Who created the work is a fresh gentleman. Description of the painting P

“Several times I wanted to find out why all these differences are happening. Why am I a titular councilor, why on earth am I a titular councilor? Maybe I'm not a titular adviser at all? Maybe I’m some kind of count or general, but this is the only way I seem to be a titular adviser. Maybe I myself don’t yet know who I am. After all, there are so many examples from history: some simple person, 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 whatever his name is...”

It seems that at these words the small face of Gogol’s Poprishchin, clenched into a fist, suddenly smooths out, blissful contentment spreads over him, a lively sparkle lights up in his eyes, and he becomes taller, and his figure is different - as if he had thrown off his shoulders. along with his threadbare uniform, a feeling of his own insignificance, oppression, and wretchedness...

The plot of the film “Fresh Cavalier”

Just why did we remember Gogol’s hero when looking at Fedotov’s painting “Fresh Cavalier”? Here in front of us is an official who celebrated receiving the order. In the morning after the feast, not yet having slept properly, he put his new robe on his robe and stood in a pose in front of the cook.

Fedotov, apparently, was interested in a completely different subject. But what is a plot for a true artist! Isn’t this a reason, isn’t it a purely accidental opportunity to fashion such characters, to reveal such aspects of human nature, so that in a hundred and two hundred years, make people sympathize, be indignant, and despise those with whom they encounter as living creatures...

Both Poprishchin and Fedotov’s “gentleman” are kindred and close in nature for us. One manic passion controls their souls: “Maybe I’m not a titular adviser at all?”

They said about Fedotov that for some time now he began to live as a recluse. I rented some kind of kennel on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, damp, with children walking from the owner’s half, children crying behind the wall - and it works in such a way that it’s scary to watch: in the evening and at night - under lamps, during the day - in sunlight.

When one of his old acquaintances expressed his surprise, Fedotov began to speak passionately about the advantages of his current life. He did not notice the inconveniences; they simply did not exist for him. But here, on the 21st line of Vasilievsky Island, his natural inclination to observation finds constant food, there is more than enough material for creativity - his heroes live all around.

It is now that he is determined to start working in oils and present his first canvases to the public. Of course, these will be pictures of morals, scenes that he spied in life: one called “The Consequences of a Revel”, the second “The Hunchbacked Groom” (this is how the paintings “Fresh Cavalier” and “The Picky Bride” were originally called).

During 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 “gentleman”. The life of officials was familiar to him from childhood, from his parents’ house in Moscow.

Here, in St. Petersburg, there is a different spirit - a metropolitan one. The artist’s new acquaintances, from those who served in different departments, seemed to have been born officials. How they sit down when visiting, take a chair, how they talk to the janitor, how they pay the cab driver - by all their manners and gestures one could guess their rank and possible career advancement. Their faces, when they trudge to the department in the morning, wrapped in shabby overcoats, reflect only official concern, fear of a reprimand, and at the same time some kind of self-satisfaction. It is contentment... They consider the desire for all sorts of abstract benefits, of course, stupidity.

And among them there are funny ones, at least his “cavalier”.

Description of the main character of the picture

Fedotov arranged the picture in such a way, so saturated it with details, so that one could read it as a narrative about the life of this person, a detailed narrative and as if leading the viewer into the depths of the picture, so that the viewer was imbued with the very atmosphere of what was happening, so that he felt like an eyewitness - as if inadvertently a door to I opened it to my neighbor - and this is what appeared to his eyes. It is tempting and at the same time instructive. Yes, the scene before our eyes should teach. The artist believed that he could correct morals and influence human souls.

When one day Fedotov’s friends gathered, and among them the writer A. Druzhinin, the artist began to explain and explain the meaning of the paintings, as he himself understood them: “a reckless life.” Yes, both in “The Consequences of a Revel” and in “The Brokeback Groom” every viewer should see the harm from an imprudent life.

Until her gray hair, the bride went through suitors and now she has to choose the humpbacked celadon. And the official! Here he stands in the pose of a Roman emperor, barefoot and wearing curlers. The cook has such power over him that she laughs in his face and almost pokes him in the nose with a holey boot. A drinking buddy, a policeman, has fallen asleep under the table. On the floor are the remains of a feast and a rare guest in the house - a book. Of course, this is “Ivan Vyzhigin” by Bulgarin. “Where there is a bad connection, there is dirt on the holiday,” concluded Fedotov...

In spite of all the difficult circumstances of life, he believed in the inherently good nature of people, in the possibility of degeneration of the most evil and vicious of them; moral filth, vulgarity, he believed, were a consequence of disrespect for oneself.
With his art he dreamed of returning humanity to man.

Friends liked the picture about the official extremely because of its vitality and naturalness. Talking details that do not obscure the whole, humor and this feature - captivate, lure into the depths of the picture, let you feel the atmosphere of the event. It seemed to them that Fedotov’s moralizing, edifying interpretation did not reveal the full meaning of the painting. And time has confirmed this.

Fedotov exhibited his paintings to the public in 1847. The success of “The Revel” was so great that it was decided to remove the lithograph from the canvas. This made Fedotov extremely happy, because anyone can buy a lithograph, which means that the painting will be able to have an impact on many - this is what he was striving for.

It didn't work out. Censorship demanded that the order be removed from the official's robe, the attitude towards which was considered disrespectful. The artist tries to make a sketch and realizes that the meaning, the whole point of the picture, is lost. He abandoned lithography.

This story became known outside artistic circles, and when Fedotov exhibited the canvas for the second time in 1849 - and at that time the public’s mood was fueled by the events of the French Revolution - the painting was seen as a kind of challenge to the bureaucratic apparatus of Tsarist Russia, an exposure of the social evil of modern life.

Critic V.V. Stasov wrote: “Before you is an experienced, numb nature, a corrupt bribe-taker, a soulless slave of his boss, no longer thinking about anything other than giving him money and a cross in his buttonhole. He is ferocious and merciless, he will drown whoever and whatever you want - and not a single fold on his face made of rhinoceros skin will falter. Anger, arrogance, callousness, idolization of the order as the highest and categorical argument, a completely vulgar life - all this is present on this face, in this pose and figure of an inveterate official.”

...Today we understand the depth of the generalization given by the image of the “gentleman”, 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, the complete lack of spirituality, oppression of an unfree person, mania grows.

“Why am I a titular councilor and why on earth am I a titular councilor?..” Oh, how scary this face is, what an unnatural grimace it distorts!

Gogolevsky Poprishchin, who cut his new uniform into a mantle, is removed and isolated by society. Fedotov’s hero will probably prosper, rent a brighter apartment, get a different cook, and, of course, no one will even say in their hearts: “Crazy!” And yet - look closely - the same dehumanized face of a maniac.

The passion for distinction, for rank, for power, lurking latently and growing more and more into a poor, wretched life, eats up and destroys a person.

We peer into "Fresh Cavalier" by Fedotov, a whole layer of life is exposed. The physiognomy of past centuries is outlined with plastic clarity, and in all the depth of generalization a pitiful type of self-satisfaction appears before us,

"Fresh Cavalier". The morning of an official who learned the first cross. 1846

Pavel Fedotov artist

Fedotov's last work, Players, was created at the turn of 1851-1852.
There are cases when the beginning and end of creativity are in stark contrast (for example, Goya, and in Russian art - Valentin Serov or Alexander Ivanov). A change that is tantamount to moving to another dimension is catastrophic.

The name of Fedotov, among those who graduated first 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 assigned to it in 1826, and at the end of 1833 he was sent to serve as an ensign in the Finnish regiment in St. Petersburg. His entire further creative destiny is connected with St. Petersburg. But it is significant that Fedotov’s name still shines in golden letters in Moscow. Here, by the way, it is worth remembering that the artist who was the first in Russian art to turn to painting, called the everyday genre, Venetsianov, was also a born Muscovite. It was as if there was something in the very air of Moscow that awakened in those endowed with artistic talent a partial attention to what was happening on the everyday plain.
In the fall of 1837, while on vacation in Moscow, Fedotov painted a watercolor Walk, where he depicted his father, half-sister and himself: apparently, it was decided, from 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 was staged, how the behavior of decorous Moscow inhabitants in unpretentious outfits is compared with the bearing of a picture-dapper officer, as if he had flown here from Nevsky Prospekt. The poses of the father in a long frock coat with saggy cuffs and the sister in a heavy coat are the poses of openly 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, by repeatedly endowing self-portrait traits with characters, often depicted in absurd, comic or tragicomic positions, Fedotov thereby makes it known that in principle he does not separate himself from his heroes and from all those everyday incidents that he depicts. 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 play and, like a theater actor, can find himself “in the role” of any character in his films in everyday theater. Fedotov, a director and set designer, cultivates in himself the gift of acting, the ability of plastic transformation, along with attention to the whole, to what can be called the production plan (set design, dialogue, mise-en-scène, decoration) and attention to detail and nuance.

In the first timid experiments, that primordial, unconscious, inherited from nature, which is designated by the word gift, usually manifests itself more clearly. Meanwhile, talent is the ability to understand what, in fact, is given, and most importantly (which, by the way, is discussed in the Gospel
parable of the talents) - the ability to realize the responsibility for the worthy development, increase and improvement of this gift. Fedotov was fully endowed with both.
So - giftedness. Fedotov was unusually good at portrait likeness. His first artistic attempts were mainly portraits. First, portraits of family (A Walk, Portrait of a 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 about this property as if for himself it was an unexpected inspiration - the discovery of what is called a gift, what is given by nature, and not developed, deserved.
This amazing ability to achieve portrait resemblance is reflected not only in portrait images themselves, but also in works that do not seem to directly imply such a degree of portrait accuracy. For example, in watercolor, a relatively small image format) every face, every turn of the figure, the manner of each character wearing shoulder straps or throwing up their head.
Fedotov's attentiveness to the individual, of portrait origin, captured not only the face and gesture, but also the habit, posture, “grin,” and demeanor. Many of Fedotov’s early drawings can be called “plastic studies.” Thus, the watercolor of a private bailiff's front room on the eve of a big holiday (1837) is a collection of sketches on the topic 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, because in this case this is a 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, another a drink, and the third pulls off his overcoat, holding the artist about to escape (Friday is a dangerous day). These sketch sheets also include drawings from the mid-1840s: How people walk, Cold, chilled and walking, How people sit and sit. In these sketches, for example, how a person settles down on a chair or is about to sit down, throwing back the tail of his coat, how a general is lounging in a chair, 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, is the most interesting thing for Fedotov. One of Fedotov’s drawings, After Washing, is dedicated to a similar motif.

In 1834, Fedotov found himself in St. Petersburg and began the usual, boring, routine duties of an officer in the Finnish regiment.
Fedotov, in essence, wrote anti-battle scenes and not maneuvers foreshadowing military heroism, but the unheroically everyday, purely peaceful side of the life of a military tribe, with small everyday details. But mainly different versions of boring idleness are depicted, when there is nothing to occupy oneself with except posing for the artist for his “idle” exercises. An episode of military life is openly used as an occasion for a group portrait; the composed nature of these scenes is obvious and is not hidden 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 sketches.
If military life in Fedotov’s “bivouacs” is full of peaceful, serene calm, then the sepia images created in the mid-1840s are full of stormy movement and outwardly dramatic pathos, as if events with all the signs of a military campaign had moved here, to the territory of everyday rubbish. Thus, The Death of Fidelka (1844) is a kind of report “from a hot spot”, where a real battle unfolds over the body of a deceased... that is, a dead gentleman'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. Perfect to varying degrees, they are similar in the commonality of their artistic program. Perhaps for the first time and in the purity of principle, this program is revealed in the earlier composition, executed in ink, Belvedere Torso (1841).
Instead of the world-famous monument of ancient plastic arts, a no less famous monument of drinking art in one particular country - vodka damask - was installed on the podium of the drawing class.
In view of this substitution, attention is naturally drawn to each episode in order to understand what they are conjuring around their canvases, what they are “studying”.

This composition formulates the first principle by which Fedotov’s artistic universe is built. The role of the “primary impetus” that brings it to life is played by a plot collision formed by the substitution of the sublime with the insignificant, the serious with the empty. The sacred act, which is the comprehension of the secrets of beauty in the study of ancient examples, is immediately turned into buffoonery. This typically comedic maneuver programs the audience’s attention in a special way, as happens in slapstick shows, when our interest is fueled by the anticipation of what other funny act the comedians will do. This means that a separate “number”, that is, an episode, a detail, receives independent value. The whole is built as a discrete set, a series of such “numbers”, a parade of attractions.
In the sepia prints of the mid-1840s, the same principle develops: the sheets of the series are juxtaposed with each other, like the numbers of a great attraction, which is the everyday theater. This stringing of episodes in a field of action usually expanded, like a stage panorama, tends to endlessly expand, so that every sepia, be it the Death of Fidelka. One can imagine rearranging the episodes, shortening them or adding them.
The space is usually divided by partitions into many separate cells. In the breaches of door portals at the threshold of these spaces, scenes necessarily occur that create the effect of merging what is happening here with what is happening beyond the threshold. In The Death of Fidelka, in the open door on the right, a high school student retreated, amazed 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 away the dog that turned up at 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 - in most of the sheets there are inanimate imitations of the living: figurines, dolls, plaster casts of heads, feet, hands, a tailor's mannequin... Human life is interfered with, it is crossed by another, presented in fragments, fragments, fragments - the image of a broken, crumbling mechanism and the like what the depicted human whirlwind threatens to turn into.

In sepia there is an as yet aesthetically unordered mixture of verisimilitude with the conventions of stage behavior and pantomimic direction. Fedotov does not at all seek to convince us that this is “copied from life.” His goal is different: to create an image of a world where all connections have fallen apart, where everything is torn apart and every scene, episode, figure, thing, for the most part, shouts in a clown falsetto about what Hamlet spoke about at the height of tragic pathos, namely, that “ the connecting thread of days fell apart” and “the world came out of the grooves.” The general plan, the pictorial strategy of sepia, are not dictated by moral concern and the desire to open people's eyes to the vices of urban society. The situations that embody these “vices” lie on the surface, and are, moreover, too widely known to find interest in “opening your eyes” to such elementary things. Fedotov creates not 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 the Urge with a monument to Byron, which a boy takes out of a folder as a model for the tombstone of the deceased Fidelka (Consequence of Fidelka’s Death); a boy who amuses himself by tying a paper bow to a dog’s tail (The Death of Fidelka), the pretzel man writes on the doorframe 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 covered with everyday swamp mud, losing their significance and their scale, shrinking to the size of that glass, which is usually remembered in connection with storms of the same size.
What are the techniques that provide the artistic comic effect of this decline? We know that in clownery, the more serious it is, the funnier it is. In the pictorial series, therefore, it was necessary to find an equivalent to this paradox of “ridiculous seriousness.” What it meant was to find the measure of the vitally reliable in combination with the implausible, contrived, artificial. Moreover, this “measure” should be understandable to the viewer.
One of the ways to obtain such a measure is an analogy with the theater, theatrical mise-en-scène: space is built everywhere like a stage box, so that the viewer is likened to a stage viewer. In the Fashion Store, the stage is built as an ensemble of acting 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 his empty wallet. The seatmate reached onto the shelf to get something. The fat half-lady takes advantage of this moment and tucks something into her huge reticule... Covered in rings, a young adjutant, correcting an 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 everyday theater that we observe in the human world. And this comparison casts a reverse light on the mise-en-scenes of the human theater depicted by Fedotov, revealing specifically puppet plasticity in the participants in these scenes. In all sepia images, and in this one especially, another feature common to Fedotov’s genre art very clearly emerges: people are toys of empty passions. A whirlwind, a carousel, a kaleidoscope of life, a collision of quickly passing empty interests, small conflicts that represent ripples on the surface of life - “vanity of vanities and catching the wind,” which whistles without affecting the depth of life. This, in essence, is the main theme of Fedotov’s works.

In “spectator in front of a ceremonial portrait,” the viewer 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 widely in sepia, are here grouped in a small space. Given that the floor is raised stage-wise, one gets the impression of a cramped space, like a ship's cabin, at a moment when the ship suddenly gives a strong list, so that all the rubbish filling this nook moves towards the foreground. Not a single item is left in good condition. This is emphasized by the incredible way in which the tongs “hang” on the edge of the table, as if the moment was captured when the table top just suddenly dropped with a roar. There are herring tails on the floor, overturned bottles indicate that there is not a drop left in them, the chair is broken, the strings of the guitar are broken, and even the cat on the chair seems to be trying to contribute to this chaos, tearing the upholstery with its claws. Fedotov makes you not only observe, but even hear these dissonances, cacophony, cacophony: the table top slams, bottles clink, strings ring, the cat purrs, tearing the fabric with a crash.
Fedotov studied with Hermitage masters, including Dutch still life painters. A pictorial illusion in the depiction of the material world is intended to bring joy to the eye, while everyday life, which constitutes the subject of the image, contains nothing pleasing in itself. Thus, turning to painting sharpens one of the main problems of his art: the image attracts, but what is depicted repels. How to combine one with the other?
How and what works Krylov could have seen, we do not know. But it is quite natural for a beginning artist, who is still in obscurity, to rely on recognized authorities in his first steps. Another authority to which Fedotov appeals here is Bryullov. Bryullov’s rainbow color painting, popular at that time, clearly distinguishes this new work by Fedotov from the monochrome painting of the Fresh Cavalier. The decorative ensemble in the painting The Picky Bride - the bright crimson color of the wall upholstery, the shiny gold of the frames, the multi-colored carpet, the shimmering 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 because he transferred it from monumental to a small format. It lost its decorative pathos and turned into a bourgeois toy, characterizing by no means the best kind of taste of the inhabitants of the depicted interior. But in the end, it remains unclear whether this pictorial beauty expresses the vulgar preferences 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 an illustration for this poem. And during an exhibition of his works in Moscow in 1850, he composed a long “racea”. Fedotov loved to perform his dance himself, imitating the intonation and speech of a fairground barker inviting spectators to look through a peephole at an entertaining show in pictures inside a box called a district.
We are given the opportunity to spy on what is happening “without witnesses” - there, in the hallway, and here, in the living room. There is a commotion here caused by the news of the major's arrival. This news is brought by a matchmaker crossing the threshold of the hall. There is the major, showing off in the doorway the way he shows off 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 open with doors on both sides, so that we see how the news of the major’s arrival, like a draft, crosses the threshold of the door on the right and, picked up by a hanger-on stuck into the left door, moves on. walk through the inner chambers of a merchant's house. In the very trajectory along which all the characters in the scene are lined up, the continuity that is rather characteristic of all-pervasive sound is visually recreated. In contrast to the fragmentation and mosaic observed in sepia, Fedotov achieves exceptional melodiousness, “lengthiness” of the compositional rhythm, which is also stated in his race.
The unique eloquence of this picture is not the eloquence of an actual episode, as if copied from life (as in The Picky Bride), but the eloquence of the artist himself, who acquired style, mastery of storytelling, and the ability to transform into his heroes. Here we find a subtle measure of artistic convention associated with the laws of the stage, with a peculiar stage affectation of poses, facial expressions, and gestures. This removes the depressing prosaism of the actual event and turns it into a cheerful vaudeville joke.

In the linear score of the picture, the “vignette” motif varies. This rhythmic game includes the pattern on the tablecloth, the decorations of the chandelier, the zigzag strokes of the folds in the merchant’s dress, the fine lace of the bride’s muslin dress, her fingers arched in time with the overall pattern, and the slightly mannered outline of the shoulders and head, amusingly reflected in the grace of the cat, “ "washing" the guests, as well as the silhouette of the major, the configuration of his pose, parodied in the curved legs of the chair at the right edge of the picture. With this bizarre play of lines, manifested in different incarnations, the artist ridiculed the elaborate patterns and diversity of the merchant’s house, and at the same time the heroes of the action. The author here is both a mocking creator of a comic situation and an applauding spectator, pleased with the comedy he has acted out. And he seems to pass his brush over the painting again in order to capture in it both the author’s own irony and the viewer’s delight. This dual essence of Fedotov’s visual “tale”, most fully manifested in the Major’s Matchmaking. Let us emphasize that this spectacle of the elegant 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 come too close, but stand at a certain point , and the picture will become very decent, and sometimes it seems much better. The ability to fit into such a point of view is the highest human philosophy.” Of course, this ironically stated philosophy is entirely in the spirit of Gogol’s lieutenant Pirogov from Nevsky Prospekt. In the first version of Matchmaking, Fedotov seems to masquerade as this “higher human philosophy”: the event appears in ceremonial guise, and the artist, hidden behind a vaudeville mask, lavishes delight at 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 stylization of someone else’s point of view, one can recall Gogol. In his stories, the narrator is either identified with the heroes (for example, the beginning of the Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich or Nevsky Prospekt), then the mask is dropped, and at the end we hear the author’s voice: “It’s boring in this world, gentlemen!” or “Don’t trust Nevsky Prospekt.” That is, do not believe the deceptive appearance, the shiny shell of life.
The point of the second version of “The Major’s Matchmaking” is to discover the real “author’s voice.”
It was as if the artist had pulled back a theater curtain, and the event appeared in a different guise - as if the ceremonial gloss had fallen off. There is no chandelier or painting on the ceiling, girandoles have been replaced by candlesticks, and instead of paintings on the wall there are letters. The pattern of the parquet floor is less distinct, there is no pattern on the tablecloth, instead of a light muslin handkerchief, a crumpled heavy handkerchief crashed to the floor.

With the disappearance of the chandelier, the cornice, and the replacement of the round stove with a square one, the impression of the tangibility of space was weakened. There are no rhythmic divisions that slow down attention, formed in the first version by objects that disappeared during repetition. The totality of these changes reveals the feeling of space, characteristic of Fedotov’s latest works, as a single, continuous and mobile light-saturated substance. The spatial environment becomes rarefied, decompressed, and therefore all silhouettes become more mobile, the pace of action more rapid. The thoroughness of the visual story loses its former significance, and the emphasis shifts from the objective description to the subjective assessment of the event.
The ongoing transformation of visual media is accompanied by changes in the interpretation of the characters. The major turned from a fop and a hero into a flabby villain, the matchmaker lost her clever trick, 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. There is no previous shade of mannerism in the bride's movement. The frames, which crossed her silhouette in the first version and visually slowed down her 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 appears as jerky, 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 - the eyes of a person who finds himself the victim of a dramatic collision.
Fedotov’s genre is dedicated to what is called “life circumstances.” To be recreated, they require thoroughness, that is, they must be told in detail. In this regard, the beginning of Fedotov’s genreism in sepia in the first half of the 1840s can be defined as “visual 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 being said and the attitude towards what is being said is not only in the composition and grouping of words, but also in phrasing and intonation. But then in “figurative speech” there must also be a purely figurative 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, related to the characterization of circumstances, function was given to verbal commentary, sometimes very lengthy. This commentary is included in the image field and performs the same role as subtitles on a movie screen. Fine language, no longer burdened with the task of explaining and commenting on what is happening, focuses on playing with its own expressive capabilities. If this is “fine literature”, then the share of the image now remains with the expression: such figurativeness begins to depict what exists in the word in addition to its pictorial-objective meaning, namely, voice, music, intonation. It is no coincidence that in Fedotov’s verbal comments to the depicted mise-en-scène, interjections are constantly used: “Oh, I’m unhappy...” (Careless Bride), “Ah, brother! I think I forgot my wallet at home” (Kvartalny and the cab driver), “Oh, daddy! “How does the cap suit you?”, but especially often the question and exclamation marks come into play, that is, in fact, intonation.
The emphasis is transferred from the subject narrative to the intonation pattern of the plastic phrase, to the “behavior of the pencil,” copying and simultaneously commenting on the behavior of the characters. Sometimes this shift in attention is deliberately played out - the object is there, but is not immediately read. Thus, in the drawing Selling an Ostrich Feather (1849-1851), the girl, looking at it, holds in her raised hand a feather, the contour of which coincides with the curve of her shoulder, making the feather itself indistinguishable at first glance: the whole scene is likened to an elegantly performed pantomimic sketch with an imaginary object.
Or, for example, in the drawing Young Man with a Sandwich (1849), the outline of a sandwich slice in a raised hand is precisely drawn into the outline of the vest collar so that it is not perceived as a separate object at all. The sketch, of course, is not about a sandwich at all: the fingers holding a slice of bread seem to simply touch the collar and hover at the beginning of a downward diagonal, followed by a lazy glance through the hand of the other hand, lazily trying on the diameter of an imaginary glass, which the creature is lazily thinking about: lift is it? now, right? Or a little later? The graceful balletic sophistication of the entire pose betrays the languidly lazy habit of showing off, characteristic of regulars on Nevsky Prospekt, accustomed to feeling visible, catching interested glances and taking picturesque poses. This drawing definitely correlates with the theme of Fedotov’s 1849 painting “Not the Time for a Guest.” An aristocrat's breakfast.

In The Major's Matchmaking, the picture frame imitates the stage portal, as if we were viewing what was happening from the stalls. In An Aristocrat's Breakfast, the interior is shown as the scene is perceived from behind the scenes: we see exactly what is hidden from those entering. The comedy of the 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 thoughtful, so that the premeditated and the unpremeditated form a willful paradoxical unity. In this case, such an artificial staging is the “theater of things” in the interior of the room. It is here not at all to serve as a container for garbage, but to demonstrate the noble form of an antique amphora, and mainly the noble taste of the owner. The paper, obviously, was cut so that on a shining clean
On the sheet of the required format, what immediately caught the incoming person’s eye was a recently acquired figurine, presumably. But next to it, on another part of the same sheet, lay a bitten edge of black bread, thereby taking on the same character of an attraction, put on display, as the rest of the “beautiful things.” This “overlay” is what the owner is trying to cover 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”, but rather “in the interests of painting”: after all, everything ostentatious that characterizes the morals of the hero of the picture - the carpet, the chair, the trinkets on the table, the entire furnishings of this room have aesthetic merits. For the painter, for his eye, this “show off” makes up a fascinating color ensemble and allows him to demonstrate his skill and love for the beauty of the subject, regardless of the ridicule that the situation of the painting itself may cause. To indicate this comic incident, only a piece of bread next to the figurine, covered with a book, would be enough.

This work highlights perhaps the main contradiction of Fedotov’s painting. The fact is that within stories dedicated to everyday absurdities, the setting and the entire surrounding world characterize the characters depicted, their tastes and preferences. But they cannot coincide with the taste of the artist himself, since here the author and the heroes are separated by an ironic distance. And now Fedotov has reached that degree of pictorial mastery that awakens a natural thirst to affirm his sense of beauty and understanding of beauty directly, bypassing this distance. But while the same plot program remains, this distance must somehow be curtailed, shortened. In the film A Guest at the Right Time, this is expressed in the fact that the comedy of the incident, unlike previous works, is reduced to an anecdote, “reduced to a point,” and is clear at first glance. And the time of contemplating the painting 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 should have been to eliminate the antagonism between the heroes 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 internal “music of the soul” or what is commonly called mood, state is performed. Not things, but the “soul of things”, not the way they shine and shine, but the way they glow with inner light in the gloomy darkness...
Compared to the works that brought Fedotov fame, inseparable from the reputation of a fascinating storyteller and comedian, this change meant a betrayal of his previous reputation. Fedotov could not help but understand that he was thereby deceiving the public's expectations. The process of working on versions of the painting The Widow shows that this transformation was not easy for Fedotov.

All variants were created in a short period of time during 1850 and 1851, which makes dating accuracy difficult. However, 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, which provided for the descriptive principle of presenting an 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 picture construction. Depicted, therefore, is a moment of farewell to his former life. However, this condition is indicated rather than expressed. The figure is too outwardly impressive: 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 recognizable Bryullov, slightly doll-like type. Despite the small format, in terms of compositional typology it looks like a decorative ceremonial portrait.
In the version of the Ivanovo Museum, on the contrary, in a somewhat external way, the fundamentally new thing that this plot brought was forced, namely the mood, the state, and this is simply tearful sadness. Fedotov made his facial features slightly puffy, as if his face was swollen from tears. However, the true depth of what we call state, mood, is inexpressible in external signs and signs subject to calculation. His element is loneliness and silence. This is where the option “with a green room” (TG) originates. Space surrounds the figure more closely. Its proportions determine the format and rhythmic structure of the painting, the proportions of the things that make up the interior (the vertically elongated format of a portrait 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 intersects the line of the shoulder, the silhouette appears as a shimmering outline at the top on the free space of the wall, forcing one to appreciate the perfect, truly angelic beauty of the profile. The artist consistently abandons the somewhat mundane specificity of the type for the sake of an ideal “face”. The gaze, withdrawing into itself, is inclined from top to bottom, but nowhere in particular, “Like souls look from a height / At the body abandoned by them...” (Tyutchev). The flame of a candle is the same as it is when it has just been lit: it does not so much illuminate as it activates the feeling of enveloping darkness - this paradoxical effect conveyed with amazing pictorial subtlety could be commented on by Pushkin’s line “the candle burns darkly.”

What is depicted is not an event, an incident, 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 non-genre, mournful-memorial aspect of the theme is manifested in another semi-figurative version (GRM): in the geometrized architectural statics of the composition, narrative minimalism, strict fearless calm, excluding any shade of sentimentality.
In The Widow, the indefinite duration of the depicted psychological moment removed it from the boundaries of concretely imaginable time. They count down the empty, flowing time. Time moves and stands at the same time, since it does not promise any change in reality. His movement is illusory.
The same principle is used to construct a picturesque spectacle on canvas. At first glance, something indistinct appears - a swaying, smoky, stuffy haze; from it the most elementary elements are gradually reconstructed: a candle, a table, a trestle bed, a guitar leaning against the wall, a lying 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 precarious 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 embodiments of the famous 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 only appeared in Fedotov’s work in this work). The same good nature is in the writing of funny incidents - the shadow behind the owner’s back resembles a goat, and since he is with a guitar, there is something like an allusion to the widespread likening of singing to the bleating of a goat (again self-irony: the officer here is endowed with self-portrait features, and Fedotov, according to the recollections of friends , had a pleasant baritone voice and sang decently with the guitar). Frankly aesthetic admiration of the repetitions of curved lines (the outline of a chair, the edge of a tablecloth, the soundboard of a guitar and the curve of an outstretched hand, the silhouette of the bowed figures of the owner and orderly) reveals a desire to make what is visible pleasant and euphonious. In general, the scene was directed and performed as an everyday 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,” and to fulfill the truth that in art the content is created by the form, and not vice versa. In fact, the compositional proportions were “slightly” modified - and while the plot was completely identical, the theme was 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, the compositionally main place is a table illuminated by a candle, covered with a scarlet tablecloth. On it is a dish or frying pan with what looks like potatoes, a mug, a jar, a folding mirror, a burning and unlit candle - a set of objects that characterizes what is called an uncovered table. That is, it is covered with a tablecloth in order to be set for some act called dinner, tea, etc. (for example, in the painting The Officer and the Orderly the table is set for tea). So, the ensemble of things that signify that the table is set, prepared for a certain action, is not here. It's the same as if we were presented with a stage without decorations: although there may be a lot of stuff on it, it will still be perceived as an empty stage.
Another paradox - the unsteady ghostliness of the picture, appearing “in the wrong light” of a candle, is combined with a distinctly precise compositional geometry. The outlines of the beams transform the interior into a stage box; the “stage” portal 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 reveal the outlines of a “perspective funnel”, drawing the eye into the depths towards the center, where (once in Fedotov’s interiors) a window is placed. These rhymes make the role of compositional intervals tangible. Close up, in the foreground, there is a kind of proscenium between the picture frame and the “portal” of the stage box, then the proscenium – between this portal and the edge of the shadow where the dog is rushing. A similar spatial interval can be read in the background - in the echo of the mirror placed at an angle with the slopes of the snow-covered roof visible outside the window. The shaded part of the interior thus turns out to be sandwiched “from the front and from the rear” between two deserted spatial fragments and turns into a nook, a cell, a hole - a haven of eternal boredom. But also vice versa - she is guarded, looked at (through the window), the big world overshadows her: 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 on the stage of life there is nothing worthy of attention. Exactly the same thing is proclaimed by the phrase anchor, more anchor! After all, it means a repeated appeal, urging to action, while this action itself is nothing more than stupor from inaction. It's a kind of swaying void. Outside the attributes of allegorical poetics, Fedotov created an allegory on the theme “vanity of vanities” - an eventless play with a comprehensive, universal theme. Therefore, by the way, a meaningless mixture of “French with Nizhny Novgorod”, a phrase of a nobody’s dialect - this nonsense still has a meaning, and it is that in the spaces of Russian, as well as French boredom, “the monotonous clock strikes” and time flows away in the same way.
The features of Fedotov’s late work, different from his predecessor, were determined in Vdovushka. Firstly, another plot collision 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 awareness of the uninterestingness of this new plot to the public, who loved the artist for something completely different, and, consequently, the awareness that the new plays are being played in front of an empty auditorium and the previous means of catching the audience’s attention are not needed. The paintings are created as if for themselves. But this means that they are addressed somewhere beyond the present time - into eternity. If this is so, then painting begins to depict not what is happening outside, but what is happening in the inner world - not the visible, but the felt, the apparent. The main role in the creation of such an image of appearance is played by a candle - an indispensable attribute, starting with the Widow, and all of Fedotov’s later works.
By limiting the field of vision, a candle intimates the sense of the spatial environment. Another property of a candle is to make the surrounding darkness visually tangible. That is, literally and metaphorically pushing light to the edge of darkness, the visible to the edge of the invisible, being to the threshold of non-being. Finally, with a candle
Inherently connected is the feeling of the fragility of the world she brings to life and the subjection of her light to the vicissitudes of chance. Because of this, it has the ability to make the picture of visible reality illusory. 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 an old watercolor depicting Fedotov and his comrades in the Finnish Regiment at a card table (1840-1842), the dramaturgy of a card game does not constitute the pictorial task of creating a group portrait. Involvement in the vicissitudes of a card game, as they say, is infuriating: here it is not a person playing a card, but a card playing a person, turning a person into the personification of a card event, that is, into a mystical figure. The real becomes the embodiment of the illusory. This is precisely the general theme, which is also the visual style of the painting 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 the body stiff from long sitting - arching the lower back, stretching the arms, rubbing the temples, that is, bringing oneself to life - we, in essence, treat ourselves as if we were dead, extracting ourselves from where we led a ghostly existence.
Such situations are expressed by a commonly used figure of speech - “come to one’s senses”, “return to reality”. In any of these cases, there is a transitional moment when the soul is “on the threshold of a kind of double existence.”
Perhaps, due to the natural abstraction 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 is still dual
states with the transcendental, unreal world is expressed with a more impressive, piercing clarity than in a painting.
Once upon a time, in relation to genre painting of the 17th century, Pushkin coined the phrase “the Flemish school is motley litter.” Fedotov’s creative efforts were devoted to the aesthetic development of this particular “economy,” discovered by Flemish and Dutch artists of the 17th century. But for an artist who has made pouring out this “trash” his professional occupation, it seems unexpected that such a maxim is present in his notebooks. This pathos, this soaring, where in his art can we detect and understand this? Only by observing everything as a whole, only by contemplating and trying to derive the integral formula of his creative intellect.

In Fedotov’s diary notes there are extremely expressive definitions in this sense: “In favor of drawing, he made grimaces in front of the mirror,” “The experience of imitating nature.” But then one day he calls his activities “my artistic pursuits.”
At a time when art was usually divided into “form” and “content,” primacy was usually given to Fedotov’s passion for depicting life, current reality. While his artistic reflections were thought of as something that was “attached” to this main passion and affection of his. “Whoever is given the gift of arousing pleasure in another with his talents, then in order to feed his pride, he can abstain from other delicacies, this upsets the talent and spoils his purity (and nobility) (what makes him pleasant to people), chastity. This is where the key to the graceful and noble is hidden.” This last maxim can be considered a commentary on the drawing of Fedotov, torn by passions. But if we were to ask ourselves what is the purity and chastity of talent, which renounces passions in order to arouse pleasure in others, we would discover that they lie in the style of execution, in the beauty of the drawing, etc., and not at all in collecting “life stories.” It was precisely these plastic modifications that occupied Fedotov’s “artistic depths.” But Fedotov himself, envying her, developed precisely this ability in himself, and therefore this relationship between plot and style could be turned around and said that Fedotov in life chooses such situations and incidents that give him the opportunity to find and enrich the reserve of artistry pearls that weren't there before.
If the gift that Fedotov knew in himself was in perceptiveness and a taste for little things, in a predisposition, to use Gogol’s language, “to take away in your mind
“all this prosaic, essential squabble of life... all rags down to the smallest pin,” then Fedotov’s ability, or what we call talent, lies precisely in finding ways to visually translate this completely new material for Russian art into an artistically seductive form.

“I learn 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 amateur, and Fedotov initially acted precisely as an amateur talent. In contrast to this, we can recall Matisse’s rather famous statement: “It is not in front of nature that one becomes an artist, but in front of a beautiful painting.” Of course, Matisse's statement is the statement of a master who knows that skill can only be learned from masters. According to this logic, life's learning will not become art until that life is seen in the work of some master who teaches the artist lessons in craftsmanship. Such a metamorphosis in relation to life's collisions and spectacles has long been known. It is contained in the famous formula and metaphor, which belongs to the category of “eternal metaphors” - “the whole world is a stage.” In essence, when we utter, without much thought, the simple phrase “a scene from life,” we are engaging precisely with this metaphor; we are expressing precisely those aspects of a person’s relationship to reality that are characteristic of artistic distancing from life. And this kind of attitude towards life, this kind of removal of oneself from the power of its laws and the feeling of oneself at some point in the position of a spectator who contemplates a worldly carousel, belongs to completely human abilities. Fedotov knew it in himself and knew how to cultivate it.
The peculiarity of the Russian situation is that 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, developed 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 addressed to the fundamental principles of life of the human race, such as work, home, caring for the family, the cares of motherhood, etc. This is the kind of human concern and occupation that is related to the eternal, unchanging, imperishable, to irrevocable values ​​of being, human existence in the world, therefore, this is that part of life where he is involved in being, where the everyday genre gravitates towards the existential. This is precisely Venetsianov’s genre.

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 represented most fully in the urban environment. And this is the subject that determined the logic of Fedotov’s genre.
In the formation of Fedotov as a genre painter, in defining his “space” within the genre, a significant role was played by the fact that chronologically Fedotov was preceded by Venetsianov and his school. But not in the sense that Fedotov studied with Venetsianov and inherited his lessons, but in the sense that he built his artistic world in a negative way, in all respects the opposite of what Venetsianov had.
Fedotov’s Venetsian landscape style is opposed to interiority. In Venetsianov, contemplative statics, long, motionless balance predominates. Fedotov has discrete fragments of life, mobility that throws the world and human nature out of balance. Venetsian's genre is conflict-free and ineffective. Fedotov almost always has conflict and action. In the spatial relationships accessible to fine art, he modeled temporal relationships. Accordingly, in the visual style itself, in the speed or slowness of the linear design, 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 its evolution, that is, those oppositions that separate one work from another.
Portrait-like vigilance and observation, as mentioned before, are at the origins of Fedotov’s genreism. However, Fedotov’s portraits are completely, in all respects, opposed to the Fedotov genre. Firstly, because Fedotov’s portrait characters embody precisely the norm - the one that Pushkin once formulated, referring to Chateaubriand: “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 his craft and skill as a writer of everyday life required of him, Fedotov called himself a “lonely onlooker.”

With the meager provision that his artistic activity brought Fedotov, 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 closest 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 refuge. These are, therefore, those people who constitute the “delight 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 the portraits: whether they were ordered from Fedotov and whether he received fees for them. And this very ambiguity (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 the chamber portrait, small-format portraits approaching miniature, the purpose of which is to accompany a person everywhere and always; they took the miniature portrait with them on the road, putting it, for example, in a box, or hanging it around their 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 broad gestures and pathos - sets the aesthetic code within the framework of which Fedotov’s portrait concept itself took place.
This is a world of purely “interior” feelings, where friendly attention and participation are idealized, that pacifying peace that comes from home, comfort, and the warmth of familiar, lived-in things. The inhabitants of this ideal kingdom are literally images, that is, images, icons, or household gods, penates, that which is worshiped. Therefore, these images have the main quality of sacred images - they live outside of time.
In the latter, the world is driven by the temporary, while the heroes of Fedotov’s portraits are removed from the power of any event, 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: this quiet, unobtrusive indifference, like weariness from sadness. The main thing that is present in this portrait and that, to one degree or another, is diffused in all Fedotov’s portraits, is the models’ indifference to external manifestations of feelings, to how they look “from the outside.” And these are precisely the kind of states in which the passage of time is forgotten. They take you away from the immediate. But in addition, this is the shyness of people (and the artist, who endows his models with this property) not only secretive, but who consider it indecent to impose their “feelings” on anyone.
In this series, a work of such strange design as the portrait of E.G. stands out. Fluga (1848?). This is a posthumous portrait, based on Fedotov’s drawing of Flug on his deathbed. The plot is clearly made up.

Another portrait where the outline of the event is guessed is Portrait of N.P. Zhdanovich at the piano (1849). She is depicted in the uniform of a student of the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens. She either just played a musical piece, or is about to play, but in any case, in her posture and in the look of her cold eyes with scattered eyebrows, there is some kind of amazing victorious look, as if Zhdanovich was sure that she would certainly seduce with her performance and will conquer the one she hopes to conquer.
Fedotov’s portraits are not only detached from stable forms of portrait representation, which aimed to glorify the model, showing her, 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 an interior setting, and, as a rule, in these fragments one can discern the “distant chambers” of the house - not a living room or hall, not state apartments, but a purely homely, intimate environment where people live “on their own” busy with everyday worries. But at the same time, his portraits are detached from the decorative tasks of being one of the beautiful things in the interior ensemble; the visual language of Fedotov’s portraits is completely devoid of decorative rhetoric.
One of the important components of portrait art is the artist’s reaction to the age characteristics of the model. Considering Fedotov’s portraits in this way, we will be surprised to note that they lack the specific note characteristic of youth. In the beautiful portrait of O. Demoncal (1850-1852), the model is 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), Fedotov’s longtime acquaintance from the Cadet Corps and colleague in the Finnish Regiment, is 27 years old. It’s impossible to say that Fedotov ages faces. But one gets the impression that these people were touched by some kind of early knowledge, which deprived them of naive responsiveness and openness to “all the impressions of existence,” that is, that winged animation that is the distinctive property of youth.
The specificity of Fedotov’s portraiture, therefore, has to be characterized to a large extent in a negative way - not by the presence, but by the absence of certain properties. There is no decorative rhetoric, no ceremonial pathos, the social role does not matter and, accordingly, no attention is paid to the role, behavioral gesture. But all these are significant absences. Among them is the following: it would seem that Fedotov’s genreism, dealing with all kinds of everyday absurdities, should have sharpened sensitivity to the unusual, acutely memorable, characteristically special in the human form. But this is precisely what is missing in Fedotov’s portrait images, and this is perhaps their most surprising property - the artist shuns everything that is sharply emphasized and catchy.
Fedotov repeatedly portrayed himself in the images of characters in his works. But it is unlikely that the pictorial image attributed to Fedotov’s portrait 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 of sketches for other works, where Fedotov is filled with deep sadness. He didn’t just screw himself up and “hang his head” - this is the sad thoughtfulness of a man who sought “pleasure for the soul” in “noticing the laws of the highest wisdom,” and comprehended one of them, bequeathed by Ecclesiastes: “In much wisdom there is much sorrow, and that "Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow." This intonation, completely absent in Fedotov’s genres, forms the background and accompaniment of his portrait art.

Bivouac of the Life Guards Pavlovsk Regiment (Camping Rest). 1841-1844

P.A. Fedotov and his comrades in the Life Guards Finnish Regiment. 1840-1842

Pavel Andreevich Fedotov was an incredibly talented person. He had good hearing, sang, played music, and 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 while serving in the Finnish Regiment, Pavel enrolled in classes at the Imperial Academy of Arts under the guidance of professor of battle painting Alexander Sauerweid.

He turned out to be too old to study, as another academy teacher, Karl Bryullov, did not fail to tell him. 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 a lot. Soon he began to produce good watercolors. The first work exhibited to the audience was the watercolor “Meeting of the Grand Duke.”

Its theme was suggested by the meeting the young artist saw between the guards and Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich in the Krasnoselsky camp, who joyfully greeted the distinguished person. These emotions struck the future painter and he managed to create a masterpiece. His Highness liked the picture, Fedotov was even awarded a diamond ring. This award, according to the artist, “finally sealed artistic pride in his soul.”

However, Pavel Andreevich’s teachers were not satisfied with the works of the aspiring artist. They wanted to get from him the polished and polished image of the soldiers, which the authorities demanded from the servicemen at the May parades.

One artist guessed another

Fedotov did not like all this, for which he listened to constant comments. Only at home did he vent his soul, depicting the most ordinary scenes, illuminated with good-natured humor. As a result, what Bryullov and Sauerweid did not understand, Ivan Andreevich Krylov understood. The fabulist accidentally saw the sketches of the young painter and wrote him a letter, urging him to leave horses and soldiers forever and get down to real business - the genre. One artist sensitively guessed the other.

Fedotov believed the fabulist and left the Academy. Now it is difficult to imagine how his fate would have turned out 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 did in literature. He was one of the first painters of the mid-19th century to decisively take the path of critical realism and began to openly expose 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 “Fresh Cavalier”. It is also known as “The Morning of the Official Who Received the First Cross” and “The Consequences of the Feast.” The work 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 along with his second work, “The Picky Bride,” at the Academy. And a miracle happened - Karl Bryullov, who had not been particularly friendly to Pavel Andreevich before, gave his paintings the highest rating. The Academy Council nominated him to the title of academician and awarded him a monetary allowance. This allowed Fedotov to continue the painting “The 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 the attention of censors. It was forbidden to remove lithographs from the “Fresh Cavalier” due to the disrespectful depiction of the order, and it was impossible to remove the order from the picture without destroying its plot. In a letter to censor Mikhail Musin-Pushkin, Fedotov wrote: “...where there is constant poverty and deprivation, there the expression of the joy of a reward will lead to the childishness of rushing around with it day and night. ... they wear stars on their dressing gowns, and this is only a sign that they are valued.”

However, the request to allow distribution of the painting “in its present form” was refused.

This is what Fedotov wrote in his diary when he returned from the Censorship Committee about the painting: “The morning after the feast on the occasion of the received order. The new gentleman could not bear it, as soon as it was light he put his new one on his robe and proudly reminded the cook of his importance. But she mockingly shows him the only boots, but they are worn out and full of holes, which she carried to be cleaned. Scraps and fragments of yesterday's feast are lying on the floor, and under the table in the background you can see an awakening gentleman, probably also remaining on the battlefield, but one of those who pester those passing by with a passport. The waist of a cook does not give the owner the right to have guests of the best taste. “Where there is a bad connection, there is a great holiday - dirt.”

Pavel Fedotov gave a certain amount of his sympathy to the cook in his work. She is a pretty, neat young woman with a round, common-spirited face. A scarf tied on the head says that she is not married. Married women in those days wore a warrior on their head. Judging by the belly, she is expecting a child. One can only guess who his father is.

Pavel Fedotov painted “Fresh Cavalier” in oils for the first time. Perhaps this is why work on it took quite a long time, although the idea was formed a long time ago. The new technique contributed to the emergence of a new impression - 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 subsequently reproached him for this.

Poor official

Critics called the gentleman as many times as he could: “an unbridled boor,” “a soulless careerist official.” After many years, the critic Vladimir Stasov completely burst into an angry tirade: “... before you is an experienced, stiff nature, a corrupt bribe-taker, a soulless slave of his boss, no longer thinking about anything except that he will give him money and a cross in his buttonhole. He is ferocious and merciless, he will drown anyone and anything he wants, and not a single wrinkle on his rhinocers skin face will falter. Anger, arrogance, callousness, idolization of the order as the highest and categorical argument, a completely vulgar life.”

However, Fedotov did not agree with him. He called his hero a “poor official” and even a “toiler” “with little support”, experiencing “constant poverty and deprivation.” It’s hard to argue with the latter - the interior of his home, which is at once a bedroom, an office and a dining room, is quite poor. This little man has found someone even smaller to rise above...

He is, of course, not Akaki Akakievich from Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. He has a small reward, which entitles him to a number of privileges, in particular, to receive nobility. Thus, receiving this lowest order in the Russian award system was very attractive to all officials and members of their families.

The gentleman missed his chance

Thanks to Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the official became a central figure in Russian literature of the 1830-1850s. It was made hardly the only theme for vaudevilles, comedies, stories, satirical scenes and other things. They may have made fun of the official, but they felt compassion and sympathy for him. After all, he was tormented by the powers that be and he had no right to vote at all.

Thanks to Pavel Fedotov, it became possible to see the image of this minor performer on canvas. By the way, today the topic raised in the mid-19th century sounds no less relevant. But among the writers there is no Gogol 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 gratitude in his hands from another official of a higher rank. Management receives cash bonuses and serious awards...

The painting was painted in 1846. And in 1845, the awarding of the Order of Stanislav was suspended. So it is quite likely that the cook’s laughter, 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 art and went down in history as a talented artist who took 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 puts human weaknesses and human essence on display. These paintings are witty, and during the master’s lifetime they were a real revelation. Genre scenes where vulgarity, stupidity and generally various aspects of human weaknesses are ridiculed were an innovation in Russian art of the 19th century.

However, the artist’s integrity, along with the satirical orientation of his work, caused increased attention from censorship. As a result, patrons who had previously favored him began to turn away from Fedotov. And then health problems began: his vision deteriorated, headaches became more frequent, he suffered from rushes of blood to his head... As a result, his character changed for the worse.

Fedotov died forgotten by everyone except his friends

Fedotov's life ended tragically. In the spring of 1852, Pavel Andreevich showed signs of acute mental disorder. And soon the academy was notified by the police that “there is a madman in the unit who says that he is the artist Fedotov.”

Friends and the authorities of the Academy placed Fedotov in one of the private St. Petersburg hospitals for the mentally ill. The Emperor granted 500 rubles for his maintenance in this establishment. The disease progressed rapidly. In the fall of 1852, acquaintances arranged for Pavel Andreevich to be transferred to the All Who Sorrow Hospital on the Peterhof Highway. Here Fedotov died on November 14 of the same year, forgotten by everyone except a few close friends.

He was buried at the Smolensk Orthodox Cemetery in the uniform of a captain of the Life Guards of the Finnish Regiment. The censorship committee prohibited publication of the news of Pavel Andreevich's death in the press.

Natalia Shvets

Reproduction of Pavel Fedotov’s painting “Fresh Cavalier”

Fedotov's first work on the plot of a poor official showing off his first order to his cook was a sepia drawing created in the early 1840s. in a series of critical everyday scenes. The drawings were seen by I. A. Krylov, who in a letter to Fedotov advised him to develop further in this direction. Then the aspiring artist decided to turn a sketch about an official’s morning into his first full-fledged subject painting with a complex composition. The work was hard. “This is my first chick, which I “nursed” with various amendments for about nine months,” Fedotov wrote in his diary. He presented the finished picture, along with the second work (“The Picky Bride”), to the Academy, where they received high praise from Karl Bryullov. Soon, in 1847, both paintings were presented to the public and created a real sensation both in the academic environment and among the metropolitan public. The next exhibition, along with fame, brought the attention of censors: the removal of lithographs from “The Fresh Cavalier” was prohibited due to the disrespectful depiction of the order, and it was impossible to remove the order from the picture without destroying its plot. In a letter to censor M. N. Musin-Pushkin, Fedotov wrote:

...where there is constant poverty and deprivation, there the expression of the joy of 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 are valued

However, the request to allow distribution of the painting “in its present form” was refused. This was one of the reasons Fedotov fell into need.

Description

The morning after the feast on the occasion of the received order. The new gentleman couldn’t bear it: the light put his new one on his robe and proudly reminds the cook of his importance, but she mockingly shows him the only boots, but they are worn out and full of holes, which she was taking to clean.

Scraps and fragments of yesterday's feast lie on the floor, and under the table in the background one can see an awakening gentleman, probably left on the battlefield, also a gentleman, but one of those who pester passers-by with passports. The waist of a cook does not give the owner the right to have guests of the best taste.

Where there is a bad connection, there is dirt on the great holiday .

The poor official, having received the youngest of the awards of the Russian Empire - the Order of St. Stanislav, 3rd degree - in the evening he arranged a feast in his room. His cohabitation with the cook and her pregnancy limits the society available to him to the lower strata of the population: his guest, who has fallen asleep under the table, is “also a gentleman,” a retired soldier with two St. George’s crosses on his chest. Taking the pose of an ancient hero, wrapping his worn robe around him like a toga and sticking out his lower lip, the official points out his order to the cook.

The cramped room is filled with mismatched furniture. On a table covered with a tablecloth there are bottles and plates in disarray, and on the newspaper “Vedomosti of the St. Petersburg City Police” there is a piece of sausage. Nearby are a mirror, shaving accessories and a curling iron. A dog sleeps under the table, and on the chair opposite, a mongrel cat stretches, scratching the upholstery; There is a birdcage suspended from the ceiling. A guitar with broken strings is leaning against a chair; on the back of this chair hangs a uniform with a badge “For 15 years of blameless service.” Under the chair lies an open book - this is the popular social and moral novel by F. Bulgarin “Ivan Vyzhigin”. On the back wall are framed paintings and a Caucasian-style dagger. The saturation of details, as usual with Fedotov, turns the picture into a “pictorial text” that should be read carefully.

Perception and criticism

Since the very middle of the 19th century, a tradition has developed to perceive the picture as socially critical, exposing the vices of society embodied in the main character. Thus, the famous Russian critic Vladimir Stasov wrote about the depicted official in 1882: “Before us is an experienced, stiff nature, a corrupt bribe-taker, a soulless slave of his boss, thinking of nothing more than giving him money and a cross in his buttonhole. He is ferocious and merciless, he will drown whoever and whatever you want - and not a single fold on his face made of rhinoceros skin will tremble.”

Erast Kuznetsov, pointing out that the author not only depicted a poor situation, but also characterized his hero as an honest worker, still considers him to be striving to assert himself at the expense of the servants

But while noting the commonality of Gogol’s and Fedotov’s types, we must not forget about the specificity of literature and painting. The aristocrat from the painting "Aristocrat's Breakfast" or the official from the painting "Fresh Cavalier" is not a translation into the language of painting of Gogol's sky-smokers. Fedotov’s heroes are not Nozdrevs, not Khlestakovs, not Chichikovs. But they are also dead souls.
It is perhaps difficult to imagine such a vividly and visibly typical Nikolaev official without Fedotov’s painting “Fresh Cavalier”. A swaggering official, boasting to the cook about the cross he received, wants to show her his superiority. The master's proudly pompous pose is absurd, just like himself. His arrogance looks funny and pitiful, and the cook, with undisguised mockery, shows him his 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 seemed to accidentally look into a room where everything was abandoned without the slightest attention to simple decency and basic decency. Traces of yesterday's drinking are visible everywhere: in the flabby face of the official, in scattered empty bottles, in a guitar with broken strings, clothes carelessly thrown on a chair, dangling suspenders... The pile of objects in "Fresh Cavalier", their unusually close arrangement (marked as negative quality even by Bryullov) is due to the fact that each item was supposed to complement the story about the hero’s life. Hence their extreme specificity - even the book lying on the floor is not just a book, but a very low-grade novel by Thaddeus Bulgarin “Ivan Vyzhigin” (the author’s name is carefully written 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 succinct description of the hero’s poor spiritual world. Giving their “replicas,” these things do not at all interrupt each other, but when collected together: dishes, remnants of a feast, a guitar, a stretching cat, they perform a very important role. The artist depicts them with such objective expressiveness that they are beautiful in themselves, regardless of what exactly they are supposed to tell about the chaotic life of the “fresh gentleman.”
As for the “program” of the work, the author set it out as follows: “The morning after the feast on the occasion of the received order. The new gentleman could not stand it: with the light he put his new thing on his robe and proudly reminds the cook of his importance, but she mockingly shows him his only and holey boots which she carried to clean."
After getting acquainted with the picture, it is difficult to imagine a more worthy brother of Khlestakov. Both here and there are complete moral emptiness, on the one hand, and arrogant pretentiousness, on the other. In Gogol it is expressed in artistic words, and in Fedotov it is depicted in the language of painting.