Art Chowder January | February 2018, Issue 13

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE By Melville Holmes Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi (1837-1887) The Mermaids 1871 oil on canvas 34.65 x 52” Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed an opera based on the same story by Gogol called May Night between 1878 and 1879. While it never became part of the standard operatic repertoire in the West, the beautiful overture and some arias, indeed the entire opera, can be found online. A ccording to scholar Evgeny Steiner, 3 it was Stasov, the ardent Russophile, who was mainly responsible for a slant on the nature of the “revolt” and the motivations of the group of Itinerant artists, notably Kramskoi and great realist painter Ilya Repin. This ideological slant would become the conventional wisdom of post-Revolution Soviet ideology— the notions that these later nineteenth century Russian artists represented a fundamentally democratic cause and social responsibility, with a condemnation of the Tsarist regime. But these artists weren’t revolutionaries looking to change the existing political and social order. Nor were they in a hurry to fully break from the Academy. They worked cooperatively with it when it suited them. Curiously, the first several exhibitions of the so-called Itinerants were held on the premises of the Academy in St. Petersburg! In the First Traveling Exhibition of 1871, Kramskoi exhibited his Rusalki, translated Mermaids. The subject derived from a story called “May Night” by Ukrainian-born dramatist Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), whom the artist admired. In Slavic mythology and folklore, the rusalki were a sort of water nymph, often identified with the spirits of drowned maidens who haunt ponds and waterways. The painting does not illustrate any particular incident in the story but instead, intent on capturing the effects of moonlight on the landscape with its woeful company, creates a poetically haunting, eerie mood. 34 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi (1837-1887) Moonlit Night 1880 oil on canvas dimensions unavailable Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Art Chowder January | February 2018, Issue 13 | Page 34