Realism, and "Purpose" Painting
ready in the air. After the world-woe and the abstract æstheticism were gone, the first call to reshape reality was sounded. In Russia, the "intelligentzia" split into Westerners and Slavophiles, and recent friends became embittered enemies; the dazzling pleiad of our great writers, who were to contribute the Russian intellectual mite to the treasury of general culture, were coming of age, and despite the ruthless tyranny of Nicholas's government, the air was astir with revolt. The necessity was felt of changing the skin, of being renewed, regenerated, of amending one's ways.
These moods were to find expression in painting. But it is natural that the echo could not come from the Imperial Academy of Art, a bureaucratic, half-courtly world, nor was the methodical Venetzianov with his humble pupils in a position to produce the first samples of doctrinal propaganda painting. Fedotov alone was nearly fit for such a task, but even he, a retired officer, pensioned by the Emperor, a modest, simple man, intelligent, but childishly naïve, could hardly come up to the level of the literature. He limited himself to what Gogol did fifteen years earlier, that is, to a keen, but not very caustic satire of the foibles and follies of his compatriots.
It is as such a harmless satirist that he made his first appearance before the public in 1849 with his oil paint-
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