The Art of Describing in 19th Century Russian Literature
In his foreword to his translation of Lermontov’s short 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, the modern writer Vladimir Nabokov observes how nineteenth-century Russian writers were indifferent to “exact shades of visual colour” which led to a hackneyed form of prose.[1] Nabokov was surprised at Lermontov’s use of clichéd description because the earlier poet was actually a painter as well as a poet. This interest in writing and the art of painting was prevalent in the early nineteenth-century as is proved by the remarks of the painter Aleksei Venetsianov:” The art of drawing and painting itself are no other than a weapon serving literature and, as a result, the enlightenment of the people.”[2] Downgrading painting to the position of the handmaid of literature was not acceptable to some persons: near the end of the century the St Petersburg artist Alexander Benois complained that the artists of the century were the “slaves of literature” and the painter Mikhail Vrubel (a pupil of Repin) strove to free himself of this bondage by recourse to his master’s art. The sort of art that Repin largely produced, big realist crowd scenes, small intimate dramas, were more the stuff of the novelists; but as Scheijen says this was not the case where landscape was concerned; the genre was not in thrall to literature since a landscape by its nature was “anti-literary.”[3] Intellectuals hostile to the arts hierarchy that privileged literature over painting could be found amongst the literati itself. The novelist Ivan Turgenev lived most of his professional life in France, and there he assembled a small collection consisting of seventeenth-century Dutch artists like Jacob van Ruysdael and Aert van der Neer. But he also had a taste for contemporary French landscape artists like Theodore Rousseau. Turgenev’s admiration for landscape affected his views on Repin and the realists whom he saw as indulging in “photographic realism” rather than the landscape artists who would capture what was “typical in a scene.” Turgenev befriended Russian landscape painters like Vasil Polenov who was working in Paris as the same time as Repin. Such canvases as Polenov’s Moscow Courtyard (above) and Evening in the Ukraine were inspired by reading Turgenev’s poetry and prose, most especially his collection of short stories- Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album (1852) which contained illustrations by Turgenev himself.
[1] Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (Doubleday, 1958), trans. Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Dimitri Nabokov, xv.
[2] Cited in Sjeng Scheijen, “Slaves of Literature: Literature, Visual Art and Landscape Art” Russian Landscape, 89.
[3] Ibid, 89.
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