There is, for instance, a picture there by Doroschenko which bears the harmless title "Everywhere is life." It might, yes, it ought really to hang in the gallery of the Parisian, for it is a work of Christian spirit. Convicts are feeding doves from the railroad car which is carrying them into exile. As a painting it is excellent. The light falls full upon the whirring pigeons in the foreground and upon the convicts pressing their faces against the iron bars of the window of the car. One sees through the window, and notices on the far side of the car another barred window at which a man is standing and looking out. The interior of the car is almost dark. The group of convicts in the foreground consists of a young man, evidently the guilty one, and his wife, who is following him into exile with their year-old child on her bosom. For the sake of the child, and to please him, they are feeding the doves. A bearded old man looks on pleased, and a dark-bearded younger man, too, whom one might sooner believe guilty of some slight misdeed. But upon the face of all these exiles lies so childlike a brightness, so evident a sympathetic pleasure in the joy of the child, that one rather doubts their guilt than the fact that they are still capable of good-natured human feelings. And yet this picture of Christian pity has not been bought for the Parisian. For it is well understood, in spite of its harmless title, what its meaning is. "Everywhere is life" should read, "Everywhere is pity, everywhere humanity, except among the police, in the state, and in an autocracy." What guilt can these good little folk have committed—looking there so kindly at a child that cooingly feeds the doves—that they should be torn from their native hearth and be sent to the icy deserts of Siberia? The young father—perhaps he went among the people teaching that a farmer was a man as well as the policeman (pristav). And one thinks with a shudder of the two thousand political convicts of the year before that were sent into the department of Irkutsk....
Such is the Russian genre. It is full of references, but is never a mere illustration of some tendency or other. The painter does not make the solution of his problem easy, and does not speculate on the cooperative comprehension of the observer, who is satisfied if he finds his thoughts indicated. No, such a Russian genre picture is perfect in the characteristic of the heads, in perspective, in the distribution of light and atmosphere. The purely picturesque, to be sure, is more evident in the landscape. And in this the Russians do astonishing work. They have the eye of the child of nature for the peculiarities of the landscape—an eye which we in the West must train again. What west European writer could have been in a position to write nature studies like Leo Tolstoï's Cossacks, or like the "Hay Harvest" from Anna Karenina? And one might also ask, What west European has so studied the forest like Schischkin, the sea like Aiwasowsky, the river and the wind like Levitan? There is a picture of Schischkin's in the Tretyakov Gallery, "Morning in the Pine Forest." A family of bears busy themselves about an enormous fallen, splintered pine. Everything is alive; the comical little brown fellows are quite as true to nature as the moss in the foreground and the veil of mist before the trees in the background.
Strange to say, Schischkin is stronger in his etchings than in his oil-paintings, the colors of which are always a little too dry. But his etchings, which I could enjoy in their first prints, thanks to the goodness of the senator Reutern in St. Petersburg, are real treasures in sentiment and character. He is, if one may express it so, the psychologist of the trees. A tree on the dunes is a whole tragedy from the lives of the pines.
Aiwasowsky, the virtuoso of the troubled sea, is more effective than the quiet Schischkin. His storms at sea, with their transparent waves, actually drive terror into the onlooker. The Black Sea has been the favorite object of his pictures. There all the furies seem to be let loose in order to frighten fisher and sailor. And these floods shine and shimmer; they are as if covered with a transparent light. Levitan, again, has understood the charm of the calm surface of a small body of water as no one else. His brush is dipped in feeling. The beauty of his pictures cannot be reproduced in words. He seems to have a special sense-organ for the shades of the atmosphere. It is a pity that he died so very young.
The collection of Vereschtschagin has now obtained a particularly enhanced value because of the awful death of the master. The Tretyakov Gallery has, with the exception of the Napoleonic pictures which ornament the Alexander Museum, almost the whole life-work of the artist. His work has only recently been universally appreciated. The power of the versatile man was astonishing; his philanthropic turn of mind and his epigrammatic spirit give spice to his pictures; but of him, first of all, perhaps, it might be said that he used his art for purposes foreign to it in spite of all artistic treatment. For it was seldom the artistic problem that charmed him. Only his Oriental color studies are to a certain extent free from ulterior purposes.
It is difficult to choose from this abundance of good masters, and particularly to name those whom one should know above the others. Pictures cannot easily be made so accessible as books, and the contents of a picture does not permit of being told at all. And so I content myself with mentioning again the names of Ryepin, Schischkin, Levitan, and Aiwasowsky, and then those of the portrait-painter Kramskoi, the landscape-painter Gay, and the master of genre painting, Makowski. And to any one whose path ever leads him to Moscow, a visit to the Tretyakov Gallery is most urgently recommended. A people which produces such artists in every field as the Russian has not only the right to the strongest self-consciousness, and to the general sympathy of people of culture, but, above all, it has the right to be respected by its rulers and not to be handled like a horde of slaves.
But, in spite of it all, light has not dawned upon those in power. You may resolve as often as you will in Russia not to bother, for the space of a day, with the everlasting police, but, in spite of all, you will be continually coming into contact with them. Our path from the Tretyakov Gallery to the hotel leads past a long, barrack-like building. We ask our companion its object. He at once tells us something of interest. First, the giant building is the manége, the drill-room for the soldiers in bad weather. Its arched roof lies upon the walls without any interior support. The weight of the roof is so great that already the walls in many places have sagged and have had to be reinforced. Architects had suggested alterations, which, however, would have cost countless thousands. Such an expenditure could not be tolerated, and in the mean time the evil increased. Already they were about to take a costly bite from the sour apple, when a small peasant appeared and promised for a hundred rubles to arrange matters in a single night. He simply bored, in the top of the leaden roof, a hole, through which the air could circulate, and immediately the roof lay like a feather upon the walls without endangering them any longer by its weight. Such is the story of the Moskvich. Whether or not it is true, or is held to be so by people who know about such things, I do not venture to judge. But it seemed to me interesting enough to be told. But what interested me still more was the subsidiary use to which the building is put. It is near the university. Now if a student disorder arises, they manage to surround the students by Cossacks and drive them into this manége, where they are held behind lock and key, by thousands, until the worshipful officials have sought out those which may most to their purpose be called revolutionists. Chance wills that generally the Jews are held, since Herr von Plehve needs statistical proof for his theory of a purely Jewish opposition.
His accusations may have served him among those above him, but not among those below him. I found that in Moscow itself dealings between the intelligent Christians and the few Jews who are allowed upon the street were most hearty. The political bitterness, the desperate fight against the régime, unites them all; after the Russian custom they exchange, embrace, and kiss at every meeting, Jew or Christian, provided they only be friends. It was for me, a Westerner, an interesting and mortifying sight to see how young Russian nobles with world-famous names kissed on the mouth and cheek in welcome and in farewell their Jewish friends. With this impression I took my departure from Moscow. Terrible as the political pressure may be, the people have preserved one thing in this prison—their humanity. And thus they will one day attain happiness, just as they are in many things already happier than we, because they have remained human. For a well-known authoress, who begged me to write a few words in her album, I wrote the words which I shall here repeat, because they contain the sum of my Russian impressions, particularly after the pleasing days in Moscow: "Russia is a sack, but it is inhabited by human beings. The West is free, but it knows almost none but business-men. I often almost believe that we ought to envy them...."