Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/81

, etc. This fact laid its seal on their entire life, and its effect could not be removed by either the Academy, or the French language, dancing lessons, and all the drilling and schooling they went through.

The stream of outside life could not penetrate beyond the high hermetically sealed walls of the Academy. At home,—the stifling atmosphere of middle-class vulgarity and coarseness; at school,—the arid and merciless grind of a rigid education. Men moulded by such an existence could not walk hand in hand with the inspired creators of Russian literature, who absorbed both the exquisite culture of the eighteenth century and the passionate striving for spiritual regeneration which seized aching humanity after the French Revolution. Only those among the alumni of the Academy who, owing to their foreign origin, possessed a culture superior to that of their Russian comrades, created something beautiful and daring. Such was the case of Bruni and Bryullov. As for Alexander Ivanov, the greatest of this generation of gifted artists, he succeeded in freeing himself from the influence of his surroundings only after many years spent abroad, when it was already too late, on the very eve of his death.

And yet, despite its secondary position as compared to literature, Russian painting, in the first half of the