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No living artist has contributed more toward the making of a Russian school of painting than Ilia Yefimovich Repin, "the Samson of the Russian painters," as someone has called him. No name is more intimately connected with the destinies of the fine arts in Russia for the last two score years. Repin's magnificent art is, both in matter and manner, preeminently national and racial; the very sap of Russian life courses through it. In his numerous canvases the venerable master has wrought into line and color the picturesque chronicle of his own time as well as sumptuous visions of bygone ages, and in doing so he laid bare something far more deeply interfused with the outer aspects of things: the unworn vitality and the undisciplined power of his race, its measureless inertia and latent fermentation, its baffled revolt and deep resignation, its sense for the tragic, and its brooding melancholy.

Repin is the last representative of the generation whose spirit was moulded by the "era of reforms" which followed the Crimean War. The year 1864 found him, then a twenty-year old lad, in Petrograd, far away from his native Cossack village. After a year of preparatory study he entered the Academy of Fine Arts, and although he spent six years there, he was very little influenced by the scholastic ideals of a conventional and official art. The young painter was far more responsive to the artistic movement which was going on outside of the academic walls. A year before Repin's arrival at the capital, a memorable event took place at the Academy. Thirteen competitors for the gold medal refused to accept the mythological theme, "Odin in Valhalla," offered for the annual competition, and left the institution, together with the liberal stipends and the comfortable studios and living quarters which it offered them. The young enthusiasts formed a company which became the nucleus of the Society of Wandering, or Circulating Exhibitions founded in 1870. This society was the headquarters of Russian painting for about twenty years, until the Second Secession led a group of Russian artists to establish "The World of Art" (Mir