Out of Siberia

Russian-born director Andron Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky is probably best known for his television adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, which won an Emmy this year. His brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, is also famous in the West – though he lives in Russia – for directing Burnt by the Sun, which received the 1995 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But few know that these men are the great-great grandsons of Vasily Surikov, the famous Russian painter whose works grace the walls of Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery.

Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (1848-1916) was born into a Cossack family in the Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk (literally, “red bank,” from the pinkish-red clay that is found in this part of the Yenisey river). One of the artist’s ancestors helped to found the town, and the family preserved its history with great care – so much so that the young artist sometimes had the impression that they were living in the past. Surikov would later recall that, in his parents’ home, “the very air seemed ancient,” and Cossack uniforms from the time of Catherine the Great were lovingly preserved in his grandfather’s trunks. (The young artist remembered their unusual color well, for by his time, the color of the uniforms’ cloth had changed from blue to green.)

His parents’ house had an enormous influence on his work, forming a unique foreshortening of Surikov’s perception of the world. As Surikov himself put it: “The rooms in our house were big and low. To me, as a youngster, the figures seemed huge. It’s probably for this reason that I always tried in my paintings to either set the horizon very low or to make the background smaller so that the figure would seem larger.” In this admission lies the key to understanding the composition of the most famous of his historical canvases. The well-known Russian artist Mikhail V. Nesterov wrote that in Surikov existed “a great prophet of the past, a man with the highest intellect side by side with a mischievous Cossack.”

Poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin accurately observed that Surikov, “born in the 19th century, turned out to be a true modernist and a witness of those events that he tried to embody in his work.” One of his ancestors, the esaul (Cossack captain) Surikov, together with the legendary Yermak (a 16th-century Cossack outlaw and explorer), conquered Siberia and passed on an indestructible love of freedom to future generations. The Surikov name is constantly encountered among the instigators of a whole range of mutinies and rebellions, including one that occurred in Krasnoyarsk.

As Voloshin wrote: “Over the course of three centuries, the Surikovs participated in the campaigns, exploits and mutinies of the Don and Siberian Cossacks, fermenting and boiling and defending in silence the historical experience that only at the end of the 19th century would come to light in Russian art in a range of works that are the only psychological document of the creative centrifugal force of Russian history.” Up until 1825, the Surikovs remained simple Cossacks, and only after that year did they rise to officer rank, though they never lost their ties with ordinary Cossacks.

The artist’s father was a sotnik (Cossack equivalent of a lieutenant) and died young of lung disease. In Vasily Surikov’s best paintings, you can sense a genuine “cult of ancestors” and a deep spiritual relationship with the past. Surikov came face to face with tragedy early in life. In childhood, he twice witnessed executions, which at that time were carried out in public, and expressed this experience in one of his most famous paintings Morning of the Streltsy Execution.

He began painting young and worked hard. “I remember how I painted and nothing worked,” the artist recalled. “I began to cry and my sister Katya consoled me: ‘don’t worry, it will turn out okay!’ I began again and, sure enough, it did.”

But Surikov would soon have more important things to worry about. After the death of his father, the family fell into poverty, and Vasily had to work constantly to earn money on the side. He often painted Easter eggs for three rubles per hundred.

After finishing a regional school, Surikov worked as a clerk for a short time, but he never made a career as a bureaucrat. There is a rumor that he once drew a fly so life-like on some official paper that everyone tried to brush it away with their hands. This occurrence changed the young man’s fate. Krasnoyarsk’s governor, Pavel Zamyatnin, an acquaintance of Pushkin’s, decided to enroll Surikov in the Imperial Academy of Artists in St. Petersburg and ordered all his paintings to be collected and sent to the capital. The Academy’s reply, however, was not reassuring: Surikov could come, but at his own expense.

Having talked the situation over with his mother, Surikov decided to walk to the capital. His mother was able to give him 30 rubles for the road (a century earlier, the great Russian scholar Mikhail Lomonosov got to Moscow in the same way, with only threerubles in his pocket). But fate once again smiled on the artist. The Siberian gold magnate Kuznetsov saw Surikov’s paintings and decided to help, sending the young artist to St. Petersburg with a load of fish (Kuznetsov was sending rare and expensive fish as a present for some government ministers). And so, Surikov arrived in St. Petersburg in style – on top of an enormous frozen sturgeon so big it hardly fit into the sleigh.

The artist was awed by St. Petersburg, but the Academy did not greet him with open arms. Surikov failed his entrance exams, for he had no experience in creating plaster sculptures from life. The academic Fyodor Bruni, one of the most famous historical painters of the classical school, personally turned him down. But Surikov refused to be discouraged so easily. He enrolled in art school, and in one summer learned to render plaster, consciously choosing the most difficult angles. His hard work was not in vain. In three months, he managed to complete three years of course work. And he passed the fall exams at the Academy with flying colors, enrolling in the top class.

During his years of study (1869-1875), Surikov showed an interest in historical painting and consciously strived to surmount the traditional boundaries of Academic art (he introduced everyday details, specific architectural structures and realistically grouped human figures into his compositions). Over the course of his studies, he received several silver medals and finished with a large gold medal. In honor of this award, the artist was offered a trip to Italy for three years, but, as it turned out, there was no money (it had been embezzled by the Academy’s treasurer, who was later sentenced and sent to Siberia).

By way of compensation, the artist was offered prestigious and well-paid work painting murals of church ecumenical councils on the walls of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This work had little in common with his future paintings. “It was difficult to work for the Cathedral of the Savior,” Surikov recalled. “I wanted to bring live models there, I looked for Greeks. But they told me: if you paint like that, we don’t need you. So I painted as they demanded. I needed money to become free and start out on my own.” This he managed to do in a relatively short time.

On January 25, 1878, Vasily Surikov married Elizaveta Avgustovna Shara, and, that summer, finished his paintings in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Having achieved relative material independence, Surikov began working on the painting Morning of the Streltsy Execution. (The streltsy, or palace guards, were staunch opponents of Peter the Great and his reforms, and their rebellion against the tsar was brutally repressed.) This painting brought the artist national glory and a reputation as a first-class historical artist.

Just as for Alexander Pushkin, for Surikov money was always the single most important condition for achieving financial independence and the only means of painting without bowing to the whims of fashion. Surikov was never a miser, but from the start, his work was highly valued and worth a pretty penny. When one patron of the arts asked the famous artist to let a small study go for a lower price (Surikov was insisting on R5,000), the artist replied: “I would agree, but my name does not allow it!”

In an ironic twist of fate, the painting Morning of the Streltsy Execution was hung at a Wanderers movement exhibition on March 1, 1881, the day of Alexander II’s assassination [the Wanderers – peredvizhniki – movement was founded in 1870 as Russia’s first professional society of independent painters; artists adhering to it, such as Repin, Levitan, Surikov and Vasnetsov, were some of the first Russian realist painters, focusing on Russian daily life, on Russian nature and social conflicts – Ed.]. But even without this strange coincidence, the artist’s contemporaries noted a peculiar feature of his work. Every time that Surikov approached a crucial historical event, he tried to dig to its roots and, specifically, to uncover rebellious forces boiling within the people. Even after three centuries, the blood of his ancestors continued to stir the artist.

“Surikov became a great artist only when his soul was stunned and captivated,” wrote Voloshin. “The ‘streltsy’ started with a candle flame burning by day against the background of a white shirt (Ed: the main figure in the painting holds a candle). ‘Menshikov’ – from a low hut, in which you are bored and someone is innocently dying nearby. ‘Morozova’ – from the tragic black stain of a crow with a lifted wing against a white background.”

Another of Surikov’s contemporaries wrote: “By the force of his own experiences, Surikov convinced us of the reality of his historical perceptions. The Streltsy, Morozova, Yermak – all this is thanks to him alone, Surikov, the genius who ruled our imaginations, the criminal and the hero. Before him, historical events were depicted as something abstract, unnecessary for us. Surikov revealed that he saw all this himself; his uncle was executed, his grandmother was tortured, and at that time, he ran behind the sleds and was scared and couldn’t tear his eyes away from her face. The capacity in the impermanence of life to see images percolating through the centuries, this is his prophetic gift.”

The painting Morning of the Streltsy Execution was purchased by Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov for his famous gallery for R5,000. This money allowed the artist to begin a new painting – Menshikov in Beryozova – in the fall of 1881, which he worked on the entire next year. The artist was moved by the tragic fate of the best known of Peter the Great’s followers, Prince Alexander Menshikov, who won several glorious battles but ended his days in sad exile in Siberia.

On March 2, 1883, the painting was presented to the public, Surikov’s glory and material success were reinforced, and he made his first trip abroad, visiting Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, Paris, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice and Vienna (September 1883-May 1884). Having returned to Moscow, Surikov made his first studies for Boyarina Morozova  (an important figure from the age of the schism of the Russian Orthodox Church), which he completed in February 1887. Then, in the spring of 1888, his wife died, and Surikov fell into such a deep depression that he even stopped painting for a time.

During the summer of 1889, he returned to Siberia, where he stayed until the fall of the next year. His stay in his native land breathed new life into the artist, gave him a second wind. During this time, he painted the genre piece The Taking of the Snowy Village and hit on the theme for Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia (1895).

But from this time on, according to many experts, Surikov’s creativity began to decline. He went on to paint a number of works (Suvorov Crossing the Alps, Stepan Razin and Annunciation), but none of them could compete with his earlier canvases. It seemed that he had already said everything that his ancestors wanted to pass on to their descendents. One of whom, by the way, is returning to his roots. Nikita Mikhalkov is currently shooting a new film The Barber of Siberia – a take-off of The Barber of Seville – in Krasnoyarsk, the hometown of his famous ancestor.  RL