Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/113

Rh —a reversion to the conditions of the savage state There is very little that is picturesque about it. As men fall dead by the wayside, they lie like dull, sodden mushrooms, earthy and squalid."

"As I have seen war," writes the painter, "so I have painted it." Therein lies the strength and the weakness of Vereshchagin's art. Very often he made his sketches while bullets were whizzing round and shells bursting nearby, and his pictures were the direct outgrowth of the memories which he brought from his trips to the Inferno of War. No artist, since the times of Callot, had ever painted the appalling realities of war with such a poignant cynicism, with such a relentless, terrible fidelity to life. No painter has ever shown us war, shorn of all its trappings, with such an austere and implacable realism. The physical element of war prevails in Vereshchagin's paintings. He is a painter of bodies and corpses,—the riddles of the human face concerned him as little as the mystery of individuality. It is the faceless mass that is the main hero of his vast canvases. In the words of a Russian critic, "he is greater in chorus than in solo." Vereshchagin's genius was on the whole exterior; he lacked the ability to transform crude reality into mystic visions of naive fairy tales. It was not given him to spiritualize life and infuse into it the light that never was on sea or land. Yet he was not a cold photographer, for back of all his work there is a measureless human pathos, which is the very vis vivida of his paintings. Of late, Russian critics of the modernist school have shown a tendency to undervalue Vereshchagin's art, on the plea that his work is deficient in color and design. In fact, aesthetes have every reason to dislike Vereshchagin. He was utterly indifferent to the problems of pure æstheticism; his art is art for life's sake, art intended to serve a great humanitarian purpose. Like Dostoyevsky's novels, his paintings are unbeautiful, unartistic: they are the product of a mind, powerful, but lacking the Apollonian element of measured proportion, and winged harmony.

The first pictures which made Vereshchagin's name famous were painted, or, at least, sketched during his wanderings in Central Asia and during the Turkestan campaign which he accompanied as a volunteer on the staff of General Kauffman (1867). To most of these works, the artist gave the general title of "Poemes Barbares," and it must be said that these pictures bear their name well, for these magnificent studies of Oriental life have the unity of purpose, the pathos, and the