Greetings, fellow Dostoevsky readers! We are in the home stretch now, deep into the fourth and final part of the novel. As always, feel free to participate regardless of how far you’ve gotten, but please keep spoilers labeled so that new readers have a chance to discover the material on their own.
Last week … I was out of town, but you all did a fantastic job of keeping the conversation going. This week, it’s Dostoevsky’s turn to take a break — spending some time with The Children as a way of giving us room to breathe between the investigation and the trial. Or is there another reason The Children are taking center stage? The end is nigh, folks, and we only have a few chapters to go!
Notes and Comments:
Since the author’s taken us on a long digression, I’m going to do the same: this week, let’s talk about the artist behind these header images, the incomparable Ilya Repin.
First, some (wildly oversimplified) background. In the mid-19th century, art in Russia (of all types: the visual arts, music, theater, literature) was passing through the same difficult straits as European art: with the decline of aristocratic and/or church patronage, how could one make a living as an artist, especially if one’s ideological leanings were tilted away from the conventional markets? This happened at the beginning of the century, too: what did landed aristocracy or church bishops care about stormy Romantic art, with its focus on the individual Ego?
For a while, wealthy non-aristocratic patrons filled in that gap by paying artists to decorate their homes. Composers in Russia had it best (from a certain perspective) because the upper crust was still interested in packing opera houses and concert halls, and it didn’t matter much to them what ideas were behind the music (plus, 19th century Russian music is heavily nationalistic, so in general, they liked what they were hearing). So many of the writers we know lived in poverty, but a market for general readership was opening up by the early mid-century, and someone like Dostoevsky was able to survive on subscriptions. But what do you do if your primary mode of art are large, patient canvases with no real audience?
This was a problem. An entire generation of artists grew up in the shadow of Vissarion Belinsky (I wasn’t exaggerating when I called him “the most influential literary figure of the 1840s” and felt that they, too, could contribute to Belinsky’s call for socially engaged art. This would mean, at first, depicting social inequality as it was, a dicey proposition in a market that mostly wanted portraits of whoever was paying for the painting or giant Biblical tableaux. Who was going to pay to see poverty?
This group of artists, dropouts from the Imperial school, banded together into a “guild” (artel in Russian) in search of a solution. Since their art was aimed at The People (or more accurately: the broader urban public), they decided to take their art to The People by organizing traveling exhibitions — and thus they became known as The Travelers (Peredvizhniki). They’d still seek out patrons where possible, but they’d also make a living by selling tickets to their shows, allowing them greater control over the content of their work.
(*Note: I’m linking rather than posting all these images below, so you can choose what you want to see. This’ll help keep low-bandwidth readers from fleeing the diary in frustration.)
The artel’s early master was Nikolai Kramskoi, who’d become so well-known for a lonely and suffering Christ in the wilderness, and a mysterious aristocratic woman. They’d soon attract other artists, as well, like Vasily Surikov, whose great historical paintings include Peter the Great’s execution of the streltsy (the former Imperial guard) and the dramatic arrest of Old Believer Boyarina Morozova; like Vasily Perov, who painted one particular portrait I'm sure everyone here knows, but might also give us the miserable sight of a drowned man; like Nikolai Ge, whose Last Supper so annoyed Dostoevsky, and who drew Peter the Great interrogating his son; like the great portrait artist Valentin Serov, a generation younger than the movement’s founders, who’d transition from idyllic portraits of everyday life to stark Modernism after the century’s turn.
But surely no member of the Peredvizhniki is as well-known today as Ilya Repin (1844-1930). Repin was a later addition to the group (he was not originally with the artel), but quickly brought a keen eye for composition and detail to the group’s ideological aims. His entrance exam, of a sort, was “The Barge Haulers on the Volga” (aka “The Volga Boatmen,” 1873), an immediate sensation that won the grudging respect even of Dostoevsky. Even today Repin’s use of light and dark is astonishing — he details the miserable drudgery of boat haulers, who dragged heavy boats against the Volga’s strong currents, but also a small tinge of hope — an onion, if you will — in the young barge hauler who stands upright, looking off into the distance.
If Barge Haulers was a massive success for Repin and an eventual manifesto of what realist painting could be, his major succès de scandale came a decade later, with an historical painting that depicted Ivan the Terrible’s reaction after accidentally killing his son and only promising heir, Dmitri (Ivan had clubbed him in a fit of rage, only belatedly realizing it was a fatal blow — not just for the man himself, but, as early critics recognized, for the continuation of Ivan’s line). Though this was surely exaggerated for press, the exhibition claimed it was too intense for most spectators, who filed through in silence and, allegedly, sometimes fainted at the horror. It’s a great, very effective painting (and, though the roles are reversed, this is my mental image of what Fyodor and Dmitri Karamazov look like).
Lest we think Repin was all doom and gloom, let’s take a moment to appreciate what may be his greatest historical painting, “The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” (1891). The context takes a little explaining: in the 17th century, during a war between the expanding Turkish empire and the nomadic Cossacks in what is today Ukraine, the Sultan sent a letter requesting that the smaller, weaker, destined-for-defeat Cossacks simply surrender. The Cossacks allegedly sent back a hilariously crude, sarcastic letter in response (pdf, if you’re interested): Repin depicts the (likely illiterate) Cossacks dictating the letter to a monk-scribe, cracking themselves up as they lay elaborate vulgarity on top of vulgarity. Even the man of God can’t resist a smile. Take some time to soak in the different facial expressions in this painting: you can see the process playing out on their faces, and it’s magical.
Repin was a versatile painter: he painted famous scenes from books (like Onegin and Lensky’s duel) and fairy tale-fantasy tableaux (like “Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom”) and the usual crop of landscapes, dramatic scenes, and portraits — including my vote for best of all Russian portraits, if not my favorite portrait ever painted: that of the composer Modest Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky died a few days after the painting was completed, and his alcoholism-related suffering is clear even in Repin’s dissolving brushstrokes. He never painted Dostoevsky, but he did multiple portraits of Tolstoy. All in all, a major figure in the history of art whose work is worth exploring in depth.
To round off this discussion, I should mention that not all the great artists working during this period were Peredvizhniki. Aside from the more conventional painters of landscapes and portraits, I’d be remiss not to mention the great Mikhail Vrubel, who’s usually labeled a “modernist” or a “symbolist” because of choice of subjects and the rich abstraction of his images (like his most famous painting, “The Demon Seated”, an 1890 depiction of a scene from Lermontov’s epic poem.) His work, unsettling and strange as it is, was painted at the same time as many of the works linked above.
And when Russian art finally did move into modernism…. let's just say this diary would be about five times longer, because it was a rich period for the medium.
Questions for Discussion:
As I suggested in the Intro, we can look at this book as a respite from the intensity of the crime → punishment arc, or as something else entirely. For those of you reading the book for the first time, how did you interpret this shift in emphasis? For those of you who’ve read the book already, do you have a different experience with this set of chapters? (with spoilers marked, please)
Buffoonery has long been a theme in Dostoevsky’s work, but this book provides us with a clearly stated theory-of-buffoonery: “a form of resentful irony against those to whom [the buffoon] daren't speak the truth, from having been for years humiliated and intimidated by them. . . sometimes tragic in the extreme.” Does this give us cause to reevaluate the novel’s buffoons, or is this specific to Ilyusha’s father alone?
Dostoevsky does a Very Literary Thing at the end of Book 10, where he makes an allusion (“If I forget thee, Jerusalem”) that’s right and proper for the moment (i.e. he’ll never forget his son, Ilyusha) but he expects the readers to pick up on the part that isn’t quoted. Anyone want to take a stab at the relevant verse Captain Snegiryov leaves out?
For Next Week:
Let’s finish off Book 11, shall we? I’ll give something away and say that 11.IX (“The Devil: Ivan’s Nightmare”) is my single favorite chapter in all of Dostoevsky, so I’m obviously stoked for next week.
Ran out of time on the character list, so I hope we can do without it this time. There are a bunch of kids, the miserable Snegiryov family, and Alyosha, then the action shifts to Madame Khokhlakova’s home.
PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THE SERIES:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
- Book 4
- Book 5
- Books 6-7
- Book 8
- Book 9