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Adrian Prakhov's inaugural lecture at the Academy of Arts, published in the journal The Bee in 1875, represents an approach to art different from that of Stasov and Kramskoi, who considered Prakhov an antagonist in their struggle for democratic and national realist art. Stasov, for example, attacked Prakhov's inaugural lecture at the University in an article published in the previous year. Prakhov did not subscribe to the theories of the radical intellectuals of the 1860s, such as Chernyshevskii, Dobroliubov and Pisarev. Having travelled through Europe, he had acquired an impressive knowledge of art history. However, his aesthetic views were conventional: his statement that the source of art was the interest in the perfection of form and beauty must have seemed outdated to those who supported the art of the Peredvizhniki. His emphasis on antique art, the Renaissance and the writings of Winckelmann suggested that the students of the Academy would receive a thorough but standardised knowledge in art history. Prakhov's statement that the 'enmity between the classicists, romantics, and realists is unthinkable, and the very names themselves should be consigned to the archive of history' demonstrates his ambition to stand above the battles waged by different artistic movements. Prakhov expressed the same academic attitude in his art critical articles in the arts section of The Bee, which he edited. However, his professorial impartiality in criticism proved to be impractical in the heated atmosphere of the debates between the Academy and the supporters of the Peredvizhniki. In 1878, following the publication of a series of articles in which Prakhov drew attention to deficiencies in the Academic teaching system and acknowledged the importance of the realism of the Peredvizhniki, he was suspended from his teaching at the Academy.
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