Minin's Appeal is the address of the zemstvo elder Kozma Minin to the inhabitants of the Nizhny Novgorod land. The central Nizhny Novgorod Meme. An address that has remained in the history of our country as a symbol of national unity achieved through the regions' own independent drive to restore the centre of Russian statehood in the city of Moscow. At present it serves as the main semantic core of Nizhny Novgorod identity and as the justification for its continued necessity.
Minin's address to the "The Peoples of Nizhny Novgorod"
The years-long Time of Troubles, which struck the central administrative apparatus of the Muscovite state, in the end ruined the rear The Principality of Nizhny Novgorod as well. It was overflowing with the remnants of government troops and with refugees; in particular, Arzamas was occupied by servicemen who had fled from the Smolensk region. In this situation the Nizhny Novgorod zemstvo elder — as one would say today, the City Manager — the Tatar Kozma Minin had a vision. Saint Sergius of Radonezh appeared to him and ordered him to collect a "treasury" for military needs and to "cleanse" the Muscovite state.
Minin understood that the Lord Himself was his patron, and in the autumn of 1611 he addressed the inhabitants of Nizhny Novgorod with a proposal to sacrifice everything for the liberation of their native land. He spoke simple words, but he spoke so passionately, so convincedly, with such inspiration, that his speech reached the very hearts of the people. And everyone responded to the call of "the man elected by the whole land".
With every day more and more men-at-arms came to Nizhny from various towns.
Dissatisfied entrepreneurs had their hands cut off.
What Minin said
The record of the appeal that has come down to the present day runs as follows:
|
"O brethren and friends, The Peoples of Nizhny Novgorod! What shall we do now, seeing the Muscovite state in great ruin?.. Let us summon to us in Nizhny Novgorod the brave and valiant warriors of the Muscovite state, the trustworthy noblemen of the town of Smolensk, for they are now near our town, Arzamas" | 
|
In conversations with various strata of the population Minin proposed a multitude of schemes for raising money, but the tsarist official historiographers recorded only the formula "to pawn our wives and children", which in those times was considered the most patriotic and the most intelligible.
In Sergey Solovyov's "History of Russia" this is described thus: "If we wish to help the Muscovite state," he said, calling on the people of Nizhny Novgorod to donate money for the militia, "then let us not spare our property, let us spare nothing — let us sell our homesteads and pawn our wives and children".
In pre-revolutionary Russia this phrase was quoted in every school history textbook. Back then it prompted a mass of unnecessary questions. Arkady Averchenko, author of the "Universal History as Treated by Satirikon" (1912), remarks on this occasion:
"It is supposed that a secret patriotic company was founded for buying up houses and property. 'It is strange,' remarks one foreign historian whose name we have given our word to keep secret, 'that everyone was compelled to sell their houses; whoever did not want to sell his house voluntarily was compelled to. How, then, at such a time, could there appear people who dared to buy houses?'"
Minin's Appeal in the popular retelling and rendering
The folk song "Leave behind your houses…"
"Leave behind your houses,
Forsake your wives and children,
Sell off all your gold and silver,
Buy yourselves sharp spears,
Sharp spears and blades of damask steel,
Choose from among the princes and boyars
a daring young fellow,
A daring young fellow, a good voivode,
Let us go and fight for our mother,
for our native land,
For our native land, for the glorious city of Moscow,
For the wicked Poles have already overrun Moscow.
We shall smash them, hang a great many of them,
And take Suzmund himself captive..."
K.E. Makovsky's painting "Minin's Appeal"
Depicting Minin's call, the painting by Konstantin Makovsky, the famous master of the salon portrait, is considered the largest patriotic canvas in Russia. The area of its painted surface exceeds 40 square metres.
The full title given by the author is "Minin on the square of Nizhny Novgorod, calling upon the people to make donations"; its original dimensions were 6.98 x 5.94 metres.
..An early September morning in 1611. Bells began to toll all over Nizhny Novgorod. At their alarming summons the people of Nizhny Novgorod gathered at the busiest place in the town — the Trade Square of the Lower Posad, beneath the walls of the The Kremlin. Here, standing on an improvised rostrum — a barrel covered with boards — the elected man, the elder of the Lower Posad Kozma Minin, appeals furiously to the motley crowd, finding a response in the hearts of townspeople of every age, estate and fortune..
The state of patriotic excitement is expressed in more ways than one. The artist's imagination populated the canvas with an enormous number of types, characters and faces of the most varied expression, and conveyed the shades of mood and feeling of the people gathered on the square.
Here is how they are described by Maxim Gorky in one of his sketches from the All-Russian Exhibition: Everywhere, up the hill, around Minin and his pulpit, there is a crowd, agitated, clamorous, seized by the fire of an awareness of its task. A wretched beggar, a crutch under his arm, tears the cross from his neck, and his face is agitated, pale. A hulking butcher, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, is ready to go and beat the Poles this very moment; the muscles of his bare arms are tensed, his face is bestially ferocious, and out of his mouth, most likely, there fly winged words. A lad with a stupid, round mug thrusts a leather purse at Kozma.
A horseman pushes through the crowd, which is wrapped in a cloud of dust and pours in a broad stream from the gates of the tower of the old kremlin — a kremlin that has seen Mordvins and Tatars — firmly settled up there, on the hill, high above the crowd. The crowd pours down the hill like an avalanche; it is felt even behind the grey, gloomy wall of the kremlin. A grey-bearded peasant crosses himself devoutly — he has just laid an icon in its riza at Kozma's feet; a Tatar in a malakhai looks out from behind someone's shoulder with frightened but curious eyes at the butcher-orator; a flaxen-haired little girl, holding on from behind to the fur coat of her mother, who is carrying her dresses to the barrel, smiles at the gleam of the goblets and loving-cups lying on the ground.
From every side they drag bright clothes, caskets, silver vessels; damask, brocade and silk lie in heaps under people's feet. A beautiful boyar's wife with burning eyes and a matte-pale face takes the earrings from her ears; not far from her some wanderer — a rogue and a drunkard, judging by his foxy mug — raising his hand to the sky, is solemnly preaching about something. Behind Minin a young musketeer, swinging a heavy poleaxe in the air, bawls at the top of his voice, and his eyes are bloodshot... Everywhere the excitement is terrific, and it is expressed — to my mind — vividly... The crowd is deeply of the people. You see that this is precisely the Nizhny Novgorod folk; all Nizhny has risen to its feet and roars and rushes about with a terrible force, ready to smash everything at a single stroke.
The painting was based on authentic facts. However, not much detailed information about the event has been preserved. In order to be as authentic as possible in his work, the artist translates into the imagery of the piece the concrete material that was at his disposal.
Thus, the scene in the right part of the canvas is depicted with historically exact details: from the wooden Church of John the Baptist a religious procession comes out with the miracle-working icon of the Kazan Mother of God. This icon was sent to Nizhny for safekeeping by Patriarch Hermogenes. Just as Russian troops once marched to Kulikovo Field with the Mother of God of the Don painted by Theophanes the Greek, so the Kazan Mother of God became the symbol of the victory of Russian arms over the Polish invaders; she accompanied the militia right up to the decisive battle — the storming of the Moscow Kremlin on 22 October (4 November) 1612.
Patriarch Hermogenes himself was imprisoned by the Poles, and two fearless envoys of Nizhny Novgorod, Rodion Moiseev and Roman Pakhomov, at the risk of their lives made their way to him. They obtained a letter in which the patriarch counselled them to keep purity of soul and brotherhood, to consider how to lay down their souls... for the faith, and to write to all the towns, to the regiments, to the boyars and the atamans. It is precisely this letter, which had so inspiring an effect on the people of Nizhny Novgorod, that Feodosy, archimandrite of the Nizhny Novgorod Pechersky Monastery, is reading. At the head of the religious procession, blessing the people for the holy cause, walks Archpriest Savva.
Historical legends and chronicles suggested one more name to Makovsky — that of the hapless voivode of Nizhny Novgorod, Prince Zvenigorodsky. In the face of danger he was unable to find within himself the moral strength that would have allowed him to cement the will of the people, to weld them into a single fighting body. It is no accident that the artist places him beside Minin in the painting. The voivode stands in a pensive pose, and his thoughts are not hard to read: the people are heeding not him, a boyar of noble birth, of ancient blood, but are listening to a man not glorious by birth; yet wise in understanding.
The boyar is one of the few dramatically charged images in the work, developed with psychological care and depth. In this crowded canvas he is not easy to find at once. Had he been too conspicuous, he would have introduced a dissonant note into the general mood. But once you have found and read him, you understand how important a role this figure plays in the picture, accentuating by contrast the democratic traits of the main hero, Minin, and bringing out the work's central idea — the popular character of the movement.
The remaining figures of this densely populated canvas were created by the artist's imagination. In order to single some of them out, Makovsky makes compositional pauses within the general flow of the action, introduces spatial rests, slows the movement of the streaming mass towards the front edge, which is read by the viewer first of all. Breaking the crowd into groups, he used devices of juxtaposition to show the various strata of the population which, according to their goods and trades, take part in the common cause. In this respect the foreground is built in a particularly interesting way — a kind of prologue to the picture.
A wealthy merchant in a murmolka cap and a caftan of green velvet with a standing collar shows his servants where to place the rich offerings: garments embroidered with pearls, costly fabrics, gold and silver bowls and goblets. His wife, in a kokoshnik with a pearl fringe, holds a casket of jewels in her hands. And beside them is a simple craftsman. His contribution is far more modest than that of the merchant couple, but no less valuable, for on the altar of the Fatherland he is ready to lay the fruit of many days of labour — a finely and intricately worked cupboard-chest.
On the right two women of Nizhny Novgorod are shown, who have brought to the square all that they own. For the elderly woman who has sat down to rest, this is the cherished savings kept in a birch-bark box: the rainy day has come for her and for her homeland. Behind her a young girl, who has come running impetuously into the square, presses to her breast a kokoshnik — her festive attire.
The centre of the foreground is free of figures. On the ground, in a disordered heap, lie the gifts, as an old song has it, of the bold young fellows, the merchants of Nizhny Novgorod, who knew so well how to trade with visitors from overseas: fabrics, goblets, loving cups, kvass jugs, icons in costly settings. These object-images take an active part in revealing the content of the work and perform another function as well: they serve as a visual bridge from the foreground to the main plane, where the semantic centre of the canvas is located — the figure of K. Minin.
Placed slightly below the intersection of the main diagonals, at the most compositionally charged point of the canvas, he stands out from the general mass. Minin is first among equals, the main hero, the leader, the voice of the people's thoughts and hopes. And at the same time he is in the thick of the crowd, merged with the people, flesh of their flesh, one of many. Perhaps the greatest success of the painting is the image of Minin, endowed with individualised features and with an outer and inner strength that falls to the lot of few — a bogatyr both physically and spiritually.
The expressiveness of Minin's pose and gesture is the culminating point in the expression of the mood and state of the people around him.
Beside the central group, marked by the pathos of lofty civic feeling, the artist placed, for dramatic contrast, a small scene handled in a more prosaic vein, with humour and everyday truthfulness. A clerk sitting at a table records the offerings and, chuckling slyly, looks at a not overly generous boyar who is in no hurry to loosen his purse strings.
In this crowded picture, where the figures rendered as portraits alone number more than a hundred, not everything came out equally well for the artist. Many figures were introduced into the picture for the sake of numbers, for narrative variety or simply for entertainment. Their psychological involvement in the common action is quite relative. Thus the young boyar's daughter in a kokoshnik standing not far from Minin, taking the earrings from her ears, is frankly posing. She is one of Makovsky's numerous ravishing beauties, of the kind to be met in other canvases by the artist as well.
But on the whole Makovsky succeeded in conveying a certain pulse within the common surge of feeling, which allowed him to bind all these seemingly heaped-up figures into a single mass — to create an image of the people and to convey their spiritual strength.
The conception of the painting The Appeal of Minin dates to the 1870s. As early as the eighteenth century, on the initiative of M. V. Lomonosov, subjects from national history were proposed at the Academy of Arts, among them the feat of K. Minin. In the early 1870s, in connection with repeated appeals by the people of Nizhny Novgorod to erect a worthy monument to him in his native city, the public of the capital turned to the events of the Time of Troubles. The president of the Academy of Arts, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, proposed that artists reflect this theme in painting as well.
K. Makovsky, who had established himself as a master of the multi-figure composition in the painting Fairground Booths on Admiralty Square (1869, State Russian Museum), resolved to create a large historical canvas. The first sketches and studies make it possible to picture the beginning of a difficult path towards realising this conception, one that dragged on for many years — a path marked by compromises, states of crisis, searchings and artistic discoveries.
It might seem that the stage-like treatment of the subject, long prescribed by academic rules, made the artist's task easier. In the foreground there were to be K. Minin with an energetic gesture of appeal, a warrior in a helmet, a girl taking an earring from her ear, a listening boyar, a holy fool, and so on. They personally embodied the idea that all strata of the population took part in the movement. We meet these figures both in K. Makovsky's early studies and in the final version of his painting.
These were the programmatic guidelines the young artist followed in his first studies. From them one can trace the course of the young artist's creative thinking, and see his attempts to free himself from the constraining framework of academic assignments. Deepening and broadening his conception, moving from separate mises-en-scène with effectively chosen episodes towards the idea of showing the nationwide character of the event, the image of the crowd, its hum and its spirit, Makovsky came, without intending to, into conflict with the system of imagery and expression of late classicism that then prevailed in historical painting. Thus, in one of the studies in the Russian Museum made by K. Makovsky, the semantic accent falls on the moment when the clergy carry the icon of the Mother of God out of the church.
Such a subject gave the artist's decorative gift a chance to show itself, for the glow of the precious icon settings and banners and the sheen of the priests' brocade vestments created a whole symphony of bright, festive colours. Minin and all the other figures depicted became mere extras, which of course undermined the semantic significance of the historical events.
In another watercolour study in the Russian Museum the narrative treatment of the theme is more logical: Minin is the central figure among the people crowding round him with offerings in their hands. It might seem there was scope here for bringing out genuine human feelings, emotions, the agitated states of a multitude of characters. But once again the classicist composition constrained the artist's possibilities. The sweep of Minin's arm is not free in its movement and is therefore deprived of naturalness and ease: it is required to form the apex of an obligatory compositional pyramid whose sides are made up of kneeling figures. Since the main group occupies almost the entire surface of the sheet, there is no room to show the stream of people; the crowd is blocked off by the foreground figures.
In the oil study in the Tretyakov Gallery a tendency towards depicting the popular mass is noticeable, though it is still treated too summarily and generally. The artist has not rid himself of the primacy of the foreground, but the compositional triangle has already shifted towards the left edge and had begun to open up movement into the depth of the space. However, still conceiving the picture as a painted analogue of a stage, Makovsky, instead of a living crowd varied in its outward manifestations, managed to show only heads, and even then only those nearest the viewer. And Makovsky hastily blocked off this inarticulate mass with the familiar statuesque figure of a girl of the common people taking out an earring.
It is hard to see any other reason why so incidental a character should be honoured with the central place in the composition. The image of Minin himself is also lacking in expression: pressing his hand to his breast, he inertly observes what is going on. The other figures of the foreground are likewise static, and at times treated quite abstractly, like the half-naked figure with a burden on its head shown on the right, or the running infant, which have clearly migrated here from some classical subject. The event is devoid of dramatic meaning, of an emotional epicentre.
In one of the pencil drawings belonging to the Russian Museum, the semantic and compositional key was found that later helped to bind the whole image into a single psychological and emotional whole — Minin's passionate appeal to the people. Striving to be natural and truthful in the portrayal of the main hero, the artist makes the setting of the action concrete. Now it is not a conventional spatial isolation that sets his figure apart from the crowd, but a well-chosen detail — an elevation in the form of a barrel. All this predetermined the relative compositional freedom of the sketch. Unfortunately, as a whole it too closely resembles a theatrical stage, down to the curtains introduced into it.
It was necessary to move on from the solution of particular tasks, with all their discoveries, to a generalised, monumental canvas in which all the heroes of legendary antiquity would find their historically justified place, and above all the people themselves, moulded in a variety of types and characters, psychologically and socially many-sided, with a living reaction to a great event in their life and a sense of spiritual unity. Academic training offered no possibility of such a synthetic construction of a painted work.
The difficult task of showing what V. Stasov called choral action in a historical picture, its grandeur and sweep, could be solved only by a school that consistently drew the material for its art from life itself. In the end Yermak's Conquest of Siberia and Boyarynya Morozova by V. Surikov and The Zaporozhian Cossacks by I. Repin became a fundamental summing-up not only of their creators' work but of an entire movement in Russian art, whose ideological foundation was the conviction that the true maker of history is the people.
Russian reality in the second half of the nineteenth century presented the artist's eye with anything but touching scenes. Russian painting set about resolving the same accursed questions as literature did. Its democratism showed itself not only in artistic contact with reality, but in appraising life, in its broad reading, by the means of art. New content demanded a search for new methods and devices of depiction. It was precisely along this path that genuine artistic revelations were created.
Having failed with a complex historical drama of the people, Makovsky finds himself in a historical genre of his own kind: he seeks to make play with the exotic quality of old Russian customs, rituals and rites. Working out collisions and original narrative devices of his own came to Makovsky with difficulty. His imagination feeds on literary reminiscences. His pictures become enormous painted illustrations to the historical novels of A. K. Tolstoy, the dramas of L. A. Mei and others. The first of these pictures — A Boyar Wedding Feast, The Choosing of a Bride by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, The Death of Ivan the Terrible — fresh, spontaneous, painted with a certain dash and decorative sweep, with a subtle penetration into the specific character of Russian life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, create a feeling of historical authenticity.
They brought the artist well-deserved recognition in Russia and abroad. At world exhibitions he was awarded numerous honorary prizes. Having quickly mastered boyar genres in the russe style, Makovsky began to exploit this theme intensively. Richly appointed interiors, sumptuous old costumes, precious utensils — as the main heroes — abundantly fill his countless canvases. Into them he puts his whole talent as a painter and decorator, who as no other artist could convey the texture of the entire array of objects and reproduce intricate old accessories with illusionistic exactness. His pictures were executed with a particular painterly brilliance.
Konstantin Makovsky, recalls a contemporary, carried himself as a great gentleman, went about almost in a boyar's costume, and kept up the tone of a great and distinguished artist. He earned a great deal of money and knew how to spend it. To please the wide bourgeois public he painted sweet, falsely Russian scenes and endless heads of young ladies, and in the end he became a typical purveyor to the art market.
A challenge for Makovsky
In 1891 an event occurred that shook K. Makovsky morally: Repin showed the public for the first time the historical canvas on which he had worked for thirteen years — The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan. Repin's earlier historical pictures, in which the drama of a major historical personality is expressed (Tsarevna Sophia, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan), or the tragic and heroic creations of Surikov, were spiritually remote from and even alien to what Repin called the Hellenic character of Makovsky, who noticed only the festive, fairy-tale side of life. In The Zaporozhian Cossacks, a historical group portrait, he saw that element of the love of life which so captivated him. The historical theme, treated in the classical traditions of the large-scale canvas, was brought out through energetic, full-blooded, convincingly lifelike images of the free Zaporozhian Cossacks, moulded with great painterly power. The difference between this seething, joyous painted tale and Makovsky's boyar melodramas was striking.
In search of a similar subject he turns to the Ukrainian historian D. I. Yavornitsky, who had helped Repin gather material for The Zaporozhian Cossacks. On learning of Makovsky's request, Repin remarked sarcastically: Give him a colourful subject. Colourfulness in painting is above everything else for him. And it must be said that he has fathomed the secret of combining colours as none of us has. But look for nothing beyond that in him: neither the groans of a sufferer, nor the burning pains of the soul, nor the cries of despair, nor a brave struggle for freedom against oppressors.
At this moment of inner turmoil, of moral crisis, of the reappraisal of his place in art, K. Makovsky returns once more to a theme that had long stirred him — the popular movement of the early seventeenth century and its leader K. Minin.
In the summer of 1891 Makovsky came to Nizhny Novgorod. The impressions of life he gathered in the ancient Russian city finally confirmed his decision to paint a picture about the Nizhny Novgorod militia and its leader Kuzma Minin. Here, on the very site of the events, Makovsky was drawn into an atmosphere of remembrance of deeds of days long past. Chronographs, chronicles, manuscript compendia and other historical and literary sources, painstakingly collected by the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Scholarly Archival Commission, preserved for posterity a great deal of reliable material about the beginning of the 17th century. They contained such an abundance of particulars, details, features of daily life and peculiarities of speech that people who had lived in a distant epoch, their deeds and their thoughts, took on a tangible reality. Makovsky worked with the archival documents like a passionate scholar-researcher. This could not, of course, fail to tell on the documentary persuasiveness of the future painting.
The memory of the city's past lay hidden not only in documents and legends of deep antiquity, but also in the mute witnesses of historical events: in the walls and towers of the formidable and majestic kremlin, in the winding lanes and steep descents that run capriciously down the hillsides and lend the appearance of Nizhny Novgorod a particular attractiveness and singularity. One might have expected that the interweaving of mighty rivers, the expanse of meadows and the boundless spaces beyond the Volga of the Nizhny Novgorod land would work upon the artist's awakened creative imagination, and that it would break through the thickness of the centuries. And so it happened.
More than that, the city presented Makovsky with a truly priceless gift - the view of Ivanovsky Descent, that is, a visible, almost ready-made spatial composition for the picture. This is one of the city's most memorable places for the force of its emotional impact. As you climb the descent, you see before you all the while the bulk of the kremlin, mighty in its mass and majestic in its outlines, which as you draw nearer grows in scale, looms over you, overwhelms you with its power and awakens awe and respect for our forefathers, for the creations of their hands, for their heroic nature.
Artistic intuition helped Makovsky choose precisely this corner of Nizhny to depict in the painting. A far-sighted choice! Historians at that time had no single opinion as to where Minin's address to the people had taken place: on the kremlin square in front of the Saviour Transfiguration Cathedral, by the Dmitrievskaya Tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, or in the Lower Trading Quarter. Historians have proved from documents that the people of Nizhny Novgorod gathered near the s"ezzhaya izba (the administrative office), not far from the church of St Nicholas on the marketplace. Makovsky turned out to be right, and his picture acquired the authenticity of a historical document.
Evidently in the summer of 1891, or during his next visit in April 1892, Makovsky made a study of Ivanovsky Descent, in which the spatial solution of the future painting took shape: an inclined plane with planes marked out by large architectural forms. This happily discovered device helped to distribute the enormous mass of people across the slope of the hill naturally and logically, so that the figures did not block one another. This in turn made for compositional freedom and variety in placing individual characters, groups and broadly treated patches of the crowd across the field of the image.
A comparison of the study with the painting makes it possible to understand how the artist's thought and imagination translate impressions taken from nature into the figurative fabric of a finished work. The clumsy stone church of the 19th century in the study gave way to a light old wooden structure characteristic of the 17th century, which at once brought into the picture the scent of antiquity, a sense of the historical truthfulness of the architectural motif. The same may be said of the kremlin's Ivanovskaya Tower. In place of a sullen, absurd superstructure with a hipped roof there appeared an elaborate finial in the spirit of the towers of the Moscow Kremlin.
The architectural and natural background of the painting - the river distances glimpsed on the left, the mighty trees, the grandiose structures - for all its impressiveness does not overwhelm the main thing, the mass of people, but only frames it and restrains its fluidity. Ivanovsky Descent is one of the few surviving studies for Minin's Appeal.
There is no doubt that a canvas so enormous in size and so densely populated demanded of the artist a great deal of preparatory work. A number of portrait sketches he made in Nizhny Novgorod. In June 1891 he stayed at the hotel of the so-called Blinovsky Passage. The windows of his room looked out on the noisy Nizhny Novgorod wharves, where a motley and varied throng crowded together: factory owners, merchants, craftsmen and peasants who came from all sides to Russia's largest trading centre, along with idle onlookers, vagrants, down-and-outs and strong, muscular stevedores with the build of heroes of the old epics. The dense, mixed crowd provided rich material for impressions, for the search for this or that type, character or interesting face.
The numerous sketches and studies from nature have not survived. There remains only a drawing depicting a public-square clerk with an inkwell and a case for goose quills at his belt for the writing of petitions. The merchant Bryzgalov posed for it. Evidently there was also an oil study, since a similar figure appears in the large sketch and in the painting itself - just above the beggar with the crutch. The drawing of the clerk and two landscape sketches of Nizhny Novgorod were made by Makovsky in the autograph album of the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Scholarly Archival Commission in memory of their joint work.
In Nizhny Novgorod Makovsky became acquainted with the artist A. O. Karelin, who had assembled one of the best collections in Russia of folk art and household objects: national costumes, old fabrics, icons, craftsmen's wares. Makovsky himself was keen on collecting old objects, and his studios were full of antique utensils, which allowed him to be archaeologically precise in pictures devoted to the life and customs of the 17th century. Karelin's advice and his rich collection, together with Makovsky's own conscientiousness and thoroughness in rendering the ethnographic particulars of 17th-century Russian life and his splendid knowledge of its way of living, helped him cope with the unusually abundant world of objects in the painting. This was all the more important because caskets, coffers, chests, flagons, candlesticks and goblets appear in Minin's Appeal not merely as trappings pointing to a particular epoch, but as a character in the painting. For it was necessary to show the concrete realisation of the patriotic impulse of the people of Nizhny Novgorod - their offerings.
Most likely the large sketch for the painting, which belongs to the Russian Museum, was made in Nizhny. In it the artist verified from nature the architectonics of the masses, the relation of individual elements to the scale of the whole, and the colour possibilities within a single overall tonality; he outlined the main nodes in the arrangement of the crowd and introduced individual figures.
Probably even then Makovsky intended to exhibit the finished work in Nizhny Novgorod - the city was preparing to become the venue of the grandiose 16th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition. The canvas had to be large in scale and impressive, so as not to be lost among the other exhibits. And most importantly, it had to match the significance of the event depicted in it. Makovsky asked the Academy of Arts to provide him with premises of large dimensions and, having been refused, at the beginning of 1893 bought the studio of the artist V. Vereshchagin, situated in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain.
The studio was unusually convenient: it had not only an enclosed studio of large dimensions, where large-format canvases could be accommodated, but also a so-called summer studio in the garden, intended for work on large pictures in natural light. It consisted of a platform some 9 or 10 sazhens in diameter, forming a complete circle in plan. A rail is laid around its circumference, and along it runs a fairly capacious booth that shields from the rays of the sun and from the wind; there the models are placed, along with the various objects from which the picture is painted and, at the necessary distance, the artist himself with his canvas. Depending on the position of the sun and the requirements of the lighting, this canopy can be moved along its rails wherever needed, and the artist can work from early morning until late at night - so V. V. Stasov, who visited Vereshchagin in 1878, described this ingenious contrivance.
The possibility of working en plein air, that is, in the open air, while creating a picture as enormous as Minin's Appeal, interested Makovsky. How he worked on the painting is recalled by one eyewitness, the Moscow artist N. Shestopalov, who lived in Paris in the 1890s: The artist Malov took me one day to the sculptor Bernstamm, who was modelling a bust of K. Makovsky. I made Makovsky's acquaintance, and after an exchange of civilities he invited me to his place, asking me to pose for him for the picture "Minin". I agreed and went with curiosity to his studio in the Saint-Germain forest near Paris. Makovsky's studio was called "Maison Laffite" and had been bought from the famous artist V. Vereshchagin in 1893.
Besides the luxurious studio, where many of Vereshchagin's things, books and cartoons had been left behind, there was also an "open-air studio"... Makovsky painted unusually quickly and with great craft. I posed for him several times in the sun in the pose of a young fellow lifting up a casket as a donation to Minin's host. Besides that, a standing man in the crowd was also painted from me... How long he painted it I do not remember, but I know that he finished it in his Petersburg studio on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt.
What stood in the moving cabin was not the painting itself but the large sketch that now belongs to the Russian Museum. On it Makovsky studied nature in plein-air conditions, and then transferred his observations to the painting, which was kept in the studio. There the figures were modelled more carefully, acquired a face of their own and became individuals. Their psychological characterisation grew deeper. For example, the voivode standing beside Minin is in the sketch merely an important personage listening with dignity to the butcher-orator, while in the painting he is a man with a complex inner world, torn by contradictory feelings. The whole setting of the foreground, the architecture and so on are painted in a generalised way, without elaboration.
In the complicated history of the painting Minin's Appeal, the sketch in the State Russian Museum (2.73 x 2.33) became an important part of the preparatory work, but in no way a variant of the enormous canvas, as it is treated in the monograph by E. V. Nesterova. This vexing carelessness led the author to a mistaken conception of the artist's entire creative path. The painting became the concluding chord in his painterly epic about the Rus of the 16th and 17th centuries, the most substantial part of his artistic legacy.
Probably, far from his homeland, Makovsky lacked models with Russian features. He was obliged to repeat himself often. In the photograph showing him at work on the painting one can see a study of a man's head turned energetically to one side. This broad-cheekboned face occurs three times in the picture: in the porter in the foreground (here its modelling is very expressive - it is sculpted with bold strokes of colour), in the upper left figure, and in the one beneath Minin's arm. There are many such repetitions; the female and child figures fared particularly badly. They are deprived of individual treatment and differ from one another only in pose and dress. There are exceptions, such as, for instance, the girl with the kokoshnik in her hands in the foreground. Incidentally, this heroine was not in the sketch, and yet in the painting she not only enlivens the whole right-hand edge with her impetuosity and spontaneity, but also closes it off by the direction of her movement, which lends the whole composition a certain balance.
Another compositional find was the motif of the river, brought directly into the picture: this spatial opening strengthened the depth of the image. The persistent, painstaking work of six years (the painting contained over 100 figures treated as portraits alone) was drawing to a close. The finished work was shown to the public for the first time in 1896 at the exhibition that opened in Nizhny Novgorod.
Passions at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair
The exhibition town was built up with buildings in every style. In the enormous, pompous pavilion of the Art Section about a thousand works by Russian artists were shown.
Owing to various circumstances, the most sensational works were exhibited outside the premises of the Art Section. Because of its unwieldy dimensions, a special pavilion had to be built for K. Makovsky's painting Minin's Appeal. The architect R. F. Meltzer made it a wooden structure, somewhat dry in its proportions and in the sculptural treatment of the facade. Yet the austerity of the pavilion's architecture against the background of the exhibition's ornate buildings was rather a merit than a fault. Makovsky's pavilion adjoined the building of the Art Section directly. Next came the Far North pavilion, decorated inside with magnificent panels by K. Korovin. Not far off stood a shed of planks, with the large panel-paintings by M. Vrubel, The Dream Princess and Mikula Selyaninovich.
All the polemical passions flared up mainly around the works of K. Makovsky, M. Vrubel and K. Korovin, for here different artistic directions collided, different ideas and views on art, on subjects and on the ways of embodying them.
One can imagine that beside such audacious neighbours Makovsky's canvas looked almost like an anachronism. Hence the assessments were most contradictory, at times of an entirely opposite character. The broad public had heard a great deal about the popular artist and knew him from widely circulated oleographs and reproductions in the magazine Niva; it willingly visited Makovsky's pavilion and spoke of Minin with delight. Moreover, the picture was imposingly displayed - surrounded by carpets, tapestries and objects of old domestic life. Most important of all, being painted in an accessible manner, it demanded of the ordinary visitor no preliminary preparation or sophistication in matters of the fine arts. Its meaning was easily read, and its patriotic content readily found an answering echo in the heart.
Judgements of the painting in artistic circles were more restrained. The keepers of the Peredvizhniki traditions saw in K. Makovsky an apostate who even in his youth had renounced the indispensable critical mastery of reality and had taken up a hedonistic position in art, and they did not acknowledge even his obvious merits. The young gave their artistic sympathies to the bold explorations of Vrubel and Korovin. There were also more objective reasons for criticism on the part of artists. They lay in the very painting Minin's Appeal, in the vulnerability of its painterly and plastic language. It is not a question of magical mistakes, as V. Serov splendidly defined an artist's right to liberties, but precisely of artistic miscalculations.
Even if we did not know from documents how agonisingly difficult it was for the artist to create his finest painting, what an inner drama he lived through, the canvas itself would tell us of it.
By moving the action out of the terems, the light-chambers and the halls with groined vaults, out of the interior and into the open air, by fitting a great number of people into a vast space, Makovsky came up against a problem that art in many countries, Russian art included, had been struggling with - the rendering of the light-and-air environment through a heightening of chromatic tension in a painted work. In choosing a realist method of depicting nature, artists faced the necessity of conveying not only the volumes of objects convincingly, but their colour properties as well. The point is that air is not inert; it possesses material and colour properties of its own.
It alters objects, dissolves their contours, makes them unsteady - if they are at a distance. In a current of air objects lose their firm tangibility, they vibrate, interact, influence one another with a multitude of additional shades, of reflected glints. Within the light-and-air environment colour is not the local tinting of objects in green, red or white, as it seems to a superficial observer, but a complex whole possessed of heightened emotional expressiveness. The interaction of light and colour, the ability to model the form of an object not only through gradations of light and shade but through gradations of colour, the sense of air as a colour-bearing medium, enriched the artists' palette extraordinarily and widened the means of artistic impact.
The viewer learned to see in a painted work not only what is depicted but how it has been done. The open texture of the canvas surface with the traces of the artist's work upon it - the movement of the brush, the relief of the stroke, its pulsation - draws the viewer into the process of the picture's making. The Appeal of Minin is likewise painted in this free, sweeping manner. Look at how magnificently the still-life elements of the composition are worked up - the stretcher of utensils in the lower left of the canvas, a little above it the wicker basket filled with belongings, or the table with its heap of coins, the kvass jugs, caskets and candlesticks standing nearby.
How virtuosically the matte sheen of the velvets is conveyed, and the shimmering sheen of the satins. The sides of the goblets glimmer dully with silver, the gold flickers mysteriously, the precious stones dazzle. And this illusion is achieved not by deceiving the eye - the artist treats form in a generalized way, he makes us admire the oil paint itself, laid on thickly, in full body, materially.
But what is this? Beside such succulent passages there is painting that is limp, dull, impoverished. One gets the impression that the whole heap of offerings in the foreground - the part closest to the viewer and therefore very important in terms of meaning - has been left in the underpainting, unworked, unmodelled. As though it had been painted by another artist, weak and unskilled in his craft.
Treacherous air, what a cruel trick it played on the celebrated colourist! Like many artists of the academic direction, Makovsky, who in his own practice did not work in plein air and did not know its laws, imitated it, introducing the device of sharply contrasting illumination in the lightened and shadowed areas. In this case the device was logically justified by the motif of a bright sunny morning. And as for the lit areas, everything there is painted materially, weightily and handsomely. But in the shadow? In plein-air painting shadow is dense with colour, actively absorbing a wealth of reflected light.
There were difficulties with the rendering of the planes as well. The artist was unacquainted with the notion of colour-and-air perspective, which would have united and bound the whole composition into a single plastic whole without destroying its colour-bearing quality. The intensity of colour in the figures of the far plane ought to have been damped down; otherwise they would have pushed forward into the plane of the foreground and, in spite of the perspectival diminution, would thereby have destroyed the impression of depth, the illusion of space. And so there vanished from the picture that chromatic sumptuousness, that ornateness and refinement which had so captivated the public in Makovsky's earlier portraits and boyar spectacles.
That these problems were being solved successfully by realist art is attested at least by V. Surikov's Boyarynya Morozova, where every passage of the painted surface sparkles, turns to jewellery, shimmers, which in no way undermines its optical conviction. That seeming ease was preceded by years of intense searching, which could not be ignored.
One can imagine the confusion, even the despair, of the now ageing master, unable to cope with the chromatic chaos of an enormous canvas, unable to bring it to tonal unity. He proved helpless in colour, that is, in the very quality that had until then been acknowledged as his chief merit by absolutely everyone.
In 1895 the sculptor A. Golubkina visited Makovsky's Paris studio. She had come to Paris to study, although in Russia she was already known as the author of many significant works. Merciless in her demands upon herself and others, frank to the point of harshness, Golubkina could not conceal her disappointment on seeing a raw, loose picture that was far from finished. In a letter to his friend A.S. Suvorin, the publisher of Novoye Vremya, Makovsky reports with bitterness on the deplorable results of her visit. The emotional shock and heavy reflections led the artist to the thought of forgetting about the picture and driving Minin out of himself. But, he writes further, this proved beyond my strength, and after several months I set to work again with new energy.
Persistence and industry made the artist carry through what he had begun. While the work was still unfinished he moved it to St Petersburg. The battle painter F. Roubaud, who had helped Makovsky gather study material for the picture, advised him to introduce a haze of dust or morning mist into the image, which, filling the spatial pauses between figures and objects, would join the separate parts of the composition and give an overall unified impression. Roubaud himself, who was working at that time on his first panorama, The Storming of the Aul of Akhulgo, had successfully resorted to a similar device to create illusionistic spatial effects. And so Makovsky wittily found a way out of his difficulty, but at a high price: the haze, while bringing to the canvas a sense of morning freshness, ate up the picture's colourfulness. Its palette became pale and whitish. It is no accident that the artist M. Nesterov, while acknowledging Makovsky's great talent, drew this unflattering conclusion: For all its enormous size everything is petty, insignificant; even the velvets and fabrics are poor this time.
Nesterov's verdict, perhaps excessively harsh, was not an isolated one. One of the reasons for the mistrust of the new work by Makovsky among the educated part of the public was his tribute to salon aesthetics - unfortunately an abundant tribute paid over many years, with an incalculable number of cloying little heads of ineffable beauty, of naked and half-naked women, of painted spectacles à la russe, which brought the artist, in the words of his son, the critic and art historian S. Makovsky, an insulting popularity.
Thus the cause of the mixed assessments of the artist's finest work, which is what The Appeal of Minin became in his creative legacy, and of the disputes around it that have still not died down, lies in the contradictory nature of Makovsky's talent, in the instability of his outlook. Makovsky was a stranger to Surikov's historicism with its deep penetration into the dramatic essence of the phenomena depicted, with its ability to address the problem questions of one's own time through the prism of the past.
Yet those who have unreservedly assigned this complex and interesting work to the academic category are hardly right. As often happens, the truth lies at the crossing of opinions. Makovsky is one of those powerful creative natures capable of overcoming themselves, of recognizing their errors, of outgrowing backward notions. It must not be forgotten that the sources of his art are closely bound up with the Peredvizhniki movement in its formative period. Democratic ideals found embodiment in his works of the later period as well. Alexeich, a genre portrait of a little man warmed by heartfelt sympathy, is painted in the best realist traditions.
In 1882 he painted the deliberately refined, pretentious Portrait of the Artist's Wife Yulia Pavlovna with Their Two Children, Seryozha and Elena, in which all the energy went into the meticulous finishing of glittering accessories. Makovsky's artistic responsiveness, coupled with the shakiness of his philosophical foundation, led him to such opposite results, as he sadly admits in his Autobiography : I did not bury my God-given talent in the ground, but I did not use it to the degree that I might have. I loved life too much, and this prevented me from giving myself wholly to art.
An elevated, even festive atmosphere prevails in the picture The Appeal of Minin. The image of a fearsome epoch did not get into the frame; the tragedy of the events of one of the most difficult periods in the history of the Russian state is scarcely felt and has to be supplied by inference. The opposing forces are absent, as are significant situations of conflict and dramatic collisions; that is, the subtext, the second plane of meaning, disappears, the psychological fabric of the work thins out, and it takes on a somewhat external, illustrative character.
Nevertheless Makovsky achieves conviction in his reading of history by placing the emphasis on the setting-and-ethnographic side of the scene shown in the picture and by accentuating the decorative elements of the image. This is Makovsky's element; here he is an unsurpassed master, and the viewer is carried along by the stream of varied characters, entertaining details, curious particulars, precisely observed and painted with ease and vivacity. Try to "discover" Makovsky, advised A. Benois, the well-known artist, critic and subtle connoisseur of the retrospective strain in the visual arts, and you will see that before you are works of painting of exceptional mastery and, moreover, works not devoid of poetry.
In the picture The Appeal of Minin the whole of his previous experience of creating a gallery of historical genre scenes told in full measure. For K. Makovsky the epoch of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is shot through with living human feelings and social realities.
In this large canvas he as it were poured the events out of the halls, the terems and the light-chambers onto the square, joining them into a single many-faced action. The picture became the closing chord of a many-part epic poem created to the glory of Old Rus. The artist fulfilled a mission that had lasted thirty years, and he never returned to the theme of Russian antiquity again.
There is one unerring criterion for determining the vitality of a work of art - time. G. Siemiradzki's once celebrated A Christian Dirce in Nero's Circus has been justly forgotten. The picture The Appeal of Minin has had a different fate. It became an artistic document of the heroic past of the Motherland and for that reason flowed organically into the history of its culture. In it the connection of times pulsates, the breath of history is felt, it is filled with the tremor of genuine moods. Finally, it clearly and definitely expresses the idea of the greatness of the people as the arbiter of the destinies of country and nation.
The viewer is won over by the ecstatically powerful image of the people's leader Kuzma Minin, modelled with great plastic force and possessed of enormous outward and inward energy. Kuzma Minin as depicted by Makovsky is a match for V. Vasnetsov's bogatyrs of the byliny, for I. Repin's Zaporozhian Cossacks, for Stepan Razin and Yermak from V. Surikov's pictures. It is one of the finest embodiments in Russian historical painting of the image of a people's leader, a people's hero.
The patriotic feat of the people of Nizhny Novgorod in the seventeenth century found reflection in the work of many artists, and at various times there were created Minin and Pozharsky by M. Scotti, Minin's Appeal to the People of Nizhny Novgorod by V. Peskov, Minin and Pozharsky by A. Tyranov, Minin's Appeal to the People of Nizhny Novgorod by A. Kivshenko, Citizen Minin by M. Nesterov and a number of other pictures. I. Repin turned to the image of Minin more than once. It is telling that his first sketch, Kuzma Minin, was painted in 1894, at the height of K. Makovsky's work on his enormous canvas, and this is one more confirmation of the importance for Russian art of the theme he was raising, of its topicality. Repin never managed to translate the many-figured sketch into a finished work of art, although he made attempts later as well.
Only K.E. Makovsky succeeded in creating an epic work in which the mass character, the sweep and the scale of the movement itself are conveyed in monumental forms. For the people of Nizhny Novgorod the picture The Appeal of Minin has not only artistic but also historical value, for it captures the heroic past of their native city. The historical significance of The Appeal of Minin was well understood by M. Gorky. Answering those who abused The Appeal of Minin too much, he ends the essay devoted to it with these telling words: A fine picture! Perhaps it is somewhat dull - there is little sun in it, little brilliance... All this gold, silver, fabric and the church domes do not blaze. The sky is covered with light white shreds of cloud, with blue everywhere between them, but there is little sun... There is, however, a great deal of life.
Showings of the picture. Presentation as a gift to Nizhny Novgorod
After the All-Russian Exhibition the picture The Appeal of Minin travelled a great deal. In 1897 it was shown in St Petersburg, at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. At the same time 38 studies for it were exhibited, which afterwards were dispersed among private collections. Their present whereabouts are unknown. The following year Minin was displayed in the halls of the Historical Museum in Moscow. It is notable that the picture had its greatest success at the Second People's Exhibition, arranged by the St Petersburg Society of Artists in 1901 in the building of the Horse Guards Riding School specially for the common folk (as the newspapers of the day put it). Among the many entertaining and false pictures made to suit popular taste, the democratic public immediately singled out Makovsky's serious canvas, imbued with significant ideas and feelings.
The artist also showed Minin abroad, and the Paris press wrote of it enthusiastically. Many foreign collectors, so fond of Makovsky's boyar production, made offers for his new work. The artist himself, however, having spent on it, as on no other of his creations, so much effort, time and ardour of soul, was determined to keep it in his homeland. He began negotiations with the management of the Museum of Alexander III, but met with a coldly disdainful refusal, all the more surprising in that the museum had previously been glad to acquire many of Makovsky's tinselly, insubstantial works, such as the notorious Rusalki.
A correspondence began with the Ministry of the Court about the possibility of presenting the picture as a gift to Nizhny Novgorod - the birthplace of the Nizhny Novgorod Militia.
The Ministry of the Court, preoccupied with the coming celebrations in honour of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov, resolved on such an act, staging it as loudly and solemnly as could be. A deputation consisting of the city fathers, headed by N.A. Bugrov, set out for St Petersburg and was granted an imperial audience.
In 1908 the picture The Appeal of Minin was transported to Nizhny and installed in the Armorial Hall of the City Council (now the Palace of Labor). It fitted well into its wood-panelled interior.
The painting's life in the Soviet era
Carelessness during transport and packing later told heavily on the painting's condition: numerous flakings and losses of the paint layer appeared. It was partially consolidated in 1943 by the doyen of Soviet restorers, S. S. Churakov.
On 7 November of that same year, 1943, a monument to K. Minin was unveiled in the city of Gorky. The young sculptor A. S. Kolobov, working to a tight deadline, had no opportunity to seek an original solution. He gave sculptural form to the image of the great Nizhny Novgorod citizen taken from K. Ye. Makovsky's painting. With an expressive gesture, K. Minin called the people to a feat of arms, which could not have suited the times better: it was from here, from this square, from the walls of the The Kremlin, that the Gorky military units, having taken their oath on this spot, set off for the front. The Kremlin, with its powerful defensive architecture, together with the works of sculpture and painting, created in the centre of our city a single ensemble carrying an enormous patriotic and morally instructive charge.
Until 1972 the painting hung in the Great Hall of the Palace of Labour, which made access to it extraordinarily difficult for the general public, and it was better known from its numerous copies and reproductions. It was decided to move the painting to a specially built hall of the Gorky State Art Museum. Here is how an eyewitness described its last journey: With every precaution the canvas was wound onto a roller, which was carried out of the hall of the Palace of Labour by hand and carefully loaded onto a lorry with a long body. When the vehicle, having passed Minin and Pozharsky Square, drew up at the museum building, the painting was just as carefully taken down, raised by crane to the height of the third floor and lowered through a window - only in this way could a load of such extraordinary dimensions be handled - into the museum premises.
For about a month restorers from the Grabar All-Russian Art Scientific Restoration Centre worked on the painting. The team was led by the experienced specialist I. A. Tarasov, one of those world-class restorers who saved the art treasures of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence damaged by the flood. During the restoration of Minin's Appeal, Yakovlev's sins were put right: when the canvas was stretched on a new stretcher, the part of it bearing the artist's paintwork that had once been barbarously folded over the old, short stretcher was straightened out, and the painting regained its former dimensions (6.98 x 5.94). After the paint layer had been consolidated and surface dirt removed, the layer of clouded, yellowed varnish that badly distorted the work's colour scheme was taken off. Once it was removed, the painting was revealed in its original state.
In his day A. P. Melnikov justly observed: The painting loses a great deal because it is poorly lit in the hall of the town council... A picture of such enormous size was obviously painted under predominantly overhead lighting approaching that of open space, that is, diffused light, and the way the painting was lit when the artist painted it is roughly the way it should be lit for the viewer.
This circumstance was given particular consideration in designing the annexe to the museum where Makovsky's painting is now housed. In the new hall the even light from two sides, coming from large upper windows, and the room to step back allow this large-format canvas to be examined both as a whole and in its smallest details, and to take in both the work's conceptual and figurative meaning and the painterly, plastic means by which it is realised.
Interesting facts
- The canvas was created over the course of 5 years and was finished in St Petersburg. For the most part "Minin's Appeal" was created in France, in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain, where Makovsky had bought a studio formerly belonging to V. V. Vereshchagin, one of the largest in Europe and fitted out to the latest standards. It consisted of two spaces: an enormous studio and an open-air studio. Rails were laid in the garden, along which ran a carriage with three walls. Sitting inside it, the master painted the models standing in the middle of the garden. Such a working arrangement was very convenient, since it allowed him to work regardless of changes in the lighting, because the carriage moved with the sun.
- The canvas was shown to the public for the first time at the 16th All-Russian Art and Industry Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod. A special pavilion was built for the painting, and Makovsky personally supervised its installation.
Guided tour
Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum. K. Makovsky. The painting "Minin's Appeal".
A brief excursion into the history of 17th-century Russia and the events of the Time of Troubles, firmly linked with the name of the Nizhny Novgorod patriot Kuzma Minin.
The story of the painting's creation, the mood conveying the spirit of popular patriotism and the real historical figures depicted make it possible to regard this canvas as not only an artistic but also a historical document. The account is accompanied by a sound diorama featuring Kuzma Minin's address to the people of Nizhny Novgorod.
The tour lasts 30 minutes.
See also
- Return the Banner of the Nizhny Novgorod Militia — an appeal by the chairman of the "Arsenal 2010" society, the engineer Karpov.