Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/114

94 of poems. War with its physical horror is the dominant theme of these canvases. Vereshchagin seldom painted the dramatic, spectacular side of war; he preferred to paint the moments preceding the clash, or the battlefield strewn with fallen and wounded. Characteristic of his manner are the famous pictures "Before the Attack" and "After the Attack," and that implacable painting of a wounded soldier forgotten by his comrades in the desert, which the artist destroyed, and which is said to have inspired one of Moussorgsky's songs. In this series we find two pictures which are among his most popular creations. One is the "Apotheosis of War," a pyramid of human skulls, broken and maimed, amidst the naked desert, with a flock of carrion crows perched on it,—a work dantesque and tragic; it is ironically dedicated "To all great conquerors, past, present, and to come." The other is "The Presentation of Trophies," a gorgeous painting, which represents the Emir before a heap of freshly-cut human heads, and which revives old, storied Samarkand, the capital of Tamerlane.

Vladimir Stasov, a great connoisseur of Vereshchagin's art, maintains that this early cycle has never been surpassed in sentiment and dramatic power. But the artist reached his full maturity toward the end of the seventies, when he completed his Bulgarian pictures the outgrowth of his experiences during the Russo-Turkish War. In the interval he travelled in India and brought from there the sketches of those splendid "Indian Poems," which he finished at his studio, at Maisons-Laff itte, near Paris. The Bulgarian campaign cycle must be considered as the high-water mark of Vereshchagin's genius. Pictures like "The Graves at Shipka", and "Blessing the Dead" arouse an almost eery feeling which is created by an art so close to life that the border-line between them is well-nigh obliterated. At the same time these pictures are all a-quiver with most human pathos and with a passionate, Isaiah-like protest against the evil doings of men. Nothing can surpass in simplicity and poignancy the famous triptych, "All's quiet in the Shipka Pass," showing a sentinel who is gradually buried by a snow-storm in that most sinister mountain pass. Such pictures are like the living coal about which the prophet speaks,—their memory may be obliterated, their formative influence never.

Until his death (Vereshchagin was among the passengers of a dreadnought which was sunk by a Japanese mine in 1904), the great artist travelled all over the world in search of impressions. He treated historical themes ("Napoleon's Retreat from