“Several times I wanted to get to the source of all these differences. Why am I a titular adviser, why am I a titular adviser? Maybe I'm not a titular adviser at all? Maybe I'm some kind of count or general, but only in this way I seem like a titular adviser. Maybe I don't know who I am yet. After all, there are so many examples from history: some simple, not so much a nobleman, but just some tradesman or even a peasant - and suddenly it turns out that he is some kind of nobleman or baron, or something like him ... "
So it seems that at these words the small face of Gogol's Poprishchin, clenched into a fist, suddenly smoothes out, blissful contentment spreads over him, a lively gleam lights up in his eyes, and he becomes taller, and the figure is different - as if he had thrown off his shoulders along with a worn out uniform, a feeling of one’s own insignificance, oppression, one’s wretchedness ...
The plot of the painting “Fresh Cavalier”
Just why did we remember the Gogol hero, considering painting by Fedotov "Fresh cavalier"? Here we have an official who celebrated the receipt of the order. In the morning after the feast, not yet having slept properly, he put on his new clothes on his dressing gown and stood in a pose in front of the cook.
Fedotov, apparently, was occupied with a completely different story. But what is a plot for a true artist! Isn’t this a reason, a purely accidental opportunity to fashion such characters, to reveal such sides of human nature, so that in a hundred and two hundred years to make people sympathize, resent, despise those with whom they encounter as living creatures ...
Both Poprishchin and Fedotov's "cavalier" are kindred, close natures for us. One manic passion owns their souls: "Maybe I'm not a titular adviser at all?"
It was said about Fedotov that for some time now he began to live as a recluse. He rented some kind of kennel on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, damp, children are walking from the master's half, children are crying behind the wall - and he works in such a way that it is scary to look at: in the evening and at night - by lamps, during the day - in sunlight.
When one of the old acquaintances expressed his surprise, Fedotov began to talk with fervor about the advantages of his present life. He did not notice the inconveniences, they simply did not exist for him. But here, on the 21st line of Vasilyevsky Island, his natural inclination to observation finds constant food, there is more than enough material for creativity - his heroes live around.
It is now that he is determined to start working in oils, to put his first canvases to the public. Of course, these will be pictures of morals, scenes that he peeped in life: one called “The Consequences of a Feast”, the second “The Humpbacked Groom” (as the paintings “The Fresh Cavalier” and “The Picky Bride” were originally called).
In the short hours of rest, Fedotov suffered from pain in his eyes. He put a wet towel to his head and thought about his heroes, first of all about the “cavalier”. The life of officials was familiar to him from childhood, from his parental home in Moscow.
Here, in St. Petersburg, there is a different spirit - the metropolitan one. New acquaintances of the artist from those who served in different departments, as if they were born officials. How they sit down at a party, take a chair, how they talk to the janitor, how they pay off the cab driver - by all the manners, by the gesture one could guess both their rank and possible promotion. On their faces, when they trot to the department in the morning, wrapped in shabby overcoats, one official concern, fear of reprimand, and at the same time some kind of self-satisfaction are reflected. Precisely contentment... The desire for all sorts of abstract goods, of course, they regard as stupidity.
And among them there are funny, at least his "cavalier".
Description of the main character of the picture
Fedotov arranged the picture in such a way, saturating it with details so that it could be read as a narrative about the life of this person, a detailed narrative and, as it were, leading the viewer into the depths of the picture, so that the viewer was imbued with the very atmosphere of what was happening, to feel like an eyewitness - as if inadvertently the door to He opened it to a neighbor - and that's what his eyes saw. It is tempting and at the same time instructive. Yes, the scene presented to the eyes should teach. The artist believed that he could correct morals, influence human souls.
When one day friends gathered at Fedotov's, and among them the writer A. Druzhinin, the artist began to explain, interpret the meaning of the paintings, as he himself understood them: "uncalculating life." Yes, and in "The Consequences of the Revel" and in "The Hunchbacked Bridegroom" every spectator should see the harm from a careless life.
Until the gray hair, the bride went through the suitors and now she has to opt for a hunchbacked celadon. And the official! Here he is standing in the pose of a Roman emperor, moreover, barefoot and wearing hairpins. The cook has such power over him that she laughs in his face and almost pokes him in the nose with a holey boot. Under the table, a sleeping companion is a policeman. On the floor are the remains of a feast and a rare guest in the house - a book. Of course, this is Bulgarin's Ivan Vyzhigin. “Where a bad connection has started, there is dirt on a holiday,” Fedotov finished ...
Despite all the difficult circumstances of life, he believed in the initially good nature of people, in the possibility of the degeneration of the most evil and vicious of them; moral filth, vulgarity, he believed, is a consequence of disrespect for oneself.
With his art, he dreamed of returning man to man.
Friends liked the picture of the official to the extreme with its vitality, naturalness. Speaking details that did not obscure the whole, humor and this feature - to captivate, lure into the depths of the picture, make you feel the atmosphere of the event. It seemed to them that the moralizing, edifying interpretation of Fedotov did not reveal the full meaning of the canvas. And time has confirmed this.
Fedotov exhibited the paintings to the public in 1847. The success of "Pirushka" was so great that it was decided to remove the lithograph from the canvas. This made Fedotov extraordinarily happy, because everyone can buy a lithograph, which means that the picture will be able to have an impact on many - this is what he aspired to.
Nothing happened. The censorship demanded that the order be removed from the official's dressing gown, the attitude towards which was considered disrespectful. The artist tries to make a sketch and realizes that the meaning, the whole essence of the picture, is lost. He gave up lithography.
This story became known outside of artistic circles, and when Fedotov exhibited the canvas for the second time in 1849 - and at that time the public's mindset was warmed up by the events of the French Revolution - they saw in the picture a kind of challenge to the bureaucratic apparatus of tsarist Russia, a denunciation of the social evil of modern life.
Critic V.V. Stasov wrote: “Before you is a smart, stiff nature, a corrupt bribe taker, a soulless slave of his boss, who no longer thinks about anything, except that he will give him money and a cross in his buttonhole. He is fierce and ruthless, he will drown anyone and whatever you want - and not a single wrinkle on his face made of rhinoceros skin will not flinch. Anger, swagger, callousness, idolization of the order as the highest and peremptory argument, completely vulgarized life - all this is present on this face, in this pose and figure of an inveterate official.
...Today we understand the depth of generalization given by the image of the "cavalier", we understand that the genius of Fedotov undoubtedly came into contact with the genius of Gogol. We are pierced by compassion and the “poverty of a poor man”, for whom happiness in the form of a new overcoat turns out to be an unbearable burden, and we understand that on the basis of the same spiritual poverty, or rather, complete lack of spirituality, oppression of an unfree person, mania grows.
“Why am I a titular councillor, and why am I a titular councilor?..” Oh, how terrible this face is, with what an unnatural grimace it is distorted!
Gogolevsky Poprishchin, who cut his new uniform into a mantle, is removed by society, isolated. Fedotov’s hero, on the other hand, will probably prosper, rent a brighter apartment for himself, get another cook, and, of course, no one, even in their hearts, will throw to him: “Crazy!” Meanwhile - take a look - the same dehumanized face of a maniac.
Passion for distinction, for rank, for power, lurking latently and growing more and more into a poor, miserable life, eats up, destroys a person.
We peer into "Fresh Cavalier" Fedotov, a whole layer of life is exposed. With plastic clarity, the physiognomy of past centuries is outlined, and in all the depth of generalization, we are faced with a miserable type of complacency,
But, noting the commonality of Gogol's and Fedotov's types, we must not forget about the specifics of literature and painting. The aristocrat from the picture "Breakfast of an Aristocrat" or the official from the picture "The Fresh Cavalier" is not a translation into the language of painting of Gogol's non-coppers. The heroes of Fedotov are not nostrils, not Khlestakovs, not Chichikovs. But they are also dead souls.
Perhaps, it is difficult to imagine so vividly and visibly a typical Nikolaev official without Fedotov's painting "The Fresh Cavalier". The swaggering official, boasting to the cook about the received cross, wants to show her his superiority. The master's proudly pompous posture is absurd, just like himself. His puffiness looks ridiculous and pitiful, and the cook, with undisguised mockery, shows him worn-out boots. Looking at the picture, we understand that Fedotov's "fresh gentleman", like Gogol's Khlestakov, is a petty official who wants to "play a role at least one inch higher than the one assigned to him."
The author of the picture, as if by chance, looked into the room, where everything is thrown without the slightest attention to simple decency and elementary decency. There are traces of yesterday's booze in everything: in the flabby face of an official, in scattered empty bottles, in a guitar with torn strings, clothes carelessly thrown on a chair, dangling suspenders... quality still by Bryullov) is due to the fact that each item was supposed to complement the story about the life of the hero. Hence their ultimate concreteness - even a book lying on the floor is not just a book, but a very base novel by Faddey Bulgarin "Ivan Vyzhigin" (the author's name is carefully written out on the first page), the award is not just an order, but the Order of Stanislav.
Wanting to be precise, the artist simultaneously gives a capacious description of the poor spiritual world of the hero. Giving their "cues", these things do not interrupt each other, but put together: dishes, remnants of a feast, a guitar, a stretching cat - play a very important role. The artist depicts them with such objective expressiveness that they are beautiful in themselves, regardless of what exactly they have to tell about the chaotic life of the “fresh gentleman”.
As for the “program” of the work, the author stated it as follows: “The morning after the feast on the occasion of the order received. The new gentleman could not stand it: than the light put on his new dress on his dressing gown and proudly reminds the cook of his significance, but she mockingly shows him the only and perforated boots which she carried to clean."
After getting acquainted with the picture, it is difficult to imagine a more worthy fellow Khlestakov. And here and there, complete moral emptiness, on the one hand, and swaggering pretentiousness, on the other. In Gogol, it is expressed in the artistic word, while in Fedotov it is depicted in the language of painting.
“The Fresh Cavalier” by Pavel Andreevich Fedotov is the first oil painting he painted in his life, the first finished painting. And this picture has a very interesting history.
P.A. Fedotov. Self-portrait. Late 1840s
Pavel Andreevich Fedotov, one might say, was the founder of the genre in Russian painting. He was born in Moscow in 1815, lived a difficult, even tragic life, and died in St. Petersburg in 1852. His father rose to the rank of officer, so he could enroll his family in the nobility, and this allowed Fedotov to enter the Moscow Cadet School. There he first began to paint. In general, he turned out to be an incredibly talented person. He had a good ear, sang, played music, composed music. And in everything that he was supposed to do in this military institution, he achieved great success, so that he graduated among the four best students. But the passion for painting, for drawing won over everything else. Once in St. Petersburg, he served in the Finnish regiment by distribution, he immediately enrolled in the classes of the Academy of Arts, where he began to draw. It is important to mention here that they began to teach art very early: nine, ten, eleven-year-old children were placed in the classes of the Imperial Academy of Arts. And Fedotov was already too old, Bryullov himself told him so. Nevertheless, Fedotov worked diligently and hard, and as a result, his first finished oil painting (before that there were watercolors, small oil sketches) immediately attracted attention, and critics wrote a lot about it.
P.A. Fedotov. Fresh Cavalier. Morning of the official who received the first cross. 1848. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
But how did the artists live at that time? Well, the artist painted a picture and, let's say, sold it. And then what? Then he could go to a familiar engraver and order him an engraving from his picture. Thus, he could have an image that could be replicated. But the fact is that for permission it was necessary first to apply to the Censorship Committee. And Pavel Andreevich turned there after writing The Fresh Cavalier. However, the Censorship Committee did not allow him to replicate and make engravings from his painting. The obstacle was the order on the robe of the hero - a fresh gentleman. This is the Order of Stanislav of the third degree. Here it is necessary to tell a little about the system of orders that existed at that time in Russia. Two Polish orders - the Great White Eagle and Stanislav were included in the number of orders under Alexander I in 1815. At first they were awarded only to Poles, later Russians were also awarded. The Order of the White Eagle had only one degree, while Stanislav had four. In 1839, the fourth degree was abolished, leaving only three. All of them gave the right to a number of privileges, in particular, to receive the nobility. Naturally, receiving this very lowest order in the Russian award system, which nevertheless opened up great opportunities, was very attractive to all officials and members of their families. Obviously, for Fedotov to remove the order from his picture meant to destroy the entire semantic system he had created.
What is the plot of the picture? It's called The Fresh Cavalier. The painting is dated by the artist in the 46th year, it was exhibited at exhibitions in 1848 and in 1849, and in 1845, that is, three years before the public saw the painting, the awarding of the Order of Stanislav was suspended. So in fact, if this is a gentleman, then it is not at all fresh, since after the 45th year such an award could not happen. Thus, it turns out that the clash of the name “Fresh Cavalier” with the structure of Russian life at that time makes it possible to reveal both the properties of the personality depicted here and the attitude of the artist himself to the theme and hero of his work. Here is what Fedotov wrote in his diary when he came from the Censorship Committee about his painting: “The morning after the feast on the occasion of the order received. The new cavalier could not stand it, than the world put on his new dress on his dressing gown and proudly reminds the cook of his significance. But she mockingly shows him the only, but even then worn and perforated boots, which she carried to clean. Leftovers and fragments of yesterday's feast are scattered on the floor, and under the table in the background one can see a cavalier waking up, probably left on the battlefield, too, but one of those who stick with a passport to those passing by. The waist of the cook does not give the owner the right to have guests of the best tone. “Where there is a bad connection, there is a great holiday - dirt.” So Fedotov himself described the picture. It is no less interesting how his contemporaries described this picture, in particular, Maikov, who, having visited the exhibition, described that the gentleman was sitting and shaving - there is a jar with a shaving brush - and then suddenly jumped up. This means that there was a knock of falling furniture. We also see a cat tearing apart the upholstery of a chair. Therefore, the picture is filled with sounds. But it is still full of smells. It is no coincidence that Maykov had the idea that cockroaches are also depicted in the picture. But no, in fact there are none, it's just the rich imagination of the critic who added insects to this plot. Although, indeed, the picture is very densely populated. Here is not only the cavalier himself with the cook, there is also a cage with a canary, and a dog under the table, and a cat on a chair; leftovers everywhere, a herring head lying around, which the cat has eaten. In general, a cat is often found in Fedotov, for example, in his painting "Major's Courtship". What else do we see? We see that the dishes fell from the table, bottles. That is, the holiday was very noisy. But look at the gentleman himself, he is also very untidy. He is wearing a tattered robe, but he wrapped it up like a Roman senator wearing a toga. The gentleman's head is in papillots: these are pieces of paper in which the hair was wrapped, and then burned with tongs through that piece of paper so that the hairstyle could be styled. It seems that all these procedures are helped by the cook, whose waist is, indeed, suspiciously rounded, so that the morals of this apartment are not of the best quality. The fact that the cook is wearing a headscarf, and not a povoinik, the headdress of a married woman, means that she is a girl, although she is not supposed to wear a girl's headscarf either. It can be seen that the cook is not in the least afraid of her "terrible" master, she looks at him with a mockery and shows him the holey boots. Because although in general the order, of course, means a lot in the life of an official, but not in the life of this person. Perhaps the cook is the only one who knows the truth about this order: that they are no longer awarded and that this gentleman missed his only chance to arrange life somehow differently. Interestingly, the remains of yesterday's sausage on the table are wrapped in newspaper. Fedotov prudently did not indicate what kind of newspaper it was - "Police Vedomosti" Moscow or St. Petersburg. But focusing on the date of the painting, we can say for sure that this is Moskovskie Vedomosti. By the way, this newspaper wrote about Fedotov's painting when he later visited Moscow, where he exhibited his painting and performed together with the famous playwright Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky.
Pavel Andreevich Fedotov was an incredibly talented person. He had a good ear, sang, played music, composed music. While studying at the Moscow Cadet School, he achieved such success that he was among the four best students. However, the passion for painting conquered everything. Already during his service in the Finnish regiment, Pavel enrolled in the classes of the Imperial Academy of Arts under the guidance of battle painting professor Alexander Sauerweid.
For study, he turned out to be too old, which Karl Bryullov, another teacher at the academy, did not fail to tell him about. In those days, art began to be taught early, usually between the ages of nine and eleven. And Fedotov crossed this line a long time ago ... But he worked diligently and hard. Soon he began to get good watercolors. The first work exhibited to the audience was the watercolor “Meeting of the Grand Duke”.
Its theme was prompted by the meeting of the guardsmen with the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich in the Krasnoselsk camp, which the young artist saw, who joyfully greeted the high person. These emotions struck the future painter and he managed to create a masterpiece. His Highness liked the picture, Fedotov was even granted a diamond ring. This award, according to the artist, "finally imprinted in his soul artistic pride."
However, Pavel Andreevich's teachers were not satisfied with the work of the novice artist. They wanted to get from him polished and polished in the image of soldiers, which was required from the servicemen by the authorities at the May parades.
One artist guessed another
Fedotov did not like all this, for which he listened to constant remarks. Only at home did he divert his soul, depicting the most ordinary scenes, illuminated by good-natured humor. As a result, Ivan Andreevich Krylov understood what Bryullov and Sauerweid did not understand. The fabulist accidentally saw the sketches of a young painter and wrote him a letter, urging him to leave horses and soldiers forever and take up the real thing - the genre. One artist sensitively guessed another.
Fedotov believed the fabulist and left the Academy. Now it is difficult to imagine how his fate would have developed if he had not listened to Ivan Andreevich. And the artist would not have left the same mark in Russian painting as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in literature. He was one of the first painters of the mid-19th century to resolutely embark on the path of critical realism and began to openly denounce the vices of Russian reality.
High mark
In 1846, the artist painted the first painting in the new genre, which he decided to present to the professors. This painting was called "The Fresh Cavalier". It is also known as "The Morning of the Official Who Received the First Cross" and "The Consequences of the Revel". Working on it was hard. “This is my first chick, which I“ nursed ”with various amendments for about nine months,” Fedotov wrote in his diary.
He showed the finished painting together with his second work - "The Picky Bride" at the Academy. And a miracle happened - Karl Bryullov, who had not particularly welcomed Pavel Andreevich before, gave his canvases the highest rating. The Council of the Academy nominated him for the title of academician and assigned a financial allowance. This allowed Fedotov to continue the begun painting "Major's Matchmaking". In 1848, she, along with The Fresh Cavalier and The Picky Bride, appears at an academic exhibition.
The next exhibition, along with fame, brought censorship attention. It was forbidden to remove lithographs from the "Fresh Cavalier" because of the irreverent image of the order, and it was impossible to remove the order from the picture without destroying its plot. In a letter to the censor Mikhail Musin-Pushkin, Fedotov wrote: “... where there is constant poverty and deprivation, there the expression of the joy of the reward will reach the point of childishness to rush around with it day and night. ... stars are worn on robes, and this is only a sign that they value them.
However, the request to allow distribution of the painting "in its present form" was denied.
"Fresh Cavalier"
Here is what Fedotov wrote in his diary when he came from the Censorship Committee about the painting: “The morning after the feast on the occasion of the order received. The new cavalier couldn't stand it, he put on his new clothes on his dressing gown and proudly reminds the cook of his importance. But she mockingly shows him the only, but even then worn and perforated boots, which she carried to clean. Leftovers and fragments of yesterday's feast are scattered on the floor, and under the table in the background one can see a cavalier waking up, probably left on the battlefield, too, but one of those who stick with a passport to those passing by. The waist of the cook does not give the owner the right to have guests of the best tone. “Where there is a bad connection, there is a great holiday - dirt.”
In his work, Pavel Fedotov gave a certain share of his sympathy to the cook. Not bad-looking, a neat young woman, with a rounded, common people's face. A scarf tied around her head says that she is not married. Married women in those days wore a warrior on their heads. By the looks of it, she's expecting a baby. One can only guess who his father is.
"The Fresh Cavalier" Pavel Fedotov for the first time paints in oils. Perhaps that is why the work on it was carried out for quite a long time, although the idea was formed long ago. The new technique contributed to the emergence of a new impression - the complete realism, materiality of the depicted world. The artist worked on the painting as if he were painting a miniature, paying attention to the smallest details, leaving not a single fragment of space unfilled. By the way, critics later reproached him for this.
poor official
As soon as they didn’t call the gentleman of criticism: “an unbridled boor”, “a soulless careerist official”. After many years, the critic Vladimir Stasov completely burst into an angry tirade: “... before you is a smart, stiff nature, a corrupt bribe taker, a soulless slave of his boss, who no longer thinks about anything, except that he will give him money and a cross in his buttonhole. He is fierce and ruthless, he will drown whom and what he wants, and not a single wrinkle on his face of rhinocers skin will not flinch. Anger, arrogance, callousness, idolization of the order as the highest and peremptory argument, life completely vulgarized.
However, Fedotov did not agree with him. He called his hero a "poor official" and even a "hard worker" "with a small content", experiencing "constant scarcity and deprivation." It is difficult to argue with the latter - the interior of his dwelling, which is at the same time a bedroom, an office and a dining room, is rather poor. This little man found himself someone even smaller to rise above ...
He, of course, is not Akaky Akakievich from Gogol's "Overcoat". He has a small award, which entitles him to a number of privileges, in particular, to receive the nobility. Thus, receiving this very lowest order in the Russian award system was very attractive for all officials and members of their families.
The gentleman missed his chance
Thanks to Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the official became the central figure in Russian literature of the 1830s-1850s. It was made hardly the only theme for vaudeville, comedies, stories, satirical scenes and other things. Even though they made fun of the official, they sympathized and sympathized with him. After all, he was tormented by the powers that be and he did not have the right to vote at all.
Thanks to Pavel Fedotov, it became possible to see the image of this small performer on the canvas. By the way, today the topic raised in the middle of the 19th century sounds no less relevant. But there is no Gogol among the writers who is able to describe the suffering of a modern official, for example, from the council, and there is no Fedotov, who, with his inherent share of irony, would draw a local-level official with a letter of thanks in his hands from another official, higher in his rank. Cash bonuses and serious awards are received by the leadership ...
The picture was painted in 1846. And in 1845, the awarding of the Order of Stanislav was suspended. So it is quite likely that the laughter of the cook, which is clearly heard from the canvas, just indicates that the broken girl knows the whole truth. They are no longer awarded and the "fresh gentleman" missed his only chance to change his life.
The genres of his paintings are varied.
Pavel Fedotov influenced the development of fine arts and went down in history as a talented artist who made important steps in the development of Russian painting.
The genres of his paintings are quite diverse, ranging from portraits, genre scenes and ending with battle paintings. Particular attention is paid to those written in his characteristic style of satire or critical realism. In them, he exposes human weaknesses and the very human essence for show. These paintings are witty, and during the life of the master were a real revelation. Genre scenes, where vulgarity, stupidity and, in general, different sides of human weaknesses are ridiculed, were an innovation in Russian art of the 19th century.
However, the artist's adherence to principles, along with the satirical orientation of his work, caused increased attention of censorship. As a result, patrons who previously favored him began to turn away from Fedotov. And then health problems began: vision deteriorated, headaches became more frequent, he suffered from rushes of blood to the head ... Which is why his character changed for the worse.
Fedotov died forgotten by everyone except friends
Fedotov's life ended tragically. In the spring of 1852, Pavel Andreevich showed signs of an acute mental disorder. And soon the academy was informed by the police that "a madman is kept at the unit who says that he is the artist Fedotov."
Friends and the administration of the Academy placed Fedotov in one of the private St. Petersburg hospitals for the mentally ill. The sovereign granted him 500 rubles for his maintenance in this institution. The disease progressed rapidly. In the autumn of 1852, acquaintances secured the transfer of Pavel Andreevich to the hospital of All Who Sorrow on Peterhof Highway. Here Fedotov died on November 14 of the same year, forgotten by all but a few close friends.
He was buried at the Smolensk Orthodox cemetery in the uniform of the captain of the Life Guards of the Finnish Regiment. The censorship committee forbade publishing the news of Pavel Andreevich's death in the press.
"Fresh Cavalier". Morning of an official who taught the first cross. 1846
Pavel Fedotov artist
The last work of Fedotov Players was created at the turn of 1851-1852.
There are cases when the beginning and denouement of creativity are in striking contrast (for example, Goya, and in Russian art - Valentin Serov or Alexander Ivanov). The change, tantamount to moving to another dimension, is catastrophic.
The name of Fedotov, among the first to graduate from the Moscow Cadet Corps, can be seen on a marble plaque at the main portal of the Catherine Palace in Lefortovo, where the military school was located. Fedotov was appointed to it in 1826, and at the end of 1833 he was sent to serve as an ensign in the Finland Regiment in St. Petersburg. All his further creative life is connected with St. Petersburg. But it is significant that the name of Fedotov still shines in golden letters in Moscow. Here, by the way, it is worth recalling that the artist who was the first in Russian art to turn to painting, called the everyday genre, Venetsianov, was also a native Muscovite. It was as if there was something in the very air of Moscow that aroused in natures endowed with artistic talent a partial attention to what was happening on the everyday plain.
In the autumn of 1837, while on vacation in Moscow, Fedotov painted the watercolor Walk, where he depicted his father, half-sister and himself: apparently, it was decided, according to old memory, to visit the place where Fedotov spent seven years of his life. Fedotov still sketched this scene as a student, but one can already marvel at the accuracy of the portrait resemblance, and especially at how this scene is staged, how the habit of dignified Moscow inhabitants in unsightly outfits and the bearing of a picturesquely dapper officer, as if flown here from Nevsky Prospekt, are compared. The poses of the father in a long frock coat with drooping cuffs and the sister in a heavy coat are the poses of frankly posing characters, while Fedotov portrayed himself in profile, as a person absolutely not conditioned by forced posing, as an outsider. And if inside the image this foppish officer is shown with a touch of slight irony, then this is also self-irony.
Subsequently, repeatedly giving self-portrait features to characters often depicted in ridiculous, comical or tragicomic positions, Fedotov thereby makes it clear that he does not fundamentally separate himself from his heroes and from all those everyday incidents that they depict. Fedotov, the comedian, who seems to be supposed to rise above his heroes, sees himself "put on the same level with them": he plays in the same performance and, as a theater actor, can be "in the role" of any character in his paintings in the everyday theater. Fedotov, a director and set designer, cultivates in himself an acting gift, the ability of plastic transformation along with attention to the whole, to what can be called a production plan (scenography, dialogue, mise-en-scene, scenery) and attention to detail, nuance.
In the first timid experiments, that primordial, unconscious, inherited from nature, which is denoted by the word gift, usually more clearly declares itself. Meanwhile, talent is the ability to understand what, in fact, is bestowed, and most importantly (which, by the way, is the gospel
the parable of the talents) is the ability to realize the responsibility for the worthy development, increase and improvement of this gift. And Fedotov was completely endowed with both.
So, giftedness. Fedotov unusually succeeded in portrait resemblance. His first artistic attempts were mainly portraits. First, portraits of domestic (Walk, Portrait of the father) or fellow soldiers. It is known that this similarity was noted both by the models themselves and by Fedotov. Recalling his first works, he spoke of this property as if for him it was an unexpected influx - the discovery of what is called a gift, what is given by nature, and not worked out, deserved.
This amazing ability to achieve portrait likeness is reflected not only in the actual portrait images, but also in works that do not seem to directly imply such a degree of portrait accuracy. For example, in a watercolor on a relatively small image format) every face, every turn of a figure, the manner of each character wearing epaulettes or tossing his head.
Of portrait origin, Fedotov's attentiveness to the individually special captured not only his face, gesture, but also his habit, posture, "grimacing", demeanor. Many of Fedotov's early drawings can be called "plastic studies". Thus, the watercolor of the front bailiff on the eve of a big holiday (1837) is a collection of sketches on the theme of how people hold and carry a burden when it is both a physical burden and a moral inconvenience, which also needs to be “endured” somehow, since in this case this burden
also an offering, a bribe. Or, for example, a drawing where Fedotov depicted himself surrounded by friends, one of whom offers him a game of cards, the other a glass, and the third pulls off his overcoat, holding the artist about to escape (Friday is a dangerous day). These sheets of a sketchy nature also include drawings of the mid-1840s How people walk, Chilled, chilled and walking, How people sit down and sit. In these sketches, for example, how a person settles in a chair or is about to sit down, throwing back the hem of his coat, how a general lounges in an armchair, and a petty official sits expectantly on the edge of a chair. How a person shudders and dances from the cold, etc.
This explanation in parentheses, what seems completely unimportant - for Fedotov, that is the most interesting thing. One of Fedotov's drawings after washing is dedicated to a similar motif.
In 1834, Fedotov ended up in St. Petersburg and began the usual, boring, routine duties of an officer in the Finland Regiment.
Fedotov, in essence, wrote anti-battle scenes and not maneuvers that foreshadow military heroism, but the non-heroic-everyday, purely peaceful side of the life of a military tribe, with small everyday details. But mainly different variants of boring idleness are depicted, when there is nothing to occupy oneself with, except for posing for the artist for his "idle" exercises. An episode of military life is frankly used as an occasion for a group portrait; the contrived nature of these scenes is obvious and is not concealed in any way. In this interpretation, military bivouacs turn into a variation of the "artist's workshop" theme, where officers serve as models for plastic studies.
If the military life in Fedotov's "bivouacs" is full of peaceful, serene calm, then the sepia created in the mid-1840s are full of stormy movement and outwardly dramatic pathos, as if the events with all the signs of a military campaign have moved here, to the territory of everyday rubbish. So, the Death of Fidelka (1844) is a kind of report "from a hot spot", where a real battle unfolds over the body of the deceased ... that is, the dead master's dog.
Between the moment of his retirement and Fedotov's first painting, there is a series of graphic sheets made in the sepia technique. Perfected to varying degrees, they are similar in their common artistic program. Perhaps, for the first time and in the purity of principle, this program is revealed in the earlier composition Belvedere Torso (1841), executed in ink.
Instead of the world-famous monument of ancient plastic art, a no less famous monument of drinking art in one, separately taken country, a vodka damask, was erected on the podium of the drawing class.
In view of this substitution, attention, of course, is riveted to each episode in order to understand that they are conjuring there near their canvases, what they are “studying”.
In this composition, the first principle is formulated, according to which Fedotov's artistic universe is built. The role of the “first impulse” that brings it to life is played by the plot conflict, formed by the substitution of the sublime for the insignificant, the serious for the empty. The sacrament, which is the comprehension of the mysteries of the beautiful in the study of ancient samples, is at once turned into buffoonery. This typically comedic maneuver programs the audience's attention in a special way, as it happens in buffoonery, when our interest is fueled by the expectation of what other funny number the comedians will throw. And this means that a separate "number", that is, an episode, a detail receives an independent value. The whole is built as a discrete set, a series of such "numbers", a parade of attractions.
In the sepia of the mid-1840s, the same principle develops: the sheets of the series are compared with each other, like the numbers of a large attraction, which is the everyday theater. This stringing of episodes in a field of action usually developed like a scenic panorama tends to endlessly expand, so that every sepia, whether it be Fidelka's death. You can think of rearranging the episodes, cutting them down or adding them.
The space is usually divided by partitions into many separate cells. Scenes inevitably take place in the gaps in the door portals on the threshold of these spaces, creating the effect of the merging of what is happening here with what is happening beyond the threshold. In the Death of Fidelka, a high school student recoiled in the open door on the right, struck by the scandal taking place in the room, while on the left the father of the family with a bottle of punch and a glass escapes into the inner chambers, throwing the dog that turned under his feet. In sepia, the Artist, who married without a dowry in the hope of his talent, on the right you can see a window with a hole, where instead of glass there is a pillow, while on the left on the threshold of a half-open door is the artist’s daughter in the arms of a merchant offering her a necklace.
It is curious that in most of the sheets there are inanimate imitations of the living: figurines, dolls, plaster casts of heads, feet, hands, a tailor's mannequin ... Intervenes in human life, it is crossed by another, presented in fragments, fragments, fragments - the image of a broken, crumbling mechanism and the like what the portrayed human whirlwind threatens to turn into.
In sepia, there is still an aesthetically unordered mixture of plausibility with the conventions of stage behavior and pantomimic direction. Fedotov does not at all seek to assure that this is "written off from nature." His goal is different: to create an image of a world where all ties have broken up, where everything is broken and every scene, episode, figure, thing, for the most part, in a clown’s falsetto, screams about what Hamlet was saying at the height of tragic pathos, namely, that “ the connecting thread broke up” and “the world came out of the grooves”. The overall plan, the visual strategy of sepia are not dictated by moral concern and the desire to open people's eyes to the vices of urban hostelry. The situations embodying these "vices" lie on the surface, and besides, they are too widely known to find interest in "opening one's eyes" to such elementary things. Fedotov does not create satirical sheets, but funny pictures, the pleasure of which is supposed to be in the endless stringing of small incidents and details: a sheet from a uvrazh with a monument to Byron, which the boy takes out of the folder as a model for the tomb monument of the deceased Fidelka (Consequence of the death of Fidelka); a boy who amuses himself by tying a paper bow to a dog's tail (Death of Fidelka) ', the pretzel ascribes on the door jamb another line in a long column documenting the client's debt (Officer's Front), etc.
The plots of the sheets again form a coherent series. But they appear to be covered with worldly swamp mud, losing their essentiality and their scale, shrinking to the size of that glass, which is usually commemorated in connection with the corresponding size of storms.
What are the devices that provide the artistic comic effect of this reduction? We know that in clowning, the more serious, the funnier. In the pictorial series, therefore, it was necessary to find an equivalent to this paradox of "ridiculous seriousness." What it meant - to find a measure of vitally reliable in combination with the implausible, composed, artificial. Moreover, this "measure" should be clear to the viewer.
One way to find such a measure is the analogy with the theater, theatrical mise-en-scenes: space is built everywhere like a stage box, so that the spectator is likened to the spectator of the stage. In the Fashion Store, the stage is constructed as an ensemble of actor's plastic sketches, and, in fact, Fedotov describes these works of his in the explanations that were provided with these pictures at an exhibition in Moscow in 1850. “The colonel, dissatisfied with her husband’s purchase, leaves her, and he shows her an empty wallet. The inmate climbed onto the shelf to get something. The fat semi-lady takes advantage of this moment and sets something into her huge reticule ... All in rings, the young adjutant, correcting the expedition - probably his general's wife - buys stockings. Fedotov closes this scene with a closet, where on the top shelf through the glass you can see figures - either figurines, or paper silhouettes - that look like a puppet theater, mimicking the worldly theater that we observe in the human world. And this juxtaposition casts a reverse light on the mise-en-scenes of the human theater portrayed by Fedotov, revealing specifically puppet plasticity in the participants in these scenes. In all sepia, and in this one especially, one more feature common to Fedotov's genre art comes through very clearly: people are toys of empty passions. A whirlwind, a merry-go-round, a kaleidoscope of life, a clash of fleeting empty interests, petty conflicts that are ripples on the surface of life - "vanity of vanities and catching the wind" that whistles without affecting the depths of life. This, in essence, is the main theme of Fedotov's works.
In the Spectator in Front of a Ceremonial Portrait, the spectator is a cook, depicted as if posing for a full-length ceremonial portrait. In this context, even the hero's bare feet are perceived as a parodic reminiscence of classical sculpture. Details scattered in breadth in sepia are grouped here in a small space. Despite the fact that the floor is stage-raised, there is an impression of a cramped space, like a ship's cabin, at the moment when the ship suddenly gives a strong heel, so that all the rubbish that fills this nook moves out to the foreground. Not a single item was left in good condition. This is emphasized by the improbable way in which the tongs “hang” on the edge of the table, as if the moment had been captured when the table top had just suddenly come down with a crash. There are herring tails on the floor, overturned bottles indicate that there is not a drop left in them, a chair is broken, guitar strings are torn, and even the cat on the chair seems to be trying to contribute to this chaos, tearing up the upholstery with its claws. Fedotov forces not only to observe, but even to hear these dissonances, cacophony, cacophony: the table top slammed, bottles clinked, strings rang, a cat purred, tearing the fabric with a crash.
Fedotov studied with Hermitage masters, including Dutch still life painters. The pictorial illusion in the depiction of the material world is designed to bring joy to the eye, while the everyday life, which is the subject of the image, does not contain anything gratifying in itself. Thus, with an appeal to painting, one of the main problems of his art is sharpened: the image attracts - the depicted repels. How to combine one with the other?
How and what works Krylov could see, we do not know. But it is quite natural for an aspiring artist, who is still in obscurity, to rely on recognized authorities in the first steps. Another authority to which Fedotov appeals here is Bryullov. Bryullov's iridescent color painting, popular at that time, frankly distinguishes this new work of Fedotov from the monochrome painting of the Fresh Cavalier. The decorative ensemble in the painting The Legible Bride - the bright crimson color of the upholstery of the walls, the brilliant gold of the frames, the multi-colored carpet, the iridescent satin dress and the bouquet in the hands of the bride - all this is extremely close to the coloristic arrangement of Bryullov's ceremonial portraits. However, Fedotov gave an unexpected twist to this Bryullov color painting precisely by the fact that he transferred it from the monumental to the small format. She lost her decorative pathos and turned into a philistine toy that characterizes the taste of the inhabitants of the depicted interior, which is by no means the best variety. But in the end, it remains unclear whether this picturesque beauty expresses the vulgar predilections of the heroes of the depicted scene, or whether it is the taste and predilection of the artist himself.
Players. 1851 - 1852
So the picture turned out to be like an illustration to this poem. And during an exhibition of his works in Moscow in 1850, he composed a long "racea". Fedotov loved to perform his raceya himself, imitating the intonations and dialect of a fair barker-raeshnik, inviting the audience to look through the peephole at an amusing performance in pictures inside a box called a district.
We have been given a glimpse of what is happening "without witnesses" - there, in the hallway, and here, in the living room. Here is the commotion caused by the news of the arrival of the major. This news is brought by a matchmaker crossing the threshold of the hall. There is the Major, posing in the doorway the way he poses in front of the mirror in the hallway, twirling his mustache. His figure in the door frame here is the same as his figure in the mirror frame there, beyond the threshold.
Just as before in sepia, Fedotov depicted a space opened by doors on both sides, so that we see how the news of the arrival of the major, like a draft, crosses the threshold of the door on the right and, picked up by a hanger-on stuck in the left door, goes on walk around the inner chambers of the merchant's house. In the very trajectory along which all the characters of the scene are lined up, that continuity is visually recreated, which is rather characteristic of an all-penetrating sound. In contrast to the fragmentation, mosaicism observed in sepia, Fedotov achieves an exceptional melodiousness, "prolongation" of the compositional rhythm, which is also stated in his racea.
The unique eloquence of this picture is not the eloquence of a real episode, as if written off from nature (as in the Picky Bride), but the eloquence of the artist himself, who has acquired style, skill in storytelling, and the ability to transform into his characters. Here we find a subtle measure of artistic convention associated with the laws of the stage, with a kind of scenic affectation of postures, facial expressions, and gestures. Thus, the depressing prosaism of the actual event is removed, it is turned into a merry vaudeville hoax.
In the linear score of the picture, the "vignetting" motif varies. This rhythmic game includes both the pattern on the tablecloth, and the decorations of the chandelier, and the zigzag strokes of the folds in the merchant's dress, the fine lace of the bride's muslin dress, her fingers curved in time with the general pattern, and the slightly mannered outline of the shoulders and head, amusingly reflected in the grace of the cat, " washing" guests, as well as the silhouette of the major, the configuration of his posture, parodied in the curved legs of a chair at the right edge of the picture. With this play of lines, bizarrely manifested in different incarnations, the artist ridiculed the pretentious patterning and variegation of the merchant's house, and at the same time the heroes of the action. The author here is at the same time a mocking writer of a comic situation, and an applauding spectator, pleased with the comedy, played by him. And he seems to be brushing over the painting again to capture in it both his author's irony and the viewer's delight. This dual essence of Fedotov's pictorial "tale", most fully manifested in the Major's Matchmaking. We emphasize that this spectacle of the graceful characterizes precisely the image of the author, his aesthetic position, his view of things.
Alexander Druzhinin, a writer, once a colleague and closest friend of Fedotov, the author of the most informative memoir essay about him, has the following reasoning: “Life is a strange thing, something like a picture painted on a theater curtain: don’t get too close, but stand on a certain point , and the picture will become very decent, but sometimes it seems much better. The ability to fit into such a point of view is the highest human philosophy. Of course, this ironically expounded philosophy is quite in the spirit of Gogol's lieutenant Pirogov from Nevsky Prospekt. In the first version of the Courtship, Fedotov seems to disguise himself as this “higher human philosophy”: the event appears in a ceremonial guise, and the artist, hidden behind a vaudeville mask, lavishes enthusiasm about the festive splendor of the stage. Such deliberate naivety is precisely the key to the artistic integrity of Fedotov's masterpiece. As an example of such a stylization of someone else's point of view, we can recall Gogol. In his stories, the narrator is sometimes identified with the characters (for example, the beginning of the Tale about how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich or Nevsky Prospekt), then the mask is dropped, and we hear the author’s voice towards the curtain: “It’s boring in this world, gentlemen!” or "Don't trust Nevsky Prospekt." That is, do not believe the deceptive appearance, the brilliant shell of life.
The meaning of the second version of "Major's Matchmaking" is to discover the real "author's voice".
The artist seemed to pull back the theater curtain, and the event appeared in a different guise - as if the ceremonial gloss was crumbling. There are no chandeliers and paintings on the ceiling, girandoles are replaced by candlesticks, instead of pictures on the wall - letters. The pattern of the parquet is less distinct, there is no pattern on the tablecloth, instead of a light muslin handkerchief, a crumpled heavy handkerchief crashed onto the floor.
With the disappearance of the chandelier, the cornice, with the replacement of the round stove with a square one, the impression of the tangibility of space has been weakened. There are no rhythmic articulations that slow down attention, formed in the first version by objects that disappeared during repetition. In the aggregate of these changes, the feeling of space, characteristic of Fedotov's latest works, as a single, continuous and mobile light-saturated substance, is manifested. The spatial environment becomes rarefied, decompressed, and therefore all the silhouettes become more mobile, the pace of action is more rapid. The thoroughness of the pictorial story loses its former meaning, the emphasis shifts from the subject description to the subjective assessment of the event.
The ongoing transformation of visual means is accompanied by changes in the interpretation of the characters. The major turned from a veil and a hero into a flabby villain, the matchmaker lost her smart cunning, something stupid appeared in her face; the merchant's smile froze in an unpleasant grin. Even the cat, as if copying the mannered grace of the bride in the first version, here turned into a fat, coarse-haired, ill-mannered animal. In the movement of the bride there is no former shade of mannerism. The frames that crossed her silhouette in the first version and visually slowed down the movement are now raised up so that the swiftness of the line outlining the shoulders and head of the bride is clearly perceived. The movement comes to light as impetuous, even confused. If in the first version enthusiastic admiration of the details inspires the illusion that the artist sees the scene through the eyes of crafty "sellers" and "buyers" of merchant goods, then in the second version we are invited to perceive the surroundings through the eyes of the bride - through the eyes of a person who has become a victim of a dramatic collision.
The Fedotov genre is dedicated to what is called "life circumstances". For their reconstruction, they require thoroughness, that is, they must be told in detail. In this regard, the beginnings of Fedotov's genreism in the sepia of the first half of the 1840s can be defined as "pictorial literature". But the word itself has a nominative or descriptive-figurative part. And along with it, another part that does not coincide with it - pronunciation, intonation, what in speech is called expression, expressiveness. After all, the meaning of what is pronounced and the attitude to what is pronounced is not only in the composition and grouping of words, but also in phrasing, intonation. But then in “pictorial speech” there must also be a proper pictorial level and an expressive level. If so, is it possible to release these expressive possibilities in the image? Fedotov's assistant in solving this problem is the word.
In the drawings of the second half of the 1840s, the entire descriptive-naming, that is, pictorial, relating to the characteristics of circumstances, function is given to verbal commentary, sometimes very lengthy. This comment is included in the image field and performs the same role as subtitles on a movie screen. The pictorial language, no longer loaded with the task of explaining and commenting on what is happening, focuses on playing with its own expressive possibilities. If this is “pictorial literature”, then the expression now remains for the image: such pictorialness begins to depict what exists in the word in addition to its figurative-objective meaning, namely, voice, music, intonation. It is no coincidence that in Fedotov's verbal comments on the mise-en-scenes depicted, interjections are constantly used: “Oh, I'm unhappy ...” (Careless bride), “Oh, brother! I think I forgot my wallet at home ”(Kvartalny and the cabman),“ Oh, daddy! how does the bonnet suit you, 'but question and exclamation marks, that is, actually intonation, come into play especially often.
The emphasis is transferred from the subject narrative to the intonation pattern of the plastic phrase, to the “behavior of the pencil”, which copies and simultaneously comments on the behavior of the characters. Sometimes this shift in attention is specially played up - the subject is there, but not immediately read. So, in the drawing Selling an ostrich feather (1849-1851), the girl, examining, holds a feather in her raised hand, the contour of which coincides with the curve of her shoulder, which is why the feather itself is indistinguishable at first glance: the whole scene is likened to an elegantly played pantomime etude with an imaginary object.
Or, for example, in the drawing A Young Man with a Sandwich (1849), the contour of a sandwich slice in a raised hand is exactly inscribed in the outline of a vest collar in such a way that it is not perceived at all as a separate object. The study, of course, is not about a sandwich at all: the fingers holding a slice of bread seem to simply touch the collar and hang at the beginning of a downward diagonal, followed by a lazy glance through the other hand, lazily trying on the diameter of an imaginary glass, about which the creature lazily thinks: to raise whether? now, right? Or a little later? The graceful ballet sophistication of the entire pose betrays the languidly lazy habit of showing off, characteristic of the regulars on Nevsky Prospekt, who are accustomed to feeling themselves in sight, catching interested looks and taking picturesque poses. This drawing definitely correlates with the theme of Fedotov's 1849 painting The Guest Is Out of Time. Aristocratic breakfast.
In the Major's Courtship, the frame of the picture imitates the portal of the stage, as if we were observing what is happening from the stalls. In the Breakfast of an Aristocrat, the interior is shown as the scene is perceived from behind the scenes: we see exactly what is hiding from the incoming one. The comic situation here is of the same kind that is expressed in theatrical jargon by the concept of "overlay": something "from another opera" or from real life is superimposed on the artistically deliberate, so that the intended and the unintentional form a self-willed paradoxical unity. In this case, such an artificial staging is the "theater of things" in the interior of the room. She is here not at all to serve as a container for garbage, but to demonstrate the noble form of the ancient amphora, and mainly the noble taste of the owner. The paper, obviously, was cut so that on a radiant clean
The incoming sheet of the required format immediately caught the eye recently, presumably, the acquired statuette. But next to it, on another part of the same sheet, a bitten loaf of black bread lay down, thereby assuming the same character of a sight to be shown off as the rest of the “beautiful things”. It is this “overlay” that the owner is trying to close from the incoming guest.
But in this case, Fedotov uses the theme of "life for show" not so much in the interests of "criticism of morals" as "in the interests of painting": after all, everything ostentatious that characterizes the morals of the hero of the picture - a carpet, an armchair, trinkets on the table, the whole atmosphere of this room has aesthetic merit. For the painter, for his eye, this “window dressing” constitutes a fascinating coloristic ensemble and allows him to demonstrate his skill and love for object charm, regardless of the mockery that the very situation of the picture can cause. To indicate this comic incident, it would be enough just a loaf of bread next to the statuette, covered with a book.
In this work, almost the main contradiction of Fedotov's painting is pointed out. The fact is that within the plots devoted to everyday nonsense, the situation and the whole world around characterize the characters depicted, their tastes and passions. But they cannot coincide with the taste of the artist himself, since here the author and the characters are separated by an ironic distance. And now Fedotov has reached that degree of pictorial skill that awakens a natural thirst to assert his sense of beauty and understanding of beauty directly, bypassing this distance. But as long as the previous plot program is preserved, this distance must somehow be curtailed, shortened. In the film Out of Time for a Guest, this is expressed in the fact that the comedy of the incident, unlike previous works, is reduced to an anecdote, "turned to a point", is clear at first sight. And the time of contemplating a picture as a pictorial creation unfolds not in the sphere of this comedy, but in the sphere of admiring the beauty of the pictorial ensemble presented to us, regardless of the satirical tasks of the plot.
It is quite clear that the next step was to eliminate the antagonism between the characters and the author. Things and their color qualities cease to name and describe the external circumstances of the action, but turn into a kind of instruments on which the inner “music of the soul” is played, or what is commonly called mood, state. Not things, but the “soul of things”, not the way they shine, shine, but the way they glow with inner light in the gloomy darkness ...
Compared with the works that brought Fedotov fame, inseparable from the reputation of a fascinating storyteller and comedian, this change meant a betrayal of this former reputation. Fedotov could not but understand that he was thereby deceiving the expectations of the public. The process of working on the variants of the picture The Widow shows that this reincarnation was not given to Fedotov without difficulty.
All variants were created in a short period during 1850 and 1851, which makes it difficult to accurately date. However, the chronological sequence does not necessarily express artistic sequence or logic. This is the logic. In the version “with purple wallpaper” (TG), Fedotov tried to keep a completely different plot collision - detached from everything external, a state of immersion in the inner invisible, intangible “life of the soul” within the limits of the previous style, providing for the descriptive principle of presenting the event in visibly tangible details. As a result, the picture turned out to be multicolored and outwardly enumerative. The space is expanded in breadth and viewed from some distance, reminiscent of the previous stage technique of painting construction. Depicted, therefore, a moment of farewell to the former life. However, this state is rather indicated than expressed. The figure is too outwardly spectacular: the theatrical-ballet grace of a thin figure, a picturesque gesture of a hand resting on the edge of a chest of drawers, a thoughtfully bowed head, a recognizably Bryullov, slightly puppet type. Despite the small format in terms of compositional typology, it looks like a formal portrait.
In the variant of the Ivanovo Museum, on the contrary, the fundamentally new thing brought about by this plot is somewhat outwardly forced, namely, the mood, the state, and it is simply tearful sadness. Fedotov made his features slightly puffy, his face as if swollen from tears. However, the true depth of what we call a state, mood, is inexpressible in external signs and signs subject to calculation. His element is loneliness and silence. This is where the variant “with a green room” (TG) originates. The space surrounds the figure more closely. Its proportions set the format and rhythmic structure of the picture, the proportions of the things that make up the interior (vertically elongated portrait format leaning against the wall, the proportions of a chair, a chest of drawers, a candle, a pyramid of pillows). The frame of the portrait no longer crosses the line of the shoulder, the silhouette emerges as a shimmering contour at the top of the free space of the wall, forcing one to appreciate the perfect, truly angelic beauty of the profile. The artist consistently renounces the somewhat mundane concreteness of the type for the sake of an ideal "face". The gaze, withdrawing into itself, is inclined from top to bottom, but nowhere specifically, “How souls look from a height / At their abandoned body ...” (Tyutchev). The flame of a candle is the same as it happens when it is just lit: it not only illuminates, but activates the feeling of enveloping twilight - this paradoxical effect, conveyed with amazing picturesque subtlety, could be commented on by Pushkin's line "the candle burns darkly."
It is not an event or incident that is depicted, but a state that has no imaginable beginning and end; it loses track of time. In essence, stopped time - an event on the line of non-existence - is what the picture is dedicated to. This out-of-genre, mourning-memorial aspect of the theme is manifested in yet another half-figure variant (GRM): in the geometrized architectural statics of the composition, narrative minimalism, strict unquivering calm, excluding any shade of sentimentality.
In The Widowmaker, the indefinite duration of the depicted psychological moment pulled her out of the boundaries of concretely representable time. They are counting down the empty, flowing time. Time goes and stands at the same time, because it does not promise any change in reality. His movement is illusory.
According to the same principle, a picturesque spectacle is built on the canvas. At first glance, something indistinct appears - a swaying, smoky, stuffy haze; the elementary element is gradually reconstructed from it: a candle, a table, a trestle bed, a guitar leaning against the wall, a reclining figure, the shadow of a poodle, and some kind of ghostly creature in the doorway in the depths to the left. People and things are turned into picturesque phantoms, as they are perceived in the unsteady interval between sleep and reality, where the apparent and the real are indistinguishable from each other. This two-faced, tricky unity of the illusory and the real is one of the incarnations of the well-known metaphor "life is a dream."
A cozy corner, a samovar, tea, a sugar bowl, a twisted bun on the table - a meager but still dessert, a good-natured smile on the owner's face (by the way, a physiognomic nuance that flashed through Fedotov only in this work). The same good nature in writing funny incidents - the shadow behind the owner's back resembles a goat, and since he is with a guitar, it turns out something like a hint at the widespread likening of singing to goat bleating (again, auto-irony: the officer here is endowed with self-portrait features, and Fedotov, according to the recollections of friends , possessed a pleasant baritone voice and decently sang with a guitar). The frankly aesthetic admiration of the repetitions of curved lines (the outline of the chair, the edge of the tablecloth, the soundboard of the guitar and the bend of the outstretched hand, the silhouette of the bowed figures of the owner and the batman) betrays a desire to make the visible pleasant, euphonious. In general, the scene was staged and performed as a household humoresque.
Next to her is the painting “Anchor, more anchor!” seems to have been created specifically to confirm the aphorism of Bryullov, revered by Fedotov, that “art begins where it begins a little bit”, and in fulfillment of the truth that in art the content is created by the form, and not vice versa. In fact, the compositional proportions are “slightly” modified, and with the complete identity of the plot, the theme is completely transformed. The ratio of space and subject content has been changed in favor of space, the role of spatial pauses is extremely active. The figures denoting the situation are "lost" on the periphery of the image. In the center, on the compositionally main place, there is a table lit by a candle, covered with a scarlet tablecloth. On it is a dish or a frying pan with what looks like potatoes, a mug, a bowl, a folding mirror, a burning and unlit candle - a set of objects that characterizes what is called an unlaid table. That is, it is covered with a tablecloth in order to be covered for some act called lunch, tea, etc. (for example, in the picture The Officer and the Batman the table is set for tea). So, the ensemble of things that signify that the table is set, prepared for a certain action, is just not here. It's the same as if we opened a stage without scenery: although it may have a lot of stuff on it, it will still be perceived as an empty stage.
Another paradox is the unsteady illusory nature of the picture that appears “in the wrong light” of a candle, combined with a distinct alignment of compositional geometry. The outlines of the beams turned the interior into a stage box, the portal of the “stage” is parallel to the front of the picture plane. The diagonal lines of the ceiling beam at the top left and the bench at the bottom right sharply show the outlines of a “perspective funnel”, drawing the eye in depth to the center, where (once in Fedotov’s interiors) a window is placed. These rhymes make tangible the role of compositional intervals. Up close, in the foreground, there is a kind of proscenium between the frame of the picture and the "portal" of the stage box, then the proscenium - between this portal and the edge of the shadow where the dog rushes about. A similar spatial interval is read in the background - in the echo of a mirror set at an angle with the slopes of a snow-covered roof, visible outside the window. The shaded part of the interior is thus squeezed "from the front and from the rear" between two deserted spatial fragments and turns into a nook, a closet, a hole - a haven of eternal boredom. But vice versa - she is guarded, looks at her (through the window), she is overshadowed by the big world: the nest of insignificant boring idleness is included in a larger "scale grid", and it turns into the personification of Boredom.
Before us is truly a "theater of the absurd": we are urged to pay special attention to the fact that there is nothing worthy of attention on the stage of life. Exactly the same proclaims the phrase anchor, more anchor! After all, it means a repeated appeal, a urging to action, while this action itself is nothing but a stupefaction from inaction. It's a kind of rippling void. Outside the attributes of allegorical poetics, Fedotov created an allegory on the theme of "vanity of vanities" - an eventless play with a comprehensive, global theme. Therefore, by the way, the meaningless mixture of "French with Nizhny Novgorod", the phrase of no one's dialect - this nonsense still makes sense, and it lies in the fact that in the spaces of Russian, as well as French boredom, "monotonous clocks" are heard and time flows away in the same way.
Features of Fedotov's late work, different from the previous ones, were determined in Vdovushka. Firstly, another plot conflict emerged - life pushed to the threshold of death, non-existence: a pregnant widow between the death of her husband and the birth of a child. Secondly, the consciousness of the uninterestingness of this new plot for the public, who fell in love with the artist for something completely different, and, consequently, the consciousness that new plays are played in front of an empty auditorium and the old means of capturing the audience's attention are not needed. Pictures are created as if for themselves. But this means that they are addressed somewhere beyond the present time - to eternity. If so, then painting begins to depict not what is happening outside, but what is happening in the inner world - not visible, but felt, apparent. The main role in the creation of such an image of visibility is played by a candle - an indispensable attribute, starting with the Widow, all of Fedotov's later works.
By limiting the field of view, the candle intimates the sense of the spatial environment. Another property of a candle is to make the surrounding dusk visually tangible. That is, literally and metaphorically push the light to the border of darkness, the visible to the line of the invisible, being to the threshold of non-existence. Finally with a candle
inherently connected is the feeling of the fragility of the world she brings to life and the subordination of her light to the vicissitudes of chance. Because of this, it has the ability to make the picture of the visible reality ghostly. In other words, a candle is not just an object among objects, it is a metaphor. The apotheosis of this metaphorical poetics was the painting Players (1851-1852).
In the old watercolor depicting Fedotov and his comrades in the Finnish regiment at the card table (1840-1842), the dramaturgy of the card game is not a visual task - to create a group portrait. Involvement in the vicissitudes of a card game, as they say, infuriates: here it is not a person who plays a card, but a card plays a person, turning the face into the personification of a card case, that is, into a mystical figure. The real becomes the embodiment of the illusory. This is precisely the general theme, it is also the pictorial style of the painting The Players. It is quite understandable why Fedotov painted the shadow figures of players from mannequins: the plasticity of statically fixed puppet poses made it possible to remind the viewer of those states when, straightening a body stiff from a long sitting - arching the lower back, stretching his arms, rubbing his temples, that is, bringing himself to life - we are, in essence, treating ourselves as if we were dead, we are extracting ourselves from where we led a ghostly existence.
Such situations are expressed by a commonly used figure of speech - "to come to your senses", "to return to reality". In any of these cases, there is a transitional moment, when the soul is "on the threshold, as it were, of a double being."
Perhaps, due to the natural abstractness of the graphic language (compared to more sensually concrete painting) in the drawings for the Players, made with a feverish, hot stroke on paper of a cold blue tone, the correlation of such dual
states with the world beyond, the surreal is expressed with more impressive than in the pictorial canvas, piercing distinctness.
Once, in relation to genre painting of the 17th century, Pushkin threw the phrase “variegated rubbish of the Flemish school.” But the artist, who has made it his professional occupation to pour this "litter", seems unexpected such a maxim that is present in his notebooks. This pathos, this soaring, where in his art can we find and understand this? Only surveying everything as a whole, only contemplating and trying to derive an integral formula of his creative intellect.
In Fedotov's diary notes, there are definitions that are extremely expressive in this sense: "In favor of drawing, he made grimaces in front of a mirror", "The experience of mimicking nature." But then one day he calls his classes - "my artistic deepening."
At a time when art was customarily divided into "form" and "content", the primacy was usually given to Fedotov's passion to depict life, current reality. Whereas his artistic reflections were conceived as something that is “attached” to this main passion and affection of him. “To whom it is given to arouse pleasure in another with talents, then for the food of self-esteem one can refrain from other delicacies, this upsets the talent and spoils its purity (and nobility) (which is what makes it pleasant to people), chastity. This is where the key of the elegant and noble is hidden. This last maxim can be considered a commentary on the drawing of Fedotov, torn apart by passions. But if we were to ask ourselves what is the purity and chastity of a talent that renounces passions in order to arouse pleasure in others, we would find that they lie in the style of performance, in the beauty of the drawing, etc., and not at all in collecting "plots from life". As "artistic recesses" Fedotov was occupied with just these plastic modifications. But Fedotov himself, envious of her, developed precisely this ability in himself, and therefore this relationship between plot and style could be reversed and it could be said that Fedotov in life chooses such situations and incidents that enable him to find and enrich the reserve of artistry. gems that weren't there before.
If the gift that Fedotov knew behind him consisted in sharpness and taste for trifles, in a predisposition, in Gogol's language, "to take away in his mind
all this prosaic, essential squabbling of life… all the rags down to the smallest pin,” then Fedotov’s ability, or what we call talent, lies precisely in finding ways to visually embody this material, completely new for Russian art, into an artistically seductive form.
“I am learning from life,” Fedotov said. Generally speaking, this phrase, if we give it the meaning of a creative credo or principle, is the statement of a typical dilettante, and Fedotov initially acted precisely as an amateurish talent. In contrast to this, one can recall the rather well-known saying of Matisse: “One becomes an artist not in front of nature, but in front of a beautiful picture.” Of course, Matisse's statement is the statement of a master who knows that craftsmanship can only be learned from masters. According to this logic, the study of life does not become art until this life is seen in the work of some master who teaches the artist the lessons of mastery. Such a metamorphosis in relation to life's collisions and spectacles has long been known. It is contained in the famous formula and metaphor belonging to the category of "eternal metaphors" - "the whole world is a theater." In essence, when we pronounce, without much thought, the simple phrase “a scene from life,” we join precisely this metaphor, we express exactly those aspects of a person’s attitude to reality that are characteristic of artistic distancing from life. And this kind of attitude to life, this withdrawal from the power of its laws and the feeling of being at some point in the position of a spectator who contemplates the worldly carousel, belongs to completely human abilities. Fedotov knew her behind him and knew how to cultivate in himself.
The peculiarity of the Russian situation is that the everyday painting, otherwise called simply a genre, appears in Russian art very late, at the beginning of the 19th century. But in addition to historical forms in specific personal varieties, very rich and branched, worked out by European painting, there is such a thing as internal logic. From the point of view of this logic, the everyday plain, to which genre painting is dedicated, has two separate territories or regions. One is where everyday life is turned to the fundamental principles of the life of the human race, such as work, home, family care, motherhood, etc. the irrevocable values of being, the existence of a person in the world, therefore, this is the part of life where he is involved in being, where the everyday genre gravitates towards the existential. This is precisely the genre of Venetsianov.
The main antithesis hidden in the nature of the genre can be defined as the antithesis "nature-civilization". Accordingly, the second part of this antithesis is most fully represented in the urban environment. And this is the subject that determined the logic of the Fedotov genre.
In the formation of Fedotov as a genre painter, in determining his “space” within the genre, the fact that chronologically Fedotov was preceded by Venetsianov and his school played a significant role. But not in the sense that Fedotov studied with Venetsianov and inherited his lessons, but in the sense that he built his own artistic world in a negative way, in all respects the opposite of what Venetsianov had.
Fedotov's Venetian landscape is opposed by interiority. In Venetsianov, contemplative static, a long, immovable balance prevails. Fedotov has discrete fragments of life, mobility that brings the world and human nature out of balance. The Venetian genre is conflict-free, inactive. Fedotov almost always has a conflict, an action. In the spatial relations accessible to the fine arts, he modeled temporal relations. Accordingly, in the visual style itself, in the swiftness or slowness of a linear drawing, in the alternation of pauses between figures, in the distribution of light and color accents, tempo-rhythmic characteristics became extremely important. Changes in this area largely determine the difference between his graphic and pictorial works and his evolution, that is, those oppositions that separate one work from another.
Portrait quality vigilance and observation, as mentioned before, are at the origins of Fedotov genreism. However, Fedotov's portraits are completely, in all respects, opposed to the Fedotov genre. Firstly, because the portrait characters of Fedotov embody precisely the norm - the one that once, referring to Chateaubriand, Pushkin formulated: "If I still believed in happiness, I would look for it in the uniformity of everyday habits." Bearing in mind the constant wandering in an alien crowd, which the craft and skill of a writer of everyday life demanded of him, Fedotov called himself a "lone onlooker."
With the meager provision that Fedotov brought from his artistic activity, he forbade himself to dream of family joys. Fedotov's portrait world is an "ideal" world, where a homely atmosphere of friendly sympathy and sympathetic attention reigns. Fedotov's models are his friends, his inner circle, like the family of his colleague in the Finnish regiment Zhdanovich, in whose house, apparently, during his lonely and homeless life, Fedotov found a cozy haven. These are, therefore, those people who constitute the “joy of the heart”, who fill the memory of the “lonely onlooker”, the wanderer, the traveler in all his wanderings.
We do not know the motives for creating portraits: whether they were ordered to Fedotov and whether he received royalties for them. And this vagueness itself (with a relatively large number of portraits created by the artist) indicates that, apparently, these were monuments of friendly disposition and participation to a greater extent than works painted to order for the sake of earning money. And in this situation, the artist was not obliged to follow the generally accepted canons of portraiture. Indeed, the portraits are painted as if they were created exclusively "for oneself", like photographs for a home album. In Russian art, this is the ultimate version of a chamber portrait, small-format portraits approaching a miniature, the purpose of which is to accompany a person everywhere and always; a miniature portrait was taken with them on the road, putting, for example, in a box, or hung around the neck like a medallion. He is, so to speak, in the orbit of breathing, being warmed by human warmth. And this shortening of the distance, the distance of the interview with the model - quietly, in an undertone, without grand gestures and pathos - sets the aesthetic code, within which the very concept of Fedotov's portrait took place.
This is a world of purely “interior” feelings, where friendly attention and participation are idealized, that pacifying peace that a home, comfort, warmth of familiar, lived-in things conclude. The inhabitants of this ideal kingdom are literally images, that is, images, icons, or household gods, penates, what they worship. Therefore, these images have the main quality of sacred images - they live outside of time.
In the latter, a world driven by the temporal, while the heroes of Fedotov's portraits are removed from the power of any eventfulness, it is even difficult to imagine everyday emotional situations for them - thoughtfulness, joy, etc. But the portrait does not depict acute grief or a situation of mourning: it is a quiet, unobtrusive indifference, like weariness from sadness. The main thing that is present in this portrait and that is to some extent poured into all the portraits of Fedotov is the indifference of the models to the external manifestations of feelings, to how they look “from the side”. And these are precisely such states in which the flow of time is forgotten. They take you away from the moment. But besides, this is the shyness of people (and the artist who endows his models with this property), not that secretive, but who consider it indecent to impose their “feelings” on anyone.
In this series, such a work, strange in design, as a portrait of E.G. Fluga (1848?). This is a posthumous portrait, the study for which was a drawing by Fedotov of Flug on his deathbed. The plot is clearly fictional.
Another portrait, where the event outline is guessed, is the Portrait of N.P. Zhdanovich at the piano (1849). She is depicted in the form of a pupil of the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens. She either just played a piece of music, or she is going to play, but in any case, in her posture and in the look of her coldish eyes with eyebrows apart, there is some amazing winning attitude, as if Zhdanovich was sure that she would certainly seduce and subdue the one she hopes to subdue.
Fedotov's portraits are not only estranged from fixed forms of portrait representation, which were intended to glorify the model, showing it, as they said in the 18th century, "in the most pleasant light", emphasizing beauty, or wealth, or high class rank. Almost all Fedotov's portraits contain interior furnishings, and, as a rule, in these fragments one can guess the "far chambers" of the house - not a living room or a hall, not a front apartment, but a purely domestic, intimate habitat where people live "on their own", busy with daily chores. But at the same time, his portraits are estranged from decorative and decorative tasks to be one of the beautiful things in the interior ensemble, the pictorial language of Fedotov's portraits is completely devoid of decorative rhetoric.
One of the important components of portrait art is the reaction of the artist to the age characteristics of the model. Considering the portraits of Fedotov in this way, we must note with surprise that they lack a specific note characteristic of youth. In the beautiful portrait of A. Demoncal (1850-1852), the models are no more than twelve years old, which is almost impossible to believe. In one of the best portraits, the portrait of P.S. Vannovsky (1849), an old acquaintance of Fedotov in the Cadet Corps and a colleague in the Finland Regiment - 27 years old. It cannot be said that Fedotov is aging his face. But one gets the impression that these people were touched by some early knowledge, which deprived them of their naive responsiveness and openness to “all the impressions of being”, that is, that winged animation that is a distinctive feature of youth.
The specifics of Fedotov's portraiture, therefore, to a large extent have to be characterized in a negative way - not by the presence, but by the absence of certain properties. There is no decorative rhetoric here, no ceremonial pathos, the social role does not matter and, accordingly, no attention is paid to the role, behavioral gesture. But these are all significant absences. Among them is the following: it would seem that Fedotov's genreism, dealing with all sorts of worldly absurdities, should have sharpened sensitivity to the unusual, sharply memorable, characteristically special in the human form. But this is exactly what Fedotov's portrait images do not have, and this is perhaps their most surprising property - the artist shuns everything that is sharply emphasized, catchy.
Fedotov repeatedly portrayed himself in the images of the characters in his works. But it is unlikely that the pictorial image, attributed as a portrait of Fedotov, is his own self-portrait. Most likely, it was not written by him. The only reliable self-portrait of Fedotov, which is precisely a portrait, and not a character with Fedotov's features, is a drawing on a sheet with etude sketches for other works, where Fedotov is filled with deep sadness. He didn’t just screw himself up and “hang his little head” - this is the sad thoughtfulness of a man who was looking for “pleasure for the soul” in “noticing the laws of higher wisdom”, and who comprehended one of them, bequeathed by Ecclesiastes: “There is much sorrow in much wisdom, and that who multiplies knowledge, multiplies sorrow. This intonation, which is completely absent in Fedotov's genres, forms the background, an accompaniment to his portrait art.
Bivouac of the Life Guards Pavlovsky Regiment (Rest on the campaign). 1841-1844
P.A. Fedotov and his comrades in the Life Guards of the Finnish Regiment. 1840-1842