has crawled under the cart, a man with a repulsive face, a hardened criminal whom society has ejected from its midst in disgust. There, under the cart, bent over double in the most unnatural fashion because it's an awkward, tight squeeze, he is pulling the valuable ring from the dead man's finger. The criminal is dressed in rags, and he produces the same effect on the viewer as some sort of disgusting reptile, and at the same time there is something dangerous and scorpion-like in him.

Near the cart stands the transportation guard. With one hand he is opening one of the eyes of the dead man in order to check, no doubt, that he really is dead. What is opened is a large, dead eye with the pupil turned downwards. With extreme indifference the officer smokes his pipe and looks calmly at the dull eye, and his hard face shows absolutely no emotion - no involvement, no compassion, no surprise, - nothing at all, just as if he were looking at a dead cat, or a little bird lying dead by the roadside. He is much more concerned with his pipe than with the dead man into whose eye he merely glanced. Among those who share his profession there are very many just like him. It could not be otherwise. These men spend their whole lives accompanying groups of convicts and they grow tired of looking at those unfortunates, they grow accustomed to the suffering and the illness, they grow used to seeing among the convicts people who are mostly wicked. The nature of their work dulls their sensibilities and they sometimes beat the convicts with as little feeling as they fill their pipes.

In the foreground of the painting, on the right, a convict dressed in rags, paying no attention to what is going on around him, is busy with his own concerns: he is examining a wound on his leg caused by the rubbing of the leg-irons. This man has probably been a prisoner for many years in different jails and has been transported several times from one to another thousands of versts (5) away, and his hard face has a look that is common to people of this type; it is a look of complete indifference to everything in the world, whether it be the weather or the season, or a friend being tortured, or his own suffering. With precisely this dull indifference he stares at his wound, and no expression can be detected on his hard face, half-covered by his tousled hair.

There are also many secondary figures in the painting: a woman with children, other convicts, horses, peasants, carts, but all of this is in the background. The painting is astonishingly lifelike. Things really happen just as the artist has portrayed them, provided one looks at things, as it were, purely externally. In Mr Iakobi's painting the viewer actually sees real convicts just as he would see them, for example, in a mirror or a photograph that was subsequently coloured by an expert. But this is actually the absence of art. A photograph and a reflection in a mirror are by no means works of art. If they were works of art, then we would be satisfied with photographs and good mirrors, and the Academy of Arts would be one enormous white elephant. No, this is not what is required of an artist, not photographic verisimilitude, not mechanical accuracy, but something else, something bigger, wider, deeper. Accuracy and verisimilitude are necessary, they are basic essentials, but they are not sufficient. Accuracy and verisimilitude are just the raw material from which the work of art is then created; they are the tools of creative work. In a mirror reflection you cannot see how the mirror looks at the object, or rather you can see that it does not look at the object at all, it merely reflects passively and mechanically. A true artist cannot do this. Whether in a painting or a story or a musical composition, the artist himself will be visible. He will be reflected whether he wishes it or not, even against his will. He will be expressed with all his views, with his character, with his level of education. This assertion does not require to be proven. If two people talk about the same thing, say an ordinary incident that took place in the street, then as often as not even from another room, even without seeing the speakers themselves, you can tell how old each of them is, what job they each do, whether they are military men or civilians, which of the two is the better educated, and even what rank each of them holds in the Table of Ranks. (6) In our age there is and can be no epic, calm impartiality. If it were to exist, then it would only be in people lacking all intellectual development, or else people with a butterfly mentality for whom any sort of involvement is impossible, or finally, perhaps, people who have completely lost their faculties. Since one cannot conceive of these three sad possibilities in an artist, then the viewer has the right to demand that the artist should see nature not as a camera lens would, but as a person. In the old days they would have said that he should look with the body's eyes and also with the soul's eyes, or the 'eye of the spirit'. Let him see the human beings in these unfortunate convicts and let him show us them. Let us admit that transportation guards are often insensitive people solely because their responsibilities are not compatible with notable sensitivity. But one artist, in his famous poem The Tale of a Transportation Guard, (7) has managed to uncover the human being lying within his callous hero. Let us admit that most convicts become reconciled to their hopeless situation, that they become indifferent to everything. But all the same, one cannot deny that they are human beings. So if you are an artist, portray them as human beings, and leave their photographs to be studied by phrenologists or forensic investigators.

There is no trace of artistry in this sense in Mr Iakobi's painting. He photographed each of his subjects and he made an investigative error. All the figures in his painting are equally roguish, and they are all the same. Perhaps he was led to think of them like this because they were chained together for the journey. They are all equally ugly, from the twisted guard to the old nag that is being unharnessed by a peasant. The only exception is the hero of the painting, the dead man covered by the torn mat. Judging from what remains of him, he was probably handsome, but such are the requirements of the academic tradition. He could not have been endowed with more ordinary, less classical features. Thus we see a man of breeding amidst the vulgar masses, vulgar in the sense in which he understood it all his life.

It is clear from the painting that, as a pupil of the Academy, Mr Iakobi put every effort into the correct, truthful, accurate depiction of reality. This is an extremely useful and necessary effort and is exceptionally praiseworthy for a pupil of the Academy. But it represents only the mechanical side of art, its alphabet and orthography. Of course, both must be perfected before embarking on creative artistic work. One must first overcome the difficulties in depicting real-life truth before one can proceed to the heights of artistic truth.

But Mr Iakobi, are you aware that in straining after photographic truth you have thereby painted a lie? Your picture is positively not truthful. It is melodrama, not reality. You strove so much for effect that that you failed to show mercy to that torn sheepskin coat being worn by the peasant. When have sheepskins ever been torn like that, right across the back? You needed chaos, disorder at any price. Why is the thief stealing the ring from the finger at the precise moment when the officer is coming? Rest assured that even before they told the officer that a man had died, the convicts would all have clamoured to tell him that he had a gold ring on his finger, and they would all be shouting this out, interrupting one another, maybe even fighting to get the story out. Rest assured also that before the group left Moscow and before the new convict with the ring joined his future comrades, the convicts already knew - without even seeing him - that he had a ring on his finger. Do you know as well that there is no way that the thief could steal the ring from under the cart? Do you know why? Because that ring was already too well known to the group. When the convict was ill and close to death, many - very many - of them were thinking, 'How can I steal it when he dies?' So now would all the rest permit some Vas'ka Mironov or other to take advantage of the situation, when that's exactly what Ivanov and Petrov and Aleksandrov wanted to do too? (8) They would be too envious to let him steal it. And if he did steal it, they would search him and find it straight away. Each of them would be thinking, 'If I can't have it, then no one's getting it', and they'd all be watching each other like hawks. But you were after an effect. For you it was essential that the smart thief should carry out his theft precisely when the officer arrived. You've got the smartness of the thief and at the same time you've got sacrilege. Taken together it's very effective. Let us note also that before looking into the dead man's eye the officer would probably have looked at the ring. After all, it was state property. A convict could have no property. Could the officer have overlooked this? We are convinced that the officer (acting purely in the interests of the state, of course) would even have looked at the convict's (rather fine) boots before looking in his eye. The convicts fighting over a game of cards also seem to be contrived for effect. Believe me, those convicts could not sit and play cards at a moment like this. They would undoubtedly have gone to see what the officer was going to do with the dead man, and in particular what was going to happen to the ring.

There is one further very amusing photographic inaccuracy. It is not really worth mentioning, of course. The convicts are in leg-irons, and one has even got a friction wound from the rubbing, and yet none of them are wearing the special leggings that are worn under leg-irons. You can rest assured that it would be impossible to walk for just one verst, never mind several thousand, without leather leggings to prevent friction on the legs. If you were to walk one stage of the journey without them your flesh would be rubbed through to the bone. And yet they are not there in the painting. Of course, you forgot about them, or perhaps your grasp of reality was not perfect. Naturally, this cannot be considered a major fault, although it's almost exactly the same as someone drawing horses and leaving off their tails. You yourself strove for photographic accuracy. That's why we are mentioning this. The most artistic figure in the entire painting is, of course, the officer. He is very good.

Let us hope that Mr Iakobi is on a good road and that he does not stop half way. He is already approaching the truth of reality. To go on to the higher truth he will need not academic work or the supervision of professors of painting, but rather a general education, a general development, which, as we know, has been lacking in the majority (though not all) of our artists.

In this regard there is nothing the Academy can do. All of its efforts are directed to the education of specialists and all the lectures at the Academy are of a utilitarian nature, they are all specialized. For example, history is taught there from the point of view of ... costume! In architecture, perspective is taught without descriptive geometry (i.e. the rules of perspective by touch). The theory of beauty is taught without any general philosophical training as preparation. Anatomy is taught in terms of bones, muscles and integument without considering the natural history of mankind, etc. Of course, a utilitarian direction like this fails to provide the general education that is absolutely essential for an artist, and the arts in Russia will never progress until there are serious preparatory courses for artists in the universities. Without this, we will never extricate ourselves from 'daguerrotyping' (more or less successful) on the one hand, or from endless classicism on the other.

This last point needs some further explication. In this year's exhibition there are three paintings depicting Charon ferrying souls across the River Styx. (9) There would have been a fourth, but instead (whether for practical or aesthetic reasons) there is an empty frame with a notice saying that the painting is in the process of being completed. (10) One must suppose it to be a very fine painting, since in its absence the Academy has decided to exhibit at least its frame. Incidentally, the frame is an exceptional piece of work, yet there is no mention of the maker's name. A subject like Charon ferrying souls is set for students at the Academy on the basis that it gives them the opportunity to depict the body; without the body there can be no academic picture. In the view of the Academy, a picture is especially good when it depicts the naked body, without clothing, or at most with some kind of drape. True, an artist has to study anatomy just as a doctor does; but for both the artist and the doctor anatomy is merely the means, not the goal. Moreover, times have changed. Nowadays we have absolutely no interest in any Milons of Croton, (11) even if they were carrying elephants rather than bulls. In Ancient Greece such people were very important because the Greeks had neither the carbine nor the revolver. The fate of the republic depended on the development of this or that muscle. For that reason alone citizens must have looked lovingly at muscles. Moreover, the Greek climate meant that the body did not have to be covered up with clothing to the extent that we have to. That's another reason why in Greece the body was held in such esteem by artists. And then there is a further reason, one that we share with them: admiration of the beautiful (and, of course, nothing in the world is more beautiful than a beautiful body). But where are our artists to find bodies? Where can one find a model who would enable one to paint a truly beautiful body, a model who would not require too much idealization? If you pay good money then you can find a reasonable male model, but there are absolutely no female ones who are remotely tolerable. Their feet have been twisted by boots, their bellies have been ruined by potatoes and by taking in the waistband of skirts to a stupid extent, so that poor art has to invent a woman. And indeed, what kind of woman do we see at our exhibition? Mr Alekseev (12) has given us a Bacchante who is displaying an inordinately large left breast, and we have Nymph with Satyr by Mr Manet (13) from Paris . Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful! This last picture has been exhibited, of course, with the intention of showing us the extent of the ugliness that can be reached by the imagination of an artist who has painted a completely flat picture and has given the nymph's body the colour of a five-day-old corpse. On the other hand, a woman in a modern dress is not suitable for a serious painting because crinoline and pinched waists are the height of ugliness, and an artist with pretensions to creating something longer-lasting than a fashionable little picture will turn away from them in horror. Incidentally, there is a picture like that at the exhibition, indeed more than one. Mr Strashinskii, (14) for example, is exhibiting A Girl in her Brother's Study. The girl, holding a book that she is half way through reading, draws back the cover from an indecent picture and admires it. The important thing is not the subject but the fact that the girl has been well painted. She is realistic, in a pink dress with a pinched waist, a crinoline petticoat, and a suitable corset. In five years at the most we will have some new fashion and her pink dress will be so out of date that it will be funny to look at it. It will create the same impression as a picture torn out of the Telegraph. But what was the artist to do? You can't find nude models anywhere, and crinoline, corsets and tail-coats are nauseating to anyone with the slightest taste.

But what precisely can be done about this is something we will return to later. Meanwhile, let us note that not only can pseudo-classicism not manage without the body and exaggeratedly wide drapes, but it also requires Charon always to be represented as powerfully built, with well developed and sharply defined muscles. Pseudo-classicism (or perhaps one should say 'academicism') in art has no time for Charon as a decrepit old man or for the notion that he ferried souls and not sacks of flour, and so his boat was not heavy and no great effort was required on his part. Also, academicism has no time for the idea that Charon was not an angry man; he got angry only when he saw among the shadows a living man, Dante, but then his anger passed and he calmly continued to go about his eternal task. (15) What need has academicism of all these notions that come to mind when one thinks of the set subject? If he's a ferryman, then let's see the whole of him, give him muscles like the strongest of the removal men who work for Mr Taivani. (16)

But the viewer will readily accept all these paintings representing Charon and souls if he remembers that these are works by people who are still learning, and that the artists were simply searching for nature, attempting to be accurate in draughtsmanship and in shading. When they are considered from this point of view, the paintings are very satisfactory. One can see that the artists have studied live models, that efforts have been made; perhaps in time these gentlemen will turn out to have artistic talent. The influence of Flaxman (17) can be seen in the draughtsmanship, but this influence does not come from Flaxman's better side; it is restricted to his draughtsmanship, whereas the sense of his artistry is not reflected in composition or in colouring. Of course, there is no colouring in Flaxman, but the mere outline of his figures shows that he considered Dante's souls to be transparent, with almost misty bodies that virtually melt into their surroundings. If the painters had attempted to convey this in their pictures then perhaps they would have been more artistic, closer to Dante's imagination, but it would have been incompatible with the demands of academicism. Old Charon is certainly no strong man; his feeble muscles move according to the immutable will of fate, he does not try, he does not strain every sinew; his activity is automatic, involuntary, it does not require the slightest effort. But academicism does not permit him to be so depicted, because if he were then there would be no sharply defined muscles, and you might end up with a real work of art if you're not careful!

The public has also been admiring four paintings of the same subject: 'The Grand Duchess Sofiia Vitovtovna tears off Vasilii Kosoi's belt at the wedding of Vasilii II, the Dark'. Three of these paintings were awarded Major Gold Medals, the highest academic award. Also, last year three of these artists received Minor Gold Medals for paintings on the theme of 'The Olympic Games' that greatly amused the inhabitants of St Petersburg who saw the exhibition. This year's 'Tearing off the belt' (18) is also an engaging topic, which the four artists have interpreted in an exceptionally similar fashion. The principal character, Sofiia Vitovtovna, a lady of varying degrees of plumpness, stands in the centre, holding a belt, in the position of a dancer who, having performed his pas in the correct fashion and having pirouetted on one leg, now stands before the audience with arms and legs apart. Sofiia Vitovtovna is standing like this in three of the pictures, with the only difference being that she is holding Vasilii Kosoi's belt in her hand, whereas a dancer is usually holding nothing when he performs his exercise. All the other figures are arranged exactly as they would be in the final scene of a ballet, as the curtain comes down. In the theatre the grouping is done following the instructions of the ballet master. The point of groups of figures in the theatre is to create as much of an impression as possible without worrying too much about naturalness. But a stage effect is entirely different from a natural effect. A stage effect is conventional; it is determined by the requirements of the stage. To say nothing of any other conditions, let us simply recall that actors cannot stand with their backs to the audience. They become nothing but faces, unable to turn any further than in profile. This alone is enough to ensure that naturalness is distorted. But audiences are so accustomed to the conventions of the stage effect that they accept them and believe that things cannot be any other way. This habit extends so far that audiences patiently accept what they might be expected to subject to whistles of derision: an ordinary oar brought on to the stage in one ballet. True, it is not an entirely ordinary oar. It is much thicker than the oars that are used to propel a boat, and in the middle it has a kind of ledge or notch. A dancer representing a fisherman appears several times with the oar in order to give things a certain degree of conventional stage naturalness. But the audience has no idea what the point of the notch is, or why the poor dancer has been weighed down with an oar that is thicker than normal and is far from elegant. In the end all becomes clear. When it is time for the ensemble dances in the familiar groups then, in between his various pirouettes and the use of his legs to express his emotion, the dancer comes centre-stage and rests one end of the damned oar on the floor and the other end on his shoulder. All this is done as softly, smoothly and elegantly as possible. Then a ballerina, the prima ballerina, with the help of another male dancer (and also in between various graceful twists and turns) stands on one leg on the above-mentioned damned notch and stretches the other leg out like the outstretched arm on Falconet's statue of the Bronze Horseman. (19) Then she slowly pirouettes round. The hefty male dancer keeps a tight grip on the oar while trying to give the impression that it is easy, and even that he is enjoying himself greatly. In order to keep her balance, the ballerina holds on to his shoulder with one hand, and with the fingertips of her other hand she grips the fingers of the dancer who helped her up onto the notch and so enabled her to do this whole thing. Then, with the lightness of fluff 'flying from Aeolus's lips', (20) she jumps down onto the stage and carries on using her legs to express her emotions. Audiences are not in the least put out. On the contrary, they are pleased and call for an encore. The male dancer once again takes on his shoulder the three- or four-pood (21) weight of the ballerina who is 'light as a feather', and the leg that reminds one of the arm in Falconet's statue once again slowly and triumphantly makes the required pirouette to the sound of more or less enchanting music.

It is clearly understood that stage naturalness is not the same thing as real-life naturalness. Therefore beauty on the stage is different from beauty in nature and the other arts, e.g. literature. Without having to look too far for our evidence, let us remember that a play that is very good on the stage may not be good when it is read, and vice versa. And in particular, stage pictorial quality will not do in painting. In order to be convinced of this, all that one has to do is look at the depiction of scenes from ballets and operas that are sometimes printed in foreign illustrated magazines. Exactly the same impression is created by the four paintings of Sofiia Vitovtovna with Vasilii Kosoi's belt. In all these paintings the grouping of the figures is purely theatrical rather than natural. And the costumes of different colours, the gold, the traditional loose tunics and so on - it all creates an entirely balletic effect that is unworthy of pure art.

Equally theatrical is the huge painting The State Sejm at which Iv(an) Zamoiskii Delivered the People's Complaints to King Sigismund II. (22) There are about one hundred people looking like choristers dressed in mauve-coloured full-length cassocks, both seated and standing. One of them is sitting on a special throne. All the faces are serious, enlivened by passion. They are all concerned for the good of the people, that is, they are concerned for themselves. Everything else in the picture is light mauve in quite narrow folds. It is quite possible that it was just like this in reality, with the King on his throne and the noble members of the Sejm positioned just like that, all wearing the same coloured costumes. But there are many things in real life that cannot be reproduced in a painting without damaging the artistry. Incidentally, the painting is unusual in terms of the remarkable amount of light mauve paint used.

Considerable interest has been generated by two paintings standing next to each other. They are The Dying Father by Mr Zhuravlev (23) and The Last Will and Testament by Mr Cherkasskii. (24) The figures in the first of these are grouped very much more successfully than those in the second. All the figures in The Last Will and Testament are placed in a line and they are all moving towards the viewer's left, exactly like an orderly corps de ballet. On the right side there stands some sort of ragged pilgrim, a filthy creature, like Ivan Iakovlevich from Moscow. (25) He is turning to the viewer's left towards a dying woman. She, the main figure in the painting, is lying on a bed and has just signed, or is about to sign, her last will and testament. Her hand stretches out left towards a pen. Further left, beyond the bed, there is a woman who seems to be some sort of dependent. She is turning left to a nephew with a revoltingly cunning yet jolly face. He is also turning left, towards an official with an even more revoltingly cunning face, who in turn is also, for some reason, holding out his hand to the left, probably towards the doors. It's a jolly little picture despite the fact that the dying woman's pallor is conveyed very realistically. But it is a student's work, both in composition and in execution. Last year the artist was awarded a Major Silver Medal.

In the end what kind of failure is this? There's student work here, student work there, further over there - the same. What is going on here? What is the aim of the exhibition? What were the organizers' intentions? How are we to regard the whole exhibition?

Judging from the fact that most of the works are by students at the Academy, one must conclude that the annual exhibition is something like a formal public examination and prize-giving ceremony, like those that exist in other educational establishments. In this case the examination is more convenient, in that the account of each student's success is here in its entirety, one can take it all in at a glance. Here you have both the public examination and the 'prize-giving ceremony': for their publicly demonstrated success they are each awarded visible prizes. Therefore, one might have expected there to be only students' work here, with no other elements. But in that case, if the Academy is giving an account to the public of its teaching activity, then one might expect in the natural course of things to see those paintings that were done for silver medals, starting with the Major Silver Medal; also the best drawings of statues and of live models. Then the visitor would have a clear idea of the whole academic course, he could see the developing success and - what is more important - the account of the Academy's full range of activity would be clearer. Even so, it would not be fully comprehensive. Until now it has been extremely rare for Academicians and professors to exhibit their work. Let us assume that the efforts of the professors and teachers can be seen in the works of their pupils. But there are also honorary professors, and there are Academicians who are not members of the Academy Council but who are still, to some extent, members of the Academy. What is it that they do? They do not vouchsafe this information to the public. They do not consider it necessary, despite the fact that without the public the arts would have no reason to exist and there would be no Academy, which currently costs society a considerable sum of money.

However you look at it, the exhibition is incomplete as an annual account of the Academy's activity. It is equally incomplete as a purely pedagogical account of the teaching. Moreover, it contains some paintings by foreign artists and by Russians who are not members of the Academy. What is the rationale behind the exhibition? Is it to educate the viewers? But for that purpose Russia has the great Hermitage collection. (26)

It is, therefore, no surprise that one finds oneself speaking about students' work at every turn, since this is specifically an exhibition of students' work, with the exception of a few works that we ought really to have discussed at the beginning.

Among the works by artists who have long been recognized the most significant are three paintings by the famous Professor Aivazovskii (27) : 1) Sheep Blown into the Sea by a Storm; 2) Partenit on the Southern Shore of the Crimea (28) ; 3) Storm near Evpatoriia. (29) There is no doubt that Aivazovskii's talent is universally recognized, just like the talent of Alexander Dumas the Elder. (30) And these two artists have an extraordinary amount in common. M. Dumas writes with exceptional ease and speed, and Mr Aivazovskii paints in the same way. M. Dumas has written an awful lot; Mr Aivazovskii has painted an awful lot. Both artists are striking in their use of exceptional effects; precisely 'exceptional', since they do not deal at all with ordinary things, they despise ordinary things. The entertaining nature of their compositions is not in doubt. Dumas is read avidly; Aivazovskii's paintings sell like hot cakes. In both cases the works have a fairytale quality: fireworks, crackles, wailing, the howling of the wind, lightning. They both use colours that start off being ordinary, and then they add some effects here and there, effects that have a natural basis but that are exaggerated to the limit, to the verge of caricature. As a matter of fact, there is nothing insulting to Mr Aivazovskii in this comparison. All art consists of a certain degree of exaggeration; just so long, however, as it does not go beyond certain limits. Portrait painters know this well. For example, if the sitter has a rather large nose then in order to get the maximum likeness the nose must be made just a little longer. But then, if it is elongated any further you end up with a caricature. Knowing this only too well, poor portrait painters simply cannot cope with ordinary faces in which the nose is neither too big nor too small and the mouth and chin are moderately proportioned. For this reason an artist of average talent, not a Gogol', could never have succeeded in the depiction of Ivan Ivanovich, a man with pleasant manners, with a deftness reminiscent of a soldier, a man with no sharpness at all in his character and his actions. (31) Alexander Dumas does not attempt such portraits; neither does Mr Aivazovskii like such ordinary subjects. Only unusual things happen to M. Dumas's three famous heroes: the three of them lay siege to a town, or they save France and perform unheard-of deeds. We see the same thing in Mr Aivazovskii. There is a rock with a wave smashing against it; on the rock sits a seagull. And there's nothing else. Like Aramis or Porthos (32) putting the enemy army to flight. There is a large flock of white, woolly sheep walking along. The sunlight reflecting off them is so bright that it is painful to look at them, as it is any white object in the full glare of the sun. Mr Aivazovskii conveys this on canvas; it really is painful to look at his sheep. There is nature here, albeit exaggerated, but it is not art; it is a long nose made three times longer than necessary. It is a large canvas, and the artist might well have allowed himself to show two or three sheep illuminated in that way. But certainly not a whole flock, and deliberately to paint an entire picture in such a way that it is painful to look at it is strongly reminiscent of the adventures of d'Artagnan. (33) At this exhibition there is a flock of sheep blown into the sea by a storm. The flock is rushing from the sloping shore; two shepherds are trying to stop them; some sheep are already in the water; a wave is breaking over them and in this confusion it is difficult to tell where the sheep end and the waves begin. Everything is covered in the leaden hue of the storm. That's fine, that's all possible. There is some real-life truth here, but there is no artistic truth. The famous hero of the hunting caricatures by Cham, (34) Baron Craque, was once coming out of a marsh where he had gone to get a duck that had been shot when he tripped, fell, and put his outstretched hand right on a hare that was lying in the grass. Just then his gun went off accidentally and the shot hit a snipe that was flying past. All this is physically possible, but no artist would dare paint it in a picture, just as Aksakov (35) would not dare to narrate the tale if something like that had happened to him. There is a moment when the evening sun, shining on objects, turns them golden. Mr Aivazovskii takes that moment and paints a gilded picture such as Partenit on the Southern Shore of the Crimea. It depicts a ship standing at anchor under a cliff. It is lit up by the sun in such a way that the right side of the picture is a mass of rose-tinted gold. Go ahead and do as Gogol' did - drop two or three splashes of rosy gold in a description of the steppe. But take pity on the viewer's eyes and don't make your whole picture gold. The reason why Dumas is no artist is that he cannot restrain his unbridled imagination when it comes to exaggerated effects. Let us admit that the Count of Monte Cristo (36) is rich, but why does he have a poison phial made from an emerald? Why the detail of the edible substance one pinch of which is sufficient to sustain him for several days? Of course, it is physically possible to find in nature an emerald large enough for a phial. But one must have a sense of measure, one must be able to restrain oneself. It is known that the sun creates marvellous effects through light and shade, and whoever has studied these solar effects has seen many things that are inexpressible, almost imperceptible, not so much beautiful as strange. But when conveying these miraculous effects do give us them in their proper place: make them as infrequent as they are in the course of a day or the course of a year. Do not forget to give us also the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane exploits of the sun. Otherwise, if you deal only with miracles, whether you like it or not you are verging on the fairytale, on the Count of Monte Cristo. True artists have a remarkable sense of measure, they feel it extremely acutely. When Gogol's Manilov and Chichikov are exchanging sugary compliments, only once do they get as far as mentioning 'the birthday of the heart'. (37) If another artist, not a Gogol', were to deal with the conversation in the doorway about who should go first, then in answer to Chichikov's question 'why "educated"?', he would undoubtedly have Manilov utter some rubbish along the lines of 'the birthday of the heart' or 'a festival of the soul'. But Gogol' had a sense of measure, and Manilov answered very sweetly, but modestly: 'Well, just because'. Neither M. Dumas nor Mr Aivazovskii could ever have restrained himself in this way. They would not have given such an impersonal response and at the first opportunity one would have spouted a lot of rubbish while the other would have given us a brilliant light, astonishingly effective, unexpected and exaggerated

Mr Aivazovskii's Storm Near Evpatoriia is also remarkably good, as are all his storm paintings. Here he is the master, he has no rivals, he is the complete artist. In his storms there is rapture and that eternal beauty that the viewer finds so striking in a real live storm. Mr Aivazovskii's talent cannot be called one-sided because a storm itself is endlessly varied. Let us merely observe that in the depiction of the endless variety of a storm perhaps no effect can seem exaggerated, and is this not the reason for the viewer's failure to notice the excessive effects in Mr Aivazovskii's storms?

We have quite a lot of water at the exhibition. Apart from Mr Aivazovskii, there is the water of the Swedish painter Mr Larson, (38) who has sent thirteen paintings, we have Mr Reisner's Niagara Falls, (39) two of Mr Goravskii's landscapes, (40) Mr Velezhev's storm scene, (41) Calame's Lake of the Four Cantons, (42) and even a piece by Mr Ivanov (43) which is displayed in the first hall and which has perplexed all visitors to the exhibition. How this last landscape came to be exhibited is a mystery. On the right side of the painting there are two towers and a shoreline, on the left side there is water. It is not clear what the painting represents: it is not listed in the catalogue. But why has it been exhibited? It is not the work of a student, but the work of a painter from Suzdal' who is an experienced, fully tempered artist. Paintings like this can often be seen in provincial railway stations and inns. One must hope that it has been exhibited as a point of comparison in order to show the Academy students how not to paint, what to be afraid of, and what a lack of talent can lead to.

The thirteen pictures by the Swedish painter Larson are all of immense proportions, they all have immense price tags, and they are all a yellowish-brown colour. Under a yellowish-brown sky some yellowish-brown waves break against yellowish-brown rocks. Physiology teaches us that some people have abnormal vision as far as colours and paints are concerned. But in ordinary people this is less noticeable than it is in a painter. If a painter cannot distinguish yellow from blue, then the result is sad phenomena like Mr Larson's paintings. One of his pictures, which is almost as large as The Last Day of Pompeii, (44) depicts a shipwreck at sunset among the Bohusland Islands off the Swedish coast. If the water, sky and rocks were in their natural colours, then perhaps the picture would be good.

Calame's painting The Lake of the Four Cantons is a real adornment to the exhibition. A huge, sinuous lake lies between high mountains. Quite apart from the astonishing verisimilitude and the fact that each part, each detail is done extremely painstakingly, the painting is striking because the magician of a painter has put his soul into it. There is absolutely nothing extraordinary in the painting: there are mountains, calm water and a slight mist. But each and every person who sees it will think deeply and pleasantly about this painting, everyone will see that the artist himself was immersed in some sort of sad pensiveness as he looked at the far mountains, the clear sky, and the mist in the distance. How he managed to convey all this in the painting is his secret. It is clear, though, that he has not photographed nature; rather has he taken it as a medium through which to plunge the viewer into that quiet, calm and sweetly pensive mood that he himself experienced. There is nothing simpler than to copy such a simple painting, but it is doubtful whether the spirit of the original could be transferred to a copy.

Another Swiss painter, Diday, (45) is exhibiting a picture of the Reichenbach Falls in the Swiss Alps. This is a work of almost equal mastery, and once again it is not pure photography. Diday has not attempted to use any unnatural or fortuitous lighting. He has not striven for effect and he has not painted a 'portrait' of his subject, the waterfall; rather he has sought to convey the impression and mood created in him by the Reichenbach Falls in their grandiose setting.

If we compare Larson's enormous Shipwreck (price 4000 roubles) with Calame's small Lake view (price 1200 roubles) or Diday's small picture of The Reichenbach Falls (price 1500 roubles), then one feels sorry for the person who would consider spending money on the acquisition of Larson's huge canvas that is entirely the colour of a bay horse. Perhaps Mr Larson thought he would be able to fool people with the size of the picture; perhaps he thought that in Russia, among the barbarians, size would be taken for distinction.

Our landscape painting is flourishing and has far outstripped historical painting. Russia can take pride in several distinguished names beside which people like Mr Larson would be perfectly entitled to hide their brushes and sell their stocks of yellowish-brown paint. Landscape painting in Russia owes its success, perhaps, to two circumstances: first, to the fact that we are predominantly an agricultural nation, and second to the fact that it is much more difficult for academicism to take root in landscape painting, and therefore it is not so easy to tie it down and limit the development of talent. In landscape painting the teacher is incomparably more varied than all the professors in the world: it is nature itself. For a soul open to her lectures, the teaching is remarkably successful, modest and lacking in arrogance; it does not, therefore, hammer the students, but leads them along the path as quickly or as slowly as each student is able to go.

It is difficult to enumerate all the fine landscapes being exhibited this year. The best are two lovely scenes by Mr Goravskii. Then one must mention fine works by Messrs Riazanov, (46) d'Algeim, Kamenev, Diuker, Sukhodol'skii, Griaznov, Popov, Meshcherskii, and especially Mr Klodt Senior. (47) In many of the paintings by these masterly artists the sense of nature is very palpable, and some - for example Mr Klodt Senior - treat nature with the artistic naivety, the artlessness and sincere trust that is always shown by the true artist. In places one can see how, for example, Mr Goravskii has declined to use exaggerated effects like those of Mr Aivazovskii, although such restraint is not uniformly maintained. Among all these landscapes there are some (for example, the works of Mr d'Algeim) that reveal great efforts and superb conception, but in which the execution is careless, done without love, like a touch-up job. Whether because the works were rushed (although they were not done in response to a commission), or because of a lack of respect for the public, Mr d'Algeim's touch-up jobs remains just that: touch-up jobs.

Among genre painters the leading place this year is taken by Mr Braekeleer, (48) who is exhibiting the painting Catching Mice.

The naivety of this scene is enchanting. The painting's content is so simple and the work is enlivened by such a strong yet everyday interest, that everyone who sees it will give an involuntary smile, not of mockery but of involvement. A mouse has been caught in a cupboard, and an old man and an old woman are intent on getting it out and subjecting it to execution. The old man is standing expectantly with a broom in his hand, ready to strike the domestic thief, while the old woman is using a pair of tongs to remove from the cupboard all sorts of things that the mouse is hiding behind. It is clear that the woman's most vital domestic interests have been stirred; she is sacrificing external order so as to restore her sense of inner order.

Mr Morozov (49) and Mr Korzukhin (50) have been awarded the Academy's Minor Gold Medals for Resting During Haymaking and Drunken Family Man respectively. These awards are fully merited, and viewers who are not aware of the demand of pseudo-classicism will be left wondering how the same medal could also have been awarded to Mr Litovchenko for Charon Transporting Souls. But the demands of academicism contain wonders that were never dreamt of by our wise men. (51)

The really serious genre painters are Messrs Shil'der (52) and Perov. (53) Mr Shil'der has been made an Academician for his painting Paying off the Creditors and Mr Perov has been awarded a Major Gold Medal for A Village Sermon. Paying off the Creditors has a strong note of melodrama in it, and in its sense of fortuitousness it reminds one of those run-off-the-mill vaudevilles in which the denouement takes place not as a result of the natural course of events, but purely fortuitously. The hero of this vaudeville is a good-looking young man who has just arrived at the moment when the creditor turns up to get his money for a promissory note. The debtor, an old man, is sitting in an armchair, beside himself with happiness. On the floor we can see the torn-up promissory note and an open suitcase from which money has clearly just been taken for the payment. The old man's daughter has thrown herself round the hero's neck in gratitude, but rather than paying due attention to her sweet embrace he is looking threateningly at the creditor, who is retreating towards the door pursued by Nemesis in the shape of the neighbourhood policeman. There are several more figures: the wife and children. The setting is a poor one, but the heroine, the young girl, is wearing quite an expensive dress. And the viewer can imagine all that follows after this scene. The daughter, grateful that her father has been saved from prison or from having his property seized, marries their saviour, and is suitably loving to her magnanimous husband. Later the old man dies happily, having had the chance to feast at his grandchildren's christening-parties. And so on, even to future such scenes when today's saviour, now frail and sick in his turn, is sitting in his chair in desperate need of a saviour. But one does not turn up so fortuitously, because that degree of luck happens only in vaudevilles.

Mr Perov's Village Sermon is distinguished by a delightful naivety. The peasant men and women, the snoozing landowner, the clear sky, the religious procession, the little children - almost everything is marked by truth, that artistic truth that only real talent can achieve.

Another remarkable painting has been recognized by the award of the highest academic honour, a Major Gold Medal, and that is The Last Spring by Mr Klodt the Younger. (54) A sick and dying girl is sitting in a large armchair opposite an open window. She is suffering from consumption and will not survive beyond spring, and the members of her family know this. One sister is standing by the window, crying; another sister is kneeling beside the sick girl. The girl's parents are sitting behind a screen, talking. Theirs must be a gloomy conversation. The dying girl's situation is dreadful, yet all of this is bathed in beautiful, bright, spring sunshine. The entire picture is beautifully, impeccably painted, but as a whole the picture is far from beautiful. Who would want to have such a pathological painting in their study or living-room? No one, of course, absolutely no one. It would be a constant memento mori for us and our dear ones. We are perfectly well aware of this, and can manage quite comfortably without a reminder that achieves nothing except the constant, ceaseless poisoning of our lives. In itself, death is a disgusting business, but the expectation of death is much more disgusting. Thus the artist has chosen to undertake an extremely difficult task: to present the disgusting in a beautiful way. That is something that no one could ever succeed in doing. The death of those near to us is something that is familiar to more or less everyone. It is a dull, senseless, fateful blow, for which - it is said - we must all be prepared. That is complete rubbish. However prepared someone might be for it, it still comes as something apparently unexpected. There are dramatic works in which death takes place on the stage. Why not? In the words of the women who work as professional mourners, hawking their services around the cemeteries, death is an everyday matter. But just imagine an actor or actress dying on stage in accordance with all the rules of pathology, with the maximum of natural truth rather than stage truth, conveying the whole agony, one manifestation of the illness after another, as happens in real life. The dying man will either be carried off like a light piece of bark in a stove, or else he'll sit up a little and look round with large, dead eyes, or he'll utter something with a dry, swollen tongue, grasping with his blue fingers as though he were feeling the air, and with his pupils rolling in the whites of his eyes like some bad provincial actor playing Othello. Meanwhile his legs will grow cold and his toes will curl up. The entire audience would run out of the theatre to escape a performance like that! But Mr Klodt the Younger gives us the agony of the dying woman and, with it, the virtual agony of the entire family, and this agony will last not for a day or a month but for ever, for as long as this beautifully executed but ill-conceived painting hangs on the wall. No one could stand it. Everyone would run away. No, artistic truth is something completely different from real-life truth.

Some painters make use of ready-made content and turn it out as an exercise. Thus, several years ago one artist (I believe it was Mr Bronnikov ) (55) exhibited a painting of a dying gladiator, based on a poem by Lermontov. In the painting, the gladiator seems to be dying, but because Lermontov has him recalling his homeland as he dies, Mr Bronnikov repeats this recollection (fairly obscurely) in the form of the clouds above the gladiator. This reminds one strongly of those old engravings in which bubbles containing speech come out of the characters' mouths. Also several years ago one gentleman exhibited two separate paintings, one of a not badly painted pine tree and the other of a well painted palm tree, and he announced that the work was drawn from Lermontov or Heine: (56) the pine tree was thinking about the palm tree growing far away in the south.

This year there are three such paintings: The Vestal Virgin based on Mr Polonskii, (57) The Captain's Daughter based on Pushkin, (58) and Faust and Mephistopheles based on Goethe. (59) Pieces like these are almost never successful. In the work of literature you get the whole history of the emotion, but in painting you get just one moment. What is the painter to do? It is very simple. He either has to paint five or ten vestal virgins (that is, the same vestal virgin with five or ten shades of feeling), or else he does not attempt such an impossible task.

Incidentally, this year's exhibition is remarkable for the absence of battle scenes, of which there always used to be so many. Obviously in our time the attention of the public has turned to other, no less important, matters. True, even this year there are a few scenes from military life, but fortunately only a few, and I mean precisely 'fortunately', because there is and can be nothing artistic in them. Mr Jebens (60) has exhibited Scenes from Military Life. The exhibition catalogue informs us that 'Mr Adolf Jebens, a pupil of Paul Delaroche, (61) came to Russia in 1848 and was fortunate enough to be able to present the Sovereign, Emperor Nicholas I, with a painting depicting a military scene. As a result of this he received a commission from His Majesty to paint a number of military scenes, a project on which he is currently engaged.' Mr Jebens has exhibited two scenes, or rather groups consisting of soldiers dressed in the appropriate uniforms with all the essential piping and collar-tabs, and since he is a specialist in these matters one supposes that it has all been painted properly and the form has been fully observed.

There are quite a lot of portraits in the exhibition, and also quite a few photographs. But we will discuss them on another occasion in connection with the work of Mr Dal'. (62)

There are very few drawings of architectural projects at the exhibition, no more than eleven. All are distinguished by their splendour and an unusual degree of grandiosity. In general, the Academy is not fond of simple, utilitarian architecture, and its projects are always colossal. But the question of architectural projects is also one that we will discuss on another occasion.