So what picture did Repin paint: “Sailed” or “Did not wait”? Description of the painting by I. E

The painting has two options. The first, dating back to 1883, was started by Repin at a dacha in Martyshkin, near St. Petersburg. The rooms of this dacha are depicted in the picture. In the first version, a girl returned to the family, and she was met by a woman and two other girls, presumably sisters. The painting was as small as Arrest of the Propaganda and Refusal of Confession.

“They didn’t wait” (the first version of the painting, begun in 1883)

Following this picture, Repin in 1884 begins another version, which was to become the main one.

Ilya Repin. Didn't wait

This picture was also written quickly, and already in the same 1884 it was exhibited at the Traveling Exhibition. But then Repin finalized it in 1885, 1887 and 1888, changing mainly the facial expression of the incoming person and partly the facial expressions of his mother and wife. Ten years after the completion of any work on the second version, Repin in 1898 again takes up the first version and refines it, mainly the image of the incoming girl.

The second version became the most significant and monumental of Repin's paintings on revolutionary themes. The artist also performed it in much larger sizes, modified the characters and increased their number. The incoming girl was replaced by a revolutionary who returned from exile, the old mother rising from the chair in the foreground, instead of one girl at the table, a boy and a little girl are depicted.

Two female figures appeared at the door. Only the figure at the piano has survived, but its appearance and posture have changed. All these changes gave the picture a different sound, gave its plot a richer and more significant content. The purely family, intimate scene of the first version acquired a social character and meaning. In this regard, obviously, Repin increased the size of the picture, giving it monumentality.

In the film “They Didn't Wait,” Repin found a plot that allowed him to create a canvas of great ideological content, revealing his talent as a genre painter, his mastery of psychological characterization. As in "Refusal of Confession", Repin gives in the film "They Did Not Expect" a psychological solution to the revolutionary theme. But here it is in the nature of action. This was dictated by the very meaning of the plot of an unexpected return. Replacing the characters in the second version, increasing their number, Repin pursued the task of the best development and demonstration of this action. As happened in a number of Repin's paintings, the solution to the plot proceeded by overcoming external characterization, artificiality and "illustrativeness" and creating a lively scene snatched from life. So, at first, Repin introduced the figure of a father into the picture, warning about the return of the exile and thus preparing those present. There was also, according to Stasov, the figure of "some old man." But in the process of working on the picture, Repin removed what was too external in nature, and focused precisely on the psychological solution of the topic. At the same time, he left figures that contribute to the preservation of the effectiveness of the scene. So, for example, the figures of women in the doors are needed in order to show the experience of the scene also by outsiders, and not just family members, who, in turn, are shown more diversely than in the first version.

Interestingly, all changes in the composition, the removal of figures, as well as the processing of facial expressions, were made by Repin directly on the canvas itself. The picture was thus arranged as if it were a theatrical mise-en-scène. Repin wrote the first version of the picture directly from life, in his dacha, placing his relatives and friends in the room as characters. They also served as models for the big picture: the wife of the returned painter is written from the artist’s wife and from V. D. Stasova, the old mother is from her mother-in-law, Shevtsova, the girl at the table is from Vera Repina, the boy is from S. Kostychev, the maid at the door is from the servants of the Repins. The big picture was probably also begun in Martyshkin to some extent from life. Continuing work on it already in St. Petersburg, Repin composes and writes it, as if having a natural scene before his eyes, a method that he also applied in Zaporozhets.

Before us is an image of a typical intelligent family in its usual setting. The heroic revolutionary theme in the film "They Did Not Expect" appeared in the usual form of a genre picture of modern life. Thanks to this, genre painting itself and modern life were elevated to the rank of a historical painting, which Stasov correctly noted. The internal theme of the picture was the problem of the relationship between public and personal, family duty. It was decided in the plot of the unexpected return of a revolutionary to his family, left alone without him, as an expectation of how this return would be perceived, whether the revolutionary would be justified by his family. This problem of justifying a revolutionary by his family was, in essence, a problem of justifying and blessing a revolutionary feat, which Repin gave in the picture in the only form possible under conditions of censorship.

From this it is clear that the main task of the picture was to convincingly show precisely the unexpectedness of the return of the revolutionary, the diversity of experiences of himself and his family members. It is known that Repin rewrote the face and the inclination of the head of the incoming person three times, giving him either a more sublime, heroic and beautiful expression, or a more suffering and tired expression. Finally, in the last, fourth version, he achieved the correct decision, giving the energetic face and the whole appearance of the returnee an expression of uncertainty, combining heroism and suffering in his face at the same time. Any other solution would be wrong in the sense that it somehow simplified the complexity of the moral-psychological problem, reducing it either by ostentatious confidence in blessing, in recognition, or by excessive pity and compassion.

In the picture, Repin's talent for expressive characteristics unfolded with all his might. Each of the characters is portrayed and presented with exceptional force and salience, down to minor characters such as the servant at the door or the little girl at the table.

Not only facial expressions are remarkable, but also the very poses of the characters, the plasticity of their bodies. Particularly indicative in this respect is the figure of the old mother rising to meet the incoming old woman. She is so expressive that Repin could almost afford not to show her face, giving it in such a turn that his expression is not visible. Good hands of an old woman and a young woman at the piano, characterized surprisingly individually.

The unexpectedness of the appearance of a revolutionary, his inner uncertainty are conveyed not only in his face, but also in his entire pose, in how he stands unsteadily on the floor, how else he looks “alien” in the interior. This impression is created due to the fact that the figure looks like a dark spot on the general light tone of the interior, especially since it is given against the background of an open door. He must have seemed so alien, at least in the first moments of the meeting.

The dark figure of the returnee, in a brown coat and large boots trampled on the vastness of distant roads, brings into the family interior something from Siberia and hard labor, and with it, pushing the walls of the house, here, into the family, where they play the piano and the kids prepare their lessons, as if entering the bulk of history, the harsh cruelty of the life and trials of a revolutionary.

The figure of the returnee also becomes unstable because it is depicted at a different angle to the plane of the floor than the figures of the rest of the family. The composition of the picture is easily divided into two parts. At the same time, it can be found that the level of the horizon in them is different; this can be seen from the perspective of the floorboards. It is also noteworthy that all the characters on the right side, that is, the family of the returnee, are given against a closed background of walls, while all the characters on the left side, including the returnee, are given in free space, flooded with light pouring from the balcony. door and out of the door in the back. Such asymmetry of the composition, as in The Arrest of the Propaganda, enhances the dynamics of the image, which was especially important here when conveying the unexpectedness of the meeting.

Repin builds the composition as a scene captured on the fly. The actions of all the characters are depicted at the very beginning: the revolutionary takes his first steps, the old woman just got up and wants to move towards him, the wife just turned around, the boy raised his head.

Everyone is caught unexpectedly, their experiences are still vague and indefinite. This is the first moment of meeting, recognition, when you still don’t believe your eyes, you still don’t fully realize what you saw. Another moment - and the meeting will happen, people will rush into each other's arms, crying and laughter, kisses and exclamations will be heard. Repin keeps the audience in a continuous tension of expectation. He, as in "Ivan the Terrible", depicts the transitional moment as eternally lasting. Thanks to this, the solution is not given immediately ready-made, but, so to speak, is conjectured by the viewer himself. The justification and blessing of the revolutionary receives all the more public and generally significant sounding.

The figures of the returnee and the mother are especially dynamic. Directed directly at each other, they form the main psychological and formal knot of the composition. The direction of the aspiration of the figure of the mother draws our gaze to the figure of the incoming person and, at the same time, is a link between his figure and the characters on the right side of the picture. The shifted chair in the foreground emphasizes the unexpectedness of the event, introduces a moment of life chance into the image. At the same time, it closes the floor in this place, not allowing the viewer to see the difference between the horizons of the two parts of the picture.

Repin sought in the composition of the picture, as well as in the poses and gestures of people taken by surprise, to create the illusion of the greatest natural chance. He deliberately cuts off the chair on the right and the armchair on the left with the edges of the picture. But at the same time, the monumentality of the picture, its "historicity" required a picturesque construction of the composition. This is achieved by balancing the clearly visible horizontals and verticals, revealed by the architecture of the room, and the figures, and the furnishings. The asymmetric, “random” in its instantaneous arrangement of people and objects turns out to be laid down in a strict linear construction, in a linear backbone, the construction of the composition.

The format of the picture is a slightly elongated rectangle approaching a square. When comparing this format with the vertical format of the first version, it becomes clear that the horizontal lengthening is caused by the complication of the scene, in particular, the development of a secondary episode with the kids at the table, additional to the main scene. This format creates a harmonious relationship between numerous figures and a relatively small, but seemingly large interior due to its elongation. It is not for nothing that the picture is visually perceived and especially remembered as square, and more vertically than horizontally oriented. Repin was remarkably able to combine in the picture the important with the secondary, significant with those little things that give the scene vitality, genre persuasiveness, which bring lyrical warmth to the sublimity of the general interpretation of the event. Such, for example, is the image of a girl sitting at a table with crooked legs dangling above the floor, the entire interior painted with love, transferring us to a typical environment of an intelligent family of that time; such is the soft, caressing light of a summer day, pouring through the half-open balcony door, on the glass of which drops of recent rain are still visible. The details of the situation, like the still life in "Princess Sophia" or the suitcase in "The Arrest of the Propaganda", have a meaning explaining the plot. So, on the wall above the piano, it’s not without reason that portraits of Shevchenko and Nekrasov, so common in this setting, are depicted, and between them is an engraving from the then popular painting by Steiben “Calvary”, furtheremperor image Alexander II, who was killed by the Narodnaya Volya, on deathbed- symbols of suffering and redemption, correlated by revolutionary intellectuals with their mission.

Portrait of Taras Shevchenko

Karl Steiben "On Golgotha" (1841)

Portrait of N. A. Nekrasov

Konstantin Makovsky "Portrait of Alexander II on his deathbed" (1881, State Tretyakov Gallery)

Details such as raindrops on glass testify to the artist's observation, the passion and interest with which he paints, his purely professional artistic attention to his work, like the image of wax drops on the floor cloth in "Princess Sophia".

The canvas “They Didn’t Wait” is an outstanding painting by Repin for the beauty and skill of its pictorial solution. It is written in the open air, full of light and air, its light color gives it a soft and light lyricism softening the drama. As in The Procession in the Kursk Province, and perhaps even to a greater extent, this naturalness of lighting and plein-air light tonality is generally subordinated to a certain general color system of the work, in which, along with the harmony of light bluish and greenish tones, there is a strong there are also contrasts of dark spots.

The coloristic solution of the picture, to the same extent as its composition, is such a well-founded, clear construction that it seems self-evident, directly natural. In fact, the natural here is ordered and brought into a certain system, all the more strict and harmonious, since the seeming accident of living reality fulfills the task of showing sublime morality, spiritual nobility and greatness of deeds as the natural life and feelings of ordinary people. Retaining their naturalness, they became just as truly historical heroes in Repin's depiction, as they were in the conventional loftiness of the heroes of historical painting of the past. Finding and showing the real heroes of his time, the artist made a big step forward in the development of both genre and historical painting. Rather, he achieved their special fusion, which opened up the possibility of historical painting on contemporary themes.

Fedorov-Davydov A.A. I.E. Repin. Moscow: Art, 1989

Ernst Sapritsky "DID NOT WAIT"

It must have been Sunday
The mother taught the children lessons.
Suddenly the door flung open
And the light-eyed wanderer enters.

Didn't you wait? Everyone is amazed
As if the air was stirred.
That is not a hero who came from the war,
The convict returned home.

He's all anxiously tense,
He hesitated.
Will the wife be forgiven?
Caused her a lot of grief
His arrest, then prison ...
Oh, how old she is.

But everything is lit by the sun.
Not yet evening. Happiness will be.
A beautiful day looks out the window.
God bless the entry in the Book of Fate.

Ilya Efimovich Repin (1844-1930) - Russian artist, painter, master of portraits, historical and everyday scenes.

In his article on the XII exhibition of the Association of the Wanderers, Stasov wrote:
“I will end my review of the exhibition with Repin’s painting “They Didn’t Wait”. I consider this picture one of the greatest works of new Russian painting. Tragic types and scenes of present-day life are expressed here in a way that no one else has expressed in our country. Look at the main character: on his face and in his whole figure, energy and strength not crushed by any misfortune are expressed; whatever his picture: it is a powerful intelligence, mind, thought ... All together makes this picture one of the most extraordinary creations of new art.

Whole family to gather. Sitting at the table, children, a boy and a girl, are preparing their lessons. At the piano is a young woman. Here is an old lady in a black dress.

And then a stranger enters the room. At first, they don't recognize him. They do not believe themselves, is it really him? It can't be!.. But it's him, he!

Who is he? What does he have to do with this elderly lady, frozen in a half-bent position, this frightened girl and her brother, who, it seems, was the first to recognize the stranger, this young woman at the piano frozen in perplexity? On the faces of those present - surprise, joy, love, a whole gamut of the most complex emotional experiences that suddenly engulfed each of the members of this small family world and presented by the artist with an extraordinary, almost physiological tangibility.

All elements of the picture truthfully and accurately characterize the environment, people, their state of mind. Even if only one moment is captured in Repin’s picture, only one brief moment that caused the deepest confusion of feelings among all the participants in the scene, it is clear to any viewer: a son, husband, father unexpectedly returned to his family from a distant exile, or maybe even from hard labor.

The whole scene is full of extraordinary tension, ready to be discharged in the noise of happy, joyful exclamations. It seems that in a moment everyone will recognize the newcomer. And they will rush towards the one whom, perhaps, they considered already dead. It is no coincidence that Repin painted women, an old mother and a young woman sitting at the piano, in dark mourning dresses. After all, they did not expect a return from the royal penal servitude; those who got there usually did not return. "They Didn't Wait" truthfully captures a bright page in the life of the democratic intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s. The characters, the setting, all the details are typical, right down to the portraits of Shevchenko and Nekrasov on the wall above the piano. Of course, it is no coincidence that the artist placed two lithographs side by side on the wall, one of which depicts Alexander II on his deathbed, and the second reproduces Steiben's painting "Golgotha". The first lithograph is intended to emphasize that the action takes place after the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya, and the second, as it were, indicates to the viewer the high, martyr feat of those who are fighting for a just cause.
Although the picture was painted quickly, almost without sketches (the nature was before my eyes and the work was arguing), the central image did not work out in any way. The figure of the incoming person, and especially his head, was repeatedly reworked, the face was rewritten several times, and the general characteristics changed.

In the process of work, Repin changed a lot in the original appearance of the picture. The number of actors and the layout of the entire scene varied in different ways. Moreover, if at first a revolutionary woman returned from exile to her family, to whom the artist gave the features of a typical female student, then he later abandoned this image and in the final version of the picture depicted a revolutionary, strong and proud, not broken by any hard trials.

In fact, in the whole appearance of this courageous man, exhausted by years of hard labor, one feels the unbroken inner strength, fearlessness and nobility of a fighter for the people's happiness. Nekrasov's poems are involuntarily recalled:

Fate prepared for him
The path is glorious, the name is loud
People's protector.
Consumption and Siberia.

The artist managed to subtly convey in his picture the most complex interweaving of human feelings, reflecting many emotional shades in facial expressions, gestures, in the natural, involuntary movements of each character. Only a great artist could so convincingly convey the state of mind of this hunched-over woman, standing half-turned to the viewer, almost in a daze, looking for support with her hand. And how subtly the artist saw in life itself the reaction of fear in a child - pulling her head into her neck, tucking her leg in, the girl looks frightened at this stranger to her (after all, she was very small when he disappeared from home, and, of course, forgot him ); how calmly, indifferently and at the same time distrustfully, with her hand on the door bracket, the maid is watching what is happening, having let the stranger into the house with great apprehension. In everything - reality, truth, naturalness, a surprisingly direct feeling of life.

The fidelity of the artist's psychological observations, the accuracy in finding specific real images that convey human emotions, were already noted by psychologists who drew attention to the striking coincidence of Repin's artistic discoveries with the data of psychology as a science.

In “They Did Not Wait,” Repin outlined new pictorial possibilities for Russian art and approved it. No one has yet achieved such a reality of the image before Repin. The volume and materiality of objects, the space in which the figures are located - all this is conveyed by the artist with the utmost expressiveness.

Even in The Procession, Repin managed to build a free composition, devoid of conventions and deliberate "construction", as if transferring it to the canvas entirely from life. There is also nothing theatrical in the way the artist arranged his characters in “They Did Not Wait”, not the slightest game or posing. The walls of the room are deliberately cut off by the frame, and the viewer, as it were, finds himself in this room, drawn by the artist into the development of the action and into the experiences of the family. The eyes of all the characters are directed towards the person who entered. With the lines of the drawing, the arrangement of the figures, the color contrasts, Repin focuses our attention on the central moment: the viewer's eye first of all stops at the returnee. The threads of complex and diverse feelings that engulf all the characters in the picture diverge from him and stretch to him.

Repin and this time proved to be an amazing colorist, a master who knows how to bring out the sonority of color, who is fluent in the palette. The picture amazingly conveys bright sunlight, green reflections on the walls and on the floor of the room, and the air, as it were, vibrating, saturated with light. This sunny, life-giving light, pouring through the glass doors of the terrace and filling the whole room, saturates the picture with a cheerful sense of life, faith in a happy outcome of events, hope for a better future, bright and joyful.

The appearance of "They Didn't Wait" caused many attacks in the conservative press on Repin, who was declared a "seditious artist." Realizing the revolutionary significance of the painting, the writers from Novoye Vremya, Grazhdanin, and Moskovskie Vedomosti tried in every possible way to discredit it as a work of art. They repeated in every way that Repin had made another "jump down", that the artist's talent was steadily "falling into the abyss". But on the other hand, with what enthusiasm this picture was met by democratic spectators, especially young people!
“They didn’t wait” is Repin’s best work on the themes of revolutionary struggle. With this picture, the artist once again showed whose interests his brush defends. He was invariably on the side of those who entered into a bold single combat with the autocracy, and in a whole series of heartfelt paintings he expressed his ardent sympathy for the humbled working people and the revolutionary fighters who sacrificed their lives in the name of liberating their native people from the power of their age-old oppressors.

It is possible that, while working on "They Did Not Expect", Repin sought to make the revolutionary plot of the picture somewhat hidden. The picture was given the character of a family scene, but the advanced viewer could not help but see in it a passionate protest against the existing system. The political sound of the theme, its sharpness expanded the scope of the everyday family scene to a complex socio-psychological drama, made it a truly historical picture of the revolutionary struggle against the autocracy. In this vivid story about a revolutionary who returned from exile, thousands of progressive democratic families saw a living expression of their experiences; everyday genre painting sounded like a military revolutionary work.

“I was right, and still remain right, attaching great historical significance to your three paintings,” Stasov wrote to Repin. - In addition to the words “They didn’t expect”, the picture had no explanations, and everyone understood right away, and some were delighted, others hated. It can be seen that something in the matter itself was important, and immediately affected everyone. Similarly, another painting "Confession". No explanations, and everyone immediately understood how, what, where, when ... This is history, this is modernity, this is real modern art, for which you will be especially highly placed later on ”

Painting by Russian artist Ilya Repin “They didn’t wait”, written in 1884-1888. It is part of the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery (inv. 740). The size of the painting is 160.5 x 167.5 cm.

I. Y. Repin was one of the greatest Russian artists. His work has become a valuable contribution of Russian art to world artistic development. Deeply popular, closely connected with the progressive ideas of his era, Repin's work is one of the pinnacles of Russian realistic art. Repin's painting "They Didn't Wait" has two versions. In the first version of "They Didn't Wait", a girl returned to the family, and she was met by two sisters. The picture was small. Following her in 1884, Repin begins another version, which becomes the main one. The picture was painted quickly and in 1884 was exhibited at a traveling exhibition. But then Repin refined it, changing mainly the expression on the face of the incoming person and partly the expressions on the faces of his mother and wife. The second version became the most significant and monumental of Repin's paintings on revolutionary themes.
In the film "They Didn't Expect", Repin found a plot that allowed him to create a canvas of great ideological content, revealing his talent as a genre painter, his mastery of psychological characterization.
Before us is an image of a typical intelligent family in its usual setting. Heroic revolutionary theme in Repin's painting "They didn't expect" acts in the primary form of a genre picture of modern life. Thanks to this, genre painting itself and modern life are elevated to the rank of a historical painting. The internal theme of the picture "They did not wait" was the problem of public and personal relations. The main task of the picture was to convincingly show precisely the unexpectedness of the return of the revolutionary, the diversity of experiences of himself and his family members. In the picture, Repin's talent for expressive characteristics unfolded with all his might. Each of the characters is portrayed and presented with exceptional force and salience, down to minor characters such as the servant at the door or the little girl at the table. Not only facial expressions are remarkable, but also the very poses of the characters, the plasticity of their bodies. Particularly indicative in this respect is the figure of the old mother rising to meet the incoming old woman. The dark figure of the man who returned in a brown coat and large boots trampled on the vastness of distant roads brings into the family interior something from Siberia and hard labor, and with it, pushing the walls of the house, here, into the family, where they play the piano and the kids prepare their lessons, as if the bulk of history enters , the harsh cruelty of life and trials of a revolutionary. Repin builds the composition like a scene captured on the fly. The actions of all the characters are depicted at the very beginning: the revolutionary takes his first steps, the old woman just got up and wants to move towards him, the wife just turned around, the boy raised his head. Everyone is caught unexpectedly, their experiences are still vague and indefinite. This is the first step of meeting, recognizing, when you still don’t believe your eyes, you still don’t fully realize what you saw. Another moment - and the meeting will happen, people will rush into each other's arms, crying and laughter, kisses and exclamations will be heard. Repin keeps the audience in a continuous tension of expectation. Thanks to this, the solution is not given immediately ready-made, but is conjectured by the viewer himself. Repin was remarkably able to combine in the picture the important with the secondary, significant with those little things that give the scene vitality, bring lyrical warmth. Such, for example, is the image of a girl sitting at a table with crooked legs dangling above the floor, the whole interior painted with love, such is the soft gentle light of a summer day, pouring through a half-open balcony door, on the glass of which drops of recent rain are still visible. The details of the situation have an explanatory meaning for the plot. So, it’s not without reason that portraits of Shevchenko and Nekrasov, so common in this setting, are depicted above the piano, and between them is an engraving from Steiben’s then popular painting Calvary. The analogy with the gospel legend of suffering and sacrifice was very common among the revolutionary intelligentsia. Repin's painting "They Didn't Wait" is Repin's outstanding canvas for the beauty and mastery of its pictorial solution. It is written in the open air, full of light and air, its light color gives it a soft and light lyricism softening the drama.