Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/167

 naïve conception of art, but he has never yet attained the conscious, cultural attitude toward it. The meaning of painting, in particular, has remained for him a sealed book. All his life he has been applying his splendid, but not completely developed pictorial gift to the solution of non-artistic problems, and, of course, neither Stasov's sermons, sympathetic in their sincerity as they are, nor the influence of Kramskoy, absorbed in political interests, could save him from his errings.

Nor was Repin corrected by his life abroad, where he was sent by the Academy, after he created his celebrated "Burlaki" ("Bargemen"), a work of great energy and of an excellent composition. In Rome he criticised into nothingness the classics of paintings with the candour of a barbarian, and in Paris, like all his compatriots, he became completely bewildered and started tossing about, unable to derive anything from sources which were the very ones to be of great use to him. Upon his return home, Repin could never quite come to himself. He painted all the prominent men of his time, created a series of denunciatory pictures, on subjects taken from the "nihilistic" and "gendarme" period; finally he tried his hand in the "historical variety," but almost never did he concern himself with the problems of pure painting. Everywhere