To the war (picture)

Work on the first version of the painting and the 8th traveling exhibition

Konstantin Savitsky began work on the painting "For War" in the second half of the 1870s. The artist’s first plans related to the future canvas appeared when he was abroad ^[9] : in 1876, Savitsky, who was in Paris at that time, showed a sketch for the painting to the artist Alexei Bogolyubov , and he, in turn, showed it Alexander Alexandrovich , future emperor Alexander III . In the process of working on the painting, Savitsky used many sketches that he had written in Dinaburg , in Moscow, near St. Petersburg and elsewhere ^[20] . In a letter to the artist Ivan Kramskoy , dated December 22, 1878, Savitsky wrote: “I would give a lot so that one of my friends would like to talk with me about the painting I am writing now. Darkness and darkness are the questions that you sort out secretly in your head, and there is no answer to them ” ^[21] .

The first version of the painting, completed in 1880, was exhibited at the 8th exhibition of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions ("Wanderers") ^{[10] [11]} , which opened in St. Petersburg on March 6 (18), 1880. Savitsky’s appearance at the exhibition was greeted with a series of criticisms. Reviewers, among whom were authors of a number of periodicals, noted the lack of compositional integrity in the picture, insufficient communication between individual groups, and inaccuracies in depicting perspectives. The author of the article in the literary magazine “ World Illustration ” noted that in particular the picture is “quite interesting and talented,” but in separate scenes “it is a motley crowd painted in two tiers”, so in general “there is no one whole picture” ^[12] . A columnist for the newspaper Novoye Vremya wrote that Savitsky’s work contains “plentiful material for a dozen paintings”, which was the reason that “the artist himself could not figure out the mass of people leaving and seeing off.” Nevertheless, paying tribute to the artist’s mastery, the author of the article in “New Time” noted that “individual groups and faces are full of movement, life and expressiveness, and if you stop at them, you will read the whole drama in many faces and poses” ^{[12] [22]} . The author of the review published in the Molva newspaper wrote that if you mentally try to “cut as much as you like from it on either side of the picture or add as much to it in the same way - the content of the picture will not benefit and will not lose”. The author of the article in Petersburg newspaper noted that in Savitsky’s canvas “everything is interesting, but interesting in particular”, but in general “there is no picture, or better to say, it is not concentrated, not connected together.” Nevertheless, the critic from the Petersburg newspaper acknowledged that “the scenes and types are excellent, the expressions in movements and in faces are vital, truthful and deeply felt” ^[12] . Art critic Vladimir Stasov noted that Savitsky’s painting is too gray, although he acknowledged that “despite many shortcomings, this painting also had a lot of truth and feelings” ^[14] . The artist Ivan Kramskoy explained the shortcomings of the canvas by the fact that, shortly before the exhibition, Savitsky made significant changes to his picture, and “alterations reflected on its picturesque side in the direction of deterioration” ^[20] .

Work on the second version of the painting and the 16th traveling exhibition

Apparently, being strongly impressed by this criticism, Savitsky decided to create a new version of the painting “For War”. In addition to the comments made, in the process of working on the new canvas, Savitsky's work could have been influenced by the works of other artists, primarily the multi-figured historical canvas “ Morning of the Archery Execution ” by Vasily Surikov , presented at the exhibition of the Wanderers in 1881 ^[15] . Some sketches of Savitsky written during this period are known, including depicting characters who were not included in the final version of the picture, such as “The Crying Soldier” ^[23] . For eight years, sharing the dates of the creation of the first and second versions of the picture, Savitsky also created other works that helped to find the images of individual heroes and in general the birth of the final version of the canvas. According to art critic Dmitry Sarabyanov , such works should primarily include the paintings “Dark People” (1882, the State Russian Museum ), “Konokrad” (1883) and “The Hookman” (1884) ^[24] .

According to the diaries of Secretary of State Alexander Polovtsov , on June 10, 1886, at breakfast, the artist Alexei Bogolyubov told him that the day before, presenting to Alexander III his painting “Opening the Sea Channel”, he also showed the emperor a new version of Savitsky’s painting “For War” ^{[25] [26 ] [26 ] ]} (perhaps this was one of the sketches ^[27] ). The great prince Vladimir Alexandrovich, who was present at the same time, was indignant: “What impudence to represent drunken soldiers to the emperor!” Perhaps his reaction was dictated by the fact that he knew about the dissatisfaction of the conference secretary of the Academy of Arts Pyotr Iseyev , who did not like the fact that the artists reached Alexander III not through it, but in other ways. At the same time, Empress Maria Fyodorovna and Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna tried to soften before Bogolyubov the “harshness of this trick” by Vladimir Alexandrovich ^[25] . Be that as it may, the final version of the painting was created by order of Alexander III. Probably, this was due to the fact that the artist removed or softened a number of episodes present in the first version of the picture, testifying to the lack of rights of the soldiers and the assault of the authorities ^[21] .

In May 1887, Savitsky reported: “I’m all, from the heels to the forelock on my head, immersed in my picture. I’m just thinking how to quickly see her completely established. And I eat, and drink, and sleep all with the thought of her. ” Finally, on February 23, 1888, when work on the painting was completed, the artist declared: “The painting is over! Brought so much that he decided to set; I myself had looked at her before that I couldn’t solve this myself. Tomorrow I drag my brainchild to the exhibition ” ^[6] . The second, final version of the picture was presented at the 16th exhibition of the Partnership of Traveling Art Exhibitions (“Wanderers”) ^[16] , which opened on February 28 (March 11), 1888 in St. Petersburg ^{[11] [17]} . This time, the picture of Savitsky was more favorably received by experts and critics. In a letter to the publisher Vladimir Chertkov dated April 14, 1888, the artist Ilya Repin emphasized two paintings presented at the exhibition: “The good thing here was at the exhibition - Yaroshenko “ Everywhere Life “. Maybe you have already been sent. And Savitsky's picture “For War” came out very well, you should have and show both of these pictures. It would not be bad to publish them for the people ” ^[18] .

Even after the painting “For War” was presented at the 16th traveling exhibition and received good reviews there, Savitsky continued his work on it, postponing its transfer to the customer. In September 1888, he wrote to the artist Alexander Kiselyov : “... Do you know that I, unfortunate, still carry on with my great brainchild? I have not yet surrendered, but I am writing and writing to stupor. I had the misfortune to write a small repetition for the province, it was written in the air, it turned out better, and I saw the light, now I am knocking out of the darkness. This is not easy for me. ” ^[28]

After Creation

The painting "For War" was in the Winter Palace , and in 1897 was transferred to the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III (now the State Russian Museum ), which was being created at that time, where it still remains ^{[1] [2]} . At first, she was exhibited in the same room with the paintings “ Cossacks ” by Ilya Repin, “ The Conquest of Siberia by Ermak ” by Vasily Surikov and “ Christ and the Sinner ” by Vasily Polenov ; there were paintings by academic artists - “Orgy” by Wilhelm Kotarbinsky , “Kissing Rite” by Konstantin Makovsky and “ Sinner ” by Henry Semiradsky ^[29] . Currently, the painting “For War” has been exhibited in Hall No. 31 of the Mikhailovsky Palace , which also contains the paintings “Meeting of the Icon” by Konstantin Savitsky, “ Suffering Time ” (“Kosca”) by Grigory Myasoedov and others ^[30] .

The fate of the first version of the painting "For War", completed in 1880, remained unknown for a long time. In 1955, the State Tretyakov Gallery organized an exhibition of works by Konstantin Savitsky, which presented the second (final) version of the painting from the State Russian Museum, and also collected 13 paintings and 66 graphic works related to the artist’s work on this topic ^[31] . In an article dedicated to the painting “For War” and written based on the results of this exhibition, art critic Sofya Goldstein analyzed the aforementioned 13 paintings and divided them into two groups - works of a sketch character, characterized by incomplete writing, and well-designed multi-figure compositions. Based on the analysis, she came to the conclusion that the paintings from the second group are fragments of the first version of the painting, which, most likely, was cut into pieces by the author ^[32] . Subsequently, this point of view became generally accepted. Individual fragments of the first version of the painting are stored in the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Poltava Art Museum , as well as in one of Moscow's private collections ^{[2] [10]} .

Savitsky depicts the events of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 ^{[27] [16]} . The picture, which is a multi-figure composition, does not show military operations, but the bitterness of near and dear ones, parting with soldiers - conscripts of the reserve, who are leaving for war ^{[33] [34]} . Having made the decision to depict the last minutes before separation, the artist was given the opportunity to “show the characters when all the feelings and thoughts that are usually hidden from prying eyes” are brighter ” ^[35] . The canvas presents the various stages of this event. On the right, in the background, a dense crowd is depicted, individual figures in which merge with each other. The central part of the picture, which contains several detailed groups, is the most intense part of the action. Behind, in the depths, on the platform are the soldiers who have already said goodbye to their relatives — they are trying to catch the last time the eyes of those who came to conduct them ^[33] .

A group with a draftee, whom other soldiers forcibly withdraw from his wife and relatives, is the compositional center of the canvas. The conscript looks confused, he is not fully aware of what is happening to him and is trying to resist violence, break out in order to return back to his family. According to the art historian Elena Levenfish , the image of this young, full of life person serves as an expression of protest against those forces that doom him and many thousands like him. His wife, who is being held and reassured by her relatives, is eager for her leaving husband, she is terrified of the upcoming separation, “her terrible, heartbreaking cry fills the picture”. The images of the young soldier and his wife in the most naked form represent those feelings that other participants in this drama experience in a more hidden and restrained form. At the same time, many of those around are immersed in their own grief, therefore the stormy scene of the conscript's farewell to his wife does not attract general attention ^[35] .

The left side of the picture shows another family group in which a bearded soldier says goodbye to his parents and wife. In this scene, “restrained and chaste grief” is felt ^[36] . The soldier is not young and, like the rest of the conscripts, had previously served in the tsarist army, and now has been drafted from the reserve. He thinks of a difficult life without a breadwinner, which will be his young wife and old parents ^[37] . Without losing his own dignity, he restrains his feelings with severe tension; his face expresses "exalted nobility, grandeur and inner significance" ^[38] . While he thoughtfully squeezes his wife’s hand, his mother clung to his chest, not excluding the possibility that she would see her son for the last time. On the other side of the soldier is his father, near whom, half-turning and looking at what is happening around, is a teenage girl ^[37] . This group was also present in the first version of the picture (fragment “A group of those saying goodbye,” the State Russian Museum ), but there it was located not on the left, but on the right side of the canvas. Compared with the version of 1880, in the final version of the picture, Savitsky “poetitized” the image of the soldier’s wife, portrayed her more slender and young, more elegantly dressed, so that she even “somewhat lost the characteristic peasant appearance”. The image of a soldier acquired more strong-willed features, the artist depicted his father as less decrepit, and his mother now shows a face that was hidden in the first version of the picture. Other differences include the fact that in the 1880 version a teenage girl held a small child in her arms, which Savitsky decided not to transfer to the final version of the picture ^[35] .

Another important character is the peasant, who is depicted standing at the cart on the right side of the canvas. Savitsky plot distinguishes him from the general crowd of mourners. In his face, posture and movements visible strength and self-confidence ^[39] . The peasant's clothes - a patched shirt, ports , onuchi and bast shoes - testifies to his poverty. His figure is deep in the background, so that he has the opportunity to observe the farewell scene of the recruits and their loved ones, who are in the foreground ^[40] . The fact that he himself does not say goodbye to anyone, indicates the absence of his relatives among the soldiers leaving for the war — apparently, he simply gave a ride to one of his acquaintances on the cart ^[39] . Apparently, he had to see a lot in his life, so he understands the essence of what is happening better than others - that’s why, according to the description of Elena Levenfish, “hatred, a ripening protest passes through his sullen look”. Contemporaries especially emphasized this character of Savitsky and called him “the plowman-athlete”, “the mighty farm laborer” and “chernozem force” ^[40] . Later, his image was compared with two characters depicted in the paintings of the peasant cycle of Kramskoy - “ Woodland ” ^[33] and “ Contemplator ” ^[40] . According to art critic Mikhail Sokolnikov , the figure of a peasant forms a kind of center on the right side of the composition, and his “gigantic image breathes with such power and strength, is so plastically expressive that the viewer feels in it a symbol of a people awakening to consciousness and an unbending popular will” ^[41] . A similar image of a peasant was present in the version of 1880, only there next to him was a weeping peasant woman who covered her face with her hands and leaned on the edge of the cart ^[40] (fragment “Weeping Peasant and Peasant at the Cart”, private collection ^[11] ). Unlike the final version, in the first version the group with the cart was in the foreground on the left side of the picture ^[40] .

Behind the cart, just to the left of the peasant, in the crowd, one can notice another noteworthy group of farewells. It depicts a soldier with his head resting on his father’s shoulder, and next to them, holding back tears, is a mother accompanying her son to the war ^[42] . In the version of 1880, this scene was in the foreground on the left side of the picture, and in the version of 1888 it was moved deeper and because of this "lost its expressiveness" ^[21] .

In the background, on the left side of the picture, partially covered by foreground figures, is a group of drunken soldiers dancing to the harmonica and violin ^{[35] [39]} . According to Dmitry Sarabyanov , “now these people do not care where they are taken, what they will force them to do, with whom they will have to fight; for a while they drowned their grief in wine, but the worse would be a hangover ” ^[39] . Other authors, on the contrary, saw in this scene “the breadth of Russian nature and indestructible popular optimism” ^[43] . The artist’s wife, Valeria Ippolitovna, recalled that Savitsky “was busy a lot with the prospect , especially the figure of the dancing soldier, where the leg is in a big perspective” ^[21] .

In the background, soldiers climb the stairs to the cars. They are being watched by gendarmes , whose external appearance testifies to cold indifference to the people's grief. An officer stands on the platform, in front of which two soldiers stretched “quietly” to the front ^[21] . Unlike the first version of the picture, in which the station landing stage was located parallel to the plane of the canvas, in the final version it is shown in perspective distance ^[24] . According to some sources, the picture shows the Taganrog station landing stage ^[5] , according to others - one of the stations of St. Petersburg ^[27] .

The State Russian Museum has three sketches for the original version of the painting "For War", dated 1878-1880, - "Two Old Women" (oil on canvas, 38.5 × 42.5 cm , inv. Zh-1131, entered in 1932 from the Committee for the Arts of the SNK of the RSFSR ), “Peasant at the Cart” (oil on canvas, 15.5 × 22 cm , inv. Ж-1163, received in 1946 from N.M. Novopolsky) and “Three Walking Peasants” (oil on canvas, 22.5 × 15.5 cm , inv. Zh-1163, received in 1937 from M. I. Avilov ) ^{[1] [44]} .

The State Tretyakov Gallery stores three fragments of the original version of the painting “For War” (oil on canvas, 1880) - “A group of soldiers with a harmonist and violinist” ( 29.5 × 29.7 cm , inv. 10343, acquired in 1928 from B. S. Petukhov ), “A group saying goodbye to a rookie” ( 48 × 31 cm , inv. 11169, entered in 1929 from the Museum of I. S. Ostroukhov ) and “Soldiers Crowding at Railway Cars” ( 23.8 × 52.4 cm , inv. Zh-20, acquired in 1956 from A. V. Gordon ) ^[10] . In the State Russian Museum there is another fragment of the original version of the painting, “A group of those who say goodbye” (canvas on cardboard, oil, 70 × 56 cm , inv. J-1420, entered in 1908 from K. I. Shishkina ) ^{[1] [45]} . In the collection of the Poltava Art Museum, the fragment “Soldiers Walking on the Landing Stage” ^[46] is kept. In one of the Moscow private collections (according to information for 1955-1957 - in the collection of K. M. Shishkova ) there is another fragment - “The Crying Peasant and Peasant at the Cart” ^[11] .

Among the preparatory materials written during the work on the second version of the picture, the sketch “The Crying Soldier” (canvas, oil, 41.5 × 30 cm , 1880s) is known. He was in the Vysotsky collection (Moscow), then was transferred to the State Museum Fund, and from there he entered the Smolensk Art Gallery in 1927 ( inv. G-98 ) ^{[47] [48]} .

The self-titled reduced repetition of the painting “For War”, painted by Savitsky in the same 1888, is in the collection of the Perm State Art Gallery ^{[1] [44] [49]} .

The critic Vladimir Stasov in the article "XVI Mobile Exhibition" published in the issue of " News and the Exchange Newspaper " dated March 6, 1888, discussed in detail the painting "For War", calling it the best creation of Konstantin Savitsky. He wrote that there were enough “faithful human types, truths of national and psychological”, “tragic, tearful scenes of farewell, carefree removal, soldierly grabbing, female grace and beauty in a simple young Russian peasant woman”, and also noted “naivety and simple-mindedness in old people and children ”, fullness of movement and life,“ variety of poor people's excitement ”,“ motley of interests ”and ways of expressing them ^[50] . Stasov noted that, despite his "grayish, bluish coloring", this picture is "an important page in the history of Russian art." According to Stasov, “Savitsky is not a colorist, but he has a lot of things that will always make him forget this or that particular flaw” ^[19] .

The artist and critic Alexander Benois in the book “The History of Russian Painting in the 19th Century”, the first edition of which was published in 1902, called Savitsky’s painting “For War” “a clearly failed thing”, but admitted that it belongs to the best by the power of expression works created by the Wanderers. According to Benoit, even if, technically, the best paintings by Savitsky, including “For War”, are inferior to the works of Ilya Repin , they are still “quite satisfactory works, standing well above the general level of the school.” According to Benoit, Savitsky's important advantages over other artists were objectivity and "serious attention to the landscape, types and poses" ^[51] .

The art critic Mikhail Sokolnikov wrote in 1947 that the painting "Seeing Off to the War" refers to "the most significant paintings of the Russian realistic school of painting." Noting the ideological content, the monumentality of the plot and execution, as well as the folk character of this picture, Sokolnikov pointed out its proximity to the works of Ilya Repin. He wrote that the everyday plot of Savitsky’s picture depicting the wires of conscripts sent to war represents “the phenomenon of the old life broadly, meaningfully and typically taken by him”, to which the artist attaches “choral, folk, generalizing meaning”, putting deep social meaning into it. According to Sokolnikov, in this painting, “terrible for its drama”, Savitsky managed to convey the psychology of the masses, the confusion of the peasants sent to the war who “do not know where they will be taken further, with whom and for what, for what interests they will go to fight”. It was in this “exposure”, according to Sokolnikov, that the main point of Savitsky’s canvas was ^[6] .

The art critic Dmitry Sarabyanov, in a book published in 1955, noted that in the film “For War” the main character is a people through whose tragedy “contradictions of reality” of that time are “revealed”. At the same time, this tragedy “acquires an optimistic sound” on the canvas of Savitsky, since “great internal forces” lurk among the masses depicted by the artist ^[38] . According to Sarabyanov, the picture “To the War” with its positive image of the people develops the traditions of such paintings as “ Barge Haulers on the Volga ” by Repin and “ Repair Work on the Railway ” by Savitsky himself. It emphasizes the “dramatic conflict of action”, which sharpens the feelings of the heroes and gives the interpretation of the scene the heroism and tension inherent in such paintings by Surikov as “The Morning of the Archery Execution ” and “ Boyar Morozova ” ^[52] .

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• Savitsky K. A. - To the war. 1888 (unspecified) (HTML). Virtual Russian Museum - rusmuseumvrm.ru. Date of treatment January 23, 2018.
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