Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/250

 "the singer of Russian peasant women." He paints them in all their ugly majesty and in all the richness of their dazzling colours. He loves the Russian "baba" (peasant woman) as the pagan does his idol; he worships her, with her red fustian cloth, her coarse coquetry, her haughty grin and all her clumsy appearance, which mocks all the canons of pulchritude and has yet a peculiar beauty. It is before this graven image that Malyavin kneels and burns incense,—a phenomenon marked with the imprint of spiritual degeneration, but not devoid of grandeur.

It has been already mentioned that Vasnetzov inaugurated a certain revival of the Old-Russian, "truly Russian" art. Vasnetzov's activity, like the entire movement started by the Slavophiles, has its obscure, recondite causes. One thing can be said with certainty: even here we don't stand quite apart from the West. Our Slavophilism was a somewhat belated reflection of the European nationalistic movement, which grew up in the shadow of Romanticism.

In architecture the return to old, mediæval Russia began—if we are not to reckon Ton's feeble attempts—with the buildings of Gornostayev, Hartman, Ropet, and Bogomolov. At the same time the first attempts were made—again, if we exclude the endeavours of Solntzev and Monigetti—to create furniture in the