Art Chowder January | February 2018, Issue 13 | Página 39

Nikolay Alekseyevich Kasatkin (1859-1930)
Nikolay Alekseyevich Kasatkin (1859-
1930)
Orphaned
1891
oil on canvas
20 x 34.65”
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Nikolay Alekseyevich Kasatkin (1859-
1930)
“Who?”
1897
oil on canvas
dimensions unavailable
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Nikolay Alekseyevich Kasatkin (1859-
1930)
Poor People Collecting Coal in an
Abandoned Pit
1894
oil on canvas
32.6 x 42.1”
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
The emotional contrast could scarcely
be more strident when the foregoing is
compared with the painting by Nikolay
Kasatkin (1859-1930), entitled simply
Who? A soldier has returned from his
service to find himself in the company of
his wife and her child by another man.
Just as anyone can relate to the feelings
of the mother of the bride, clutching her
handkerchief as she contemplates the
momentous family change about to take
place, so is the viewer empathetically
drawn into a different kind of timeless
pathos with the man who wants to
know whose child this is and the
woman’s evident pain. Kasatkin’s
was a stark form of realism, but his
characters remain very much human
and emotionally sympathetic. The artist
would become one of the founders of
Socialist Realism.
1 Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
2 There are pronunciation sites online where one can hear this.
3 Evgeny Steiner. “Pursuing Independence: Kramskoi and the Peredvizhniki vs. the Academy of Arts” The Russian Review, Vol. 70, No. 2 (APRIL 2011), pp. 252-271.
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