Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/255

 ). The Wanderers sought to wed art to life, but, having freed Russian painting from the bondage of dead scholasticism, and transplanted it from the hot-houses of classic mythology into the national soil, they fell into the pit of doctrinaire, narrative, and denunciatory art. Carried away by the civic ardor and humanitarianism which was in the very air of the sixties, the "Wanderers" did not hesitate to sacrifice the artistic effects peculiar to their art, in the interests of the propaganda of progressive ideas. Repin's early artistic efforts show unmistakably the influence of this artistic movement. In fact, he is the foremost of the "Wanderers." He has never been able to understand the modern tendency to reduce painting to sheer effects of colors and design; to his mind, art must interpret life and respond to its moral clashes. But Repin was too sensitive a painter to disregard completely the purely pictorial effects of his art, and too great an artist to play on the surface of things without attempting to seize the deeper and more lasting aspects of reality. It was given him to show Russian painting the way toward a broader and freer realism, whose austere truthfulness is suffused with radiant beauty, and whose protest is tempered by a kind of resigned and clarified melancholy.

It is surprising how little Repin's manner was modified by teaching and foreign influence. His art seems to have unfolded suddenly, like the fabulous flower of the Russian fairy-tales. In the summer of 1870 the young painter made a trip down the Volga, and on the basis of the sketches he made then, he completed, two years later, a picture which is recognized as one of the most remarkable masterpieces of Russian painting. "Haulage on the Volga" (Burlaki) is the Declaration of Independence of the Russian school of painting. The picture was a great success at home, and was the first, after Vereshchagin's canvases, to win the eye of the West. To the generation of the seventies, Burlaki was, above all, a humanitarian outcry against the miserable condition of the people. But the picture signifies more than that. These uncouth creatures, cast together by fate from all corners of the vast country, and pulling at the line in the glare of day, form a gloomy human mosaic indeed, and tell a truly Russian tale of woe and suffering. But the picture is also an epic of concerted labor and of invincible human vitality, an epic full of national feeling and human pathos,—and all of this is set in the frame of a typical Volga landscape, which quietly unrolls its boundless stretches under the scorching sun.