On 26 July 1878, he did his first pencil drawing of the merry Zaporozhians drafting their defiant letter to the sultan. Although Repin was preoccupied with “Tsarina Sofiia” throughout much of 1879, he turned to his happy Zaporozhians as soon as he was free to do so. He began serious research into Ukrainian history, read with delight the Istoricheskie pesni malorusskogo naroda [Historical Songs of the Ukrainian People] by Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Drahomanov, and made several trips to St. Petersburg to interview the historian Kostomarov on the matter. Repin informed Kostomarov of his intention of going on a research trip along the Dnipro to the Zaporizhzhian region to find models and materials for his picture, and Kostomarov drew up an itinerary for the artist. It was probably also at this time that Repin painted his first full-scale colored painting, a preliminary study in which the faces of the Cossacks are somewhat stereotypical and not very well differentiated, but one already containing the principal elements of what would be the final canvas. In May-September 1880, Repin toured Ukraine in the company of his student, V. A. Serov. He traveled down the Dnipro, visiting Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia, and going as far south as Odesa, visiting local museums, sketching artifacts, especially weapons and costumes, drawing the locals, especially those whom he thought might be descended from Cossack ancestors, and painting the countryside. He even sought out and painted what he believed to be the grave of the legendary Zaporozhian “Otaman” (“Ataman” in Russian) or leader, Ivan Sirko (d. 1680), whom he later made one of the central figures of his great painting…
For a month and a half, he stayed at Kachanivka, the estate of the famous Ukrainian landowner in Chernihiv province, V. V. Tarnovs’kyi the Younger (1837–1899), whose family had earlier hosted Gogol’, Shevchenko, Kostomarov, Ge, and many others, and whose collection of Ukrainian Cossack artifacts Repin studied and whose portrait he painted at least twice: Repin titled one picture “The Cossack” (1880, TG) and the other, “The Hetman” (1880, Sumy Art Museum). In the second picture, Tarnovs’kyi is dressed in an early eighteenth-century scarlet Cossack costume with gold and silver trim, a pistol stuck in his cummerbund and a sabre at his side; he is leaning on an old Cossack cannon. Repin at this time also copied what was (probably incorrectly) believed to be an old portrait of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetman, Ivan Mazepa (d. 1709), who had dared to rebel against the Muscovite Tsardom at the time of Peter the Great (Dnipropetrovsk History Museum). On a different level, Repin also painted a portrait of Tarnovs’kyi’s wife, Sofiia, at a piano (Sumy Art Museum). Every evening Repin would visit the Ukrainian villages surrounding Kachanivka, observe the local customs, and sketch the country folk. It was at Kachanivka as well that Repin did much of his most important work on his cheery, indeed, even eager and exuberant canvas, “The Evening Party.” His last stop in Ukraine was at the estate of his colleague, the painter Ge, also in Chernihiv province, where he painted the lady of the house, before returning to Moscow loaded with entire albums filled with drawings and studies
In Moscow, Repin sat right down to work and began integrating his new materials into what would eventually become a fuller version of his great painting. On 6 November 1880, he wrote to Stasov about his passion for the work:
‘Ah, forgive me for not writing to you earlier. I am a man without a conscience. I was not able to answer you, Vladimir Vasil’evich, and the “Zaporozhians” are responsible for it. What a people! When I try to write about them, my head spins with their rowdiness and noise. […] I took up the palette and here it is two and a half weeks that I have lived with them without a break. It is impossible to tear oneself away from them, this happy people […] Gogol’ did not write about them in vain and everything that he wrote was true! A devilish folk! No one in the entire earth felt liberty, equality, and fraternity as deeply as they! Throughout its entire life, Zaporizhzhia remained free, never submitting to anyone. [When the Muscovites tried to put the Zaporozhians down,] they left for Turkey and there lived freely to the end of their days. […] It may be a mocking picture, but all the same, I will paint it [Repin, Izbrannye pis’ma 1: 240]
Over the course of the next years, Repin’s enthusiasm for the Zaporozhians never failed. His daughter, Vera, later recalled how immersed he was in Ukrainian history during his Moscow period. “Almost every day, Papa read verses aloud [to us] in Ukrainian: ‘On the Three Brothers’ [and other epics] […] At that time, he painted his picture […] We had gradually come to know all the heroes, Otaman Sirko with his grey whiskers […], Cossack Holota ‘who feared neither fire, nor sword, nor swamp’ […] There was Taras Bulba with [his sons] Ostap and Andrii, and Vakula the blacksmith. Papa modeled the figures of the Zaporozhians from yellow clay, Taras Bulba and the others. Some have been preserved to this day.” [Vera Repina, “Iz detskikh vospominanii…,” Niva 29 (1914): 572, quoted in Liaskovskaia, 1962 ed., 214.]
However, Repin’s conception of the final large canvas was of epic proportions and it could not be completed in only a few short years. He was to work on it intermittently from 1878 to 1891. In 1885, the Ukrainian archeologist and historian of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Dmytro Iavornyts’kyi (1855–1940), driven out of his homeland by charges of “Ukrainophilism,” arrived in the capital, and Repin, at that time living in St. Petersburg, made a point of meeting him. After a memorial service in honor of the poet Shevchenko at the Kazan Cathedral, Repin walked up to Iavornyts’kyi and introduced himself. The two Zaporozhian enthusiasts became immediate friends and the historian put his extensive collection of Zaporozhian artifacts at the artist’s disposal. In turn, Repin drew some illustrations for one of Iavornyts’kyi’s books on archeology and folklore, Zaporozh’e v ostatkakh stariny i predaniiakh naroda [Zaporizhzhia in the Relics of the Past and the Legends of the People] (1888). It may even be that Iavornyts’kyi’s arrival stimulated Repin to begin work again on his masterpiece. Certainly, by this time, he was again engrossed in it, and in 1888, possibly at the suggestion of Iavornyts’kyi, he undertook a new research trip to the Kuban in search of the descendants of the Zaporozhians among the Kuban Cossacks. (At one point Iavornyts’kyi hoped to accompany Repin together with Tarnovs’kyi on this trip, but his academic duties prevented it.) Moreover, in 1889, Iavornyts’kyi published an outline history of the Zaporozhians with a special section on the apocryphal letter as a Ukrainian folk motif, written especially for the use of Repin.
A very large painting, it contained more than sixteen well-developed figures closely grouped around a table upon which the scribe was penning the letter. Each Cossack is dressed in a different period costume and there are a great variety of facial types among them. Weapons and other artifacts, based upon models from the collections of Tarnovs’kyi, Iavornyts’kyi, and the museums, are prominently displayed across the picture. The fictional Taras Bulba, dressed in red, holding his enormous sides, stands to the right. Otaman Sirko, pipe in mouth, leans forward over the scribe, and to the left, a Cossack in a black fur hat of the type once worn by Hetman Sahaidachnyi looks intently on. All of the major figures are based on real models, many of them peasants originally drawn in Ukraine, but others being more famous Ukrainians or personal friends of Repin from St. Petersburg: Taras Bulba was O. I. Rubets, a professor of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and collector of Ukrainian folk songs; Sirko was Repin’s friend, General Mykhailo Drahomirov, sometime commander of the Kyiv garrison and a protector of nationally conscious Ukrainian activists; the Cossack in the black Sahaidachnyi hat was V. V. Tarnovs’kyi; the Cossack putting his fist on the back of another Cossack was the painter Ia. F. Tsionhlyns’kyi; another Cossack was the artist from Poltava, P. D. Martynovych, and the scribe was none other than Iavornyts’kyi himself. [Thomas M. Prymak, A painter from Ukraine: Ilya Repin]
De-Russification of Ukrainian Art >
