Aesthetics and Asceticism: God, Self, and Nation in Mikhail Nesterov’s Saint Sergius Cycle

Aesthetics and Asceticism: God, Self, and Nation in Mikhail Nesterov’s Saint Sergius Cycle

A Thesis Presented to The Established Interdisciplinary Committee for Comparative Literature Reed College

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts

Jessica Arabella Audrey Wolfsohn May 2018

Approved for the Committee (Comparative Literature)

Lena LenÄ?ek

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my parents, Jeanie and Roger, and my brother, Alexander, for their unflagging humor and support; Lena, whose infinite wisdom, guidance, and patience has made my entire academic career possible; and my friends, without whose immense love and bravery I would not have survived these past four years.

Table of Contents Introduction: Biography and Hagiography ................................................................... 1 Birth of an Artist ............................................................................................................. 7 The Sergius Prototype and Divine Media..................................................................... 12 “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh” ................................................................................................................................... 14 Modeling Hesychasm............................................................................................ 14 Mapping the Cycle................................................................................................ 17 I. Situation and Spectrum: Ideology at the Turn of the Century............................... 25 Nesterov’s Aesthetic Orientation.................................................................................. 25 The Wanderers .......................................................................................................... 26 The Imperial Academy of the Arts ....................................................................... 26 Alexander II, Sociopolitical Reform, and Dissent in the Academy...................... 30 The Society for Traveling Exhibitions.................................................................. 36 The Second Generation......................................................................................... 44 The Dawn of the Silver Age ..................................................................................... 52 II. Iconic Precepts ........................................................................................................... 55 Origins of Orthodoxy.................................................................................................... 55 Writing the Icon ............................................................................................................ 60 Material and Spiritual Preparation ............................................................................ 61 Theme ....................................................................................................................... 66 Setting ....................................................................................................................... 67 Proportionality and Perspective ................................................................................ 71 Temporality............................................................................................................... 75 Characterization ........................................................................................................ 76 Color ......................................................................................................................... 83

III. Nesterov and Divine Chromatics ............................................................................ 87 Symbols and Synthesis ................................................................................................. 87 Florensky’s Golden God ........................................................................................... 87 Bely’s “Apocalyptic Optics”..................................................................................... 90 Kandinsky and “Spiritual Revolution” ..................................................................... 95 Abramtsevo................................................................................................................. 104 Trinity Lavra ............................................................................................................... 106 The Saint Sergius Cycle, Reframed............................................................................ 111 In Living Color ....................................................................................................... 113 Final Motif .............................................................................................................. 122 Coda ............................................................................................................................... 127 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 131

List of Figures Figure 1. Vision of the Boy Bartholomew (1890), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas .......... 6 Figure 2. Portrait of Maria Nesterova (1886), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas ............. 10 Figure 3. Last Day of Pompeii (1833), Karl Bryullov, oil on canvas ............................... 29 Figure 4. Peasant Procession at Easter (1861), Vasily Perov, oil on canvas .................. 34 Figure 5. Icon on the Road (1878), Konstantin Savitsky, oil on canvas........................... 40 Figure 6. Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1875), Ilya Repin, oil on canvas.............. 42 Figure 7. Ukranian Night (1876), Arkhip Kuindzhi, oil on canvas.................................. 43 Figure 8. Eternal Peace (1894), Isaak Levitan, oil on canvas.......................................... 47 Figure 9. Girl with Peaches (1887), Valentin Serov, oil on canvas ................................. 49 Figure 10. Arkhangelsk Port on the Dvina (1894), Konstantin Korovin, oil on canvas... 50 Figure 11. The Demon Seated (1890), Mikhail Vrubel, oil on canvas ............................. 51 Figure 12. The Entry in Jerusalem, Russian, sixteenth century, Private Collection......... 71 Figure 13. Three Holy Hierarchs icon, detail, recreation of medieval original................ 79 Figure 14. Hand in the Blessing Position.......................................................................... 80 Figure 15. Improvisation 27, Garden of Love II (1912), Vasily Kandinsky, oil on canvas ................................................................................................................................. 104 Figure 16. Philosophers (1917), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas ................................. 107 Figure 17. Trinity (1411 or 1425-7), Andrey Rublyov, tempera on panel...................... 110 Figure 18. Left: Icon of St. Sergius of Radonezh, with Life, on the iconostasis of the Holy Trinity Cathedral at Trinity Lavra (c.1480); Right: reproduction of the medieval original .................................................................................................................... 111 Figure 19. Vision of the Boy Bartholomew. First unfinished version (1889), Mikhail Nesterov, oil and charcoal on canvas...................................................................... 114

Figure 20. The Youth of St. Sergius of Radonezh (1892-7), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas...................................................................................................................... 116 Figure 21. Labors of St. Sergius of Radonezh, triptych (1896-7), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas...................................................................................................................... 119 Figure 22. Venerable St. Sergius of Radonezh (1891-9), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas ................................................................................................................................. 121

Abstract In the course of forty years spanning the modernist fin-de-siècle and the birth of the Soviet state, the Russian artist Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov (1862-1942) produced a cycle of paintings dedicated to episodes in the life of Saint Sergius, the influential medieval Russian saint. This thesis will focus on the cycle as the site of intersection of Nesterov's aesthetic, religious, and nationalist beliefs, as articulating his image of the ideal artist for the unique historical circumstances of a Russia on the verge of political and social upheaval. I examine Nesterov's project through a triple lens: the Russian Orthodox iconographic and hagiographic tradition; the nationalist, socially-oriented program of the Wanderers; and the theological, messianic aesthetics of Pavel Florensky, Andrey Bely, and Vasily Kandinsky, whose writings on the symbolism and affective power of color both shaped Nesterov's thinking and supply the religious-aesthetic "lexicon" for decoding the semantics of the Saint Sergius cycle.

Introduction: Biography and Hagiography In early February of 1890, the Society for Travelling Exhibitions began its national tour of the arts in Russia’s cultural capital of St. Petersburg. Within days of its launch, the Society’s Eighteenth Exhibition was met with a fierce diversity of public response. For among its paintings of a worldly Russian landscape, replete with sentimental representations of an Eastern geography and its noble peasantry, hung a curiously anomalous scene. At a fleeting glance, the painting’s lush northern landscape, foregrounded by a pair of solemn figures, appears typical of the Russian Realist style promulgated by the Wanderers’1; however, upon closer observation, one suddenly discerns in the painting an abundance of divergent elements. Its flattened planes, meticulous application of detail, harmonious color palette, and the delicacy of its human figures signal a departure from the socially-oriented immediacy of its contemporaries, which were informed by the anti-establishment and populist motivations of the Society’s origins.

Most shockingly, however, the painting featured, at its right-most border, tenderly and uncritically, a member of the clergy, his hooded, hidden visage encircled by a subtle halo. This is The Vision of the Boy Bartholomew, completed barely a month before and requiring a total of eight sketches and studies prior to this final product. And the author of this controversially pious scene was the twenty-seven year old Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts and Society affiliate, recently returned from his first journey abroad, for whom this Vision served as the first work in his Cycle of Saint Sergius. This Cycle would evolve into a series of paintings illustrating the life of Russia’s premier Saint Sergius of Radonezh (born Bartholomew) (1314-1392). The Cycle includes five final artworks which deal explicitly with the episodes of Sergius’ life as informed by the hagiography of Epiphanius the Wise (mid-

1

Members of the Society for Travelling Exhibitions (Товарищество передвижных художественных выставок), which came to denote an artistic movement and style, were known as Peredvizhniki (Передвижники), commonly translated as the Wanderers or Itinerants.

2 14th century-c.1420), whose “Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh” (1417) serves as a model of medieval hagiography. Nesterov’s inaugural Vision was followed by the Youth of St. Sergius (1892-7), the triptych Labors of St. Sergius of Radonezh (1896-7), and Venerable St. Sergius of Radonezh (1891-99). Two works completed in the twentieth century, Holy Rus’ (1901-6) and Christ Blesses Bartholomew (1926) testify to the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the life and mission of Russia’s celebrated saint. The former, a syncretic work combining in one visual field a multiplicity of sacred moments in Russia’s history, features Sergius as an exemplary symbol of the national spirit. The latter presents a non-canonic representation of the saint, again as a boy, being blessed by Christ. And between these works, countless studies, plans, and sketches were created, preserved, or discarded in Nesterov’s attempts to stage this exemplary Russian life; he tasked himself with presenting to the national public a model of Orthodox behavior, thereby revealing to the Russian people their own religious inheritance and potential. By this massive undertaking, completed over the course of nearly five decades, Nesterov would come – as he navigated the increasingly unsteady terrain of turn-of-the-century Russia and beyond – to define his creative duty to self, nation, and God. Indeed, the reception of Nesterov’s Vision at the Wanderers’ Showcase spoke to the social climate of its creation. The religious foundations of the composition were certainly not lost on its Russian audience, deeply familiar with the Orthodox Christian tradition that had informed the ethical and aesthetic development of the nation since the Middle Ages. Nesterov had presented the fateful meeting between the young Sergius, then Bartholomew, and a monk: a canonic event in sacred Russian history. But the professed project of the Society during these first decades of their formation – their first Exhibition was held in 1870 – was, alongside expanding artistic exposure (and thus financial patronage) among Russia’s population outside her main artistic hubs of St. Petersburg and Moscow, the subversion of institution. And implied in the Society’s objectives was a critical attitude towards the Church, as well as a communal, geographic, and material approach to Russia’s past and present. Formed following a break from the rigidly bureaucratic St. Petersburg Academy, then the main resource for artistic education and patronage, the Wanderers had championed a style ostensibly for the people and

3 denunciatory of the state and its various bodies. The Orthodox Church, then, as an extension of the Imperial state, was not exempt from artistic censure. Common among these Realist works were depictions of a corrupt clergy that took advantage of its humble subjects, as well as romanticizations of a humble and human Russian archetype. Thus, the European stylistic inflections from Nesterov’s recent travels combined with his national religious content bewildered his audiences and fellow painters who had come to know him as a Realist painter of the Wanderer’s ilk. Yet Nesterov sought a different path for the enlightenment of his audience.

In his autobiography, Bygone Days (Давние Дни), Nesterov describes the events leading up to the Society’s decision to include his Vision of the Boy Bartholomew in its 1890 Showcase. “The day of judgment has come,” he announced before the final decision. His painting was promptly accepted. Nevertheless, in the days leading up to the Exhibition, a number of Society representatives, appalled by his “ill-fated ‘Bartholomew’” appealed to Pavel Tretyakov (1832-1898), the businessman and art collector, whose patronage had been vital to the Wanderers’ success. The philanthropist and lover of the arts had bought the painting in Moscow, home to his Tretyakov Gallery, in which he sought to consolidate a Russian artistic tradition, and whose collection was dominated by the work of the Wanderers. Nesterov’s critics thus implored him to reconsider the purchase, arguing that the painting did not satisfy the Society’s conditions of a more secular, socially motivated art. Tretyakov refused their demands, and would continue to purchase Nesterov’s works, including those of the Saint Sergius Cycle, for the remainder of his life. And in the coming weeks, Nesterov’s divisive Vision did in fact meet with “exceptional success”2 alongside considerable censure. In particular, the faint nimbus adorning the elderly monk was seen as not in keeping with the realism of the Wanderers; many even went so far as to call it an “icon” and therefore unfit for inclusion among the more socially concerned, secular works of the school.

And although Nesterov’s precise style aligns his work with contemporary conventions of perception, his work achieves an acutely resonant effect as an iconographically inspired, early Symbolist masterpiece. The canvas occupies one’s entire field of vision, over five feet tall and stretching nearly seven feet across from periphery to 2

Mikhail Nesterov, Davnie Dni, 1959, 159.

4 periphery. Nesterov imparts both his figures and landscape with a glowing vitality that suggests divine possession, as his Vision features a scene of man’s communion with god through nature in its flora and background church. The details of the landscape are taken from the environment of his home in the small village of Khomyakin near the Church of the Transfiguration in Sergius’ family home in Radonezh. These vibrant features serve as both character and backdrop to the scene unfolding in the foreground. Following a wave of Tartar attacks in their town of Rostov, Sergius’ family moved less than one hundred miles southwest to the village of Radonezh. Nesterov’s study of this landscape, therefore, provides an adequate model for his version of the encounter. The two figures of Bartholomew and the monk stand upon a gently overgrown hilltop, each piously inclined toward the other. The boy stands erect, hands clasped in supplication. His face appears only in profile, a pale and jaundiced mask of solemnity from which one large black eye peers upwards, toward the hunched figure of the elder. His starched white shirt is gathered by a red string that matches the red detailing of its hems and his red boots. Over his elbow is slung an empty bridle from which trails a nearly discarded whip down the midnight blue of his trousers covered in white flourishes, the sole accessory of his nowforgotten errand. The palette of his costume, white, red, and blue, is an echo of that of the monk, who stands at the painting’s far right, before the oak tree that supplies the painting’s right-most border. His deep blue hood, bordered by white and decorated with red, a crimson cross on the shoulder, obscures his profile entirely, as does his robe the entirety of his body – only a tuft of white beard, two clean white sleeves and their two delicate, weathered hands reveal themselves. Though hunched at the shoulders and a fair bit taller, the man too demonstrates a gentle, gracious grasp, as he reaches into his pouch to extract the bread sacrament. The small child glows with a somber yet earnest devotion at the painting’s center, at the exact midpoint between the heavens – subtly tinted in a white-lilac gradient, punctuated by a gash of bright blue – and the earth, with its mild tumult of grassy greens and yellows. He stands at the middle, too, of the painting’s horizon; at the canvas’ left, to his back, stretches the rest of the immense eastern landscape as the foreground hill slopes down, punctuated by three thin trees, leading to a dirt path that snakes through the verdant field beyond. A glimpse of still lake, behind which a greater, tree-filled hill rises out of vision, reflects the pale sky. The boy faces

5 right, a pillar between two small straw huts in the background, and at his head, it seems almost from his temple, emerges a distant church, its wooden roofing crowned by two onion turrets, pitched downwards into a flurry of trees, deep green pines and dried yellow leaves. Between the boy and the elder lies a swath of harvested field behind the little huts, a scene of tranquil harmony between man, nature, and god.

Apart from an innate, inspired glow that animates the picture, it initially appears a fairly naturalistic rendering of the storied meeting. Yet the controversial halo that encircles in a perfect diaphanous disc the monk’s head, from the topmost navy point of his hood to the lower cotton jut of his beard, throws the reality of the painted figures and objects into question. The deep velvet of the old man’s robe melts seamlessly into the rough bark of the oak before which he stoops, and the shaded vegetative growth at his feet, all drenched in dark violet shadow. In the original Russian, Nesterov’s title reads Videnie Otroku Barfolome (Видение отроку Варфоломе). What, one wonders, constitutes this Videnie? Is it the scene before us, the pastoral image delivered to the viewer? Or is it the perspective of the boy himself? Videnie suggests not only corporeal sight but conjures qualities of a dream. In reading this painting as an Apparition to the young Bartholomew, one approaches a closer, yet infinitely more complex understanding of the work. The elder, as the original chronicles assert, vanished into thin air upon leaving the boy’s home, an angel sent to unlock the divine potential of the future Saint.

The boy and man are perfect correlates of each other, united by dress and gesture, and by the ambiguity of the elder’s features. Upon this mysterious figure Nesterov projects a volley of possibilities. The man embodies the Holy Spirit, as does Bartholomew, and stands, apart from time, as a harbinger of the youth’s looming fate. And in this, Nesterov’s first installment in his visual hagiography, another dimension emerges, vital and profoundly personal, from the industrious painter’s own biography.

The devout Nesterov, however, standing at the precipice of the twentieth century in a rapidly changing Russia, spurred into defining his own artistic mission, charged himself with the prophesying of an ideal motherland. What his viewing public of the time could not yet know, detractors and admirers alike, was Nesterov’s immense investment in the figure of the esteemed Saint. The historical and religious figure of Saint Sergius is undoubtedly indispensible to the formation of Russia’s national consciousness. Reviver

6 of Orthodox monastic tradition and unifier of a Russia fractured by annexation and long burdened by “the Mongol yoke,”3 Sergius looms large in the chronicles of Russian history. In choosing to illustrate the life of Russia’s most venerated saint, Nesterov sought to implement not only his burgeoning artistic ideology, but also the resonances he perceived between their two biographies, subordinating himself to the saint as the epitome of moral perfection. His philosophy, informed by his religiosity, patriotism, and the stirrings of a national Symbolist movement that proclaimed the power of creative labor towards widespread spiritual conversion, combined with his own spiritual crisis and personal affinity with Saint Sergius, motivated Nesterov’s shouldering of his Cycle, which would occupy, torment, and inspire him for the majority of his prolific career, and for the rest of his life.

Figure 1. Vision of the Boy Bartholomew (1890), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas First of his cycle of the life of Saint Sergius, the painting resides in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery.

3

Pierre Kovalevsky, Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 53.

7

Birth of an Artist In order to fully grasp the nuances of Nesterov’s painterly motivations and philosophy, and the parallels between the life and projects of Saint Sergius and himself, one must turn to the very beginning of Nesterov’s own biography. More than five centuries after the birth of Saint Sergius, on the nineteenth of May in the year 1862, Vasily Nesterov and his wife gave birth to Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov in the Russian republic of Bashkiria. He grew up in the city of Ufa some eight hundred miles east of Sergius’ birthplace of Varnitsa, Rostov’s nearby salt-mine village. Mikhail was a sickly child, and of his eleven siblings, only he and a sister survived. Yet the Nesterovs were a resilient family. Mikhail’s paternal grandfather, Ivan Nesterov had been a serf for the Novgorodian Demidovs until he was sent to work at the family’s metallurgical plants in the Urals. He soon distinguished himself by a rare capacity for business and was released from servitude. He established himself as a merchant, and eventually rose to the rank of mayor of Ufa, a position he occupied for twenty years. Vasily followed in his father’s footsteps and became an esteemed merchant, marked at once by his quick temper and his scrupulous sincerity.

Similarly, Mikhail’s upbringing lent itself to the industrious spirit that would color his entire career. Understanding that his only son’s artistic ambitions could not be confined to his trade, Vasily gave up his business, but, refusing to remain at leisure, helped to institute the Social City Bank of which he became a partner. Homeschooled during his early life, Mikhail was sent to secondary school at nine years of age. However, he floundered in many of his academic subjects, displaying only, unlike many of his peers, and like the young Sergius, a proclivity for religion. In addition to this gravitation towards the spiritual, he exhibited a penchant for the arts, excelling at a young age in drawing. In a 1922 letter to Sergei Durylin, priest, scholar, and friend to the artist, Nesterov wrote of his youth: “My soul, my character were formed independently… I felt my own way towards what was necessary.”4 Recognizing in their son an inspired

4

Nesterov: Letters 1988, p. 282, quoted in Olga Ivanova, “Mikhail Nesterov’s Family in His Art | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine,” Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, January 11, 2014.

8 independence and burgeoning talent, his parents sent him to a technical college in Moscow from where he, at the age of twelve, embarked upon the early stages of artistic study after being discovered by painter, Konstantin Trutovsky.

A renowned Ukrainian genre painter, Trutovsky saw in the young boy boundless technical potential. He happened upon Mikhail’s drawings during a visit to his Moscow Higher Реальное училище, where he bore witness to the boy’s early creative genius. One can imagine an adult Nesterov, familiar with the chronicles of Russia’s famous Saint, reading himself into the life of Bartholomew, the troubled young student. Nesterov expressed a retroactive remorse for his lack of formal education, a sentiment he shared with the young Saint Sergius, then Bartholomew, in the very throes of an educative system with which he felt incompatible. The parents of the young Bartholomew, valuing education, had sent the seven-year-old boy and his brothers to be educated. However, the young Bartholomew’s capacities were lacking. Slow to read and write, his abilities fell short of those of his peers. He preferred the gentle splendor of nature to the intellectual demands of the classroom, and suffered for his solitary excursions in the admonishments of his exasperated teachers and parents. Recognizing his shortcomings, the boy appealed to God, praying for a divine knowledge that he seemed incapable of acquiring in the realm of men. Yet in the midst of this childhood disillusion occurred the event that decided, or rather, activated, his fate – the monk’s divine visitation, which Nesterov captured so tenderly in his Vision. Trutovsky, in galvanizing Nesterov’s creative career, plays the role of secular double to Sergius’ monk. Both elders saw the youths as vessels of divine inspiration, who merely required proper application of their abilities. Within the next two years later, the young Nesterov had rapidly ascended the ranks at the Moscow School of Art, Sculpture, and Architecture, and, by 1880, was training under Vasily Perov, renowned Russian Realist and a founding member of the Wanderers. Perov’s ability “to grasp the human soul, man’s deeds and actions”5 resonated strongly with the young student, who acknowledged this desire to make tangible man’s innate, universal feature as fundamental to the artistic project.

5

Semyon Ekshtut, “The Patriarch of Russian Painting,” Russian Life; Montpelier 45, no.

4 (August 2002): 37.

9 The very next year, however, Nesterov, seeking new perspective entered St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of the Arts. Still, he remained restless and self-critical, and following a stint under the tutelage of genre painter Pavel Chistyakov, he returned home to Ufa in an attempt at recalibration. Here, Nesterov, now just over twenty years of age, became engaged to the young Maria Martynovskaya, and the couple moved to Moscow. Here, he reenrolled at the Moscow School and almost immediately began to receive commissions for work while training under Russian landscape painter Alexei Savrasov and taking drawing classes from Vladimir Makovsky. This bevy of influence, gleaned from a diverse succession of instructors and mentors, imparted upon the young man an informed and diverse skill set. Happily married and working in Moscow, Nesterov, at the age of twenty-two, was awarded the title of Free Artist for his sketch for the painting The Coronation of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov. This appointment in March of 1885 at once granted him exemption from the military draft as well as the approval of the Academy, allowing him greater creative agency as he worked to advance his profession. Yet the peripatetic and hard-working lifestyle he had led up to this point took its toll on the man who, as a child, had to be heated in the oven by his parents in order to keep him alive. He suffered a physical over-exertion; the concerns of the soul had brought about a bodily depletion, and his wife Maria cared for him as he recovered from pneumonia. Then, the very next year, another blow befell the young artist at the peak of his early career, in his appointment as “Class Artist” for his Solicitors and the Sovereign. Following a difficult delivery, Maria passed away due to complications in childbirth on May 29, one week after the birth of their daughter. Nesterov was left alone with the baby Olga and overcome with despair at the loss of his “muse,” the progenitor of his “new life…of artistic and family joy.”6 In multiple attempts to alleviate his grief, Nesterov included his departed wife in several paintings. The first was an immense canvas upon which he painted Mary in her wedding gown; he tore down this portrait in a moment of despair, and managed only to salvage her face. He then modeled after her two Brides of Christ.

6

Ekshtut, 37.

10

Figure 2. Portrait of Maria Nesterova (1886), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas

Still he persevered, and applied himself furiously to his work towards his recovery. In 1889, Tretyakov bought his Hermit for five hundred rubles; this substantial figure funded Nesterov’s first European excursion, during which he traveled extensively throughout the continent, “visit[ing] Vienna, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Capri, Milan, Paris, Berlin and Dresden.”7 Upon his restoration to the homeland, Nesterov experienced an artistic epiphany. He approached his work now with a revitalized eye, bolstered by new perspective.

These experiences abroad served to situate Nesterov within his own Russian Orthodox canon, while imbuing him with a novel, cosmopolitan outlook on traditions both foreign and his own. And it is in this light which we must view his Vision to the Youth Bartholomew, completed in response to these stirrings, an answer to a sudden desire to convey something of the self through art. Personal tragedy had imparted upon him a sense of urgency. With his Vision of 1890, Nesterov turned fully to the religious subject, moving towards the holy in a quest for absolution, for a spiritual salve, catharsis.

This exercise, at once purgative and restorative, became an inspired project, from which issued a succession of documents of Saint Sergius’ life and work. In these works he saw not only a means of salvation, a new cause with which to occupy his time and energy so as to allow no leisure for despair, but a divine calling through which he could not only 7

Ekshtut, 39.

11 individually approach divinity, but bring about a national reanimation through the enactments of God’s holy servant. In producing these highly symbolic, distinctly Slavic paintings, he sought to relate his own life to the beholder, connecting his subjective experience with the universal, fusing his physicality with the Russian landscape, and infusing his creative inspiration with divine influence. His artistic endeavors became evocative of religious revelation as he worked tirelessly, in trances of inspiration, towards his sacred final products.

And finally, these biographical details must then be viewed in light of the Vision’s place in the Russian Symbolist canon. Around the time of Maria’s death in 1886, new forces were brewing in the Russian creative consciousness. By the early 1890’s, a distinct ideological strain had begun to emerge, cultivated by the works of German philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the French poetry of Mallarme and Baudelaire, and the Russian, specifically Dostoevskian, novel. These cultural artifacts, colored by mystical overtones and populated with figurative elements, worked to direct European Symbolist precedents into a discrete Russian strain. An insistence upon Orthodoxy and the apocalyptic, two themes vital to the development of the Russian oeuvre across history, informed the philosophy of this literary and aesthetic movement. The Russian Symbolist goal of a utopian collectivization of life, through comprehensive aesthetic organization, was put into praxis by a merging of lived experience and art, and жизнетворчество, roughly translatable as ‘life-creation,’ became the modus operandi.

The proponents of this movement sought to remove the plaque of convention imposed by history by animating the act of creative production. Habituated life, merely a repetition of tired motifs, had lost its swaying power. This synthesis of art and life, a unified generative function, was motivated by a constant interplay between oppositional forces and by a transcendence of the physical. Life gained new impetus from its marriage with the dynamic force of art, and derived import from its union of substance and spirituality towards immortality.

The Vision, completed as these ideas were just beginning to unite and take root in Russian soil, is widely considered the inductor of the Russian Symbolist movement. A visual emblem of the movement in its numinous atemporality, Western naturalist aesthetics, and in its author’s self-identification with the characters he portrays,

12 Nesterov’s scene exemplifies a belief in the reciprocally generative function of art and life. It is the genesis of both Sergius’ and Nesterov’s divine genius, generating a holy archetype of the tireless laborer, toiling towards a satisfaction of godly will. Sergius accomplished this in his monastic practices, which I will further detail, and Nesterov in his creative ones. Both are conduits of the Word in their respective arts: Sergius’ fusion of eremitism and cenobitism in his modeling of community and self in approach of the divinity sets the precedent and type for Nesterov’s own self-construction through the image. The two employ different mediums – Sergius, the body, Nesterov, paint – towards an equivalent goal; still both use life itself as the essential material for their respective practices which enforce distinct ideological schema.

The Sergius Prototype and Divine Media The narrative of Nesterov’s cycle follows the life of Russia’s beloved saint, recognized as the re-animator of a national monastic tradition through his founding of the Trinity Lavra. For his treatment of the life of Sergius, Nesterov relied on the major canonical source of Epiphanius the Wise. The hagiographic genre, the writing of saints’ lives, functioned as both record of a life and consolidator of legacy. Its highly conventionalized style sought to convey the sanctity of the subject through textual means.

Thus the holy identity of the subject demanded the hagiographer’s strict obedience to various formal principles. The text’s scribe is merely the flawed instrument of the divine Author, and the writing itself testifies to both his insufficiency and to the magnitude of his divine pursuit. In its textuality, the hagiography grounds itself in Scripture, participating in the tradition of the Word of God, which connects writing to divine speech. However, the hagiographer calls attention to his inadequacy at all times, lest he appear to heretically enter into competition with the divinity. Each hagiographic text provides instruction according to a specific medieval etiquette, presenting ideal monastic behaviors as models of sanctity towards which one should strive. The narratives operated with an explicit paradigm of the holy in which certain aspects of a life were included in the text, depending on their relevance to the typology. The personal attributes of the subject are not given; rather the life is mapped onto a formula, adopted from Byzantine

13 precedents, which determines the episodes for inclusion. The writer must hereby choose from the profusion of trait and event provided by previous models, local chronicles, oral accounts, and, in Epiphanius’ case, as a pupil of Saint Sergius’, personal knowledge regarding the text’s holy figure. Ultimately, his written selection must indicate God as the true author of the life and all lives, bringing out, through a pattern of conventional topoi, the Divine design.

As a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, Nesterov was familiar with the literary and aesthetic foundations of his faith and used them for the narrative and formal elements of his painting, and their philosophical bases. His artistic upbringing was initiated by Academy and Wanderer affiliations, yet actualized by the Russian Symbolist trends begun in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, this latter attachment was compounded by Nesterov’s religiosity, bringing him to form an artistic ideology centered upon the imperatives for individual piety and creative duty that together could effect a national conversion.

Of Sergius’ various chroniclers,8 Nesterov strikes a distinct, modern figure, by virtue of both the anachronism of his historical situation and the combination of Russian and Western elements in his painted representations. In composing his own, pictorial “Life”, Nesterov assumes as well the hagiographer’s editorial task. Yet in consolidating Sergius’ life into a small collection of scenes, he was not only drawing from Epiphanius’ prototype, but from a personal storehouse of spiritual and emotional affinities. The painter’s gravitation towards the saint was triply inflected by 1) the manifest religious fact of Sergius’ unparalleled saintly legacy, 2) the nationalistic consideration for Sergius’ fundamental role in the development of Russian consciousness and identity, and 3) the psycho-biographical resonances, perceived by Nesterov, between Sergius’ life and his own. And in mapping his paintings onto Epiphanius’ primary source, the particular ideological program, a culmination of these three influences, at the core of his endeavor 8

Though Nesterov would have been most familiar with the Russian Epiphanius’ celebrated 1417 hagiography, many other chroniclers of Sergius were also fundamental in constructing his “Life.” The Serbian hagiographer Pachomius Logothetes’ mid-fifteenth century “Life of Saint Sergius of Radonezh” constitutes the other master text. In addition, local accounts of the saint, as well as details from the hagiographies of contemporaneous holy figures have contributed to the preservation of the saint’s legacy, not to mention Sergius’ countless iconographers.

14 is gradually revealed. Epiphanius’ transmission of sacred history and his enactment of spiritual experience inspired Nesterov, following his predecessor’s superlative example, to do the same in his construction of a myth of Russian and Orthodox identity, towards the regeneration of both nation and self.

“The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh” Modeling Hesychasm In the early years of the fourteenth century, on an auspicious day in May, in the village of Varnitsa near the provincial town and ecclesiastical center of Rostov Veliky one hundred twenty-six miles northeast of Moscow, Our holy Father Sergius was born of noble, Orthodox, devout parents. His father was named Cyril and his mother Mary. They found favor with God; they were honorable in the sight of God and man, and abounded in those virtues which are well-pleasing unto God.9 From its very outset, the reader of Epiphanius’ text encounters a highly effusive syntax.

Yet Epiphanius’ verbose introduction, characterized by the repeated invocation of God’s name and the redundancy of the descriptors affirming the couple’s piety, is actually the product of a strict adherence to the protocols of medieval representation. As a disciple of Saint Sergius, the Rostov monk and hagiographer was able to directly implement in his writing the teachings of his spiritual leader, whose monastic modeling provided an ideal example for the creative pursuit of God. The hesychast tradition, a network of attitudes and behaviors in which one prepares the self through purification and inward contemplation to approach God, is vital to the appreciation of the contexts of Epiphanius’ writing and technique. This ascetic methodology was widely embraced within the

9

Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” in Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky, Revised & enlarged edition (New York: Meridian, 1974), 262.

15 monastic cultures of Epiphanius and other religious artists of the period, including the renowned iconographer Theophanes the Greek and his illustrious pupil, Andrei Rublyov.

Directly associated with this intricate mystical practice were the monastic organizational systems of eremitism and cenobitism, and the theological rhetorical techniques of apophasis and kataphasis. The eremitic way prescribed the individual’s isolation from society, in which the religious person would inhabit, alone, a wilderness dwelling and lead a life of self-discipline and prayer. Meanwhile, cenobitic life was carried out in a communal setting, in the monastery, in which every aspect of life was subject to strict regimentation. Still, both life-models pursue the same ends through different monastic patterns. Where eremitic practice generated internal pathways towards a vision of God in the habitation of a secluded cell and engagement in self-denial and prayer, cenobitic life applied this same trajectory externally. The monastery allowed for an equivalent trajectory towards theosis through the installment of a spectrum of cultural symbols. In this standardization of schedule, hierarchical rank, uniform, and the cultural products of the icon and hagiography, members of the community were also able to achieve divine realization, in subjecting the self to ordained regulation. The monastic eremitic precedent constituted an individual self-construction, a solitary praxis aimed towards self-union with God, whereas the newer cenobitic method supplied a collective dimension: the practitioners of both modes, however, function as the architects of microcosms of heavenly models on earth, the hermit through the inward discipline of the body and the cenobite through the communal manifestation of a divine order.10 Moreover, mapped onto these monastic modalities are the lingual devices of apophasis and kataphasis. The former states what God is not, employing language that emphasizes His incomprehensibility, while the latter seeks to imply, through a bounty of affirmation, the infinite perfection of God. For the hesychast tradition as implemented by its Orthodox practitioners, these techniques were vital to its tripartite methodology. The preparatory kathartic stage of praxis involves the purging of distractive and swaying passions; this combines a number of physical and mental techniques to achieve a watchful state. An inward and lowered positioning of the body, restrained breathing 10

Nicolas Laos, The Metaphysics of World Order: A Synthesis of Philosophy, Theology, and Politics (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 45-7.

16 techniques, and seclusion in a dark and austere environment, combined with the perpetual repetition of the Jesus Prayer,11 aided in promoting the mind to a state of nepsis – the condition of spiritual sobriety and attention which guards the hesychast from wayward thought. The corporeal stage is hereby set for the central phase of theoria, the performance of contemplative prayer. The initial, repetitions of the Jesus Prayer are embodied, then intellectually incorporated. This mystical speculation is the state by which the ascetic can enter the third and final stage of theosis, union with the divine.

Hesychastic methodology associates this transcendence with light: the hesychast encounters God’s energeia, or energies in the Uncreated Light, the Orthodox notion of the divine light that occurred on Mount Tabor at Christ’s transfiguration.12 Effectively, these steps towards spiritual ascent implement a movement from the kataphatic to the apophatic; the balance between these devices is central to hesychast practice, as one begins with continuous reiteration of the Name in pursuit of the energeia, culminating in a final apophatic encounter. In the decisive failure of either terminology to accommodate the divine, through kataphatic positive expression and apophatic negation, one reaches a totally apophatic silence, in which the complete absence of language affirms the divinity of God by surrendering to the incomprehensibility of His ousia.

Generally, it was upon these harmonized dualities that the hesychast ethos rested.

Indeed, in his unique monastic vision which lay at the core of his dream of a unified, enlightened Russia, Sergius democratized to a degree the rigid hierarchical ladders of the monastery and joined eremitic and cenobitic models in cultivation of a balanced Orthodox microcosm at his Trinity Lavra. Now we will turn to his life as doubly manifested through the first-hand rhetorical techniques of Epiphanius, and in Nesterov’s 11

The ‘imageless’ Jesus Prayer uses the Word of God towards the incarnation of His presence. It states, “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. (Господи, Иисусе Христе, Сыне Божий, помилуй мя грешного/грешную.)”

12 The Byzantine Empire’s Hesychast Controversy occurred in the fourteenth century over the hesychast Gregory Palamas’ conception of Uncreated Light. The monk distinguished between the unknowable ousia or essence of God and His energeia, asserting that the latter emanations of God were perceptible by His servants, following the original godly manifestation in the Tabor Light. The monk Barlaam of Calabria denounced this conception as heretically indicating the dual existence of both material and invisible divinities. The conflict was finally resolved in 1351 when the Orthodox Church officially instituted Gregory’s ousia-energeia doctrine.

17 translation of Epiphanius’ text and his own national, spiritual, and autobiographical vision into the painted image.

Mapping the Cycle Nesterov’s Saint Sergius Cycle provides a most fitting lens through which to examine the painter’s visual program as it evolved alongside the various currents shaping Russian art of the day. Furthermore, not only does the Cycle speak to his aesthetic, religious and nationalistic preoccupations, but his personal identification with the medieval saint too provides the reasoning behind this subject choice that would absorb the artist during the most psychologically fraught decades of his life. Indeed, in life as in art, Sergius provided a constant coordinate around which the devoted Nesterov organized himself. Living near Sergius’ Trinity Lavra, he was both geographically and aesthetically proximate to the fundaments of his teaching. Nesterov’s artistic objective of national transformation, originating in the transcendent ends of medieval hagiography and iconography, was one that was shared by not only, at a more material level, the social realist genre of the early populist Peredvizhniki but also by the more aesthetically and spiritually inclined Symbolist inheritors of the tradition. And this fundamental artistic mission parallels Sergius’ monastic one. If the artist can be defined as one who employs his chosen material towards the enunciation of some message, who, in the pursuit of some pressing vision, imparts some material or affective change upon his audience, then Sergius becomes a true inhabitant of that role. His materials were at once more abstract and, at the same time, exceedingly concrete – those of the body and the community.

Inversely, where does Nesterov take on the role of the religious leader? His commitment to the illustration of an Orthodox heritage and spiritual revival through his painting joins him in the proselytizing mission of his saintly forefathers.

Returning to the text, Epiphanius, in his kataphatic opening to the life of Saint Sergius, provides a straightforward example of the conscription of hesychast metaphysics by the arts. Epiphanius’ “Life”, according to the appropriate hagiographic pattern, continues in positive, affirmative style and concludes in the Prestavlenie (преставление). This term denotes the righteous death of the holy figure, in his or her deliverance into a higher realm, and manifests the silence of absolute negation; the text

18 exhausts itself in expressing divinity, and terminates itself, accomplishing apophasis in its reverent absence. But presently, attention is directed to the lived activities of Sergius in Epiphanius' primary text, and their alignments with Nesterov's Cycle as determined by their particular reverberations with the painter's ideology.

Following his beloved wife’s death in May of 1886, two days after the birth of their daughter, Nesterov immediately and feverishly began to produce a number of studies of the departed that very same year. 1887 was not a very fruitful period in terms of completed projects – the only document of that year’s work is in a small oil study of a skete of the Trinity Lavra – yet in the spring, following the death of Wanderers’ founder Ivan Kramskoi on April 5, Nesterov began work on The Bride of Christ, in which his wife would play the title role. These exercises in artistic escape served to alleviate his despair, and, years later, reflecting upon the painful events of those difficult years, he wrote, My love for Masha and her loss made me an artist, invested my work with the substance and feeling and very living soul which it had lacked, in brief, with everything that people have since come to value in my art.13 Consequently, he embarked the following year upon the cycle of St. Sergius. Over the course of 1888 and 1889, he would complete the painstaking preparatory works for what would become The Vision of the Boy Bartholomew.

Textually, Epiphanius' treatment of the young Bartholomew's sacred meeting informs the content and devices of Nesterov's painting. Sent by his father to search for a lost foal, Bartholomew happened upon a “monk, a venerable elder, a stranger, a priest, with the appearance of an angel,”14 praying beneath an oak tree. This list augments not only the figure’s sanctity but also his unknowability; therefore, Nesterov conceals the monk’s face in his hood, around which he traces a pale halo. This feat of revelation through obscurity is central to Orthodox aesthetics, as, in both text and image, Russian artists indicate sacred reality in the synecdochal substitution of a part for the whole, or in

13

Mikhail Nesterov, Memoirs 1985, p. 88-89, quoted in Rusakova, 156.

Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” 263.

14

19 the metonymic representation of a symbol in place of its abstract and divine referent.15 Bartholomew, waiting for the conclusion of the elder’s prayers, drew near the hallowed figure. One appraised the other. Bartholomew imagined the monk the perfect realization of spiritual duty; the monk recognized in Bartholomew the Holy Spirit. In response to the boy’s application, “holy Father, pray to God for me, that he will give me understanding of book learning,”16 the man took from his pouch a piece of bread, offering him this sacrament in confirmation of Bartholomew’s sanctity. Tasting the sweet “prosphora”17 Bartholomew was transformed, suddenly reciting Scripture in thanks for the benevolent stranger’s bestowal. This moment of individual transformation – Bartholomew immediately gained knowledge of the Divine Word and became exceptionally literate and pious – serves as a prelude to both the boy’s future project as spiritual leader and to Nesterov’s artistic ends, after Sergius, of national enlightenment and conversion.

Nesterov agonized over some central elements of the painting: the oak tree was a crucial aspect of Epiphanius’ narrative as both topographical locus as well as biblical symbol, recalling the Oak of Mamre beneath which Abraham hosted the Holy Trinity (Genesis 18:1-8) and Andrey Rublyov’s fourteenth century icon on the theme. It appears in an oil study, Oak (1889), as a dynamic contrast to the final version included in the Vision. The unrestrained growth of the Oak’s foliage and the vigorous thrust of its branches are countered by the Vision’s more sober iteration of the tree as a frame for the humble monk, who carries out his “devout” prayer and “shedding of tears” below the oak.18 He struggled too in his representation of Bartholomew, the central unifying force of the painting, and completed two meticulous oil studies of the child before painting his final scene. He describes in his memoir his quest for an ideal model of the boy’s head, 15

This phenomenon is crystallized in the function of the church iconostasis, which screens the holy altar from view of the congregation. Additionally, its iconographic representation work both synecdochally and metonymically as A) its painted profusion of saints signifies the vast Heavenly Kingdom through only a selection of its representatives, and B) its material presence refers the viewer by association to the divinity.

16 Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” 263.

17 Kovalevsky, Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality, 68.

18 Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” 263.

20 itself the indispensable, motivating countenance of the entire composition. While wandering the Abramtsevo landscape not far from Radonezh, the saint’s hometown, and Sergiyev Posad, the site of his Trinity Lavra, Nesterov was arrested by the sight of a young girl with “big wide open surprised blue eyes…mournful mouth,” and a sickly visage. “I froze as before a vision,” he exclaims; the “image was found.”19 Following the Tatar invasions, Cyril had moved the family from Rostov to Radonezh; once a “wealthy and renowned boyar…he was reduced to poverty.” Here, the troubles of Sergius’ father are echoed in the trials of Nesterov’s father, the merchant, who gave up his business upon realizing that his son had no interest in inheriting the family trade. When Bartholomew’s brothers, Stephen and Peter, married, the middle child “would not contemplate marriage, being desirous of becoming a monk.”20 His thoughts were turned to higher matters. Following the deaths of his parents, he enlisted his elder brother Stephen to join him in his quest for “some desert place” in which he could institute a monastic dwelling. The brothers built a small hut and chapel: this would become the Trinity Lavra. In 1347, after receiving tonsure in Moscow at the age of twenty-three, Sergius once again departed for the wilderness, but not before appealing to the priest and abbot Mitrofan for blessing and guidance for his eremitic mission. “Instruct one living alone in the wilderness how to pray to the Lord God,” he implores, “how to remain unharmed; how to wrestle with the devil and with his own temptations to pride…”21 Nesterov’s own travels – entrances and exits from the Moscow and St. Petersburg arts institutions, his European excursions, returns to Ufa, settlement near the Trinity Lavra – reveal similar contestations with his personal ambition.

Following the Society’s influential display of his Vision, the art historian Adrian Prakhov, “Chairman of the Construction Committee for the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in Kiev,” commissioned Nesterov to contribute to the “painting of the cathedral’s murals.”22 This opportunity spurred Nesterov to travel to Constantinople, Greece, and Italy, for the

19

Nesterov, Davnie Dni, 156.

Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” 265.

21 Epiphanius the Wise, 268.

22 Alla Aleksandrovna Rusakova, Mikhail Nesterov (Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1990), 12.

20

21 purpose of achieving a firmer grasp on Byzantine art. Though the painter’s delicate modern style was not suited to the particularities of Byzantine form, his stirring religious imagery, however, issues forth from similar devotional inclinations. For the next two decades he accepted commissions for further cathedral work. Following the completion of the Vladimir Cathedral, he went to St. Petersburg’s Church of the Resurrection-inBlood where he worked on mosaic from 1894-7, followed by further mural and scaffolding work among different churches. However, he gradually came to bridle at the strict prescriptions of cathedral work; the iconic forms began to stifle his creative vision.

A return to Sergiyev Posad and his projects depicting monks and Russian landscapes revived his artistic vigor; for Nesterov, the most transcendent aspects of Orthodoxy resided in the national landscape and its people.

Meanwhile, Sergius’ own trials in his holy journey would inspire the content of the following two installments of Nesterov’s Sergius Cycle. The new monk in the wilderness, beset by demons and visions, nonetheless remained stoically firm against evil imposition. Yet his kindness to the forest animals appears as a consequence of his humility and sanctity, and his communion with a wild bear is its fitting embodiment.

Sergius would often go hungry in order to feed it his last piece of bread, although the animal never harmed him; rather, it lingered in anticipation of food, glancing “around on all sides, rather like some moneylender waiting to receive payment of his debt.”23 Here, Epiphanius’ anthropomorphizing simile provides an example of the semantic overloading of his kataphatic device. He reaches into every region of language in order to present the un-presentable, restating here, in human, professional terms, the activities of an animal.

In stating or defining certain elements through a diversity of lexical and semantic categories, particular aspects are brought to the forefront, all at the service of the divinity.

Nesterov’s Youth of St. Sergius of Radonezh (1892-7) again required a number of laborious studies, completed throughout the five years of its difficult composition.

Nesterov presents the scene of the docile bear, sitting at the feet of the monk, pale and divinely childlike in appearance. The haloed Sergius at the center of the canvas is framed by the lush forest; birds rest on branches at his right. The following work of the Cycle, a 23

Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” 268.

22 triptych featuring the Labors of St. Sergius of Radonezh (1896-7), was completed, alongside his Youth, during the years of Nesterov’s church commissions. The iconographic influences of these works are manifest in the paintings due to not only the compositional structure and the latter’s triptych design, but also in a particular “didactic quality” in the instructive activities of Sergius.24 What is more, Sergius’ labors are evidence of the novel humility of monastic practice. As monk, abbot, priest, and spiritual father of his Lavra, he nevertheless joined in every aspect of the necessary physical labor.

The left hand panel shows the saint carrying water, recalling one of his miracles, carried out when, during a time of drought for the monastery, he created a spring from a puddle by simply making the sign of the cross. The right panel features the saint traversing the snowy Russian landscape, and in the central image he appears bent among fellow laborers, saw in hand, chopping wood; his head is adorned by a glowing nimbus in each.

Sergius’ dedication to manual labor as an act of piety resonated with Nesterov.

The artist’s own devotion to the physical demands of his craft, as he travelled the Russian landscape and studied in monasteries to experience the physical lives of the saints and hermits he was portraying, was often at odds with the practice of his formally educated contemporaries, many of them Wanderers and members of the intelligentsia. Alexander Benois, the Russian painter, historian, and founding member of the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) movement with whom Nesterov would be briefly associated, said upon meeting the painter in 1896, I think that he is a man who is, in the first place, extremely intelligent, although not particularly well-educated. His philosophy is deistic…Christian, but gnawed by the worm of doubt…He is struggling – with what, I do not know! Perhaps, in addition to all this, he is ambitious…25 Also in 1897, Nesterov completed a sketch for an unrealized painting from the “Life” of the saint. In this scene, St. Sergius of Radonezh Blessing Dmitri Donskoi for Battle with the Tartars, this monumental episode of Russian history would have inflected the Cycle with the political aspect of Sergius’ indispensability to Russian history.

24

Rusakova, Mikhail Nesterov, 11.

“Letter from Alexandre Benois to Yevgeny Lanceray.” 19 February 1896, (Nesterov, Memoirs 1985, p.199) quoted in Rusakova, 161.

25

23 Epiphanius describes the various powerful figures that came to visit the renowned Sergius and his Trinity Lavra, not least of which was the Grand Duke Dmitri. Dmitri journeyed to Sergius in search of his blessing to meet Khan Mamai, purported to be “raising a large army as a punishment for our sins,” in battle. With his Tatar army, the Khan would attack Russian soil. Sergius’ sanctioned Dmitri’s call to arms, and “strengthened by prayer,” replied, It behooveth you, lord, to have a care for the lives of the flock committed you by God. Go forth against the heathen; and upheld by the strong arm of God, conquer; and return to your country sound in health, and glorify God with loud praise.26 However, the painting was never begun. Nesterov, at this time, was becoming increasingly disillusioned with not only the contemporaneous artistic movements with which he was associated, but also with his own artistic viability. The grand implications of this momentous episode of Russian history proved too immense at this time of spiritual enervation to confront.

Throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century, Nesterov developed his Venerable St. Sergius of Radonezh (1891-9). This canvas presents the saint in the very center of an autumnal landscape in proximity of the Trinity Lavra, head adorned by a soft white halo. This canvas would be the last painting of his Cycle to correspond to Epiphanius’ original text; however, Nesterov never abandoned the subject of Sergius. His Holy Rus’ (1901-6) and Christ Blesses Bartholomew (1926) are testaments to his continued preoccupation with the life and accomplishments of the saint.

Ultimately, an insistence upon an overarching harmony, sustained from the glory days of icon painting to this moment at the brink of the twentieth century, is definitive of the contemporaneous Russian artistic project directed towards a cohesive national identity. Sergius’ implementation of a hesychast methodology united both cenobitic and eremitic monastic traditions, combining the former outwardly directed, communal practices with the isolated and solitary customs of the latter, and Epiphanius sought to convey this in his effusive text. In Sergius, the Slavic creative spirit toiled in service of

26

Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” 284.

24 the unification of the nation’s vast expanses, working to justify an Orthodox ethics and sensory aesthetics, one by the other. And these poles, constantly shifting in relation to each other and their spatiotemporal loci as if nodes on the needles of a compass, give voice to the multivariate concerns of Nesterov’s painted vision, which sought to proclaim an intractable Russian integrity through the monastic models of Sergius in the painted representations of the Saint in his eternal, natural landscape. Nesterov’s painted labors, after Sergius in his landscape, subjects, and body, and Epiphanius in the word, pursued the consolidation of national identity and the transformation of the Russian people.

I. Situation and Spectrum: Ideology at the Turn of the Century Nesterov’s unique position at the frontiers of a number of distinct ideological and aesthetic movements was most explicitly shaped by his affiliations with both the Wanderers and the Symbolists. Both groups influenced, and were in turn informed by, his masterful output and philosophical program. By virtue of the considerable sway of both these movements at their cultural zeniths – the Peredvizhniki flourishing in the two decades following their first exhibition in 1871, the Symbolists shortly after, from the late nineteenth through early twentieth Centuries – but also by the proximity he enjoyed to Russia’s artistic centers, as student of the fine arts in Moscow and St. Petersburg during the 1880’s, to these milieus, Nesterov’s artistic and intellectual development was largely beholden.

Nesterov’s Aesthetic Orientation Throughout his lifetime, Nesterov bore witness to a multitude of cultural movements both at home in the East and abroad in the West, in universities, churches, and various intellectual circles, in the countryside and at the very heart of urban life. His historical locus, as he matured throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century and survived the first four of the twentieth, made him privy not only to the rich discursive atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Europe and Russia, but also to its precedents and inheritors, its development and legacy. His own peculiar navigation of these currents, then, is revealing of his entire practice, as he participated in, employed, and discarded both Realist then Symbolist trends, and both Russian and Western stylistic positions.

26

The Wanderers The Imperial Academy of the Arts Nesterov, an artist of independent aesthetic convictions was nonetheless receptive to the stylistic techniques and aesthetic orientations of his contemporaries. As a student, he was acquainted with members of the Itinerant Society or Peredvizhniki, who aimed to take contemporary Russian art beyond the museums and galleries of Russia’s capital. The group brought traveling exhibitions of realist works to audiences yet uninitiated to the arts outside of colorless reproductions in various publications, or the frescoes and icons they might encounter in the church and at home.

Their artistic agenda, however, went beyond this mission and took shape from their vexed relationship with the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts. The westernizing reforms of Peter the Great throughout the beginning of the eighteenth century paved the way for a new artistic trajectory in Russia. Inspired by the museums and academies of Western Europe, Peter sent young Russians abroad for training and established the St. Petersburg School of Design. Promoting a largely crafts-based rather than fine arts curriculum, the school set a precedent for the institutions to come. His successor, Empress Elizabeth (1741-1762), at the urging of Count Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, introduced an arts department at Moscow University, and founded the Academy of Arts at St. Petersburg in 1758. In 1764, her successor, Catherine the Great (1762-1796), funded the construction of its independent building. The Academy, with the mission of training and sponsoring Russian artists to serve at the behest of the crown, had the ultimate goal to create a new professional class of Russian artists who would bolster the nation’s cultural prestige. Rather than granting its students creative freedom, the Academy instead maintained the rigid structures that dictated the Russian social system.

Artists were wholly beholden to the Academy as one of the only real resources in the nation for capital and title. A 1768 clause in the Academy’s guidelines stipulated that, in order to be classified художник or ‘artist’, one had to rely exclusively on state funding and commissions, and could only receive the benefits of the title through the Academy’s

27 granting of certificate or award, “much as any title in the bureaucracy or military.”27 The title of “artist” was assigned the fourteenth and lowest position in the Table of Ranks instituted by Peter in 1722 and dissolved, along with the Academy, only in the wake of the Revolution in 1917.

From the Academy’s founding and through the end of Nicholas I’s reign in 1855, the professional painter was regarded as a craftsman rather than an inspired artist, not a reputable occupation for nobility. Under the autocratic reign of Nicholas II, the Academy became subject to stringent bureaucratic control and the taste of the tsar. Nicholas fired and installed staff capriciously. In 1852, he even bestowed its presidency upon his favorite daughter, the Grand Duchess Maria of Leuchtenberg, following the death of the former head and his son-in-law, Duke Maximilian of Leuchtenberg, inaugurating an atmosphere of increasing regimentation, all the while sustaining the Academy as the only real patron of the arts in the nation. Thus, just as Russia’s artistic heritage remains deeply entwined with its religious history, so too have her arts been largely beholden to the government.

And it was to this atmosphere that the future Wanderers responded. Artists of the mid-nineteenth century not only faced the virtual monopoly of the court over all aspects of artistic production and consumption, but also had to contend with the tyranny of style.

Neoclassicism still dominated the Academy, as it had since the unearthing of Pompeii and Herculaneum a century earlier led to a renewal of interest in the aesthetics of the Ancients.28 The Large Gold Medal was the most prestigious of the Academy’s awards, and was given only to inflexibly Biblical, mythical, or antique subjects. The only route to professional recognition and advancement was through adherence to the aesthetic criteria of the Academy. The title of First Grade “Class Artist” was granted the student who had secured a Gold Medal, while one who had received merely a Silver Medal became a “Class Artist” of the Second Grade; both remained fourteenth in rank, the latter reserving 27

Richard Pipes, “Russia’s Itinerant Painters,” Russian History 38, no. 3 (2011): 324.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1755 “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” championed the visual stylings of antiquity as the paragon of the arts. The German archaeologist’s “History of Art in Antiquity” of the subsequent decade sedimented these musings in his presentation of an ample chronology of ancient art.

28

28 the right to this title only by appointment to public office. Meanwhile, the title of “Nonclass Artist” was relegated to the multitudes that had failed to distinguish themselves in their examinations. In the sphere of advanced achievement, the titles of First or Second Grade “Academician” could be obtained only after the artist’s homecoming following his six-year study abroad, funded by the Academy only for winners of the Large Gold Medal.

Its recipients were able to secure, at the very least, both rank and further artistic training, specifically the chance to acquire knowledge of Western style and technique during their Academy-sponsored travels.

Karl Pavlovich Bryullov, Academy graduate and Russia’s most celebrated painter in the decades preceding his death in 1852, serves as a model for the Academy’s ideal early course of the artist. Despite his decidedly more Romantic style, he won the Large Gold Medal in 1821 and journeyed to Italy, which, alongside Greece as the birthplace of Neoclassical aesthetics, promised to inspire the young artist’s work with the full force of Western refinement and Classical perfection. Upon attending Giovanni Pacini’s “The Last Day of Pompeii,” Bryullov set about creating a scene based on the opera’s catastrophic finale. Completed in oil in 1833, The Last Day of Pompeii depicts a scene of terror and confusion as an assortment of marble-like, vividly enrobed bodies clamors to escape the city under the fiery assault of the volcanic eruption, as ash pours from the sky and flames color the horizon. The ancient scene, with its smooth and statuesque figures and the angular simplicity of its Classical architecture, combines these neoclassical features with a pronounced Romantic dramatism.

The canvas was displayed and won a gold medal at the 1834 Paris Salon, the Académie des Beaux-Arts official annual exhibition and inspiration for the St. Petersburg Academy’s own yearly exhibition, in which it was included that same year, securing Bryullov a professorship. However, even the coveted “Professor” nomination did not ensure “any financial rewards, nor did they bring a professional assignment.”29 Nonetheless, in spite of its oft-grim prospects, the Academy remained the sole national recourse for Russians with artistic aspirations. And so it stayed, monolithic, the unbending benefactor and looming arbiter of taste.

29

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society : The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ardis, 1977), 6.

29

Figure 3. Last Day of Pompeii (1833), Karl Bryullov, oil on canvas The canvas was presented to a wildly enthusiastic public at both the Paris Salon and the Academy’s St. Petersburg exhibition, where writers Alexander Pushkin and later Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Gogol encountered it in high regard.

Attempts to loosen the Academy’s rigid constraints increased throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. Nicholas’ suppression notwithstanding, the Moscow Art School was able to achieve official stature in 1843; however, as it attained prominence, it became unable to evade the omnipresent imperial grasp and was promptly submitted to strict governmental surveillance and the mercy of the St. Petersburg Academy. So too was St. Petersburg’s Society for the Promotion of Artists powerless against the government’s dominion, becoming, in 1833, the Imperial Academy for the Promotion of Art, and, in 1852, joining the Academy of the Arts under the command of the imposing Grand Duchess Maria. And beyond the urban centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Russia’s distant rural reaches, those potential patrons of the arts, moneyed landowners, needed not to look beyond their own serfs for the commission of personal portraits. Provincial icon painters provided serfs with rudimentary artistic training; the city’s struggling artists were therefore forced to appeal to the imperial systems of the Academies and labor endlessly towards some tenuous end of success within the rigid and oversaturated market. The paths available to the free artist consisted primarily in Academic distinction, in bureaucratic appeals and recognition at one of the Academy’s yearly showcases. Rather than participating in the cultural edification and regeneration of

30 society, artists were instead submitted to the oppressive conditions of the Academy. With little to no freedom to evolve beyond the dogmatic technical strictures of the institution, artists were unable to occupy the relatively more dynamic roles of their Western counterparts as agents of innovation and social invigoration. Yet it was in this stagnant and sterile plateau in Russia’s artistic development, poised at the very midpoint of a nineteenth century which – following decades of monarchical inflexibility, the unprecedented regimentation of every aspect of Russian life, and revolutionary suppression, crystallized in and informed by the quashed Decembrist uprising that greeted Nicholas’ inauguration – craved upheaval and inspiration, that the first seeds of revolt were sown.

Alexander II, Sociopolitical Reform, and Dissent in the Academy Tsar Alexander’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the “Great Reforms” of the judiciary and the military, and his conferral of a greater degree of freedom upon the people, through, for one, a loosening of censorship, infected the members of the art institutions. The increasingly politicized students of the Academy began advocating for their own rights as autonomous creative professionals. Paris’ historic Salon des Refusés of 1863 further inspired their activism.30 In September 1862, in anticipation of the Academy’s 1864 contest and in reply to the public’s escalating opprobrium, the Council issued a revised statement of requirements for the Gold Medals. As before, those competing for the Small Gold Medal were provided a subject, this year, the topical “The Emancipation of the Serfs.” However, the contenders for the Large Gold Medal were granted considerably freer rein in subject

30

In response to the Académie’s Salon jury’s refusal of an astounding two thirds of the submitted canvases, whose authors included the likes of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne, the excluded artists convened their own Salon to display their works. Courbet’s Pavillion du réalisme, a gallery hosted to exhibit works of the realist style he championed throughout the 1840’s onward, was inaugurated in defiance of the prevailing Romanticism and Neoclassicism of the nineteenth century.

The realist trend in the arts emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century across the West; it was only a matter of time before the movement reached Russian soil, its spirit of independence appealing to an artistic milieu hungry for progress.

31 matter; the artists were merely confined to a number of general themes such as anger or patriotic love. Although precise subject was left to each artist’s discretion, the fourteen students competing for the Large Gold Medal appealed the Council for total license in the choice of subject. The group, comprised of thirteen painters and one sculptor who had all previously won Small Gold Medals, was composed nearly entirely of members of the lower classes. The head of the nascent collective and the author of the petition was Ivan Kramskoi. The appeal stated, Insofar as in connection with the forthcoming hundredth anniversary of the Academy, the council has expressed concern about the abundance of the next exhibition, in order to make it even more diverse and worthy of the jubilee celebration, we, on our part have decided to declare our sincere wish that those of us who so desire be given a free choice of subject, apart from the assigned subject, in view of the fact that the Council itself has accepted it in necessary cases to grant freedom to the personal inclinations of the artist. On these grounds we request that the Council extend this rule to everyone in cases when neither the [assigned] theme nor the subject match the competitor’s inclination.31 It was swiftly rejected. Kramskoi, twenty-six at the time of the petition’s submission, originally hailed from a poor family of the petit bourgeois from the Voronezh region. His ambitious character propelled him, from his village and the path laid out by his father and grandfather (both scribes before him), to St. Petersburg and the Academy in 1857 where he studied for five years before the fateful assembly of the fourteen colleagues.

In terms of professional mobility, the relative indigence of Kramskoi and a majority of his fellow pupils presented a considerable obstacle. The present rank system was not only observed socially, restricting the societal opportunities available to those of humble origin, but also enforced by law, consigning the lower estates to the state’s beck and call through obligatory public service and taxes from which the “gentry [дворянство], clergy [духовенство],” and “distinguished or honorable citizens [почетные граждане]”32 were exempt. However, the lower classes, made up of peasants, or крестьяне, and the petit bourgeois, мешчане, did have access to resources, namely education, which would provide the means for their civil advancement. Still, 31 32

Kramskoi, Письма, I: 480-1, quoted in Pipes, 336.

Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 11.

32 these routes were riddled with bureaucratic hurdles; sufficient documentation and advance payment of taxes were just two of the requirements for a member of the latter estates to secure the right to travel, to even consider the possibility of schooling.

Furthermore, once rank was secured, the young graduate was often left to grapple with an immense learning curve; the Academy failed to prepare its students to navigate educated high society, an elite to which artists, in their new role as cultural actants, were expected to assimilate. Despite Lvov’s expansion of the Academy curriculum to include history, literature, and aesthetics, he did not succeed in equalizing the intellectual playing field among the widely disparate classes. Students suffered for the absence of Russian or translated art historical writing, which was only compounded by the fact that the Academy offered no instruction in foreign language. The artist lacked access to an entire aesthetic history and vocabulary, one enjoyed by some of the higher born and the graduates of the universities. The artist occupied a unique position among the educated population, at once equipped with a set of technical skills and proximity to a Universityeducated intelligentsia, yet acutely aware of the inadequacy of his background and schooling in preparing him for inclusion in this experienced milieu.

Such were the conditions of Kramskoi’s contemporaries at the time of their petition to the Academy. Their attempt to gain a greater degree of creative freedom was informed by the somewhat contradictory currents of an environment that promoted the destruction of inflexible social and political orders all the while upholding the necessity for comprehensive formal education. Despite the initial dismissal of the students’ appeal, the fourteen competitors applied themselves only more doggedly to their cause, each appealing to individual constituents of the Academic Council. On the morning of November 9, 1863, the fourteen young artists arrived at the Academy’s Catherine Hall, for the final decision. Instead, they were met with a second rebuff; not only was freedom of subject matter denied but a new topic assigned, this time with elaborate guidelines dictating not only the content of the scene but its composition as well. This gesture on the part of the Academy served as a reminder to the young artists that the Council still commanded absolute control. The new topic assigned was the depiction of “The Festival of the Gods.” This scene from Norse mythology was to take place in the legendary Valhalla or “Hall of the Slain,” the domain of the god Odin, the postmortem destination

33 of those who had perished in battle. The artists were to illustrate Odin’s feast following a series of highly specific parameters: exactly two crows were to perch on the central god’s shoulders, two wolves at his feet, while he stood amidst a throng of knights, backlit by a moon, enveloped by the form of an immense wolf. The artists requested diplomas and titles of “Non-class Artist,” and removed themselves from the competition.

Suddenly freed from Academy regulations, the artists now found themselves untethered, no longer sponsored by their only dependable artistic patron. A program of surveillance was enacted by the state, keeping close watch of the artists’ activities and censoring offending material. All press coverage of the civil unrest was silenced. In order to leverage their newfound relative independence, and in compliance with imperial law, the dissidents appealed to the Ministry of the Interior for permission to assemble the Артель Свободных Художников, or the “Cooperative of Free Artists.” The contemporary Russian artel’ (артель) was an artifact of the revolutionary zeitgeist catalyzed by the likes of Nikolai Chernyshevsky who, in his What Is To Be Done?, described this kind of autonomous workers’ collective, in which young citizens would break free from the authoritarian constraints of family and institution to establish their own communal spaces. The Ministry acquiesced and effectively cut the Artel’ free.

For all its staid bureaucracy, the Academy nevertheless had provided its students with the facilities for working and exhibition. The Academy had stood as a stable resource for the young and inexperienced artists. But by monopolizing most aspects of the arts world, it had left the young mutineers without any dependable means of employment, instruction, or income. The newfound autonomy of the Artel’ was unheard of in Russia, yet as the very first group to operate outside the bounds of imperial jurisdiction and sponsorship, the collective had ventured into uncharted waters with little consideration for a course of action. Kramskoi, having acquired a place to house the artists, was the only member at the time with a secure source of income. Governmental commission, in the absence of any real private patronage, remained the sole recourse for artists to earn livings. Kramskoi received 10,000 rubles for his painting at Moscow’s Church of the Redeemer, and his firm commitment to the project of the Artel’ helped to maintain it for the next eight years. In true communal fashion, a certain percentage of each artist’s income, largely secured through icon and portrait commissions, was pooled

34 and redistributed among them. The Artel’ tirelessly promoted itself, hosting weekly creative presentations and conversations, and each artist advertising his services in newspapers.

The beginning of the 1860’s was a time of productive optimism and creative collaboration for the Artel’. The emergence of the Russian Realist school during the decade reflected the increasingly rebellious spirit of the greater population. The esteemed intelligentsia occupied the roles of not only cultural commentators but also reformers, describing a number of paths upon which they believed art should progress and effect change. In opposition to an autocracy that upheld obsolete systems of governance and often abused the rights of its citizens, this erudite cultural elite sought to activate art’s potential for social transformation. Against the Neoclassicist status quo, they expounded a vision of aesthetic politicization. For example, the radical Chernyshevsky’s Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855) expressed art’s obligation to provide cultural critique.

Critic V. G. Belinsky (1811-1848), an early driving force behind the sociopolitical magazine Современник, or The Contemporary (1836-1866), spoke expansively about the necessity for truth in art. Although commenting largely on the literary project rather than that of the visual arts, his virulent anti-autocratic stance and championing of the downtrodden was vital to the development of mid-century intelligentsia ideology. He ascribed to the artist the imperative of portraying reality as it truly was; only an exposé of all its injustice and ugliness could effect social transformation.

Figure 4. Peasant Procession at Easter (1861), Vasily Perov, oil on canvas A future founder of the Wanderers (and Nesterov’s favorite teacher), Perov often depicted, alongside portraits, scenes of bureaucratic hypocrisy and the plight of disenfranchised workers and youths. This work, portraying an inebriated clergy, was taken from its exhibition as it posed an affront to state religion, answering the Realist call to arms for the political mobilization of art.

35 The Russian writer and political exile Alexander Herzen – in his periodical The Bell, or Колокол, published with fellow writer and exile Nikolai Ogaryov in London from 1857 to 1865 and then in Geneva until its demise two years later – advanced a similar if slightly more drastic artistic program. Though banned in Russia, the newspaper gained popularity among Russian intellectual circles and was responsible for some of the insurgent sentiment of the 1860’s, advocating for peasants’ rights and an end to censorship. Herzen called for artists to shed the obsolete forms and themes of Neoclassicism, an obsolete style championed by the Tsarist regime in attempts to maintain its authority and the institutions that sustained it. Instead, painters were to depict the injustices of contemporary Russian life in order to awaken their audience to Russia’s political backwardness. Contemporary artistic trends were merely European transplants, as the Academy endorsed a certain Western mimicry in its idealization and teaching of Neoclassical works and principles. A number of Russian thinkers too called for a renovation of style; art historian and folklorist Fyodor Buslaev gave voice to this demand by advocating for a return to the nation’s roots of religious art. In church decoration and the medieval Orthodox icon, artists could introduce a new artistic movement that was distinctly Russian in both its aims and modes. In a fashion similar to that of the ancient icon, this new Russian art would effectively bring about the spiritual uplift of its audiences, activating a certain moral elevation by way of its method and message.

Stylistically and ideologically, the Artel’ gravitated towards Realism and the civic criticism of the contemporary literary practice of poet Nikolai Nekrasov and satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, whose обличительный жанр (the accusatory, or denunciatory genre) condemned social injustice and corruption, often through depictions of the mistreated and hardworking lower classes. Yet their realist works were not especially groundbreaking and did not garner much critical attention. Furthermore, the Artel’ still relied to a degree on the benefaction of the Academy, which continued to grant the group space for exhibitions and commission its artists for works. Lastly, a fraught relationship with title persisted even in the life of the Artel’. Artists, particularly those of modest origins, relied on rank for professional viability; and by 1869, seven members of the collective – together with Kramskoi, whose rejection of the title was denied by the Academy – had achieved the status of Academician. Thus, the significance

36 of the Artel’ was largely in its role as precursor. In its efforts to promote the role of the free artist and enter him into the ranks of the intelligentsia, the Artel’ broke ground towards the eventual emergence of the Society for Traveling Exhibitions. Early exhibitions, though substantially less profitable and renowned, predicted the future events with which the Wanderers would come to distinguish themselves.

The Society for Traveling Exhibitions In 1870, the Artel’ officially disbanded after Kramskoi’s departure. But an ardent desire to fully realize and implement the independent artistic spirit of the early collective remained alive in Kramskoi and his colleagues. Grigorii Grigorievich Miasoedov, an older and comparatively distinguished painter and violinist, picked up the baton and spearheaded the new organization. A Large Gold Medal diplomate of the Academy, Miasoedov had been inspired in his studies abroad by the novel practice of travelling exhibitions, free from state control, with most of the earnings going straight to the artists.

He was also impressed by the example of the Free School of Music, which was founded upon a nationalistic impulse to invent a new Russian compositional school, free from the Western-influenced state conservatories. Convened in 1862 by composer M. A. Balakirev, the group counted M. P. Mussorgsky, N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin among its ranks. However, the successful realization of this ambitious impulse towards sovereignty would not be confined to the musical arts. Nikolai Ge (1834-94), roused by the ideas of Russian thinkers like Belinsky and Herzen, returned from his Academy-funded Italian sojourn, largely radicalized and defiant of the authorities. In Italy, he had met Herzen and discussed with Miasoedov, his contemporary, a traveling exhibition similar to those they were encountering in Europe. Upon his return, Ge received, with his 1863 Last Supper, the title of “Professor,” bypassing the stepping-stone of “Academician.” These two men, acclaimed representatives of Russian Realist painting, would come to legitimize the original desires of the Artel’. Having never explicitly defined their terms and aims nor secured a stable clientele, the Artel’ had failed to establish itself as a reputable organization. Now, only the spark of contact was required for the Society’s ignition.

37 Upon his return to Moscow, Miasoedev conscripted a number of like-minded, eminent painters to his cause. This group included Perov, Alexei Savrasov, Illarion Pryanishnikov, and Lev Lvovich Kamenev, instructors at the somewhat laxer Academysponsored Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture and affiliates of the Moscow Society of the Lovers of Art, both organizations that had succeeded in evading to varying degrees the stifling grasp of the state. These artists possessed something that their St. Petersburg Artel’ counterparts, for all their early initiative and optimism, lacked: reputation. The older forerunners of Russian Realism combined the rebellious ideological vigor of the younger dissidents with status and mass appeal. Additionally, many of this older generation came from, at the very least, merchant families that afforded them early formal educations that set the course for their later cultural fluency and social ascendancy.

On November 23, 1869, the budding assembly outlined its vision and objectives for the formation of the collective and sent it to the St. Petersburg Artel’ for their endorsement and enlistment. The original manifesto stated that The establishment of the Society of Itinerant Exhibitions has as its goal to give the inhabitants of the provinces the opportunity to follow the successes of Russian art. In this way the Society, by striving to expand the circle of art lovers, will open new paths for the sale of works of art.33 Here, one can observe two forces at play, the first clearly mercantile, the second, cultural.

These dual motives remained central to the Society’s project throughout its run, alternately utilized by different factions within the group. Richard Pipes, in his incisive examination of the Society’s evolution, demonstrates the discrepancy between various of their aspirational stated missions and other more professionalized concerns through the juxtaposition of the above statement with its 1870 successor, which read: The Society has as its objective the organization, with proper authorization, in all the cities of the Empire of itinerant art exhibits for the purpose of a) providing an opportunity to those who wish to familiarize themselves with Russian art and follow its successes, b)

33

S.N. Goldshtein, ed., Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystakov: Pis’ma, dokumenty, 1869-99, 2 vols (Moscow, 1987), I: 51.

38 fostering in society the love of art, 3) facilitating for artists the marketing of their works.34 The language privileges the social aspect of their mission, appealing to a public concerned with the betterment of its underserved provincial masses and ultimately the ascendancy of its national culture. Yet the reverse side of this proposed objective remains the desire on the part of the artists to generate new means of revenue in the creation of a provincial patronage. At its core, the Society was founded upon the need to break free of Imperial bondage, and its twin intentions of exposure and financial gain went hand in hand.

Among its members, however, the Society was host to a spectrum of perspective.

Diversity of family background, formal education, religious consideration, and social concerns alternately drove each artist towards the fulfillment of Society aims. Perov’s pecuniary ambitions echoed Miasoedov’s, while Ge pursued a more evangelical tack in his production of socially conscious art. The next year, Kramskoi and only three of his former Artel’ associates finally, with considerable trepidation, signed the Statutes drawn up by the Moscow artists, which were sent for consideration to the Ministry in September 1870, nearly a year after their drafting. In officially entering themselves into what would become the Society, the St. Petersburg artists brought with them their complexes of class inferiority and ignorance, and a campaign for the liberation of the Russian artist born from a position of perceived peripherality.

Yet over the course of the decade, the Society for Traveling Exhibitions achieved an ardent following and national renown. On November 28, 1871, the Wanderers’ hosted the first of their exhibits at the St. Petersburg Academy. The show, which included 46 works paintings and drawings and one sculpture by various Society members and affiliates from Kramskoi to Perov to Ge, was a resounding success. Initial public response, a unique fusion of critical approbation and public sympathy, served to launch the Society’s budding reputation. The Wanderers were hailed as a collective of gifted artistic visionaries, that blended technical prowess with a sense of national ethical duty.

The magazine Delo (Labor) praised the event as “the first step made for the liberation of

34

Ibid., I: 57. quoted in Pipes, 341.

39 artists from the serf-like dependence on the Academy,”35 while other outlets applauded the creative boldness of the artists in taking the initiative to develop a new national pictorial language. Such Russian ingenuity had hitherto been the domain of the written arts, whose Golden Age, ushered in by the poetry of Pushkin and propelled by Gogol’s prose, was now thriving through the stories of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy; the Peredvizhniki were forging ahead onto uncharted grounds as the voice of the new liberationist generation.

The Wanderers’ oeuvre, with its dedication to ethical responsibility and the edification of the public, as well as the inspiring autonomy of the collective stirred the spirits of the Russian masses. This independence, however, rankled the Academy, whose absolute control was tested by the increasing popularity of the Society. Despite Academy attempts to submit the artists to their waning order, the Wanderers defiantly maintained their separation, both in terms of style and administration. When Grand Duke and future Academy president Vladimir Alexandrovich made efforts, for fear that the artistic and ethical caliber of the Itinerant exhibitions was detracting from Academy primacy, to join the annual Imperial show with the St. Petersburg leg of the Society’s 1874 exhibitions as well as come to some accord regarding both organizations’ objectives, the group refused.

Even when Kramskoi and Ge were called to answer for their insubordination, the painters maintained their independence, catalyzing a program of increased interference by the Academy that would plague the Society throughout the remainder of its two-decade evolution and ascendancy.

Throughout the 1870’s and 80’s, as the Society’s prestige and power grew, its membership enjoyed an influx of distinguished artists and patrons. Prominent Academy graduates flocked to the Peredvizhniki, just as their clout expanded beyond Russia’s city centers. The prolific Vassily Maximov joined the group in 1872. The Gold Medal winner and realist painter had, following the Fourteen’s example, removed himself from the Academy’s 1865 Large Gold Medal competition, citing his preference for traveling not to Europe but the Russian provinces for artistic study. He subsequently settled in the village of Shubino in Tver, just north of Moscow, and completed a number of paintings documenting the rural lives of the peasantry. The inclusion of his 1867 Grandmother’s 35

Pipes, “Russia’s Itinerant Painters,” 40.

40 Tales, a domestic scene depicting an elderly peasant regaling a captive audience with her stories, in the Society’s circulating show, brought the young artist to the attention of Pavel Tretyakov, who bought the painting. Tretyakov, Russian businessman and avid art collector, would prove to be one of the Society’s principal supporters. Propelled by a desire to found a Russian museum of art, he moved from his early acquisitions of the Dutch masters to the collection of contemporary national works. Frequenting the Traveling Exhibitions and the artists’ studios, he provided the Society with not only immense fiscal aid through his purchases, but also served to imbue its output with a sense of Russian preeminence, directing the national artistic consciousness to the Wanderers’ Realist works.

After Maximov’s 1872 initiation into the Society, a steady succession of artists followed suit. Accomplished Realist Konstantin Savitsky enlisted himself in 1874. His Repairing the Railroad of the same year, a scene of physical labor in the countryside, was an early example of not only painting devoted to the struggles of the working class, but also illustrative of the significance of the Russian railway system which had been developing since the late 1830’s and, under Alexander II’s reign, had succeeded in connecting Russia and Europe with the 1862 completion of a St. Petersburg-Warsaw line.

Yet the national expansion of railroads was vital to the Society, which depended upon the constant travel and transportation of its art and members between the urban hubs of St. Petersburg and Moscow to the more distant reaches of its vast countryside.

Figure 5. Icon on the Road (1878), Konstantin Savitsky, oil on canvas In this scene, typical of the Wanderers’ anti-clericalism, Savistky exposes the hypocrisy of the wealthy clergy revealing an icon to an awed, destitute peasantry.

41 1873 saw the arrival of Arkhip Kuindzhi, whose striking Western Russian landscape, On Valaam Island (1873), was the very first painting Tretyakov purchased for inclusion in his national Gallery. In 1878, Viktor Vasnetsov and Ilya Repin became members of the association. Vasnetsov, raised in the former Vyatka countryside and familiar with the icon from an early age, came to champion Russian mythological themes in much of his work of the time. His younger brother Apollinary studied under him and became a painter in his own right, focusing on the sweeping medieval Russian landscape.

Ilya Yefimovich Repin, a vital force behind Russian Realism, was also the nation’s preeminent painter. Repin’s background lent itself to the nationalistic flavor which colored his oeuvre. Born in Chuguyev in 1844, in modern-day Ukraine, Repin studied under icon painter Ivan Bunakov. However, Repin is also credited with bringing Russian art out of the recesses of the Russia’s capitals and onto the global stage. In 1864, he entered the Imperial Academy in the midst of Kramskoi’s rebellion. From a lower-class, military family, he drew on his humble roots for subject matter.36 He began exhibiting his works both at home and abroad, from the Wanderers’ Russian showcases, to Paris’ Salon in the 1870’s. The Academy funded Repin’s further exposure to Western modes of expression in 1871, whereupon he settled in Paris.

Repin struck an imposing yet sympathetic figure in his campaigns for the younger Society members, the inheritors of an ossifying tradition. His towering Sadko, a grand retelling of an ancient Slavic myth, speaks to his somewhat conflicted embrace of Western art against his zeal for the motherland. By 1876, the year of Sadko’s completion, Repin had been working in Paris for several years, and had expanded considerably his personal ethos regarding the artistic ideal, as he recognized a parallel to the Wanderers’ cause at home in the Impressionist anti-establishment stance. The painting, therefore, is symbolic of a choice, poised at the ethical border between the East and West. The painting’s protagonist, finding himself in a foreign watery grotto just as Repin finds himself supplanted from his own home to European lands, chooses the homely maid over the procession of the ocean’s exotic beauties, suggestive of Repin’s ultimate attachment 36

These themes would also ingratiate him with Soviet taste following his death in 1930, playing a role in his posthumous designation of “ethical painter” as he succeeded time and time again in depicting the Russian soul.

42 to Russia over all the exquisite finery the West has to offer. This push-and-pull between West and East permeated many debates surrounding the survival of the Peredvizhnik project. Repin, as an elder authority of the Society, represents one of the few liberal views among his senior Itinerant compatriots. Repin advocated for a symbiotic relationship between the two worlds, forming a bridge between them in order that Russian art might benefit from its contact and conversation with the West.

Figure 6. Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1875), Ilya Repin, oil on canvas

It was into this atmosphere, these environs of social and cultural foment, that Nesterov was first inducted into the world of Russian art. The young Mikhail was, at the time of the movement’s inception, only a boy. Born in 1862, just a year before the infamous walkout of the fourteen, his artistic upbringing was steeped in the ethos of the Wanderers, who, by the time of his entrance into the Academy in 1881, had been operant and revered for well over a decade. Five years earlier, in March of 1876, Nesterov attended his first exhibition, the Society’s Fifth Annual Showcase. It made quite an impression. “It was an unforgettable day…” he declared in his Bygone Days, “what an

43 exhibition…I lost my head completely, I was faint with rapture, oblivious to all around me…”37

Figure 7. Ukranian Night (1876), Arkhip Kuindzhi, oil on canvas Nesterov was particularly stricken by this rural twilit panorama, whose star-smattered sky and mysterious rockery extol the imposing splendor of the Eastern landscape, and considered it a crowning moment of the already unparalleled Fifth Exhibition of the Wanderers.

While at the Moscow School he had come under the tutelage of Perov, who would prove a most decisive figure in his artistic training. Nesterov revered the older painter’s ability to capture “human life at the moment of supreme tension,”38 a gift of insight the seed of which, nourished by a powerful spiritual drive, would bloom into an uncanny ability to reveal the elemental in his scenes of lofty subject and technical virtuoso. When Perov’s physical decline took him out of School life, Nesterov and his classmates left for the St. Petersburg Academy. Despite the brilliant tutelage of the innovative Chistyakov, Nesterov chafed under the conservative curriculum of the Imperial institution, where everything seemed “somehow official, bureaucratic…”39 He supplemented this creative drought with a vigorous immersion into the world of Western art. Throughout these early St. Petersburg years, Nesterov frequented the Hermitage, a Russian bastion of foreign artistic achievement. It was in the rooms of the sprawling museum that Nesterov first 37

Nesterov, Davnie Dni, 36.

Nesterov, Memoirs 1985, 58.

39 Nesterov, Memoirs 1985, 65.

38

44 became acquainted with Kramskoi, now an established leader of the Wanderers. As a friendship between the pair developed, Kramskoi’s unsparing and constructive critiques of Nesterov’s work were immensely beneficial to the young artist.

The Wanderers channeled a new national focus in the consolidation and employment of which the Russian intelligentsia played a large role. The Society’s senior founders, fed on the literature of their radical and learned intelligentsia predecessors and in turn distinguished members themselves, turned their attention to the social function of art. Locating and articulating certain currents of populist thought, evolving in parallel with the philosophy of the Wanderers who themselves constituted a significant portion of the intelligentsia, these new tenets were born from a nationalism intent on the emancipation of Russia’s downtrodden, on the elevation of her common man. The current elites, acknowledging that the renovation of society could not be enacted from their ivory tower alone, turned instead to the masses. In defining a vision of the noble peasant, and associating that image with a timeless, inscrutable Russian-ness that hearkened back to the youth of the nation, these authors of culture catalyzed a new Populist movement (Народничество) centered upon the innate goodness of the Russian peasantry (народ).

This new orientation would leave a profound and lasting mark on Nesterov's artistic life. He would shed the realist tendencies of his teachers and affiliates, gravitating toward a mystical, religious framework that was, however, ultimately at the service of his patriotic project for the glorification and reanimation of the motherland.

The Second Generation By the 1880’s, the younger generation of Society-affiliated artists, whose artistic and ideological identities were now beginning to mature, began to adopt new painted vocabularies. In place of the social genre paintings of their predecessors, the artists began to depict a Russia conceived of in terms of her spiritual history. This new Peredvizhnik generation gravitated toward a mythical Russian past and an eternal Slavic spirituality.

Born in the 1860’s, the young artists of this second Itinerant wave had been inculcated by a revolutionary spirit. And, thanks to the work of their elders, not only was this generation unburdened by the former ignominy of their career path, but was also spared many of the economic and social pressures suffered by Kramskoi and his colleagues.

45 Acceptance and inclusion in the intelligentsia was no longer dependent upon the privileges conferred by class, and these young men could participate in Russian society freely. Nesterov, from a fairly cultured family of the gentry, was not alone in his relative distinction. And the developing painter, motivated not only by nationalistic but religious imperatives, began to break free of the dogma of the realistically-inclined champions of anti-establishment art aimed at the direct revelations of contemporary society and its struggle. Other young artists, alike in origin and outlook, began to shift their pictorial apparatuses as well, and in turn the dominant pictorial language of popular art outside the Academy.

Among Nesterov’s like-minded contemporaries were landscape painter Isaak Levitan and portraitist Valentin Serov, both eventual fellow members of the Wanderers’ Society, as well as Russian Impressionist Konstantin Korovin and future champion of Russian Symbolism in the arts, Mikhail Vrubel. These young painters emerged from fairly prosperous backgrounds, with the exception of Levitan (1860-1900), son of a provincial railroad worker. His father’s death sent the poor, educated Jewish family into total destitution; however, the young artist was able to secure a scholarship while at the Moscow School, where he studied alongside Nesterov under Perov and Savrasov. Levitan was less interested in the depictions of urban life or the pressing social matters of the day; rather, he labored in the development of a new landscape painting. He helmed the genre of the atmospheric, or mood landscape, in which nature, the scene’s principle character, seemed to take on the qualities and concerns of humanity: in effect, the Russian land became the voice of the Russian soul.

Nesterov, colleague and friend to Levitan, admired the painter’s ability to extend nature’s symbolic potentials to their greatest capacity as he succeeded in imbuing, say, a dilapidated shed in evening light, a cluster of forest trees, or the depths of a pond below a smattering of lily pads with their own characters, using nature as a vehicle for the illustration of a Russian spirituality and identity. Levitan’s passionate love for nature was equivalent to a religious zeal. His penchant for discovering and relaying in a stirring and unified whole the Eastern landscape’s most minute features was testament to a refined sensitivity, brought about by his difficult early life plagued by poverty and religious persecution. His Judaism brought with it a degree of social abuse, though his committed

46 religiosity was not confined to his faith. Rather, it expressed itself in a profound commitment to the natural world and the beauty of sacred practices. He held a deep appreciation for Orthodox services and the Gospels, and had even been observed performing the sign of the cross. This devotion to religious aesthetics and nondenominational spirituality manifested itself in his work, depicting the Russian environment, which he understood to be the true residence of God. His relationship with the land was confined largely to his Russian homeland, where he believed that the enormity of God’s supreme will was most clearly and splendidly expressed. Moreover, his painting provided respite from his failing mental health, as he became powerless to grapple with an emerging manic depression throughout his twenties. His landscapes were demonstrations of his faith, his personal forms of communion with the Divine, and at times an escape from a more pressing physical reality. In 1887, writing to the playwright Anton Chekhov, his closest friend and confidante, he described his feelings of mortal inadequacy in the face of a nature and divinity he perceived as one.

I have never yet so loved nature, I have never been so sensitive to this divine something, spread out everywhere, but which not everyone sees, which cannot even be named because it does not respond to reason and analysis and is grasped by love…Can there be anything more tragic than to feel the infinite beauty of one’s surroundings, to observe the hidden mystery, to see God in everything and to be unable, being aware of one’s powerlessness, to express these grand feelings?”40 Yet his inspiration and faith could not prevent Levitan’s relentless self-doubt. At the Society’s Exhibitions throughout the 1880’s, his landscapes earned him few accolades and fewer rubles. However, when his Quiet Cloister was displayed at the 1891 Exhibit to much acclaim, the beleaguered artist was able to finally hedge himself against the penury that had afflicted so much of his life. His induction into the Society followed later that year, and his extensive output revealed a new trend in Russian art towards the atemporal and the explicitly spiritual. He combined a powerful love of the Russian land with a more tolerant approach to Western art, shared by many of his contemporaries, than most of his Peredvizhnik predecessors. This synthesis of Russian theme and European aesthetics was

40

Fedorov-Davydov, Levitan, (1956), 29-30. quoted in Pipes, 402.

47 one taken on by many painters of this new generation, and is echoed in Nesterov’s finely wrought scenes of the Russian past.

Figure 8. Eternal Peace (1894), Isaak Levitan, oil on canvas Earlier in the year of this painting’s creation, Levitan discovered that, due to an aortic aneurysm, he had not long to live. This knowledge at once exacerbated his misery and fueled him with an intense will to live. Levitan described this work as his “requiem,” the vessel into which he flung all his body and soul. In it, Levitan returns to his theme of nature’s divine supremacy, the church symbolic of an infinitesimal humanity beneath God’s awesome creation.

A second significant figure in the development of this new branch of Russian art was Valentin Serov. Serov was born 1865 in St. Petersburg, the only child of two composers. Following his father’s death, Serov, at the age of five, was removed from his city home and deposited at a Smolensk commune by his mother, who was returning to her native Germany to study music. Following the colony’s dissolution, the already artistically inclined boy followed his mother to Munich where he began his artistic study.

At the age of nine, Serov’s mother brought him to Paris where he trained under Repin who was at the time abroad on his Academy-funded travels. The elder artist and his young apprentice developed a close friendship that would last until Serov’s death from cardiac arrest in 1911, at the age of 46. Something of a child prodigy, Serov, on Repin’s recommendation, enrolled in the Academy at fifteen as an auditor, although the Academy instituted a sixteen-year minimum. His portraiture, from a young age, displayed a keen

48 eye for the human soul; he would often make his subjects sit through many endless sessions, staring as if through them with a frenzied intensity. One of these sittings brought his mother to tears. These exercises were grueling not only for the sitter, but for the artist as well. Akin to Nesterov’s fits of divine artistic inspiration, Serov’s calling was described by various acquaintances in none too positive terms, as disease, madness, servitude. This intensity was carried over into the exhibition hall. In the Society’s Showcases, Serov’s portraits were met with either delight or disgust. His canvases stood out vividly against the works of his Itinerant elders, whose portraits were often of a graver tone, executed indoors and in darker hues. His time spent in Europe cultivated in the young artist a freer technique, one not confined to the themes and styles that dominated the Wanderers’ canon during their emergence. Serov’s embrace of Western forms was indicative of the general embrace of foreign masters by fellow younger Russian artists. Painter, art historian, and critic Igor Grabar extolled Serov’s employment of color and light, likely inspired by the Barbizon School prominent in mid-century France.

Meanwhile, Serov’s senior colleagues held firm against this shift in approach.

Serov himself referred to his vocation “an illness”; regarding his finished products, his critics tended to agree. In response to Tretyakov’s purchase of Serov’s Girl in Sunlight (1888), Itinerant and Nesterov’s former teacher, Vladimir Makovsky, inquired of the collector, “Since when, Pavel Mikhailovich, has your gallery promoted syphilis?” 41 then held, alongside Serov’s vivid and luminous palette, as a Western export. Again, his multinational spectrum of influence spoke to a growing willingness among the younger painters to look beyond the confines of the present artistic hermeticism. Despite his entrance into the Society in 1894, and his subsequent ascendancy in the world of Imperial commission – he collected 4,000 rubles for his 1900 portrait of Nicholas II destined for the Empress’ quarters – the vitriol leveled at the works of Serov and his contemporaries by some of the Society’s founders were omens of a mounting fracture between the two generations.

41

Pipes, “Russia’s Itinerant Painters,” 411.

49

Figure 9. Girl with Peaches (1887), Valentin Serov, oil on canvas Nesterov himself, upon seeing the portrait at Savva Mamontov’s Abramtsevo Colony, praised it as “the last word of impressionistic art.”42

Of Nesterov’s contemporaries who never achieved Society membership, Konstantin Korovin provides a most direct example of Western influence upon Russian theme. Korovin (1861-1931) was a principle figure in the development of the Russian brand of Impressionist painting. As the youngest son in an educated Moscow merchant family – his father loved the arts, his brother Sergei was an established Realist painter, and the Itinerant Pryanshikov was a close relative – Korovin’s creative path was almost pre-destined. He befriended Nesterov, Levitan, and Serov at the Moscow School where he was also a pupil of Perov and Savrasov in the late 1870’s. His travels to Paris and Spain, however, activated his creative spark. He was overjoyed by the liberties taken by the French Impressionists in their unrestrained brushwork and treatments of light and color. In Paris, he bore witness to techniques for which he had been denigrated at home.

He continued to return to Western Europe intermittently during the following decades, bringing with him at each return to Russia a broadening pictorial language. He eventually moved to Paris in 1923 to seek medical attention for both himself and his handicapped son, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

42

Nesterov: Letters: “Letter to Alexandra Nesterova, 18 July 1888,” 1988 p. 35, quoted in Rusakova, 156.

50

Figure 10. Arkhangelsk Port on the Dvina (1894), Konstantin Korovin, oil on canvas

A perfect example of the divergent spirit of the new wave as it paved the way for the Russian Symbolism of the Silver Age resides in the painter Mikhail Vrubel (18561910). The son of a military lawyer and a mother of the nobility, Vrubel graduated with a degree in Law from St. Petersburg University before enrolling at the Imperial Academy to pursue his artistic inclinations. Under Chistyakov, he began to develop an original style that would take on a variety of iterations throughout the course of his ambitious career. Elaborating upon Chistyakov’s “cult of deep nature,”43 a construction befitting the Symbolism of Russia’s dawning Silver Age that fixated upon the idea of an obscured spiritual world beneath our manifest one, Vrubel crafted his own distinctive painted techniques. By harnessing the power of a single, minute detail, the artist would repeat its form across the canvas, using the essence of the object to reveal an internal harmony that resides just below the visible surface. Vrubel would come to combine his Russian iconographic training – he participated in the refurbishing of the frescoes at Kiev’s Church of St. Cyril and the planning of murals for the Cathedral of St. Vladimir – with a mysticism born of both Slavic and Western influence in his Symbolist stylistics.

Furthermore, his painted themes were often the products of a folkloric obsession. His central motif, a subject, in fact, that would haunt him for the rest of his life, was the title 43

Josephine Karg, “The Role of Russian Symbolist Painting for Modernity: Mikhail Vrubel’s Reduced Forms,” in The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2015), 47.

51 character of Lermontov’s The Demon. The poet, ill-fated champion of Russian Romanticism whose extraordinary life was prematurely terminated in a duel, completed the poem in 1839 during his exile in the Caucasus. The narrative follows the brooding, immortal creature as he roams the Caucasus Mountains, untouched by the poignant beauty of the divinely wrought landscape until he catches sight of the exquisite Princess Tamara. However, at the moment of their happy union, she is killed by his kiss, again damning him to roam the earth alone, “left once more to his inflated/arrogance, left there isolated/in all the world – no love, no hope!”44 In his obsessive visitations on the character, Vrubel succeeded in humanizing the fearsome mythical entity, using him as a vehicle for the conveyance of an endless quest for divine fulfillment. In his The Demon Seated, the pinnacle of his Demon series, Vrubel places the sympathetic character in an eternal, a-spatial environs, imbuing him with a quivering vitality that bespeaks the tormented, isolated human condition. The geometric suggestions background of flowers, the planar swaths of color that constitute his meditative three-quarter profile, the plashes of his striking blue robe upon the muted lilac horizon, coalesce a stylized iconographic aesthetic vocabulary and a Russian Symbolist inversion of the latent and tangible realms.

Figure 11. The Demon Seated (1890), Mikhail Vrubel, oil on canvas

44

Mikhail Lermontov, “The Demon,” in Narrative Poems by Alexander Pushkin & Mikhail Lermontov, 1st edition (New York: Random House, 1983), 142.

52

The Dawn of the Silver Age At the time of his official 1896 induction into the Society for Travelling Exhibitions, Nesterov had already lost faith in the viability of the Wanderers’ artistic project. For Nesterov, the movement’s realism had proven incapable of attaining its ends of social change through art by attacking the Russian social hierarchy and corrupt religious institution. The painter’s patriotism, which manifested itself in his animated, stirring landscapes in which he worked to imbue a national consciousness, was tinged with a marked conservatism incompatible with the Society’s doctrines. His intensifying nationalism – following the 1905 Revolution, Nesterov joined the Union of the Russian People, an extreme right-wing Tsarist nationalist political party – however, found resonances in Symbolist concerns for a reasserted Russian creative tradition, championed

by Savva Mamontov and the Abramtsevo circle.

Moreover, the Wanderers’ dismissal of style and spirituality, key aspects of Nesterov’s aesthetics, further distanced him from the movement. Thus, at the close of the nineteenth century, Nesterov had gravitated towards representatives of the Russian Symbolist strain. In fact, his Vision of the beginning of the decade was seen by many as a pictorial entrance into the genre, embodying a number of the themes central to the artistic ideology. The burgeoning mystical fixation aligned with Nesterov’s efforts to imbue his work with a transcendent religiosity. The writer Dmitri Merezhkovsky (1866-1941), leading figure of the Russian Symbolist movement whose 1892 publication of his poetry collection, Symbols, is considered a literary catalyst of the genre, described his vision of the style of the future thus: “the three major elements of the new art,” he wrote in “On the Reasons for the Decline of and on the New Tendencies in Contemporary Russian Literature,” are “a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability.”45 The World of Art (Mir iskusstva) movement and magazine – formed in 1898 and 1899 respectively by Alexander Benois, painter Léon Bakst, and art patron Sergei

45

Dmitri Merezhkovsky, “On the Reasons for the Decline of and on the New Tendencies in Contemporary Russian Literature,” in The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology, ed. Carl R. Proffer and Ellendea Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975), 5.

53 Diaghilev – appealed at once to Nesterov’s privileging of style as well the peculiarities of his style itself. The painter’s combination of European stylistic inflections and decisively Russian contents were reflected in the aesthetics and ethos of the art movement and magazine. World of Art members sought to “bring about a renaissance of Russian literature and art,”46 and Nesterov heeded this call, participating in a number of the group’s exhibitions. An additional factor underlying Nesterov’s Symbolist leanings was, in fact, his traditionalism to which the Russian revivalist trends of the time appealed. The World of Art grew from a reaction against a contemporary rejection of stylistic concerns in modern society; against the positivist materialism of a modernizing Russian culture, the group turned to the origins of Russia’s artistic tradition in its early folk art and religious inceptions. Merezhkovsky defined the tenor of the times as a clash between polar world perspectives, pronouncing, “the final demands of the religious feeling are experiencing a confrontation with the final conclusions of the experimental sciences.”47 This eschatological conception of Russia’s present, voicing a prophecy of the meeting between forces of light and darkness in the final judgment and destiny of the Slavic people, was deeply embedded in the Orthodox consciousness and particularly significant for the mystical generation of Russian Symbolists.

Certainly, Nesterov’s oeuvre too was defiantly anti-modernist as well as charged with the recovery of an eternal and redemptive Russian past. In his paintings he presented time and again an ageless Russian landscape; this pre-modern, divinely animated geography is consciously counterpoised to the mundanity and disenchantment of secular urban life. His works, evidenced by the recuperation of a medieval Russia in his Saint Sergius Cycle, channeled an anxiety shared by many of his Symbolist contemporaries regarding an industrializing, perverting culture that would bring its people ever further from the possibilities and inclinations for enlightenment. At last, foundational to the development of numerous of these apocalyptically-oriented, transformatively-inclined Russian Symbolist representational systems and philosophies were the symbolic origins of Russia’s pictorial tradition.

46

Barbara Ann Brown, “From Populism to Symbolism: Silver Age Discourse on the Nature of Russian Symbolism,” Epiphany 6, no. 2 (January 19, 2014): 78.

47 Merezhkovsky, “On the Reasons for the Decline of and on the New Tendencies in Contemporary Russian Literature,” 4.

II. Iconic Precepts This wealth of influence, in the formal training of the academies, the social concerns of the Wanderers, and the numinous and nationalistic obsessions of the Symbolists, instilled in the now maturing Nesterov a multiplicity of artistic concerns. The formative instruction of his teachers, from the Academic Trutovsky to the realist Chistyakov and Perov, laid the foundations for his choice of the natural landscape as well as his championing of national themes. Meanwhile, his younger contemporaries too served in the expansion of Nesterov’s art, as Levitan’s capacity for the animation of Eastern geography and Korovin’s incorporation of Western stylistics served as autonomous instances of what Russian art could be. However, none of these artists synthesized, as explicitly as Nesterov, the nation’s religious legacy with their individual myths of a “Russian” landscape as the distinctive cradle and symbol of the national character. This union, however, had its archetype in the Russian Orthodox icon which, as a repository of consecrated elements in which every feature of the composition possessed sacred, signifying meaning, presented a national geography whose very presence on the icon board implied its living existence and participation in divine Reality.

Origins of Orthodoxy Medieval Russian art arose from a religious, didactic imperative. Building upon Byzantine traditions and conventions, Russian Orthodox iconography developed as a medium for presenting Biblical episodes to spiritually instruct medieval Russians. The icon’s imagery served as a means for modeling piety for an overwhelmingly illiterate audience. The Orthodox religious image exists in two forms: as small, portable individual representations of sacred figures intended for ecclesiastical and domestic use and secondly, as frescoes that ornamented every surface of ecclesiastical and monastic spaces. In both cases, the art functioned as a medium for transmitting sacred history,

56 supporting ethical norms of virtuous and vicious behaviors, and providing images of exemplary figures: the divinity or the saints.

The history of Russian visual aesthetics goes back to the introduction of Christianity as the early Christian Church struggled to find a solution to an impossible situation in two radically different directions. Russia’s Christianization postdated two waves of anti-representational fervor. The first, following a deadly volcanic eruption in the Aegean Sea, broke around 726 AD and was initiated by Emperor Leo III who, among others, likely understood this phenomenon as a sign of Divine displeasure with the Byzantine Empire, hoisting the graven image as scapegoat for this apparent retribution.

The cause was then doggedly championed by his son and successor, Constantine V. Constantine’s persecution of iconophilia targeted the monasteries, many of which were presumed to be hotbeds of pro-representational sentiment. Monks and fellow iconodules faced persecution, censure, and exile. Icons and relics were destroyed.48 At the center of the iconoclast debate were two conceptions of the value of representations of the divinity with regard to the image and its prototype. The Iconoclasts “reject[ed] images [for] their identity-in-essence requirement of an image and its prototype.”49 By this they claimed that the portrayal of the divinity and saints sought to render the material image and promote it to the status of a pagan idol. All earthly representation, they alleged, was blasphemous duplication masquerading as divinity. The iconophiles, on the other hand, defended the image’s non-idolatrous status, arguing that it referred the viewer to a transcendent subject rather than surface, sensual fulfillment.

God’s creation of matter authorized the possibility of His material representation, directing the outer senses inward, from contemplation of the sacred visage to intuition of the divine Being.

Following the death of Constantine V, however, adherence to iconoclastic principles began to wane. His successor, Leo IV, assumed a more tolerant position on the subject, as did Irene of Athens, Leo’s wife and mother of his son and heir, Constantine VI, for whom she acted as regent. She convened the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787,

48

Pipes, “Russia’s Itinerant Painters,” 321.

Thalia Anagnostopoulos, “Aristotle and Byzantine Iconoclasm,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013): 771.

49

57 widely understood to be the last in this series of congresses whose goal was to create a unified and harmonious Christendom, to attempt compromise through the standardization of religious dogma. With this meeting, attended and supported by representatives from the papacy, the iconodulic Catholic Church and the previously iconoclastic Eastern Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire, an accord was reached, alleviating tensions between Rome and Constantinople, and ultimately dissolving the so-called ‘First Iconoclasm.’

This period of icon worship, however, soon gave way to a renewed iconoclastic vigor. In 814, Emperor Leo V, in the wake of sustained military defeat by the Bulgarians, once again made the icon the burden of God’s disapproval, attributing to image veneration all the motives for His discontent. This iconoclastic resurgence lasted for nearly three more decades, until, in 843, another regent abolished iconoclast doctrine.

Emperor Theophilus, a proponent of iconoclasm until his death in 842, was succeeded by his wife, Theodora who assumed the throne in place of Michael III, their infant heir. The very next year, Theodora oversaw the restoration of the icon. This event is memorialized in the Orthodox Church as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy,” an annual feast celebrated on the first Sunday of Lent.50 With this prolonged clash finally resolved, the Byzantine Church now turned its resources to new enterprises, expanding its outreach northward beyond the limits of the Empire. In service of this mission, the Church, under the guidance of Photius, first Patriarch of Constantinople, conscripted two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius. The two Greeks, chosen for their erudition, piety, and polylingualism, possessed a firm understanding of Slavonic dialects. In 863, three years after an unsuccessful visit to the Khazars, who converted to Judaism, they arrived in Moravia.

The following year, Photius sent an emissary to Russia who was promptly thwarted in his proselytizing efforts by Great Prince Oleg. Still, the yet un-converted Moravia, constituting the eastern part of the modern-day Czech Republic, required, at the behest of its Prince Rotislav, what was in effect a translated Christianity, one that could appeal to its potential Slavic converts through their own language instead of the foreign Latin used by the Roman Catholic Church.

50

Pipes, “Russia’s Itinerant Painters,” 322.

58 Cyril and Methodius had already begun a translation of the Bible into Slavonic.

Prior to their mission, they created the Glagolitic alphabet – from which their disciples would later develop the Cyrillic – to render scripture into the vernacular of the people to whom they ministered. This later task, however, demanded more than extensive application, as it required the introduction a new Slavonic alphabet. Based on the Macedonian dialect of Thessalonica’s Slavic population, the simplified version of Church Slavonic used Greek and Hebrew characters and today continues to be the liturgical tongue of not only the Russian but also other Slavonic Orthodox Churches.

“One cannot overestimate the significance, for the future of Orthodoxy,” writes Timothy Ware in his introduction to the birth of Eastern Christianity, “of the Slavonic translations which Cyril and Methodius carried with them as they left Byzantium for the unknown north.” This decisive undertaking informed the whole of Orthodoxy’s development hereon, redefining the ways in which the laity could interact with the practices made available to them by the Church. Services could now be delivered in the vernacular, making the Divine Word accessible to local populations. To secure the right of proselytizing in the language of the potential converts against Roman Catholic missionaries working in the same geographical area, the brothers went to Rome where, in 868, they beseeched Pope Hadrian II for his endorsement of their mission and its use of Slavonic medium. Not only did he bless their undertaking, but also authorized their Slavonic texts. Cyril’s death in Rome the following year did not deter Methodius from his expedition. He returned to Moravia, where he was imprisoned by the German missionaries who refused to abide by the Pope’s sanctions. Methodius died in 885, whereupon the Germans exiled and abused his remaining disciples.51 Nonetheless, the brothers had sowed the seeds of the Slavonic Church mission.

Methodius’ followers brought his teachings to Bulgaria where the first national Slavic Church was erected. The work of Cyril and Methodius served to create a new Christian iteration, allowing the Slavs to define the terms and means of their own faith, birthing a fierce unity between the people and its Church. Moreover, ever since Photius’ initial attempt at Russian conversion, the land had been subject to significant Christian 51

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, 3rd Revised edition (London: Penguin Books, 2015), 71.

59 influence and, in 955, Russia’s Princess Olga converted to Christianity. After a brief interlude in which her son Svyatoslav refused its implementation for fear of ridicule, Great Prince Vladimir of Kiev (980-1015 AD), Olga’s grandson, married the Byzantine Emperor’s sister, Anna.

Rus’ at the end of the tenth century was a loose confederation of principalities, each with their respective local iterations of nature worship and deities. In the midst of concerted Christian efforts of conversion, Vladimir, hoping to create a united Russian populace that would strengthen the state through its cohesion, had looked towards a new religion. His advisers explored the various major religions, and agreed upon the Orthodox Christianity that had travelled down from Cyril and Methodius from aesthetic and political considerations. It was, after all the official religion of the Byzantine Empire, and Vladimir converted to Christianity following his marriage to Anna. The resplendent, transporting beauty of Orthodox services, traditions, and architecture inspired Vladimir and his counselors, and its adoption initiated in Russia a centuries-long artistic tradition that informs national history and culture to this day.52 In 988, Orthodox Christianity became Russia’s national religion. Its implementation lasted until 1917.

Conversion to Orthodox Christianity involved the adoption of all Church Books, rites, and rituals, and the rich aesthetic tradition of the icon. In adopting an iconodulic stance, Russia announced that the icon was a privileged medium through which it could cultivate spirituality among the Russian masses. “The sign and symbol – this is the alphabet of the medieval audience.” Under the Church, the icon acquired a strict representational system that not only provided a largely uneducated public with devices for interacting with Scripture and negotiating the “spiritual world,”53 but also consecrated the aesthetic product by separating it from the apprehensible, material world.

52

Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed., Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, Revised & enlarged edition (New York: Meridian, 1974).

53 I.V. Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи),” Русский Язык За Рубежом, no. 1 (2016).

60

Writing the Icon Formally, the icon’s orientation away from phenomenal reality and illusionism is carried out in the unique pictorial language employed by the icon painter under a unified iconic schematic. The icon developed not, as it did in the West, into a painting whose claims to the divinity were in manifest subject matter alone; instead, the Byzantine icon set an unbending precedent for the continuation of the Eastern Orthodox artistic tradition.

“Here, the icon remained as if it were a symbolic text and served, not for the arousal of the imagination, but for inner comprehension and contemplation.”54 ‘Naturalism’ in art operates upon the assumption that replicating the appearance of the surface world should be the standard for artistic creation. Meanwhile, the icon, in its subversion and representation of physical laws and features, proclaims a fundamental dogma of Russian Orthodoxy: absolute Reality is equated with the divine and is not directly accessible to the corporeal senses. It can only be apprehended through the mediation of imperfect matter. This Platonic conception of Form aids in the iconic promotion of an Orthodox metaphysics. This dualist idealism states that the phenomenal appearance of matter is subject to change by inevitable material forces and is susceptible to the inaccuracies of human perception. The icon is hereby charged with evoking noumenal reality to reveal, through substantive media, the permanence and essence of divine forms.

The conventions that governed the media, the materials, and visual representation were inflexible and were codified as a set of rules that dictated all aspects of the icon’s construction and arrangement, as well as the correct usage of the portable icons and the disposition of fresco icons along the walls of churches. This iconographic standardization provided continuity from church to church and from church to home, creating a consistent, seamless environment of the Orthodox model of the world. “The entire picture as a whole,” writes the Russian philologist Boris Uspensky in his Semiotics of the Russian Icon, “becomes a sign of the reality represented.”55 He corresponds levels of pictorial representation in the Orthodox icon with those of linguistic representation, 54

Kuprin.

Boris Andreevich Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, PdR Press Publications in Semiotics of Art ; 3 (Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976), 34.

55

61 connecting, for example, the perspectival devices used to depict spatio-temporal relations in the icon to the phonological level of language at which phonemes, the minimal arrangements of sounds, are assembled for the formation of words. In a chapter examining the “Principles of Spatial Organization in Ancient Painting,” he establishes the icon as a microcosm of the greater world, its every element referring the viewer to an inassimilable reality. Russian icon painter and art historian Léonid Ouspensky, in his “Meaning and Language of Icons,” advances, some years prior, a similar understanding of the relation between representation and its divine referent, explaining that “illusory three-dimensional space is replaced by the plane of reality; the connection between figures and objects becomes conventionally symbolical.”56 In this way, icons functioned to provide a visual point of reference for the dogma of an invisible god and they functioned sociologically and ideologically to unite all who used them in common practices and views. Iconographic convention consists in a number of compositional techniques. These techniques specify medium, the artist’s preparation, scale, point of view, time, theme, characterization, setting, and finally color.

Material and Spiritual Preparation Strict prescriptions dictated not only the equipment and processes involved in icon-creation, but also specified which individuals were fit to participate in the practice.

The icon-painters, as spiritual apprentices to the saints and witnesses of the prototype, were necessarily severely pious individuals and, “because they are raised in the ecclesiastical hierarchy above ordinary laypeople, they must therefore practice a greater humility, purity and piety, a profounder practice of fasting and prayer” in order to intensify the connection between self and Holy Father.57 Furthermore, only individuals of Greek or Russian origin were considered, by virtue of their Orthodoxy, equipped to produce legitimate icons just as among the Old Believers,58 icons painted post-Schism by 56

Léonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982), 27.

57 Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev, 1st THUS edition (Crestwood, N.Y: Oakwood Publications, 1996), 90.

58 A group of religious dissidents who, following the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (1652-66) aimed at the unification of Greek and Russian Orthodox liturgy and

62 those outside the various sects were not acknowledged.59 The Russian philosopher and theologian Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) describes, in his Iconostasis, the position of icon-painters within the Church. They receive special designation as icon-painters and must “live a prescribed life, almost semi-monastic, under the direct supervision of the Metropolitan, the local bishop,” and overseers. Moscow’s 100-Chapters Council of 1551, which sought to assert Church authority through an articulation of Church instruction, included a comprehensive list of prohibited activities for the icon-painter, who shall be meek, humble, and reverent, neither filled with vain talk, nor empty laughter, not quarrelsome, not envious, not a drinker of spirits, not a thief nor a murderer; and above all things, that he shall sustain in great mindfulness a pure chastity of soul and body…they shall with great diligence make the image of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of His Most Pure Mother, of all the holy apostles and prophets, of all the holy hierarch and martyrs, and of all the righteous woman and holy fathers, each and every according to the “image and likeness” of the most divine essence, looking always to the images of the ancient iconpainters and always drawing from that good treasurehouse of their most excellent example.60 The exhaustive language of these mandates goes on to specify the manner in which the supplicant can achieve official sanction by Church and Tsar; only by the utmost humility and obedience to God and his earthly authorities can one receive the title of icon-painter.

The painter’s talent, as in the cases of the masters Andrei Rublyov (1360’s-1427) and Danil Chyorny (c.1360-1430), was considered to be a gift from God merited through virtue.61 The painter was required to practice humility: any assertion of authorship or any personal inflection of technique and subject matter would constitute a blasphemous repudiation of the icon’s central requirements that the painter be conduit rather than creator of the sacred image. Furthermore, Dionysius (1440-1502), icon painter and head of the Moscow school of icon-painting, emphasizes the importance of the apprentice-

rites, upheld the original practices of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church. This rejection of the reforms led to the Schism (Raskol) which resulted in widespread persecution of the Old Believers.

59 Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 28.

60 Florensky, Iconostasis, 92.

61 Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

63 master relationship in the transmission of sacred knowledge and tradition across generations, ultimately ascribing the ideal fulfillment of the icon practice to the icon painter’s piety, modesty, and ultimately, his “devotion to prayer.”62 Florensky elaborates upon the necessary inner state of the devout practitioner in his descriptions of the spiritual movements that comprise the journey of enlightenment.

In his metaphysical treatise on the Orthodox icon, Florensky describes an ascent and descent necessary for the soul to attain divine knowledge. Using the dream as an analog for artistic creation in his account of this transition between spheres, he introduces the sleeping realm as a preface to the divine realm, the waking to the secular, thus initiating his development of a religious-aesthetic history directed towards the icon. Florensky suggests that, for the execution of truly inspired work, the artist and conduit, akin to the dreamer, must not only make the spiritual voyage from the earthly realm into the divine, but must experience a spiritual descent as well. In doing so, he delineates a boundary between these two perspectives and worlds. During the first leg of this practice, the psyche makes the Dionysian ascent. This first traversal of the boundary provides inspiration; immediately satisfying and deceptively fulfilling, it appears the absorbing end of the spiritual journey. However, only the Apollonian descent confers true spirituality, as the soul, achieving fullness, suffused with the experience of the eternal non-sensory essence of matter, returns to earth.

Florensky contrasts this state of “spiritual sobriety,”63 with that of прелесть (prelest’), the confusion of “the images of ascent” with those of the descent, a preoccupation with the “mere shadows of sensuality”64 that inhabit the border between heaven and earth. Divine creative insight can only follow the soul’s completion of the arc, a double crossing of the frontier by which “the soul’s spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of the symbolic imagery” which populate the work of art. In the ascetic tradition, this condition forms the basis of a hesychastic practice of “authentic selforganization, the art of sculpting and ‘chasing-out’ our essence,” and the cenobitic community-arrangement in approach of divinity. This self-construction towards God is

62

Florensky, Iconostasis, 97.

Florensky, 46.

64 Florensky, 48.

63

64 mirrored in the hagiographic generation of divine lives through the observation of certain precepts, and finally becomes the divine precedent of Russian Symbolist жизнетворчество, the idea of ‘life-creation’ in which the life of the artist was “considered to be a microcosm of human existence,”65 its purpose to effect a transformation of not only the artist himself, but of the general population. I will elaborate upon this fundamental Symbolist synthesis in the following section, as it informs Nesterov’s own painterly project and the theory of contemporaneous Symbolist thinkers.

For the process of icon-creation proper, both icon-painter and monastery were to initiate the activity with prayer. Florensky affirms the significance of the “materials and techniques of an art,” each possessive of “its own concretely determined metaphysical aliveness through which it corresponds to a unique spiritual fact.”66 Therefore, each detail, from ingredients of the paint, to tools, to board material and preparation, is crucial in ensuring the success of the unified final product, its manifestation of the “concrete… metaphysical essence of the event or person it depicts.”67 The texture of the painting surface dictates the motions of the brushstroke, conducted by the inner rhythms of the artist’s soul, thereby informing the painted texture and, ultimately, revealing and revitalizing that “primary plane” of the icon board. A “non-resinous wood, such as lime, alder, birch, cypress and…pine [the least resinous kind]” provided the material for the panel.68 The board’s sturdiness and inflexibility serve to increase the icon’s conventionality; this unbending platform solidifies the icon’s ontological steadfastness and prefigures the unwavering techniques of its construction. The solid stone walls of the church perform the same function for the fresco-icon.

The methods and application of pigments transform both surface and the colors themselves in cooperation with the artist’s divinely-granted vision. In the “preparation of the board” the wooden panel is “first well dried, then a depression is made on the front side so that a raised margin frames the depressed surface [the kovcheg, literally ‘little 65

Michael Wachtel, Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of Vyacheslav Ivanov (Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 144.

66 Florensky, Iconostasis, 99.

67 Florensky, 113.

68 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 53.

65 ark’], and then the whole board is strengthened by traverse splines on the reverse side to prevent later warping,” after which gesso (a mixture of white-wash, olifa [linseed oil that has been boiled], and chalk) is applied in seven stages. The entire procedure of glue and linen application, whitewashing, and gessoing takes up to five days, allowing for sufficient setting, drying, and repeated buffing with a moistened pumice stone. This process concludes with a dry pumice-stone polish of the gesso followed by polishing done by the horsetail plant or sandpaper. In this way, the uniform white surface of the board comes to assume the essential objectivity of the church wall from which the board emerged. A skilled icon-painter would then draw the initial sketch for the icon. The paints too were highly regimented and mixed prior to painting, according to symbolic ordinance. Egg yolk was mixed with water, kvass or vinegar, and pigment to create the fast-drying egg tempera of the icon. Moreover, the rigid icon-board accommodates the paint’s thin consistency; once dried, any movement of the vehicle to which it has been applied will cause cracking and flaking of the paint.

Following the board preparation, the background and secondary elements of the icon are finished by the subordinate painters – including the addition of gold, which preceded the application of the tempera, lest it stick to the other pigments – after which the first icon master writes the face, the principle iconic element. Then followed the addition of the gold lines of garments (assyst) and the application of gold leaf, the process “exceedingly complicated and delicate…requiring” more experienced painters.69 A final covering of olipha serves to protect the icon against air and light damage, while cohering the pigments into one enhanced plane, inflecting the icon with a “general warm golden hue.”70 In the tradition of certain Old Believer sects, the painters “used a technique of ‘building-up’ the representation that symbolically represented the process of the recreation of the figure being depicted,” proceeding from the “skeleton” to the “musculature, next the skin, hair, and clothing, respectively” and lastly the individual features. Conversely, the process was more generally conceived of in terms of an uncovering, the painter at each level “reveal[ing]” rather than “creat[ing]” the preexisting 69 70

Florensky, Iconostasis, 134.

Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 54–55.

66 image.71 The icon was then finished with olifa by yet another person in order to prevent its fading or darkening over time.72 In the case of thoroughly degraded icons, a new image could be “recorded” over the original; however, burning or destruction of icons was forbidden. Each step and role involved in this practice bears its own unique inner meaning, as, “in this visual ontology,” proclaims Florensky, “the painting of the icon repeats the main stages of God’s creation from absolute nothingness to the holy creation.”73

Theme Iconographic content was similarly governed. The icon channeled through symbolic means “the concrete events of sacred History…indicating their inner meaning.”74 The scenes comprising the iconic canon were drawn from the Old and New Testaments, models of which were passed down from Byzantium. These Byzantine prototypes, alongside exemplary “images of saints and their verbal descriptions,” podlinniki or written manuals the two types of which were either image-based or textual, and the guidance of icon-masters, provided the icon-painter with reference and instruction. The icon-painter, therefore, had access to a number of sources upon which all icons were to be modeled.

The principal figures of the icon included the “Mother of God, Christ, John the Baptist, apostles, patriarchs, prophets, saints and the great martyrs.” Iconic themes ranged from testaments of the noble Christian characters of individual saints, to particular “evangelical events that formed the basis of the main Church holidays” and scenes from the life of Christ.75 The Christ icons presented the Savior in a number of established positions: the Pantokrator, for example, showed His image to waist or full length, while the Acheiropoieta, the Savior Not Made By Hands, portrays only his face. After Christ, 71

Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 16.

Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

73 Florensky, Iconostasis, 137.

74 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 27.

75 Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

72

67 the Theotokos (Greek: God-bearer) was the most commonly depicted holy figure. The images of the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary or Mother of God, were also, as all icons, sorted by event, gesture, frame, and elements featured. For example, the Hodegetria (guide) icon showed the Virgin with the infant Christ in one arm, motioning towards the Son in indication of his role as mankind’s future savior. “Christianity,” concludes Ouspensky, “is the revelation not only of the Word of God but also of the Image of God, in which His Likeness is revealed.” The godly likeness is central to the New Testament as it bears pictorial witness to man’s “deification.” Yet as these thematic types attempt to convey an objective super-reality, it is nonetheless fundamental to their nature that they never fully realize this goal. The icon’s content, visual manifestations of sacred history, pursues the divinity for the purposes of its glorification. In doing so, Ouspensky continues, both iconography and theology are charged with the same impossible mission of depicting what cannot be depicted using human tools or methods.

There are no words, no colors nor lines, which could represent the Kingdom of God as we represent and describe our world. Both theology and iconography are faced with a problem which is absolutely insoluble – to express by means belonging to the created word that which is infinitely above the creature…Therefore the methods used by iconography for pointing to the Kingdom of God can only be figurative, symbolical, like the language of the parables in the Holy Scriptures.76 However, in the inevitability of their failure, the deficiency of the symbolic products, resides their significance. The futility of the aim of totally grasping the divinity only seeks to reaffirm its resplendence. And the content of this living witness, “expressed in this symbolical language,” remains “immutable,” providing the devout with the signs of a world beyond their mortal comprehension.

Setting The elements that composed the background of the icon provided a visual frame for its central figure(s). Icons depicting landscape were typically composed of three planes, a near, middle, and far plane which was “limited to an impenetrable background.”

76

Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 48–49.

68 The secondary features of the background, natural or architectural elements, objects, animals, acted as supplementary signs, “their symbolic nature brought to maximum conventionality.” The age of the icon often determined the number of these doličnoe, with older icons including fewer secondary details.77 Uspensky classifies three background types, sorting these features into 1) natural setting, 2) secular architecture, and 3) religious architecture.78 Degrees of conventionality, he explains, are dependent upon the semantic significance of the elements. For example, nature in the icon is represented synechdocally in the “icon hillocks.” These take the form of distant, uniform mountains, the land raised according to the distortions resulting from a “dynamic visual position.” Uspensky suggests that this increase of conventionality in the natural aspects of the background, this essentialization of landscape to the icon hillocks, relayed through the repetition or “multiplicity of a certain figure or object,” works to amplify the semiotic consequence of the icon’s central figures. In reducing the backdrop to a single swath of color, then nature to a series of uniforms peaks, the primary events appear more crucial in comparison. The hillocks “act as the sign of a sign of a mountain landscape,” alluding indirectly to a removed reality and thereby enhancing the attention and urgency of the key events at the icon’s foreground.79 Next, the representation of secular buildings was similarly “subjected to formal perspectival distortions, approximating in this respect the ‘icon hillocks.’” The symbolic schema governing iconic representation allows for a geographic divergence; “the figures which are semantically loaded are generally treated in a system of other, special semantic laws,” thereby combining the “general cartographic projection[s]” of nature and secular architecture – constituting the icon’s “geometric” syntax – with the more substantially inflected sacred persons of its “semantic” syntax. This “summation[al]” plan, a product of the artist’s representation of dynamic perspective, provides a platform for the augmentation of the divinity.80

77

Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

78 Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 68.

79 Uspenskiĭ, 42.

80 Uspenskiĭ, 67.

69 On the other hand, representations of churches conveyed a higher level of semantic specificity which corresponded to their religious nature. This fact was expressed in further specialization of form; the homogeneity of other background fixtures here yields to a more defined architecture, the articulations of which appear in multiple planes of different sizes denoting either exteriority or interiority, the Royal Doors, the church towers and turrets. Larger walls reflect the church exterior while shorter ones refer to the church sanctuary. Action occurring in front of these lower boundaries suggested events taking place within the confines of the church, despite being situated externally;81 this inversion, a turning-out and spreading of action along a single plane, allowed for the simultaneous representation of sacred activity that transcends the spatio-temporal confines of the laws of physical, secular reality.82 Finally, church roofing was afforded special attention due to the different potential historical contexts and meanings of their protrusions. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading up to the time of Nikon’s reforms in response to Russia’s “old aesthetic norms,” the Byzantine church dome gave way to the “tent-shaped roof” of late-medieval Russia.83 The former, “perceived as the abode of God,” a heavenly projection toward earth, signified an inner orientation and “the interior architecture of the temple,” while the latter indicated an external point of view of earthly “aspir[ation] toward heaven.”84 Finally, objects in the icon function metaphorically not only as signs of noumenal reality but also as symbols of other contents. In these cases, their meanings are separate from their syntagmatic contexts and wholly dependent upon their semantic, paradigmatic relations. For instance, the mountain often represents “the path of man to God; the oak, a symbol of eternal life; the chalice and grapevine, symbols of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice; the dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit.”85 Additionally, the rooster can indicate dawn, “while night is depicted in the form of a scroll set with stars,” or a river in “the 81

Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 77.

This reverse spatio-temporality will be explored further in the following sections.

83 Nikon’s Patriarchate saw the destruction of a number of tent-roofed churches, considered transgressions of the Byzantine architectural canon, and their replacement by the Old Byzantine domed churches, as in the case of Moscow’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral.

84 Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 38.

85 Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

82

70 form of a stream pouring out of a jug held by human figures. These metonymic devices thus necessitate a “two-fold operation…of a supplementary re-coding of meanings on a higher level,”86 as the relations between signifying element and signified content are infused with additional values.87 The icons of the “Entry into Jerusalem” offer a clear illustration of these properties. The Biblical scene (Matthew 21:1-11), signaling the end of Lent and ushering in Palm Sunday, depicts Christ after His resurrection of Lazarus, greeted by an adoring public in his arrival at the holy city. In the sixteenth century Russian icon below, the background features a solid expanse of blue upon which, at Christ’s left, the icon hillocks, denoting the Mount of Olives, travel downwards in a slanting cascade. This slope is mirrored by the central palm tree’s trunk which undulates to the right, both reflecting the path of Christ and his Apostles across the composition. This movement is terminated by the rigid verticality of Jerusalem, described at the right-most trisection in a white façade in which are housed a series of repeated turrets, indicating the city, and a domed church at its center. The planes of the large white expanse are spread out in one flat surface: this can be seen in the three obtuse angles produced by the main building’s frieze, indicating multiple planar transitions, and in the windows and doorways of the building, which are shown from simultaneous, alternating viewpoints from the right and left. Both the Apostles and citizens before the city are respectively “welded into one collective figure, with the majestic Saviour between them, giv[ing] the composition a strict equilibrium.”88 Christ’s identity is revealed through His nimbus and the scroll in His left hand; St. Peter, cloaked in a deep yellow, too holds a scroll, which signifies Divine Wisdom. The Apostle John follows alongside Peter, the pair leading the procession as the “pillars”89 of the church. The branches of the central palm tree are offered to Christ by the welcoming crowd, as the tree itself indicates glory and paradise. Finally, the icon always includes 86

Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 15.

This symbolic level of the icon carries over into the field of emblematic iconic color, which will be examined extensively towards the end of this chapter.

88 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 186.

89 David Wenham and A. D. A. Moses, “‘There Are Some Standing Here....’: Did They Become the ‘Reputed Pillars’ of the Jerusalem Church? Some Reflections on Mark 9:1, Galatians 2:9 and the Transfiguration,” Novum Testamentum 36, no. 2 (1994): 148.

87

71 children laying out garments before Christ, at the hooves of His donkey or horse. Though the original text features Christ’s entrance on a donkey, this Russian variant substitutes the donkey for the horse, then more familiar to the Russian public. Here, a single child, draped in pure white at the very forefront of the composition, lays out a robe, bent towards Christ in the act, surrounded by scattered palm branches. Christ’s back is turned to the Apostles as He appears to urge them onwards in his return to Jerusalem despite the sentence of the Jewish authorities; the Apostles’ hesitancy, reflected in their mixture of expressions, anticipates Christ’s impending Crucifixion, and the selfless joy of the child provides a counterpoint to the cautious Apostles and the welcoming crowd that will betray Him.90

Figure 12. The Entry in Jerusalem, Russian, sixteenth century, Private Collection

Proportionality and Perspective The proportions of both geographic and figural details, as well as of the icon painting itself were further specified. These dimensional relations not only obeyed a strict regimen of measures, but also submitted to the greater perspectival scheme of Orthodox iconography. To begin, in terms of proportional uniformity, the size of the image was 90

“His disciples said unto Him, ‘Master, the Jews of late sought to stone Thee, and goest Thou thither again?” (John 11:8)

72 dependent not upon that of the icon board but upon a ratio of either 3:4 or 4:5. Moreover, the total bodily height of the icon figure, following the Byzantine model, was to correspond to nine lengths of the head, while the head itself constituted a crowning tenth of the total length. Additionally, the width of the nose as it concluded at the nostrils was equivalent to the distance between the pupils of each eye.91 Yet these aspects are only part of a greater spatial system, specific to the Orthodox icon. Every element of the composition was necessarily subordinated to the laws of “reverse perspective.” Where linear perspective seeks to reproduce on canvas reality as it meets the eye, reverse perspective, in fulfillment of its iconic function, strives to represent on board an index of a higher, invisible reality. This technique receives extensive treatment by Florensky in his essay, “Reverse Perspective”, in which he traces a history of representational methods in art, from the hieroglyph, Ancient Egypt’s early “bearer of metaphysical representational meaning,” through the development of “synthetic”92 illusionistic perspective in Ancient Greek theater design, to contemporary painting’s attempts at maximal verisimilitude to superficial reality. The essay’s eponymous technique, then, serves as the artistic ideal in its distribution of multiple perspectival centers, simultaneous representation of neighboring angles and planes, the relative size of each figure, and employment of lighting and coloring as autonomous signifier rather than the result of earthly exposure and shadow.

Perspective does not denote a single point of view; rather, the term encompasses all visual orientations. Perspective is the tool for expressing any point of view, generating the potential for an infinite spectrum of forms. In the opposition between linear and reverse perspectives, we can approach the diversity of the device’s functions in its organization of visual material towards the expression of a particular point of view. This point of view, in turn, is loaded both paradigmatically and syntagmatically, bearing the spirit of its time, culture, and place as well as the semantics of its pictorial choices. The sole, static viewpoint promoted by Renaissance aesthetics in its classical, or linear, perspective reflects sensual reality in its devotion to ‘naturalistic’ appearances, and 91

Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

92 P. A. (Pavel Aleksandrovich) Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (London: Reaktion, 2002), 213.

73 fulfills at best an ornamental function. At worst, its masquerade of divine reality verges on the blasphemous. Furthermore, it presumes that corporeal vision is not only superlative in its apprehension of its environs but is able to accommodate it through mortal means. Instead, this linear system’s utility trends illusionistic: foreshortening, coloring, and vanishing points at the horizon conspire to create a scene that pretends at reality, privileging the appearance of natural depth and fixed viewpoint over spiritual integrity.

Meanwhile, reverse-perspective’s multiply-oriented viewpoint and resultant multiplanarity infuse each line and gap of the icon with symbolic value. Reverse perspective asserts the icon’s decisively anti-mimetic project as it warps the conventions of classical perspective. This system reflects not a replica of Reality but its “transcription.”93Architectural surfaces, as we witnessed in the Entrance, are conveyed all at once, as are all the features of the face in profile, the distant sides of turned bodies, the interiors of buildings, and so on. No element is obscured by shadow to the viewer, who assumes the position of artist who has in turn assumed the perspective of the divine.

Shadow itself, Florensky contests, the negation of the “essential goodness” of being, cannot feature in the icon; it connotes “absence of being” and therefore violates the icon’s ontology, disputing the essential natures of its elements.94 Here, the omniscient divine perspective perceives multiple states of being at once, and this perception is communicated in the icon.

Uspensky invokes Alois Riegl’s notions of the “haptic” and the “optic,” in which the Austrian art historian suggested that art moves between the former tactile, “objective” orientation and the latter subjective manner of representation.95 The haptic aspect, in subordinating elements to a contained world within the image, disrupts the continuity between the our own reality and the represented one, elevating it and demanding a certain reverent, subordinated attention on the part of the viewer. Uspensky constructs a notion of internal and external positioning of the viewer, through which he examines the 93

Florensky, 207.

Florensky, Iconostasis, 144.

95 Clemena Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, Ashgate Studies in Theology, Imagination, and the Arts (Farnham, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate PubLtd, 2010), 55.

94

74 meanings of left and right, raised and lowered, recessed and close positions of the iconic bodies. He suggests that the “position of the ancient painter is primarily an internal rather than external one with respect to the representation.” From this perspective, the space around the object is first conveyed; only after this spatial preparation can the object, then the viewer, be brought into the pictorial world, as we bear witness to the “laws governing the construction of this microcosm.” Moreover, the painter can move between the external situation of the viewer and the internal, “surrounded” one of the artist, carrying out the transcendent content of the icon through the dynamic array of viewpoints that constitutes reverse perspective.96 Another feature of reverse perspective appears in the sizing of each person, relative to neighboring characters and scenery. Scale can communicate both semantic significance and perspective, revealed by the figure’s depth and corresponding size in the visual plane. At the same time, the iconic figure’s position also connotes its sacred value, according to placement upon both the vertical and horizontal axes of the composition.

However, an uncertainty arises between these semiotic classifications of the levels of the icon and the reverse perspectival system. As figures retreat farther from the viewer in the icon’s composition, their “magnitude…increases, as they appear higher upon the fresco.

This,” Florensky announces, “is a characteristic of that other, spiritual space: the further away something is, the bigger it is, the closer…the smaller.” This is a central tenet of reverse perspective, which seeks, according to Florensky, to prevent the viewer from fully assimilating this index of divinity. The higher the figure, as heavenly proximity increases, the greater the semantic significance; larger dimensions of the figure here denote sacredness. However, this element is complicated by Uspensky as he separates value from perspective: the size of the figure may depend upon the spatial considerations of reverse perspective alone, wherein the size of the figure is a product of its distance from the foreground as it reasserts the icon’s immunity from phenomenal law; or, the size may result from the relative importance of the iconic figure, as greater scale reflects greater divinity of the subject. This is treated in Uspensky’ semantic level of the icon which corresponds to the depicted objects and figures; just as the maximally conventionalized icon hillocks served to augment the divine consequence of the 96

Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 60.

75 comparatively un-distorted churches, so too are “the semantically more important figures less subject to perspectival deformations.”97 Ultimately, reverse perspective provides the central organizational principle of the icon; not only does it create a sacred space in its preparation of the icon’s environs for its content but also generates a sacred temporality in which multiple viewpoints are inhabited at the same time. The viewer approaches the omnipotent position of God in this apprehension of all the planes of the painted features, spread out perpendicularly across the icon board. In this way, the “icon remembers its prototype,”98 recuperating for a pious audience the hallowed figures and their divine circumstances as they exist in perpetuity.

Temporality The theory of a “reverse” temporality further underscores this supra-real nature of iconic being. In his Iconostasis, Florensky discusses the icon in terms of “instantaneous” time that unfolds against the current of secular time. In the icon, meaning is directed at once towards a pre-existent divine fact and its future realization. The icon provides a vision, the ends of which trigger their pursuit in the viewer. In explanation of this, Florensky uses the dream – which he imagines purely in terms of external stimuli, suggesting that it arises directly from outside disturbances around which it constructs the dream-narrative – as a tool for understanding this idea of “teleological” time, in which creative expression is semantically “front-loaded” and “can flow from future to past, from effects to causes."99 In this way, both icon and artist confirm a notion of teleological being. The artist’s voyages between sacred and secular territory consecrate the icon process. The icon, in achieving spatio-temporal harmony, primes its beholder for spiritual transcendence in its role as reminder and gateway. This iconographic program substitutes potentiality for deception, “symbol” for “simulacra,”100 while its doctrine of a synthesized

97

Beyond Vision, “Reverse Perspective,” 239.

Iconostasis, 71.

99 Florensky, Iconostasis, 25; 35.

100 Florensky, Beyond Vision, 215.

98

76 space-time framework whose manifest mission is spiritual regeneration is deeply ingrained in Russian religious and national identity.

Characterization The elements of figural portrayal in the icon are numerous and complex, always subordinated to a detailed system of hierarchy and context. This system governs every feature of the holy person, including the relative sizing and positioning of figures (treated above), framing and shape of the body, gesture, clothing, titly, hair, nimbus, kleima (клеӣмо) or hagiographic hallmark, and face, itself the platform for a number of regulated symbolic elements. “Extra-personal” details, or dolichnoe (доличное), denoted the figure’s hierarchical position (such as martyr, bishop, etc.) while the “personal” details, or lichnoe (личное) – painted before the former individual additions, often by a secondary painter – signaled the specific identity of the figure.

The length of body depicted concurs with the icon type, and typically appears in four views. The icon manifests the face alone, as in the aforementioned Christ Pantokrator. The body can also be shown to the shoulder, as is often the case in the Theotokos icons in which Mary’s upper length is depicted only as far as the infant Christ fills her arms. Icons depicting the individual to waist length are also canonical, as are icons depicting the full body of the figure; icons depicting populous Biblical event typically reveal the total lengths of many of its figures, or join many people into one mass that is nevertheless described head to foot, as seen in the peripheral crowds of the Entry into Jerusalem icons.

The objects and clothing of the icon’s various figures also bear information regarding both rank and identity. For example, “the Apostle Paul was usually portrayed with a book in his hands – this is the Gospel – or less often with a sword symbolizing the Word of God.” Meanwhile, Peter was often shown holding keys – “these are the keys to the Kingdom of God.” Different orders were also characterized by objects, as the

77 “martyrs are depicted with a cross in their hand or with a palm branch – symbols of belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven.”101 Next, saints in the Russian icon are nearly always accompanied by the clothing typical of the individual, Uspensky explains, “just as the heroes in the Russian byliny” or Slavic epic poems are always attached to the “‘fixed epithets’ which characterize them.”102 For example, a prince is “depicted everywhere in his…princely attire and with his royal crown, a warrior – in his cloak and armor.” Florensky even describes clothing as an extension of the body itself. “In the visual order of art, clothes are the body’s appearance,” as they reveal the form through the movements of the material. Clothing assumes a spiritual function as it becomes “an amplifier for the body, making louder and more direct the words the body is saying as witness to its own inner idea.”103 The coloring of “holy garments” further determined rank and function,104 while their conventional reduction to a network of creases and folds, akin once again to the uniform conformity of natural and secular architectural features, expresses their extra-personal, typographic nature. This “ornamental depiction of pleats,” along with bodily distortion, functions similarly to the subordination of background complexity as it elevates the more semantically significant elements of the uncovered body, in iconic gesture and face.105 Moreover, the bodies of the Biblical characters were conveyed “less densely, not multilayered, deliberately stretched.” These methods of elongation and simplification seek to generate “a visual effect of lightness” which minimizes the figure’s corporeality and enhances its spirituality. In this violation of physical law and gravitational force, the holy person’s transcendence is thus manifested. The bodily expression of holiness also features in emaciation or perfection of the figure, according to identity and context.

Likewise, the nimbus confers similar information upon its characters. The nimbus, “analogous in its sign function to [iconic clothing] or to identifying inscriptions

101

Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

102 Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 13.

103 Florensky, Iconostasis, 118.

104 V.P. Sokolov, Jazyk drevnerusskoj ikonopisi, I: Obraznye odezhdy (Kazan, 1916): 12, quoted in Uspenskiĭ, 25.

105 Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 72.

78 [titly] which accompany the representation,”106 symbolizes the Uncreated Light.

Florensky theorizes that the saints, through their ascetic discipline or podvig, approach God as they generate new “lightbearing” capacities; this “spiritual expansion of the body is symbolized by the clothes,” as it is by the halo in which are manifested the radiations of an illuminated countenance and spiritual perfection. In this emanation of ousian light, the figure is both transformed and an agent of transformation, a conduit of God’s grace in light. Its sacred nature is underscored by the gold leaf and coloring with which it is depicted. The cruciform halo, in which a cross extends in three arms from behind the head, filling or sometimes exceeding the circle of the nimbus, is typically reserved for members of the Trinity. In Orthodox icons of Christ, the three extensions of the cross feature the Greek letters “O ΩN” respectively. Taken together, they mean “The One Who Is,” and reiterate His divinity.

Then, inclusion of iconic text satisfies the purposes of both classification and cohesion. Russian Statesman Ivan Viskovatyj proposed that certain icons “be composed of a verbal and an ideographic text.” Therefore, he advised that the icons of the Nicene Creed, for example, feature textually the opening lines of this liturgical statement of faith, and that the iconic image symbolically represent the remainder of the prayer. “Thus both manners of representation (verbal and…pictorial) enter into the icon as two different, yet complementary, means of expression.”107 These textual “inscriptions, titly, on an icon act as an essential component of the icon-painting representation”; these titly join the body and its various attachments in constituting the individual archetypes of the iconic figure as well as providing further semantic reference. Moreover, spoken word could feature in the icon through certain objects; a scroll held in the hand or a cloud emerging from the mouth of an individual can bear some text, which corresponds to the speaker’s message.

Most notably, however, as most iconic inscription was written in Greek, and due to the widespread illiteracy of the Orthodox icon’s medieval Russian audience, the titly were typically “not designed to be understood, but precisely to establish an internal, sacred

106 107

Uspenskiĭ, 113.

Uspenskiĭ, 11.

79 (mystic) identification and to affirm the ontological connection between the image and the name.”108 Subsequently, hair in the icon serves as another marker of a variety of details regarding the nature of its owner, as color and shape denoted different aspects of the person’s status and identity. For example, the sixteenth century Stroganov Podlinnik states “Venerable Simeon. Gray,” (Преподобный Симeон. Cед), indicating that the monk’s hair is canonically gray and must be painted according to this rule. The saint’s beard in the icons of Simeon Stylites is therefore always gray.109 Beard shape too was especially significant in communicating identity. The Three Holy Hierarchs icon, depicting the synaxis of the great Orthodox theologians Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom, illustrates clearly the various stylistic attachments that make unambiguous the figure’s identity. The far left Basil appears across the Orthodox iconographic canon with a full head of dark brown hair that culminates in a long and pointed beard, while Saint John is featured with receded hairline and a smaller, lighter beard and mustache, and, finally, Saint Gregory appears always with white hair and a full, parted beard.

Figure 13. Three Holy Hierarchs icon, detail, recreation of medieval original Note the names of the saints atop their nimbi: these titly serve as markers of individual identity.

Iconic gesture supplied the viewer with a variety of meaning; the particular posturing of the hands supplied an entire alphabet in itself, serving to draw attention to certain elements of the icon and to denote different states of emotion and prayer. The icon draws from the gestures of ancient Greek rhetorical tradition in which different signals of 108

Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 24.

Stroganov Podlinnik, quoted in David, “Podlinniki: The Manuals of Icon Painting and How to Read Them,” Icons and Their Interpretation, September 29, 2011.

109

80 the hand expressed certain messages. This system was co-opted by the icon in order to inscribe the figure with additional “symbolic charge.” A hand pressed to the heart, for example, expressed its owner’s compassion, while hands “pressed to cheeks were a sign of grief.” Raised hands could signal a call to prayer or the initiation of a holy act.110 Furthermore, representations of Christ show His right hand in the blessing position. This pose carries a specific semantic load in the correspondence of the fingers to the Greek letters IC CX, the first and last letters in the name of Jesus Christ, IHCOYC XPICTOC. The three fingers composing the I and X recall the Trinity, while the fingers joined in the C signify the Incarnation, “the union of the divine and human natures in” Christ. The icon’s exemplary figures mimic the gestures of Christ, just as the trajectory of Christ’s life is imposed upon the saint’s in hagiography. This gesture is also used by priests in the liturgical act of blessing; the recreations of these abbreviations through the fingers thereby repeat both Name and sacred fact in the icon and in the rites.111

Figure 14. Hand in the Blessing Position The index and middle fingers represent the I and C, the thumb and ring finger the crossed X, and the curve of the pinky and thumb, the final C of the Name of Christ.

Meanwhile, the framing device of the kleima provides, external to the body itself, both key to and illustration of the history and identity of the specific saint. These details come in the form of an iconic border composed of events from the saint’s life – a

110

Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

111 Esparza, Daniel, “What Do the Hand Gestures in Icons Mean?,” Aleteia — Catholic Spirituality, Lifestyle, World News, and Culture, June 12, 2016.

81 pictorial hagiography in miniature. The kleima present the life of a saint through “a series of representations…in the form of the most characteristic scenes from his life.” These framing elements of the icon are, unlike the central figure of the saint that composes the icon, situated definitely in historical time and place. Therefore, these two types of representation within a single image occupy two different realms. One is rooted firmly in the past, in the case of the kleima, progressing chronologically in the “single temporal direction…of the saint’s life” on earth, and is totally distinct from the viewer. The central iconic image, however, occupies at once the past, the viewer’s present, and future. The former provides narrative, while the latter sustains “spiritual contact.”112 The most important aspect of the icon’s individual figure is the face. Florensky, in articulating the sacred quality of the iconic face, distinguishes between A) face (лицо), B) countenance (лик), and C) mask (личина). We encounter the face in ordinary life; it corresponds to “that which we see as the recognizable appearance of the real world” and inhabits the “boundary between subjectivity and objectivity.” Meanwhile, the countenance represents the ideal face, that which “manifests its ontological reality.” The countenance is iconic face. Through it, the holy person, whether in the icon or on earth, relays the invisible knowledge of the divine and is in genuine satisfaction of Plato’s notion of the idea: the countenance is the prototype, the “supreme” articulation of “a precise reality.” And opposed to the countenance is the mask, which assumes the appearance of a face, but is ultimately hollow. Its “physical materiality” lacks “metaphysical substance.” Where the countenance refers one to divinity, the mask purports to, appropriating spiritual façades, and repeating the actions of the perverting boundary spirits which precipitate prelest’.113 The iconic face, or countenance, then becomes the domain of multiple symbolic elements, the accomplishment of which are in accordance with their respective metaphysical agendas. Complexion and facial features each possess their own specific symbolic attachments and are effected following these considerations. Firstly, the complexion of the countenance is an indicator of holiness. While “a swarthy complexion” was canonically a sign of holiness, opinion arising in the late-seventeenth century argued 112 113

Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 20.

Florensky, Iconostasis, 50–53.

82 against the “gloomy” and aged aspect of this style; at the same time, Protopope Avvakum (c.1620-1682) decried the “carnal grossness” of new trends depicting rosy-cheeked and full-faced saints which appeared to convey a sense of earthly aliveness. Though differing opinions informed the styles of the complexion’s representation, all were in accord over the vital import of its affect.114 The furrows and tonality of the brow communicate an additional layer of meaning as they trisect the forehead; this attribute is most clearly manifest in icons containing cruciform halos, as the three branches of the brow repeat the three arms of the cross by which it is framed. Moreover, due to their semantic import, every feature of the countenance, whether in full-frontal view or three-quarter profile, is always represented. The “semantically important part of the object being depicted,” here the face, however, is generally forward-facing. This frontal orientation establishes further contact between the “representation and the praying viewer,” and therefore subject to fewer “perspectival deviations.”115 Next, mouths, which “symbolized sensuality,” are reduced in size while the eyes, the most crucial aspect of the countenance, are enlarged.116 Gaze and expression guide both focus and emotional affect. The directionality of the iconic gaze can conduct the viewer to the most vital areas of the representation, as in the case of the saints upon the iconostasis which works conversely to its obscuring function by indicating, by means of concealment, the existence of a higher, mystical sphere. The “upraised gaze” of the saints indicates their witness to God’s practice above through the orientation of their “holy countenances.”117 Otherwise, a forward, penetrating gaze is in express commune with the viewer and becomes the central iconic aspect. The criticality of iconic eye arises from this iconic imperative, its mission to channel the gaze of the viewer from external perception to internal comprehension; therefore, the represented eyes must symbolize the power of the living countenance. Towards this, Theophanes the Greek (c.1340-c.1410), Byzantine master and the teacher of Rublyov, sometimes showed his saints with “closed or even empty eye sockets,” thereby invoking this notion that outward sight was merely a means to the ends “of divine truth and inner prayer.”

114

Uspenskiĭ, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 13–14.

Uspenskiĭ, 63–68.

116 Kuprin.

117 Florensky, Iconostasis, 62.

115

83

Color And at last, color bestows upon the icon its final, fundamental stratum of meaning. The icon manifests itself entirely in the juxtaposition of differently hued fields, creating a harmoniously synthesized vision of Reality. Color’s vital role in arts and spirituality has prompted a multitude of manuals and theories, respectively prescribing meticulously technical systems for its employment and speculating upon the discursive potentiality of its infinite properties. To begin, the iconographer’s deployment of color was paramount to his entire project, and the podlinniki equipped the icon-painters with comprehensive guides for the mixing of their paints. One such Russian manual, the “Kyrkalov Handbook” dating from around 1630, includes detailed instructions for the composition and proper placement of different tones. An excerpt reads …Orange (сурик) and yellow produce gold color. Blue and white produce sky blue (лазорь). Ocher and cinnabar produce carmine (бакан). Pinks (румянец) and cinnabar produce light red. Two parts white and one-third blue produce light sky blue…Ocher and black produce facial flesh color, with a little bit of cinnabar. Ocher and two times yellow produce light ocher…[The folds on] a white garment are drawn (прописывати) with green and shaded (тинити) with the same pigment. On an ocher garment, draw with violet and shade with the same pigment. On the garment of a monastic saint, draw with violet [mixed] with green.118 This brief selection provides one with an idea of the exhaustive lengths to which the icon process was governed. The minutiae of its detail had to emerge from a combination of divinely granted impulse and pious submission to the iconographic canon.

Color, as the primary material for the icon’s execution, was therefore subject to an inexhaustible number of guidelines. However, the Russian Orthodox icon, drawing from Byzantine prototypes, possesses an elemental glossary of color which serves semantic and symbolic purposes. Canonically, green is symbolic of immortal life, nature, and fecundity, also denoting the Holy Spirit; light blue (голубой) “was the color of the Virgin…and virtue” while dark blue (синий) evokes the divinity and its mystery. Red, the

118

Irina V. Dolgikh, Georgi R. Parpulov, and Peter Cowe, “A Byzantine Text on the Technique of Icon Painting,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010): 211.

84 imperial color, connotes “authority and power” as well as “the redemptive blood of martyrdom.” White symbolizes “purity and integrity,” often used to color clothing in indication of its wearer’s divine belonging or destiny; this can be seen in the robes of the “righteous in icons depicting the Last Judgment.” Black, on the other hand, often represented hell, “the maximum distance from God,” or grief and “humility.” Often a replacement for gold, yellow could also suggest the “superior power of angels,” while gold, finally, revealed the “radiance of Divine glory,” the dwelling-place of the saints.

Gold was generally used in the icon’s “background, the halos of the saints,” Christ’s bodily aura, and the clothing of Christ and the Virgin.119 The application of color in the icon was accomplished in a series of layers, or “translucent…washes,” beginning with the darkest colors first and building upwards to the lightest in the method of okhrenie (охрение). The Russian icon typically began with application of sankir (санкир), the medium brown color often used as the base coat for the countenance and uncovered body parts. Florensky describes a “floating” of colors onto the icon board, which affirms their unified nature – hues are applied in stages, gradually accumulating across the board to produce a final product. He then avers that the icon includes “no half-tones or shadows: instead reality is revealed by the degrees of the manifestation of existence.”120 Ouspensky elucidates this claim as he writes that “the fundamental colours used in iconography are the ‘earths’ (that is, mineral pigment) and natural organic colours. Artificial colours are only used as supplementaries.” Notably, he goes on to describe an unusual prerogative of the icon-painter as regarded his palette.

Outside of the intricacies of canonical and prototypical iconographic law, the painter is granted a particular degree of choice in the specific shades of the representation. This relative freedom, though, always remains tethered to the Divine, never straying from Godly provenance.121 In his “Speculation in Colors” (1917), in one of three essays exploring the Russian icon, prince and philosopher Evgeny Trubetskoy (1863-1920) wrote of Rublyov’s work “as having ‘expressed the inner history of the Russian religious

119

Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

120 Florensky, Iconostasis, 138–39.

121 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 55.

85 and national self-consciousness.’”122 Thus, this license serves instead to convey the “living language” of the painter’s time and place, uniting the immediacy of the present with the eternity of the holy figures. Chromatic regularity persists despite, and perhaps for, this small sovereignty: consistency in the face of this allowance only attests to the fact of an objective ontological Reality, which inspires its conduits with a vision of its ideal being.

122

Evgeny Trubetskoy, “Russian in Her Icons,” Contemplation in Colours. Three Essays on the Russian Icon, (Paris, 1965): 117-8, quoted in and trans. Antonova, Clemena: 159.

III. Nesterov and Divine Chromatics Symbols and Synthesis “It is no accident,” Kuprin writes, "that the icons were called ‘theology in colors.’”123 Kuprin emphasizes the deep connection between aesthetics and religiosity in the culture of Russian Orthodoxy, also acknowledged by Evgeny Trubetskoy who declared that, “in the lines and colors of the icon, we have a predominantly semantic beauty.”124 Trubetskoy’s analysis exemplifies a Russian Symbolist resurgence of interest in the mystical properties of the arts in which the synthesis of elements could be potentially mobilized to regenerate self and the collective. The icon had provided a vocabulary of stylistic elements that, in the revivalist and spiritual turns of the age, held promise for the possibilities of a regenerative worldview. Through the prism of Russia’s iconographic tradition, color itself becomes the vehicle for spiritual experience. The evocative capacities of color, as blessed into service in the polysensorial rites of Orthodox liturgy, became a particular object of study.

Florensky’s Golden God Priest, theologian, historian, and mathematician Pavel Florensky, from an early age, treated nature as his greatest teacher by which he could refine an early, profound piety. He suffered, however, an intense conflict between this calling of Orthodoxy, the scientific rationalism of his upbringing, and his own intellectual interests. His initial attempts at reconciling this fundamental perceived opposition would determine the course of his theoretical musings and projects. After graduating from the Moscow Theological Seminary in 1908, he subsequently entered the priesthood, and, in 1912, defended his dissertation for his Masters of Theology. This thesis would go on to become his

123

Kuprin, “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).”

124 Kuprin.

88 monumental Pillar and the Ground of the Truth in which, in a sequence of twelve letters addressed to a friend, a stand-in for Christ, he expounds upon the nature of Christian love.

Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Florensky participated in a number of Symbolist intelligentsia circles. From these intellectually formative experiences, Florensky, after the Symbolist pursuit of a unified definition of the essential natures of religion and the written and visual arts, refined his own ideology aimed at the synthesis of his spiritual, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. For Florensky, color first serves an accentual function in its direction of the gaze. The “supplementary” or “simultaneous” planes that occur through reverse perspective are quite literally highlighted, with an “emphasis placed on particular foreshortenings…to which particular coloured glazes (rastsvetki…or raskryshki), are applied.”125 To this end, planes that should in fact exist in shadow are generally executed in the most vivid hues and differ in color from their connecting “façade.” These observations extend the ideas of reverse perspective, illustrating the ways in which color assumes spatial and temporal functions.

Yet Florensky’s theories regarding the functions of gold set the stage for the theological and spiritual inquiries into the symbolics of color that would dominate this eventful era of Russian life, an inspired epoch in which Nesterov labored. Color integrates the varied powers of sensory reality into a harmonious, nearly tangible, infinite spectrum – a multipurpose, divinely-inflected language. “The gold is pure, ‘admixtureless’ light,” Florensky asserts, “a light impossible to put on the same plane with paint – for paint, as we plainly see, reflects the light.”126 With this statement, he launches an explication of the gold tone as distinct from color; gold is the artist’s medium for manifesting Divine presence and potentiality that does not correspond to any earthly image. He contrasts the generative technique of gold assyst with the black line that denotes absence. “God is light, and not in a moral sense, but as a judgment established by perception,”127 and “in every case, the gold clearly corresponds to the spiritual gold that is

125

Florensky, Beyond Vision, 203.

Florensky, Iconostasis, 123.

127 Florensky, Beyond Vision, 121.

126

89 the divine light of God.”128 And encoded in this light is Gregory Palamas’ fundamental energeia-ousia distinction. God’s Created Light is immanent and ambient in the icon, while the Uncreated Light, intrinsic to His presence, appears through the emanations of Christ’s aura. Meanwhile, color is entrusted with the task of transcendence.

We do not reject the full truthfulness of colors…through spiritual sobriety, colors are themselves made spiritual, growing always more transparent, purer and penetrated with light such that they abandon all earthliness and approach the condition of precious gems, becoming in the end intense concentrations of planetary rays.129 Colors themselves reproduce the iconographic contradiction that posits the impossibility of the earthly representation of divine truth. The icon dispatches all the means at its disposal within an intricate representational system, becoming a kataphatic agent of the expression of the Divinity. In this way the icon-painter strives, in total acceptance of the insufficiency of his equipment, towards an outward manifestation of celestial noumena, which will in turn effect internal pious comprehension in the viewer. For Florensky, colors follow a similar trajectory within the representation: in aspiring to the holy light upon which the icon is “executed,” colors assimilate the utilities of the golden tone through proximity and difference, communicating to the devout viewer their symbolic dimensions. Thus color is divinely endorsed and made incorporable for its enlightened beholders.

As the gold invigorates its surroundings, it also infuses color with originary meaning. “The process of incarnating the icon begins with the gold-leafing of light…with the gold of creative grace,” and concludes in the gold assyst highlighting. And “in this visual ontology, the painting of the icon repeats the main stages of God’s creation from absolute nothingness to the holy creation.”130 In their iconographic application, colors join this undertaking and enter the domain of light which stands beyond the bounds of human space and time. The icon’s consecrated patterns and reverse temporality allows for primordial assignations of value; the light precedes and proceeds the colors and invites them into the kingdom of sacred semantics.

128

Florensky, Iconostasis, 129.

Florensky, 129.

130 Florensky, 136-7.

129

90

Bely’s “Apocalyptic Optics” Florensky’s theories concerning color in the icon set up a primary symbolic context in which to conceive of color’s archaically and eternally sanctioned spiritual authority. His investigation of the symbology of iconic form, light, and color is concurrent with a number of theories proposed by both visual and verbal artists of the time. These thinkers pursued further an illustration of the communicative functions of color, investigating the semantics of specific shades and hues in terms of an apocalyptic theological vision that was only intensified by its pressing national resonances. Andrei Bely (1880-1934) was one writer who constructed a glossary of color in which each shade bore a specific value and meaning, inflected by both Russian literary precedent and an Orthodox eschatological vision.131 Like Florensky, Bely’s interests were wide-ranging; he studied everything from the sciences to mathematics to music, and, from this multidisciplinary repository, developed a vast and discursive literary oeuvre. Born to a noble family of Moscow intellectuals, he benefitted from extensive private schooling and graduated in 1903 from Moscow University with a natural sciences degree. However, he soon gave himself over to literature, joining in the early years of the twentieth century the “Argonauts,” a Moscow group of Russian Symbolists.

While his writing of this period predates Florensky’s publication of Iconostasis by some twenty years, the contemporaneous thinkers and friends both enacted and were enacted upon by the Symbolist currents emerging at the turn of the century. In 1906, Florensky wrote, in the face of criticism of his intricate prose style brimming with “densely complex connections,” that he could not in good “conscience” sway from the mission of his intellectual-spiritual methodology: “the investigation of concepts and the synthesis of heterogeneous materials.”132 Russian Symbolism, founded upon these elements of fusion, joined together the notions of religious and artistic creation, promoting an understanding of aesthetics as closely linked to the functions of life and 131

Samuel D. Cioran, “A Prism for the Absolute: The Symbolic Colors of Andrey Bely,” in Andrey Bely: A Critical Review, ed. Gerald Janecek (University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 103.

132 Florensky, Iconostasis, 26.

91 spirituality. This idea recuperates some central tenets of Russian Orthodoxy and its iconography; color, then, as the primary agent of its representation, occupied a special position in Russian Symbolist thought. At this time, Bely was motivated by the ideas of Russian philosopher and theologian Vladimir Solovyov, whose promotion of his theory of vseedinstvo from the Slavophile conception of sobornost’ reflected the holistic tenor of this Symbolist movement. Sobornost’ denoted a distinctive unity among a population; the imperative of this variant of ascetic lifestyle was a voiding of individuality directed towards collective progress, which underlies the systems of monastic communal living.

By this, it achieves its core religious resonance in the kenotic ideal held by Russian Orthodoxy which holds Christ’s kenosis or self-emptying, embodied in his self-sacrifice, as an ethical model. Solovyov’s vseedinstvo or ‘total-unity’ explicitly directed this idea towards the realization of an Orthodox Ideal.

These religious frameworks inform, then, Bely’s aesthetic creation although his participation in the Russian Silver Age in the Symbolist vein was inflected by a highly individual vision. As novelist and poet, Bely developed a synesthetic prose in which sound is generative of color; as critic, he not only participated in early explorations of symbolism and the arts, but also in the articulation of cosmological systems. In this way, Bely’s works operate in a similar manner to the icon in the construction of universal, discursive glossaries. For Bely, the icon’s divine image is equivalent to “a concrete emanation of Divine Grace,” its aesthetic beauty the divinity’s “concrete, kenotic emanation.”133 In his essay, “The Emblematics of Meaning,” Bely defines a symbol as “the union of the purposes of cognition with something that may be found only outside the limits of cognition,” the product of “an organic union of one thing with another.” He elaborates, “symbolic unity is the unity of form and content,” and “the unity of a series of cognitive acts in a series of creative acts.”134 The icon is thus the peak of symbolic unity in its harmonious formal accommodation of content. Technically, color for Bely becomes

133

Andrey Bely, Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, trans. Steven Cassedy (University of California Press, 1985), 41.

134 Bely, Selected Essays, 129.

92 the chief agent, alongside secondary form, of the artist’s “breakdown of the visible world”135 through representation, he explains in “The Principle of Form in Aesthetics.”

And finally, upon these foundations, Bely builds, in his essay “Sacred Colors (Священные Цвета),” an encyclopedia of shades and their symbolic, theurgic meanings.

Invoking an array of sources, he combines religious and scientific systems of thought in order to produce a definition of each hue’s lived and spiritual activity. He constructs two axes of meaning. The first, vertical and absolute, cites the Old and New Testaments in placing at its extremities the white and black shades. “God is light and there is in him no darkness,”136 he begins, consecrating his project from the outset in this biblical citation.

The fundamental light-dark polarity, providing the basis for theories of color since antiquity, informs the tenor of his chromatically-determined cosmos. Furthermore, it infuses his writing with urgency, putting his theories into the context of an apocalyptic vision of the universe. Light is distinct from color in that light is the domain of all color: the infinite multitude of tones resides in the ray of light, while darkness, in the absence of light, terminates spiritual and chromatic animation. Bely orients humanity, created in God’s image, towards His light, translated into white, by nature opposed to black as the “symbol of nothingness, chaos…Black color phenomenally defines evil…violating the fullness of being.” Meanwhile, grey, the admixture of the two critically opposed shades, manifests “non-being in being…the ultimate deception.” Still, the unified fact of the Divine and its potentials for communication are expressed in white, and metaphysical light is manifested in the entire spectrum of colors.

The illusory quality of grey recalls Florensky’s prelest’, “mere shadows” pretending at the divine. Herein lies the truest and most damaging evil, advancing appearance without substance. Bely denounces the false objectivity embodied in gray; its miasma exemplifies the Kantian noumenon which he perceives as morally destructive, un-rooted in a conceivable reality or idea and therefore delusive rather than instructive.

Bely describes a frenzied metropolitan environment in which the self becomes the “black abyss” and the grey “dusty whirlwinds” reveal pedestrians, “maybe a policeman,” the

135

Bely, Selected Essays, 217.

Andrey Bely, “Sacred Colors (Священные Цвета),” World of Art, no. 5 (written 1903, pub. 1904), http://az.lib.ru/b/belyj_a/text_07_1903_arabesky.shtml.

136

93 unenlightened masses led astray by the modern urban phenomenon of relativism. Grey is therefore the product of a diverted and diminished white; the “ash” and grime that carry this color pervert human apprehension not only of present reality but of the sacred elements. The writer employs a highly fraught and lyrical prose to convey the chaotic abandon promoted by the force of gray. And his colors are indeed forces, enacting their divine and aesthetic charges upon the earth. “This is the devil,” he writes, “the gray dust settling over everything.”

The first color to interrupt this haze of illusion and “despair” is yellowish-brown, inhabiting again a sinister boundary at which turmoil and distortion reign. Here, Bely recalls Lermontov, whose poetry imbues Bely’s discussion with additional apocalyptic and creative dimensions. The imagery of Lermontov’s “Death (Смерть)” (1830), for example, introduces new color as the “sunset burns a fiery stripe,” moving Bely from an insidious yellow-brown to yellow-red, a portent, however, of doom as the poet envisions his corpse beneath the next setting sun. Bely summons Lermontov’s brief life, alongside the bloody hues of the evening sky, in illustration of his vision of a destructive red.

Here, Bely constructs his second, horizontal and relative axis. He draws upon a national literary canon in order to motivate his emblematics of color; his varied sources serve his creation of a chromatic world-view, in which he classifies a series of life elements towards pressing prophecy. A series of binaries are mapped onto the fundamental light and darkness opposition. This is brought about through theological and scientific speculation as well as through the Russian artistic canon, itself characterized by dualism. This latter layer of his essay generates a chronology of national thought as it leads towards the impending meeting of diametrically opposed forces. Bely recalls the “dirty taverns” which figure throughout Dostoevsky’s novels. These filthy spaces provide the settings for the “most momentous…and terrible discussions of his protagonists about the final fate of Russian and world history.”137 This dingy, apocalyptic atmosphere – its grays and browns poising it for sudden and violent catastrophe – provides the cloudy channel for the transformation of new colors and meanings. “In physics,” Bely claims, “the property of a white beam is known to be colored red (красный) when passing through a dusty, opaque medium.” The color 137

Bely, “Sacred Colors.”

94 red is produced by the mixing of white, full light and gray relativity. Thus, it becomes the “final limit of relativity,” its “transparency…in its own way a theosophical revelation.”

The devil reveals himself, in a manner tangible to us, in the “fiery-red glow of Hellfire,” and we attain knowledge of the theological elements of the universe. At the same time, Bely ascribes a “theosophical duality of red,” distinguishing between the flaming red of the devil and the redemptive red, or crimson (багряница) of Christ’s crucifixion. The crimson of Christ’s bloody sweat at Gethsemane symbolizes his welcome suffering and denotes the possibilities for salvation through sacrifice.

Pink (розовый), then, is a derivative of red as it travels up the colored spectrum by the addition of white, joining evil incarnate with divine light. Bely defines red theosophically as the “relativity of the struggle between God and the devil”; hence, pink, “in which the predominance of the white beacon of man-godliness (человекобожество) is already clearly expressed,” manifests the subsequent “phase of spiritual experience.”

This light-ward ascent produces insights which, when standardized, become divine purpose – it is by this gradient that “art comes into contact with religion.” Prayer allows these ideas to reach the soul, and in this union of “mysticism and art is theurgy.” Bely brings his investigation into the numinous realm of Symbolism in which, he asserts, cerebral and emotional thought can be applied together towards a transformative, religious “organization of love.”138 Bely concludes with an eschatological re-visitation of the absolute and allencompassing properties of white, in which resides the totality of the cosmological color wheel. When the dust and ash disperse, he proclaims, and whiteness reigns overhead, the effect is one of light blue (голубой). The un-colored backdrop of the universe, enacted upon by the white light which cloaks the depths of the universe, appears blue. “Aerial whiteness,” refracted through the earthly abyss, is the azure (лазурь) sky. The merging of the “abyss of the world, where there are no times or conditions, with the air-white transparency…[of] ideal humanity” exposes, in the color of the sky, the fundamental God-manhood (Богочеловечество) duality. “On the basis of the symbols of colors, we can restore the image of what has conquered the world,” its final judgment accompanied by a manifestation of divinity which, in the suggestion of its colors alone, will have the 138

Bely, "Sacred Colors.”

95 power to dispel the gray fog. Its white countenance; its light blue eyes; its golden hair, “like flowing honey”; the “bloody purple” or crimson of its mouth that predicts the apocalyptic crimson flames that will engulf the world at the end of days – these colors of the sacred countenance confront and transform the viewer, and are elemental to the Russian Symbolist palette. The apprehension of truth and being through colors by theoria, the contemplative incorporation of the Divine, brings about the animation and transformation of the beholders, the Russian self and public.

In joining a science of optics, foundational Biblical reference, Russian literary history, and his own mystical conjectures, Bely builds a symbolic lexicon of color.

Through the objective correlative of color, he produces a polychrome system in which each shade, mixture, and gradient becomes a symbol for the individual, historical, and cosmic correspondences that populate his chromatic theology. Bely, in formulating his emblematics, repeats in verbal language the operations of the icon-painters. Each color – the white of the Absolute; satanic and deadening black; red, in its double inflection of catastrophic destruction and redemption; pink, as the emblem of the man-god dualism; divine blue; and finally glorious gold, “the rapture of the saints over heaven”139 – moves Russia towards the theosophic realization of an Orthodox worldview, achieving an especially eschatological tenor in the hands of Bely’s critically modern position on the threshold of the twentieth century.

Kandinsky and “Spiritual Revolution” At around the same time, the painter and art theorist Vasily Kandinsky (18661944) was working to develop a theory of aesthetics that united multiple creative disciplines in the service of a transcendental artistic ideal. Towards this end, the Moscowborn artist articulated a vision of the spiritual imperative of the creative laborer, whose inspired products play a regenerative role in the progression of human history. Vital to this project is color: as a channel for the expression of countless ideas and affects, and for its representative potentials across a diversity of artistic domains, color for Kandinsky offered the ultimate focal point upon which to concentrate his model of creation.

139

Bely, "Sacred Colors."

96 Kandinsky’s fascination with the synesthetic aspect of Russian Orthodox practice informed his unique philosophy of a totalized arts. His first artistic stirrings, in fact, were brought about by his early encounters with the Church’s liturgical tradition. As a lifelong practitioner of Russian Orthodoxy, Kandinsky was intimately familiar with Church ritual, the spaces and services of which deployed sensory stimulus to awesome effect. The walls of the medieval church feature uninterrupted fresco iconography which in its profusion of color in the service of the sacred annals immediately conveys to its subjects the elevated reality of its space. At the same time, the cathedral plan provides a kinesthetic, organizational affect; in the cruciform architecture formed by the nave and transepts, the congregant literally inhabits the cross as he or she is directed towards the iconostasis, that “cloud of witnesses”140 that Florensky hoists as the central spiritual actant of the church, which conceals the altar. Its colors imply the divinity through tangible presence; this manifestation of light thus becomes photosensory. The standardized motions of the clergy create a uniform rhythm, while the censer produces additional sensory layers in its smoke and smell. The odor of the burning incense enacts a somatic effect upon the believer who is suffused with the pleasing aroma as its ladder of smoke symbolizes uplifted prayer, both climbing toward Heaven. This olfactory dimension is multiplied by the gustatory in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Finally, the chants and song heighten the ritual’s overall aesthetic effect, sonically cohering the sundry sensory impositions in time and text. The auditory aspect functions similarly to the visual in that both voice and color are conscripted towards the performance of divine prototypes.

In this way, the interrelations between every sense are maximized as each participates in the ultimate mission of approaching the Divine. Like Florensky and Bely, Kandinsky was particularly interested in the spiritually metamorphic power of Orthodox aesthetics. Both Florensky and Kandinsky141 conceived of the “medieval church…[as] the

140

Heb. 12:1, quoted in Florensky, Iconostasis, 61.

Though there are no records of the contemporaries' collaboration, Florensky and Kandinsky shared similar influences and acquaintances as early constituents of Russian Symbolist circles. Their tenures as VKhUTEMAS faculty just coincided (Kandinsky [1920-1]; Florensky [1921-4]).

141

97 original synesthetic prototype,”142 whose regenerative powers were induced largely by its synthesis of diverse form. This fusion is directly necessitated by its content, the sacred nature of which defies any one mode of containment or knowledge. In response to this multiform imperative, color stands as the ultimate vehicle for the revelation of a complex spiritual and historical artistic situation.

And in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910), Kandinsky creates an artist’s manifesto that seeks to respond to these demands. In this concise examination of the creative impulse, Kandinsky establishes the work of art as an irreplicable artifact of its time and place. While formal resemblances may occur across disparate epochs, a singular “inner tendency” characterizes the output of every aesthetic tradition: spiritual resonances, however, can effect the revival of certain past attitudes, and, in this way, Kandinsky introduces the specific Russian Symbolist attachment to the medieval. The fin-de-siècle moment at which these ideas were developing saw a reaction against a “positivist, materialist and largely anti-clerical”143 nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia. In a Symbolist return to the tenets of medieval Russian aesthetics, crystallized in the anti-mimeticism and spiritual charge of Russian iconography and folk art, Kandinsky advances his own vision of art’s reformative capacities. Kandinsky’s adherence to the Russian Orthodox eschatological bent manifests itself in a fixation upon the realization of these aesthetic potentials. A modern materialism, Bely’s gray miasma, threatens to stifle spiritual knowledge. The arts, as the first domain of “spiritual revolution,” expose to the public the tenor of the times and are therefore responsible for the spiritual growth of their audiences. Dependent upon the artists’ destiny is the destiny of their respective generations; their inspired creation is therefore vital to a final estimation of humankind, according to an Orthodox perspective in which aesthetics and spirituality are generative one of the other.

Accordingly, in his painting and writing of the time, Kandinsky labored towards the fulfillment of a truly transcendental practice through “inner knowledge” and

142

Maria Taroutina, “Iconic Encounters: Vasily Kandinsky’s and Pavel Florensky’s ‘Mystic Productivism,’” Postmedieval; Basingstoke 7, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 62.

143 Taroutina, 56–57.

98 “harmony.”144 His quest for this non-illusionistic and visionary art culminates in the informed harmony of the external and internal impulses. The existence of an obscured, ontological content engenders the need for form; the “sole purpose of form” is the expression of a content that “demands embodiment.”145 Kandinsky’s pursuit is informed by his championing of current theories of art and life unity, alongside the synesthetic requisites of ideal incarnation. Kandinsky’s interest resides, at last, in his formulation of a psycho-sensory schematics of color. Color is not merely the pigment by which we perceive it; rather, shades are qualities, existing ontologically and possessive of a vast array of meaning. Due to this inflective identity, color can be combined with a number of forms for its tangible expression, which in turn induces a certain emotional resonance in the receiving subject or atmosphere. Kandinsky joins each hue, in his inquiry into the “Psychological Working of Color,” not only with its corresponding psychic implications, but with it respective motions as well as with its auditory, instrumental equivalents. Each color in the work of visual art provokes in the individual a double effect – a fleeting and “purely physical impression” coupled with its “psychic” spiritual aftermath. The latter effect is that which is critical for the viewer’s enlightenment; only in their inward contemplation can the art’s active intentions be realized in the soul. However, the initial physical effect is vital in triggering this “spiritual vibration.” The immediate external impression is therefore key to the subsequent inward illumination.

“Generally speaking,” Kandinsky writes in illustration of his notion of the inner need – the artist’s motivating impulse, constituted by individual, national and historic, and eternal, creative drives – “colour is a power which directly influences the soul.”

Where pigment for the icon-painter provided an insufficient material means for the tangible representation of sacred truth, artistic vision takes the place of a concrete divinity. Color remains the means of the artist’s mission of spiritual regeneration, but Kandinsky, parallel to a movement from, say, a portable icon to the multisensory environment of a church service, takes this procedure a step further. Thus, he brings color

144

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 15.

145 Taroutina, “Iconic Encounters,” 62.

99 to bear on a variety of media. These vehicles – of sight, sound, taste – become the catalysts of spiritual states, themselves the means of spiritual regeneration.

He continues, “colour is the keyboard, the eyes are hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.” The artist becomes the musician who, with each touching of the key, induces “vibrations in the soul.” The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915) offers an example of the discursive capacity of color in his development of a color-coded atonal scale. Scriabin pursued a simultaneous activation of multiple senses within his audience. Certainly, as evidenced by the Orthodox rites, the totalizing intensity of the multisensory experience, in its overwhelming appeal to both body and soul, is the most promising means of spiritual persuasion. The orchestra for his composition Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1909-10) included a Chromola, or color organ, which expressed the notes both visually and sonically, manifesting the synesthetic Scriabin’s inner vision of an emotional chromatic scale.

“Colour harmony” thus depends entirely upon the inspiration of the artist and the activation of the souls of the artwork’s beholding subjects: the “corresponding vibration” between color and its human, spiritual appraisal determines the legitimacy, the dynamic potential of the work of art.146 Kandinsky’s own tonal glossary is oriented largely towards the psychological implications of the spectrum: this conviction in the compelling and innate psychosensory capacity of colors, when accompanied by their embodying forms, underlies his belief in the possibilities for a fateful, redemptive art.

Indeed, the chapter in which he lays out his fundamental “Language of Form and Color” is something of a testament to this conception of an intrinsic chromatic symbology. Kandinsky’s definitions resonate with those of Florensky and Bely. These echoes issue forth from a deep familiarity among the three interdisciplinary thinkers with the foundations of Russian aesthetic history, as each devised his symbolic, theosophic color wheel by bringing a medieval, national conception into the Symbolist turn of the century.

What follows is a color system that combines the delimiting element of painted form with the evocative element of color. Central to Kandinsky’s own painted project are the “different spiritual values” of the infinite combinations of form and color, the “two 146

Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 26.

100 weapons at [painting’s] disposal.” The harmony between color and form are of utmost importance. For instance, the sheer angles of the triangle are most purely conveyed through “whole, keen colours,” such as yellow, while the roundness of the circle corresponds most closely to “soft, deep colours,” such as blue.147 Furthermore, form can assume either material, naturalistic shape or “remain abstract,” seeking to represent, through geometrical shape, non-physical matter. The task of the painter, then, is to achieve harmonious balance between these two poles, avoiding mere reproduction of reality while making tangible the abstract and mystical. Color thus becomes the primary tool for art’s imposition upon the human body and mind.

First, Kandinsky develops two axes of color quality; at each end of the first stand warmth and cold, at the second, light and darkness. Movement towards yellow achieves a warming effect, which brings its planes of the composition towards the viewer to embodied effect, while greater proximity to cool blue produces a receding, inward and “spiritual” effect. This “horizontal movement” is crucial for its appeal to the viewer; each form must bear the hue that maximizes the spiritual vibration of the whole, as each color also effects fluctuations in the aspects of its neighboring shades. On the vertical axis, white light and dark black stand in opposition. Here, the movement upon the viewer is more semantic and abstract, with white imposing a potentially generative “discord” against the total, final “discord” of black; the former is “birth,” the latter, “death.”

Kandinsky links the warm with the light pole, the cold with the dark. Gradation of the colors of the respective temperatures towards their corresponding light or dark extremes increases the impact of their representation. Green, therefore, yellow’s cold-ward advance, in halting the outward yellow and inward blue motions, “becomes sickly and unreal.”148 This arrested state underlies all movements of hues towards their particular distant poles, though the activity of their components sustains the potential for their “spiritual appeal.” However, white and black, the presence and absence of light, contain no “active force,” and, in their union of static “discord” and immobile “negation,” produce “a motionless” gray.149

147

Kandinsky, 29.

Kandinsky, 37.

149 Kandinsky, 36.

148

101 After establishing these quadrants of tonal motion, Kandinsky delves into the particularities of his “spiritual appeal.” This colored imposition upon the viewing subject manifests in emotional and symbolic charge, and further dictates the forms of its visual containment. Yellow’s “insistent, aggressive character” is made green “madness” with the addition of a retreating, inwardly-oriented blue. Green’s inactive combination contributes to its position as the “most restful color.” “In the hierarchy of colors,” Kandinsky postulates, “green is the ‘bourgeoisie’ – self-satisfied, immovable, narrow.”

Meanwhile, yellow “is the typically earthly colour,” this foundational identity certified by its lack of “profound meaning.” Blue, on the other hand, is the “heavenly colour,” its recessive, inward motion signaling depth and creating in the viewer a restful state. As blue travels further down the gradient towards black, however, “it echoes a grief which is hardly human,” while its white ascent reduces its semantic intensity.150 Conventionally, white and black represent the realms of creation and death; white’s lightness recalls the light of God, and therefore figures as a divine color, one of “joy and spotless purity,” as seen in Bely,151 throughout a chromatic chronology.

Conversely, black, an absence of light, signals despair, an end of possibility and of life.

Kandinsky echoes these precedents in his vision of the two polar shades. White conveys “a world from which all colour as a definite attribute has disappeared.” This sphere resides far above human comprehension; its ideal abstraction, tempered neither by materiality nor by active color, is not tangible to the corporeal senses. White is the veil that conceals the higher realm from the lower; yet, in its obscurity it indicates the existence of further realities, a silence “pregnant with possibilities.” And if white possesses the “appeal” of a pre-partum state, black represents the post-mortem.

“Motionless like a corpse,” it provides a deadened backdrop upon which the active gradations among colors shine forth in stark contrast.152 Finally, Kandinsky’s red is a domain of multiple potentials. Its warmth is directed towards its interior, increasing, by this autonomy, its dynamism and affect. Again, red is doubly defined, its lighter and warmer shade evoking sensations of “vigour, 150

Kandinsky, 38.

Born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, Andrei Bely assumed this penname due in part to his belief in the symbolic powers of color. Bely (белый) is the Russian word for white.

152 Kandinsky, 39.

151

102 determination, triumph,” while its “sharp…glowing,” darker vermilion, “called a dirty colour,” attests to the inner spirit of the composition: “At the call of the inner need that which is outwardly foul may be inwardly pure.” The addition of blue to red results in a mournful violet, enhancing the inward movement of both its components, while the admixture of red and yellow becomes orange, its outward extension kept at bay by the inner pull of red. Six nodes – yellow and blue, red and green, violet and orange, each pair opposed as antitheses – compose Kandinsky’s psychosensory color wheel. He likens this circle to an ourobouros, the self-consuming serpent, repeating its motions in perpetuity.

This dynamic wheel rests between black at the left and white to the right, “the two great possibilities of silence – death and birth.”153 Throughout his examination of the emotional-spiritual tenors of each color, Kandinsky weaves a current of sonic associations. Though he cautions that these comparisons are “relative,” due to the infinite prospects for shade, pitch, and tone, an ideal instance of musical sound can match the pure hue. In describing the jarring affect of yellow, he relates the augmentation of its hue to a progressive “shrillness of its note.”154 Next, the high notes of a flute sound a light blue; as the blue darkens along the gradient, it is conveyed through the cello, then the “thunderous double bass,” then the organ, and the “placid, middle notes of a violin,”155 carry a true and still green. Likewise, a forceful “light warm red…is a sound of trumpets, strong, harsh, and ringing,” while its darker brown iteration, benefited by masterful mixing, “rings like a great trumpet, or thunders like a drum.” Violet arrives in the tones of “an English horn, or the deep notes of wood instruments,” while its orange antithesis is conjured by the note of the “angelus, or of an old violin.” Lastly, the frozen shades of white and black are transmitted in silence. White produces a “harmony of silence,” residing in the expectant “pauses in music that break temporarily the melody.” Black, “the colour with the least harmony of all,” alongside gray, carries a terrible silence.

153

Kandinsky, 41.

Kandinsky, 38 155 Kandinsky, 39.

154

103 These musical correspondences of the six “primitive colors”156 and their framing shades function as amplifiers of the emotional resonances of each hue. The verballyexpressed associative feelings, “the material expressions of the soul,” cannot fully accommodate color; textual language requires a musical accompaniment in order to approximate color’s visual appeal. As material pigments fall short of the sacred image in the icon, here, words alone fail to fully express color. And this insufficiency generates the possibility of a synthesized “art of the future.” Various elements – shapes, hues, notes, words, emotions – can achieve their most apt, ideal expressions in a multiple determination through a simultaneous variety of mediums. Kandinsky proclaims that this totalized representation “exceeds in richness and force any expression attainable by one art alone,” as dissonance and harmony between the mediums further promote the complexity of the central element. The painter, in symphonic language, even titled his own works “Impression,” “Improvisation, or “Composition,” according to the degrees of their external or internal inspiration.157 He continues, “Repetition of the same appeal thickens the spiritual atmosphere which is necessary for the maturing of the finest feelings.” Moreover, the artistic disciplines appeal variously to different people: one might find greatest resonance with the painted arts, another with the written, etc. This unified prospective art strives holistically to manifest the kernel of creative impulse.

Finally, it is this cultivation of environment that provides the basis for art’s transformative appeal upon its audiences. Towards this “art of the future,”158 Kandinsky’s psychosensory color wheel, double-coded by the foundational iconographic symbolics of the Russian Middle Ages and by contemporary preoccupations with synesthetic and transformative art, provides a symbolic vocabulary for his “spiritual revolution.”

156

Kandinsky, 41.

Kandinsky, 57.

158 Kandinsky, 43.

157

104

Figure 15. Improvisation 27, Garden of Love II (1912), Vasily Kandinsky, oil on canvas

Ultimately, this historical inflection constructs the lens through which to read Nesterov’s own artistic output. His contemporaneous, similarly inclined paintings, created in the decades flanking the turn of the century, pursue similar spiritual themes, through however, a manifestly illusionistic style, that betrays its tutelages by both his Academy and early Itinerant affiliations. From Florensky’s preoccupation with iconography and painted gold and light, through Bely’s eschatological, literary chromatic index, culminating in Kandinsky’s investigation into the spiritual effects and potentials of color, the aesthetic and theological theories of the time provided the context in which Nesterov created his Saint Sergius Cycle, seeking to establish his own artistic legacy aimed towards a national religious awakening.

Abramtsevo At the top of a hill, nestled upon a swath of overgrown, forested land overlooking the Vorya River in the village of Sergiyev Posad, exactly thirteen miles from Sergius’ Trinity Lavra, stands the Abramtsevo Estate. Nesterov’s affiliation with this cultural circle initially came about through his gravitation towards the site of the medieval monastery, but evolved as a result of overlapping interests in the unification and elevation

105 of the Russian arts. Now a museum, the grounds of Abramtsevo were once host to a vibrant artistic movement. Its history as creative hub began in 1843, when the novelist Sergei Aksakov began inviting to his manor the various cultural luminaries he counted among his friends. One of these was Nikolai Gogol, who frequented Abramtsevo during the two years leading up to his death in March of 1852. Turgenev was another regular guest. Until Aksakov’s death in 1859, the estate was a pastoral place of respite for Russian literary talent.

However, Abramtsevo’s culturally generative bequest did not perish with Aksakov. In 1870, Savva Mamontov, the Russian industrialist and philanthropist, bought the estate and determined to continue its artistic legacy. Inheriting his father’s railroad business, which he did much to develop in his lifetime, he supervised the construction of the Moscow-Yaroslavl-Archangel line, Russia’s longest at the time of its 1898 completion. Yet Mamontov’s business interests were accompanied by a passion for the arts. In addition to his love for the theater, Mamontov wrote, acted, and sculpted; however, he was most concerned, like Aksakov before him, with bringing together his artist acquaintances. Numbering among these were many of Nesterov’s Wanderer contemporaries of both generations, including Repin and Vasnetsov, and fellow Peredvizhnik Vasily Polenov. The younger Korovin and Mikhail Vrubel too became regular visitors to the artists’ colony, as did the young Serov, for whom the estate would prove immensely formative in his own creative development. His landmark Girl with Peaches was painted at Abramtsevo when the artist was twenty-one, and depicts the twelve year old Vera Mamontova, the patron’s daughter.

And finally, in 1888, Nesterov, now living in Sergiyev Posad where he labored interminably over the studies for his paintings, met and established a friendship with Mamontov’s wife Yelizaveta. At the time, still in spiritual crisis over the death of his wife two years earlier, Nesterov had only just moved to the town. Yet he soon became a fixture of the colony, staying often throughout the following decade, finding its atmosphere conducive to work. His admiration for the Mamontov family and his artist contemporaries instilled in him a sense of industrious peace. A spirit of infectious innovation permeated the grounds, each artist working symbiotically in convivial propinquity within the sublime landscape. Yet the originary impetus for Nesterov’s

106 relocation to nearby Sergiyev Posad resided in its proximity to Saint Sergius’ Trinity Lavra, spiritual nexus of the Russian faith and nation.

Trinity Lavra In 1910, Pavel Florensky moved with his wife and children to a house in Sergiyev Posad. Thus, Florensky’s expositions upon the divine aesthetic ideal originated in an intimate familiarity with the icons that adorn this crown jewel of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the two years following the October Revolution, Florensky was a member of the Commission for the Preservation of Monuments and Antiquities of the Lavra of the Trinity and St. Sergius. Alongside various experts in the arts, he toiled ceaselessly for the protection and preservation of both the ideological and material relics of Orthodoxy under mounting state atheism and interference. In 1923, Nesterov, who had by then lived intermittently in the town of Sergiyev Posad for nearly four decades, joined Florensky by the Lavra, beginning work on a number of studies, and living with him in the philosopher’s nearby home throughout that spring. Five years later, Florensky, due to his unwavering faith and participation in the preservation of the institutions of Russian Orthodoxy, would be exiled to Nizhny Novgorod. This punitive measure was the catalyst for a Soviet program of persecution that would hereon follow Florensky: despite his tireless labor for the state in mathematics and the sciences, he was nevertheless falsely accused of conspiratorial activity in 1933 and would spend the remainder of his life in prison camps, the last of which was Solovki, a converted monastery on the secluded Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. However, in these years of increasing administrative imposition, the Trinity Lavra served not only as the grounds of industrious creative production, but, resultantly, as a testament to the unswayable resilience of a national Orthodox identity. This spiritual strength was confirmed at once in the monastery’s housing of some of the most significant artifacts of Russia’s history, and in its ideological gravitational pull as it served as a congregational locus for some of Russia’s greatest intellectuals and artists.

Nesterov’s Philosophers (1917), presents Florensky and fellow thinker Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) walking side by side among the green fields and forests of Sergius’ Trinity

107 Lavra. The portrait condenses in a single frame a “spiritual image of the era,”159 indexing in the expressions of its pair of devout subjects two manifestations of a Russian Orthodox eschatological vision. Florensky, in ecclesiastical white, bows his head in repose, and, hand at heart, assumes a theosophic position of inner enlightenment. Bulgakov on the other hand, draped in black, glares fiercely into the scenery beyond the painted border, confronting uncertainly yet resolutely an unknowable future and destiny.

Figure 16. Philosophers (1917), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas This portrait, painted at the dawn of the Revolution, shows Florensky with fellow theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Like Florensky, Bulgakov’s Orthodoxy and intellectualism would earn him the censure of the state. In 1922, Bulgakov numbered among those removed from Russia on the ‘philosophers’ ships,’ the steamboats used for the mass deportation of Russian intellectuals by the Bolshevik government in preparation for the Soviet regime.

And still, in 1919, as part of his conservational efforts, Florensky produced a series of essays dedicated to the sacred grounds. Among this compilation was his “Trinity – St Sergius and Lavra” which sought to trace a history of both the monastery and the metaphysical origins of the Russian faith and, in doing so, secure the province’s standing as the spiritual core of the nation. Summoning the transformational power exerted by the 159

Bulgakov, Sergei. "Autobiographical Notes". Paris, 1946, 89, quoted in Lyudmila Bobrovskaya, “The Portraits of Mikhail Nesterov | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine,” Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, January 12, 2014.

108 monastery by mere proximity to it, Florensky establishes the Lavra as Russia’s ultimate model, one that nurtures a sense of harmony and national belonging in all who enter its historic orbit. Of the sites’s tremendous and moving power he wrote, It is not only an aesthetic experience, but also a feeling of history and a sensation of the national soul, a perception of Russian statehood as a whole…It is this very thoroughly vital unity of the Lavra, as a microcosm and microhistory, as a kind of conspectus of the being of our homeland, which gives the Lavra its character of noumenality. Here the pulse of Russian history is more perceptible than anywhere else, here are collected the most nerve, feeling and dynamic endings, here Russia is sensed as a whole.160 This stirring testimony affirms the original works of the Lavra’s founder and endorses Nesterov’s lifelong obsession with this incomparable figure.

Nesterov’s Cycle commenced immediately after his entrance into the Lavra’s surrounds. Following his relocation to Sergiyev Posad in 1888, he began work on the Vision of the Boy Bartholomew at once. Florensky’s hypothesis of an elevated realm on earth, “permeated with the spiritual energy of the Venerable Sergius,” is supported in the rapid, ardent trajectory of Nesterov’s activity. Here, Florensky proclaims, the grounds are charged with the spirit of “antiquity,”161 as he plots onto the Lavra’s architecture and history the metaphysical language used in his glorification of the ancient icon. “If the House of the Venerable Sergius is the face of Russia,” he writes, “shown by the mastery of fine art, then its founder is the original image of it…of Russia…her countenance.”

This zone, as the domain of countless creative constructions towards the divine manifested in its housing of many of the crown jewels of Russian iconography, embodies Nesterov’s artistic ideal. If the ultimate task of the Russian artist is synthesis, then the Holy Trinity fulfills this call most acutely, as Sergius constructed his Trinity Lavra as an incarnation of this highest manifestation of synchrony, “a summons to unity for the Russian land, in the name of a higher reality.” This “life-giving unity” lies at the heart of

160

Pavel Florensky, The Trinity - St Sergius Lavra and Russia, trans. Robert Bird, vol. 1, Variable Readings in Russian Philosophy (The Variable Press, 1995), 6.

161 Florensky, 1:8.

109 Sergius’ divine architecture which, “in an act of genius, is a prototype of the gathering of Rus’ in spiritual unity.”162 And, concentrating all the divine truth of the monastery’s motivating Trinity, now linked inextricably to the name of Sergius who incarnated it in his labors for the Lavra, is Rublyov’s Holy Trinity (1411 or 1425-7), “expressing the spiritual essence of the church itself…the church’s name executed in paints.”163 Florensky goes on to identify precisely the power of this unparalleled work of iconography as it functioned in the climate of its own creation, declaring Among the violent circumstances of the time, among the divisions, internecine conflicts, general wildness and Tatar invasions, among the deep lack of peace which had ravished Rus’, an infinite, imperturbable, inviolate peace, the ‘higher peace’ of the Heavenly world was revealed to the spiritual gaze.164 Rublyov’s Trinity signals, after Sergius’ initial incarnation of the Trinity in his Lavra, the “second symbol of the Russian spirit”; these artifacts are simultaneously bearers and generators of the Russian culture, epitomizing the creative pursuit of God in service of His subjects. The pitch of Florensky’s praise soars as he joins this “most beautiful building of Russian architecture with the most beautiful image of Russian painting…the most musical incarnation,”165 in a kataphatic, synesthetic amalgamation of the uncontainable office of the two works. At last, the two original elements of Russian identity are fused in these two creations; as the prototypes of “the Russian spirit and its creative incarnation, which encompass each other,” Sergius’ and Rublyov’s Trinities confirm the inextricability of Russian ontology from the ideals of its Orthodoxy and its unceasing aesthetic creative service.

162

Florensky, 1:21.

Florensky, 1:22.

164 Florensky, 1:24.

165 Florensky, 1:28.

163

110

Figure 17. Trinity (1411 or 1425-7), Andrey Rublyov, tempera on panel

The models for Nesterov’s creative ends are hereby fully articulated. Bearing witness to these prototypes, he incorporated their divine ends into his own artistic labor.

The iconographic hagiographies housed in the Lavra would have provided additional didactic examples by which Nesterov could develop his variety of a spiritually productive and reformative artwork, one informed by the distinctive pattern of influence by contemporaneous trends and his own unswayable personal ethos. In this way, Nesterov joined himself in this spiritual undertaking for the generation of culturally indispensible, reformative holy archetypes.

Exemplars of the sacred content that Nesterov sought to capture, and of the many resplendent works of iconography adorning the monastery, are the vita, or hagiographic icons of the father saint. Vita icons, featuring the characteristic kleima, are based on the hagiographic Vitae, the Lives from which they derive their episodic content. One such icon with which Nesterov would have been intimately familiar, housed in the Holy Trinity Cathedral of the Lavra, is a c.1480 Icon of St. Sergius of Radonezh, with Life, included in the church’s iconostasis. Around the central figure of the saint, whose light, full beard and raised right hand serve as his typical iconographic markers are the framing kleima. These scenes of Sergius’ life in the vita, drawn from Epiphanius’ master text,

111 feature the canonic episodes of his life, from his divinely ordained birth, his childhood meeting with the monk, his construction with Stephen of the foundations of the future Lavra, his miracles – the resurrection of a devout Christian’s young son, the curing of a madman – his blessing of Dmitri Donskoi, and ending in his death, burial, and the legacy of his work in the posthumous vision of his Lavra’s expanding architecture.

This returns us at last to Nesterov’s Cycle of Saint Sergius.

Figure 18. Left: Icon of St. Sergius of Radonezh, with Life, on the iconostasis of the Holy Trinity Cathedral at Trinity Lavra (c.1480); Right: reproduction of the medieval original

The Saint Sergius Cycle, Reframed What is the value of a representation? Content is conveyed pictorially, textually, musically, tactilely; it is expressed and embodied, momentary yet eternal. For Florensky, true art, by which he means the manifestation of countenance, rends the veil of illusion and falsehood to reveals to the beholder the artist’s transcendent vision. This accomplishment is realized most absolutely in the projects of Sergius, and by extension, Rublyov, whose unmatched piety and self-discipline allowed them to, with the materials of the earth, transmit their privileged experiences of the divine. Florensky joins the medieval iconographic with contemporary ideas of synthesis; for him, the church ritual,

112 the living witness of the icon, the Lavra as “a laboratory”166 – all these microcosms of cultural construction – are the most genuine works of genius, constituting in themselves entire civilizations, bearing the weighty legacy of a people and its place. These artifacts occur in the light: every color is the product of unbroken, unceasing illumination acting upon our material world, God, as light, Himself inflecting the imperceptible “atmospheric dust”167 with its aesthetic petition upon our sight.

Nesterov sought in his Cycle a consolidation of not only his own creative identity through artistic legacy and psychological parallel between Saint and self, but of a Russian archetype, one that fused the breathing, noble body of the national landscape with the righteous, resilient spirit of its public. Nesterov labored after this harmony, through the meticulous building up of colors across his canvases, in order to appeal to the inhabitants of what he perceived as a fracturing modernity. This telos is exemplified in Cyril and Methodius’ naturalization of Scripture, which presents an example of the potentials of one mode of, literally, re-presentation, through textual translation. In the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet, the brothers were able to deliver the sacred content, God embodied in His Name, in the language of the Slavic people. This generated communion between the text and its subjects, allowing for a national inflection to Christianity, creating the conditions for, and effectively authoring, the Russian Orthodox faith. Therefore, this feat exists, next to Sergius’, as another paragon of Nesterov’s creative aspirations.

Russia’s 988 Christianization, nearly one thousand years following the birth of Christ, represents a foundational moment in the emergence of Holy Rus’. The existence of Sergius, climaxing in his virtuous and momentous operations at his Trinity Lavra, reiterates and re-presents this constitutional moment. Sergius constructed in his monastic order, through the materials of the land and of his disciples, a microcosmic reaffirmation of Russia’s religious birth. In representing these moments of the saint’s life as they recalled the earliest days of the nation’s Orthodoxy, Nesterov too sought to restage this twin birth of Russia’s most sacred foundational episodes, thereby reminding his own audience of its godly inheritance towards another spiritual reawakening.

166 167

Florensky, Beyond Vision, 101.

Florensky, 119.

113 Fundamentally, Nesterov’s palette was the medium of his inspired project. The combination of contemporaneous schematics of color, his own familiarity with both iconographic canon and creation, and the resolute independence of his passionately devout artistic vision informed Nesterov’s entirely original color vocabulary. And this symbolic spectrum, as the synthesis of a profusion of historic, national, and theological influences, activated by the flame of Nesterov’s religious creative ethos and telos, stands as his very own cultural microcosm as it united body and biography, land and a sacred ahistory, spirit and the divine, for the transformation of his compatriots.

In Living Color During his first attempt at the Vision of the Boy Bartholomew, Nesterov, recovering from illness and depression towards the close of the 1880’s, mistakenly tore his canvas midway through his efforts.168 The determined artist immediately recommenced work on what would become the final canvas, but kept the original.169 This painting is deeply illuminating as to Nesterov’s technical process: instead of the underpainting and shading of different paints across distinct areas of the picture, typical for large-scale oil paintings of this sort, Nesterov works intricately from the outside in, relying only on the charcoal design for the direction of his brush and color. Completing the background, secondary elements first, he was working towards the central lichnoe of his scene. He appears to follow the icon-painter’s method of building the canvas. One can also see that he had only just begun the coloring of the monk, the dark peak of his hood reflecting the points of the distant emerald pines, his pale, yellow nimbus translucent against the light fading green of the forested hilly background.

Nesterov described his process in painting the Vision, writing, “in those days, I lived only the picture…When not painting, I did not exist.” The act of painting possessed him body and mind; consumed by his work, Nesterov gave himself over to this inauguration of his Cycle, the burgeoning of his nationally rejuvenating mission. “I paint Bartholomew’s head, the most critical part of the painting. The head accomplished, the 168

Rusakova, Mikhail Nesterov, 184.

In 1927, Nesterov gifted the unfinished Vision to the Bashkir State Art Museum in his hometown of Ufa, where it remains to this day.

169

114 picture is there.”170 The youth’s face provides the scene with its holy countenance.

Though some of its audiences objected to the monk’s nimbus as the incongruous iconographic feature of the painting, what they failed to comprehend was the totalized religiosity of the composition. The radiant landscape is lit from within, the sky white and pure, and the future Sergius’ countenance pale, large-eyed, sober, divine, above his clasped hands.

Figure 19. Vision of the Boy Bartholomew. First unfinished version (1889), Mikhail Nesterov, oil and charcoal on canvas

From the two Visions, both unfinished and final, one can observe the green that had come to dominate Nesterov’s repertoire of colors. Where Florensky and Bely conceived of God in terms of gold and white light, Nesterov conceived of Him as the distinct animating force behind his beloved Russian landscape. Central to his transcendent artistic objective was the synthesis of divinity and nature, each of which he saw as productive of the other. Moreover, the land, as an embodiment of the resilient soul of the Russian people, achieves vigorous expression in the varied shades of Nesterov’s vibrant greens. One would be hard-pressed to find a single landscape of Nesterov’s that doesn’t feature to a significant, even if spatially reduced, degree his vivid green touch.

170

Nesterov, Davnie Dni, 158.

115 Even his panoramas of northern winters, in which the earth is blanketed in pure white snow, feature the somber tones of evergreen pines.

Nesterov’s verdant grounds are only heightened in his subsequent scene of the young monk in his Youth of St. Sergius of Radonezh. The vision of Sergius in eremitic solitude amidst Nesterov’s virginal, atemporal Slavic terrain, subdued bear at his left, features a glowing grassy foreground upon which yellow and blue wildflowers signal a warm and bountiful shift from the yellowed autumnal landscape of its predecessor. Here stands the saint in his early divine glory, at one with the landscape. He is donned in pure white, echoed by the trunks of the luminous pale birches at his back and the small dwelling beyond; his brown bast shoes initiate a lower, earthly plane in the mahogany tones of the bear and the darker tree stumps behind. The multi-hued greenery overwhelms the canvas, preventing any patch of sky from breaking through; however, now Sergius has achieved a nimbus, a sign of his activated sanctity, and its subtle blue shade recalls the absent azure of the heavens, a symbolic element which is confirmed in the muted blues of the small dome and cross at the top of his monastic dwelling in the background.

Nesterov hereby employs color to unifying and metaphorical effect: the saint and nature are radiating from the same vivifying force, as the overwhelming green of eternal fertility and creation provides the environs for a modeling of earth, pure human spirit, and heaven in the Russian saint himself.

Where Kandinsky’s green, in his alphabet of geometric form and hue, confronts the viewer with a psychic deceleration and halt as the “most restful color,” Nesterov’s breathing green landscape rouses the spirit. His Youth’s peaceful effect issues not from, as Kandinsky lays out, the mutual immobilization of an excentric, forward thrusting yellow by a concentric, inward turning blue, but by a multilayered, multi-textured expansion of a nation in full bloom. Each shade of the fecund landscape, from the rich greens of the grass, to the delicate lime bursts of foliage of the left-hand sapling upon which two small birds perch, to the rich olives and emeralds of the leafy wall of trees that constitute the final plane, is working in unison to produce a melodious, cohesive environment. Moreover, the conventional iconographic application of green as representative of fertility, immortality, nature, and the Holy Spirit resonates loudly in Nesterov’s canvases. Looking back, one observes the dark green of the palm foliage in

116 the icon of the Entry into Jerusalem, and the green of the leaves of the Oak of Mamre in Rublyov’s Trinity. Additionally, the green outer robes over the blue inner garment of the Trinity’s Holy Spirit symbolize regenerative life in communion with heaven and nature.

Therefore, the greens of Nesterov’s imagery testify to the ends of his aesthetic mission; the creative, life-giving charge of the color destines it as the vehicle of his blessed Russian landscape.

Figure 20. The Youth of St. Sergius of Radonezh (1892-7), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas

Nesterov’s following triptych of the Labors of St. Sergius, completed the same year as his Youth, presents the saint in different stages of his life, A) in the early offices of his monastic life as he carries water, B) as he aids in the construction of his Trinity Lavra, chopping wood, and C) as an aged man, walking with a staff throughout the snowcovered grounds of his completed monastery. Each panel transmits a discrete era of Sergius’ life, not only through action but in the details of his dress, his physical features, and the landscape as well. In the first, left-hand panel, Sergius, a young man shoulders two heavy loads of water, walking up the incline of a grassy hill. The vertical composition is crossed repeatedly by rolling hills which, almost neon in their vibrant greenery, stretch far into the horizon before terminating in a swath of muted green forest while another bank of hills, here a distant blue, separates the earth from the dusky yellow

117 strip of sky. Next, the central panel shows Sergius, saw in hand, bent over a trunk midcut, the other handle of the saw shared by a young boy, extending beyond the right periphery, whose profile and forearms alone are visible. Around Sergius, his fellow laborers carry and pile logs in the building up of the monastery. The surrounding grassy expanse is considerably less extreme; the land is now the theater for Sergius’ activational creation, and the vibrancy of the first panel, evocative of a summery abundance, is subdued in the yellowing foreground and the browning crowns of the distant trees. They roll across the composition again, zigzagging in a crawl to the fore. And finally, at the left, the aged Sergius appears to trace a line of impressions in the snow with his gaze. The third panel repeats the landscape of the second panel, a sort of before and after of the Trinity Lavra during and following its erection.

Summer, autumn, and winter occur in the respective scenes, yet years pass between each episode. The rusty full beard of the water-bearing Sergius is followed by the darker one of his future self, whose sober and sunken profile are markers of his toils.

Finally, the white and gray-bearded Sergius of the right panel, here re-assuming his typical iconographic representation, appears in the winter. This temporal friction, successive seasons symbolizing the passage of decades, only serves the vision of eternal time that defines Nesterov’s landscapes. Additionally, the right-ward progression of the saint in the first two panels culminates in the left-ward orientation and gaze of the elder Sergius. In the inclination of his hooded head, Sergius appears to look back across his timeline, appraising the legacy of his work. This brings the three Sergiuses, an incarnation of the Trinity, together in time, as each exists simultaneously and eternally.

Furthermore, the nimbi of each, tinged with blue, yellow, and red respectively, compose, in the fundamental primary colors, a trinity. In iconographic terms, the heavenly blue of the former, the earthly yellow of the second, and the authoritative and redemptive red of the third are reflected in their horizons – the blue stretch of hills under a yellow sky is repeated partly in the central panel, though the latter features a greater encroachment of emerald trees. The final panel shows a dusky pink sky above the red-tinged halo of the aged saint.

Returning to Epiphanius’ text, in his development of a scopic universe, a synesthetic dimension emerges. This sensory proliferation is echoed in Nesterov’s

118 paintings in the Cycle in which, through the maximization of the resplendence of Russian nature and its central saint, multiple perceptive sites are activated. Epiphanius works to create a written system in which the vehicles of the divine tenor are overburdened by their sacred charges. The profusion of divine sense cannot be contained in one realm alone but must overflow into the next, the agricultural accommodating the political, the auditory conscripting the gustatory, and so on. A primary motif of this divine synesthesia is the sweetness of divinity. This sensory confusion occurs at the boy Bartholomew’s tasting of the bread, which produces “a sweetness of honey” when the monk reveals to him his fate and in the “sweet odor”171 that suffuses the chapel and its surrounds at Sergius’ taking of the sacrament at his tonsure. At the same time, the subtlety and halftones of his paints manifest a tender divine beauty.

In Nesterov’s Labors, a psychosensory synesthetic appeal is carried out in the work of the saint. The profusion of activity in the triptych presents Sergius modeling ideal physical practices in a northern landscape over-brimming with divinity. Sergius’ monastic mission is expressed in Nesterov’s painted restaging of Sergius’ original creative, transformative activity through his charity and construction of his Lavra. The kinesthetics of Nesterov’s Sergius achieve a similar appeal to the viewer-directed and excentric applications of Kandinsky’s “warm” colors, such as yellow. Indeed, the dynamic labor of Nesterov’s first two scenes in the green-dominant landscapes seems, in juxtaposition with the reflective snowy scene of the senior Sergius, to look back on his life in reflection. He appears washed in a physical yellow glow, while the blue-tinged furrows of the snowy landscape concentrate in shadow the cool aerial solemnity of the scene. Here Kandinsky’s somatic effects and color movements map onto the triptych. As the viewer regards the complete work, the eye comes to rest on the right-most panel as it seems to provide a terminating moment of repose, the cold-toned contemplative state, before the yellowed foregrounds of the grassy landscapes to the left once more impose the activity of Sergius’ ideal industry upon the viewer. Meanwhile, the white smoke rising from the right panel’s chimneys, nearly imperceptible against the snowy roofs and

171

Epiphanius the Wise, “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh,” 268.

119 the rosy sky around the three white spires of the church, climbs towards heaven like the smoke of the liturgical censer.

Figure 21. Labors of St. Sergius of Radonezh, triptych (1896-7), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas

The final chapter of the Cycle drawing on the Epiphanius text and executed at the close of the nineteenth century was the Venerable St. Sergius. The painting follows a nearly identical compositional scheme as that of Nesterov’s Youth of St. Sergius, as it was painted upon an earlier, unused version on the theme. This depiction of the saint in the landscape around Sergiyev Posad, however, casts a markedly solemn tone upon the northern landscape, which had appeared to hum with life in the earlier installments of the cycle. An 1890 gouache study for the painting shows a roughly sketched Sergius, perched haphazardly upon its first flat plane. A chapel in white, its right-hand façade washed with a hasty light blue, stands at his back but does not feature in the final product, nor does the intensity of the green and blue gouache hues used in the plan. Instead, the subdued landscape, punctuated by thin, bare trees, signals an imminent winter. The lively white structure of the gouache study is substituted in final oils by a remote complex of small buildings in his monastery, itself effected in pale cool greens that join it with the surrounding greens of the landscape. The brightest geographic concentration appears in the second rolling hill behind the foreground. The short, dry grass upon which Sergius stands is pale and punctuated by the white-yellows and browns of the looming barren months, rather than the joyful floral messengers of a promising spring. The tone of the

120 canvas provides a fitting close to Nesterov’s nineteenth century in which he suffered episodes of doubt amongst his strong religious convictions in the sanctity of his project.

Plagued with uncertainty about his viability as artist to realize his spiritual mission, he produced this temperate exercise.

Here, planes are particularly flat, and cloaked in a mysterious quality that seems to invoke the “atmospheric dust” of Florensky and Bely. However, a most significant development in this canvas is Sergius’ nimbus. Unlike the translucent spheres worn by Sergius in the earlier paintings in the Cycle, the halo here appears flat and opaque, a white disk rimmed with the finest edge of gold. Looking back to the origins of the cycle, we observe the steady increase of the halo’s presence, from the barely perceptible light wash of the monk’s adorning nimbus to the thin, sky-blue ring of the Youth, through to the three primary hues of Sergius in his Labors the blurred circumferences of which make them appear emanations of pure colored light. This sequence culminates at last in the final nimbus: the solid, frozen surface of the Venerable St. Sergius’ countenance, ever pale and sallow, is only distinguished from the reflected pale white of the halo by the framing of his beard and black vestments. This converging point of the canvas becomes its spiritual motivator and nexus; reexamining the environs, a quiet but unshakeable force seems to run through the white pillar of his robed body cloaked in the green of his outer clothes and of the landscape, now joined as one.

This white-gold nimbus follows most closely the iconographic conventions of light and form, and echoes the theologically founded postulations of Florensky and Bely in their equivalences of gold, white, and the Uncreated Light of Tabor. The lone figure invigorates his environs through his pious, deferent stillness, transmitting in his posture and gaze an ideal hesychast modality. Aesthetic appreciation breeds contemplation; Nesterov’s green achieves a polyphony of permutations, each joining together in harmonious unison towards the elaboration and celebration of a spiritually charged though presently subdued land. As Sergius’ enlarged blue eyes peer upwards from beneath his dark hood, lips pursed and visage drawn, he seems to peer into the uncertainties of the coming age, amidst a fourteenth century Russian landscape prone to any form of imposition or attack. At the same time, Nesterov stood at the precipice of a twentieth century bristling for the upheaval of identities and beliefs he held most dear; his

121 Venerable St. Sergius, therefore, exists as a model of unity and repose in the face of national and spiritual uncertainty, seeking to face its Russian viewers with the quiet nobility of their spirit, announcing that they are the inheritors of this perfection on earth.

Figure 22. Venerable St. Sergius of Radonezh (1891-9), Mikhail Nesterov, oil on canvas

Of course, Orthodox eschatological suppositions, illuminated in Bely’s “Sacred Colors,” are repeatedly prophesied in Nesterov’s pre-modern scenery in which the utter suffusion of each scene with the colors of the Russian land concede only to holy architecture and body, and are nonetheless deeply connected with each. In the white façade of a monastic cell or chapel, or in the blue and white draperies of religious uniforms, the glory of the Russian landscape is not dulled or diminished but amplified and reflected. Bely’s gray devil is decisively absent from Nesterov’s Cycle; his project of representation is one of affirmation, harmony, brimming with positive terminology – a window into Holy Rus’, an escape from a prosaic present. Nesterov offers a non-mimetic restatement of a sacred Russian past whose colors and forms together appear that much finer, that much more radiant, yet nearly material, only so tangible so as to incorporate and pursue their messages of the divine. These delicate yet vibrant smatterings of wildflowers, the boldly tinged nimbi, a vast catalogue of greens that, in its seemingly infinite store of gradations in the Cycle, could constitute an entire sacred index in itself, are the tools Nesterov chose in the pursuit of an absolution of self and state. The eternal

122 colors gave voice to the painter, were the raw materials of his praxis, as, in life and in paint, he labored for the generation of a holy archetype.

Final Motif In defining Nesterov’s Saint Sergius Cycle, the focus rests always on the eponymous figure as the primary connecting thread among the paintings, his mission informing the unfolding of the painted narrative. Yet a profusion of harmonizing elements that confer not only aesthetic but semantic cohesion across the grounds of the paintings also serve to unite the cycle under one coherent whole across the many decades of its composition. Just as in the icon the living character of the landscape and religious architecture and the conventionality of its figures serve to define its particular aims and meanings, so too are these elements vital to the motivation of Nesterov’s work in the Sergius Cycle. The developmental progression, through certain recurrent and individual features, provides both chronological and spiritual information.

Throughout the works, Nesterov recalls various iconographic elements: features of landscape include hills, trees, and a path to represent the natural world created by God. The human world is represented by a church, either in the distant background or prominently featured in juxtaposition with the figure of the saint. The clothing unambiguously codes the subject’s age and the particular spiritual grade he has attained at each stage of his life. Nesterov’s representations also migrate the language of gesture and stance from icons and ecclesiastical ritual to specify the particular aspect of his subject’s piety: acolyte, monk, abbot. Each painting also presents one of the canonical episodes or topoi represented in the genre of hagiographic icons. These render the events in a saint’s life that mark the stages in his imitatio Christi, or imitation of Christ, referring the particularity of the human subject’s life to the paradigmatic plot of the life of the Savior. The Vision’s child Bartholomew is rendered in the pose of the communicant, standing with lowered head and hands clasped in prayer, waiting to receive the sacramental bread. He strikes the humble pose of the supplicant, asking for grace and instruction. In Nesterov’s Youth, the saint is presented as the newly tonsured monk. He raises his eyes in pious prayer and opens one hand to confer his first blessing upon a congregation beyond the visual field that opens up to include the spectator. Behind him

123 stands the church in which, we are to infer, he has been initiated into his mission. The presence of the supine and benevolent bear, the hagiographic topos of the saint taming a wild beast, is a sign of divine grace, indexing his miraculous immunity from physical dangers that threaten normal humans. The Labors then relate the saint’s vita activa, his work in constructing an earthly “City of God” in Russia. In one painting, he is hauling water in buckets suspended from a yoke. Each element carries a symbolic meaning: the yoke refers to his life of service, while the water speaks of his dual mission: to provide spiritual life by offering the sacrament of Baptism through water, and to provide material sustenance to the monks in his charge as abbot. In the central image, Sergius is shown in three quarter profile drawing one end of a saw across a log. His occupation as carpenter here evokes Christ as his prototype. Sergius is shown here surrounded, as is the Gospel Christ, with his disciples, who are harmoniously engaged in raising the edifice of the church. Lastly, Nesterov includes canonic gesture in his Venerable Saint Sergius, as the saint’s hand on his heart acts as marker of his divine love.

Additionally, the character of the foliage reverberates across the Cycle, tying together in its multiplicity of forms the various emblems and ages of the Russian land. To begin, Nesterov’s oak in the Vision recalls the origins of the nation’s landscape in its recollection of Rublyov’s Oak of Mamre in the Trinity icon. This motif is employed throughout Russian history as symbol of the nation’s biblical consciousness and religiosity. Meanwhile, the trio of saplings at the young Bartholomew’s back prophecies his future divinity. The affinity between the Youth and the elder Venerable scene is generated by the fact of their same compositional plan; both feature in their corner a budding spruce, the nascent trees evoking the immense potentiality of the Russian land.

And finally, the motif of the path provides a central unifying element that motivates the paintings of the Cycle from within, both formally and symbolically, imposing both a sacred and a national teleology. The path is sometimes featured prominently in the landscape, sometimes implied in the cuts of the hills, or in an orderly disruption in the pattern of vegetation at the saint’s feet. In all cases, however, the path, whether explicit or implied, organizes the space into discrete functional zones. In the Vision, for example, the serpentine trail emerges from beneath the hill in which the young saint and aged monk stand, then meanders from left to right, ascending, and, as it does so,

124 separating the river and forested slopes of a hill on the left from the plowed fields and church on the right. These three zones are unified in the figure of the young saint, at whose head the spaces of uncultivated nature, civilization, and religion meet. The tripartite segmentation of the landscape can be read in three allegorical ways, each recalling a theme from Epiphanius’ hagiographic text: Sergius as builder of Russia, as missionary and Christianizer, and finally, as follower in Christ’s path. Furthermore, the path symbolically articulates space into the zones of the transcendent, church and sky; the phenomenal, agricultural and regenerative nature; and the human, the zone of potential and mediation through which history – both national and sacred – is performed.

In two paintings, the Labors of St. Sergius and the Venerable St. Sergius, the path is either an element of the distant background, or emerges as a momentary interruption of the stacking of hills and fields. In both of these paintings the subject is seen from above, with the vantage point situated at a considerable height from the plane on which the saint is standing. In his Labors, the saint, incongruously clad in full ecclesiastical regalia, is first a water carrier. His gaze is directed downward to his right as though he is studying some element of the topography, gauging the lay of the land, perhaps considering whether the soil needs irrigation. One of his water buckets is inscribed with the cross, while the other is blank. Again, the dual mission – of the cultivation of the land and of the spirit – is suggested, and conveys the saint’s engagement in his vocation at the age of mature manhood. In the Venerable St. Sergius, Nesterov makes use of a similarly physically elevated vantage point. The path is glimpsed only for a moment as it winds from behind the curve of the raised central hill, continues in a single arc and recedes into the bank of dense forested brush behind the viewer’s field of vision.

This scene renders Nesterov’s vision of Sergius at the very turn of the century from a strikingly different orientation. The saint is now shown as seen from a lofty perspective, suggesting that the road – if one exists – before him will involve a steep climb. The saint’s upward gaze does not communicate the rapture of a mystical vision or the ecstasy of prayer, nor does it convey the absolute confidence and clarity of vision that comes with faith. Rather, his facial expression is enigmatic and confronts the viewer with a series of questions. Does the saint perceive some destination in real space? Is he glimpsing a vision of a distant time? Has he just left behind the church that is faintly

125 visible in the distance, or is he anticipating his return? Is he diverted from the obscured path, or has he endeavored to follow it past our line of sight? In his painting, Nesterov, himself poised between worlds, braced against the swift approach of modernity, is situated in a moment of liminality: between faith and doubt, Sergius’ iconically enlarged blue eyes and pursed lips anticipate the gravity of the mission ahead, yet, equipped to climb, staff in hand, he meets the viewer frontally. Sergius stands facing his audience, heels together, feet splayed, hand upon his chest, ready to embark upon a mission for which he is willing to sacrifice both body and spirit.

Coda In reading Mikhail Nesterov’s painted cycle on the life of Saint Sergius of Radonezh through the selective filter of significant moments in the history of Russian painting, I sought to underscore its “synthetic” nature. By this I mean that the paintings themselves not only record a particular interpretation of “Russianness” as compounded of Orthodox piety, the concept of the “soil,” and the historical mission of Russia that rehearses some of the major ideological themes of the fin-de-siècle Russian intelligentsia, but that in their aesthetic techniques, style, and painterly devices these paintings simultaneously instantiate the practice of the key movements of Russian art.

At the time of the revolutions of 1905, Nesterov became increasingly disillusioned with the ability of current artistic movements to effect the vital epiphany he felt was needed to redirect the Russian public, under the sway of violent forces beyond its control, towards a proper, pious course. His Holy Rus’ (1901-5) initiated his development, of a new, more enigmatic style of religious painting, much of which he would have to carry out privately in the coming years of revolution and eventual Soviet dominion. His Holy Rus’, however, also served to carry his beloved Saint Sergius into the twentieth century. The scene features a procession of Russian people, crossing the snowy northern landscape towards Christ; among the trio of holy figures at his back, Sergius stands at the very forefront.

His final known document of Sergius came decades later. By this time, despite his former reputation as a fundamentally religious painter, he was able to continue to achieve national acclaim in the Soviet state through the double-coding of his aesthetic program, now dominated by portraiture, as both spiritual and nationalistic. His Christ Blesses Bartholomew (1926), however, presents an anachronistic, religious, pastoral scene in which a haloed Christ, robed in deep burgundy and black, bestows his blessing upon the young boy. The scene recalls his Vision, performing again the conferral of divine grace by the patriarch upon his devout subject in the Russian landscape. His hand rests at Bartholomew’s temple, Bartholomew’s at his heart. A communion, from the birth of Christianity to its ideal implementation in Sergius’ Rus’, is formed.

128 Though Nesterov managed to evade severe Soviet persecution – he was imprisoned briefly at Moscow’s Butyrka Prison in 1925, likely for his support of the deposed, then deceased, Patriarch Tikhon – and in fact achieved considerable distinction under Soviet rule, receiving the Stalin Prize in 1941 for his portrait of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1935), and subsequently the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, many of his colleagues, friends, and family were not as fortunate. Nesterov labored on his religious subjects away from the inquisitive eye of the state, and his public body of work, in its espousal of the virtues of the industrious Russian human soul and landscape, its glorification of the cult of Rus’, aligned with the nationalistic idealism of the state and the precepts of its Soviet Realism. However, Nesterov was forced to contend with the execution of his son-in-law, Viktor Schreter, accused of espionage in 1938, and the subsequent imprisonment of his eldest daughter, Olga, at Zhambyl. She was released three years later at the intercession of Nesterov and esteemed friends, but, due to an illness suffered at the prison camp, remained physically debilitated for the rest of her life.

In 1937, Florensky, friend and spiritual council to the now aged Nesterov, was condemned to death. His final months at Solovki saw the selfless continuation of his scientific labor for the state in the laboratories of the gulag, as well as a more private altruism, as he distributed the remnants of his own bread among his fellow starving inmates. Survivor accounts describe Florensky’s path through the labor camp, as the guards carried him out of the prison and towards his execution; the journey of the modern martyr, upon a recapitulated Via Dolorosa, was met with awe and piety as “hundreds of prisoners” prostrated themselves before “their spiritual father.” Holy acts and lives are mapped one upon the other, consecrating their authors and transforming their beholders; after Christ, Sergius, Rublyov, Florensky, Nesterov – each artist and conduit embodies or stages a moment, crystallizing divinity for the enlightenment of his beloved people. Art, life, and sacred prototype converged as on the eighth of December, 1937, “as if before the very Cross itself,” the inmates of Solovki “knelt in the presence of this accomplished Mystery.”172

172

Donald Sheehan, “Introduction,” in Iconostasis, 1st THUS edition (Crestwood, N.Y: Oakwood Publications, 1996), 23-4.

129 Of his originary Vision, Nesterov would say, “I won’t live long. ‘Young Bartholomew’ will. Even thirty, fifty years after my death, he will still be discussed, and so he will live, and me with him.”173 Even as the possibilities for a public spiritual regeneration seemed to grow ever more unlikely, Nesterov found solace in the idea of his art as a repository of life. In his works, Nesterov sought to fan the flames of an inextinguishable light of Russian, Orthodox identity founded upon the “organization of love.” And this he accomplished – earnestly, religiously, devoutly – in his restaging of the spiritual lives of Russia, her divine and self-sacrificing subjects, and of himself that would survive the material demands and insufficiencies of this world.

173

“Мемория. Михаил Нестеров - ПОЛИТ.РУ,” http://polit.ru/news/2014/05/31/nesterov/.

Bibliography Anagnostopoulos, Thalia. “Aristotle and Byzantine Iconoclasm.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, vol. 53, 2013, pp. 763–90.

Antonova, Clemena. Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God. Ashgate PubLtd, 2010.

Atroshchenko, Olga. “From Biography to Hagiography. The Russian Intelligentsia in Mikhail Nesterov’s Work | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine.” Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 24 Apr. 2014.

Bely, Andrey. “Sacred Colors (Священные Цвета).” World of Art, no. 5 (written 1903, pub. 1904). http://az.lib.ru/b/belyj_a/text_07_1903_arabesky.shtml.

Bely, Andrey. Selected Essays of Andrey Bely. Translated by Steven Cassedy. University of California Press, 1985.

Betancourt, Rosa, and Taroutina, Maria, editors. “Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity.” Vol. 12, Brill, 2015.

Birkett, G. A. “Moscow, 1147-1947.” Slavonic and East European Review; London, Etc. 25 (January 1, 1946): 336–355.

Bobrovskaya, Lyudmila. “The Portraits of Mikhail Nesterov | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine.” Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 12 Jan. 2014.

Bowlt, John E. "Russian Symbolism and the 'Blue Rose' Movement." The Slavonic and East European Review 51, no. 123 (1973): 161-81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4206705.

Brown, Barbara Ann. “From Populism to Symbolism: Silver Age Discourse on the Nature of Russian Symbolism.” Epiphany 6.2 (2014): n. pag. epiphany.ius.edu.ba.

Bubchikova, Anastasia. “Mikhail Nesterov as Muralist and Icon Painter | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine.” Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 10 Jan. 2014.

132 Bychkov, V. V. (Viktor Vasilʹevich). The Aesthetic Face of Being: Theology of Pavel Florensky. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.

Cherniavsky, Michael. “‘Holy Russia’: A Study in the History of an Idea.” The American Historical Review 63.3 (1958): 617–637. Web. Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. Routledge, 2017.

Cioran, Samuel David. The Apocalyptic Symbolism of Andrej Belyj. Berlin/Boston, Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 1973. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/reed/detail.action?docID=3040706.

Costlow, Jane Tussey). “Beyond the Shattered Image: Mikhail Nesterov’s Epiphanic Woodlands.” Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest. Cornell University Press, 2013. 147–182. quod.lib.umich.edu. Web. Dianina, Katia. "Museum and Message: Writing Public Culture in Imperial Russia." The Slavic and East European Journal 56, no. 2 (2012): 173-95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41698471.

Efird, Robert. “Andrey Rublev: Transcendental Style and the Creative Vision.” Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 35, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 86–93.

Ekshtut, Semyon. “The Patriarch of Russian Painting.” Russian Life; Montpelier 45.4 (2002): 34–45. Print.

Epiphanius the Wise. “The Life, Acts, and Miracles of Our Blessed and Holy Father Sergius of Radonezh.” In Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, edited

by Serge A. Zenkovsky, Revised & Enlarged edition., 262–90. New York: Meridian, 1974.

Esparza, Daniel. “What Do the Hand Gestures in Icons Mean?,” Aleteia — Catholic Spirituality, Lifestyle, World News, and Culture, June 12, 2016 Florensky, P. A. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Reaktion, 2002.

Florensky, P. A. Iconostasis. Trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev. 1st THUS edition. Crestwood, N.Y: Oakwood Publications, 1996. Print.

133 Florensky, P. A. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Princeton University Press, 1997.

Florensky, Pavel. “The Trinity - St Sergius Lavra and Russia.” Translated by Robert Bird. Vol. 1. Variable Readings in Russian Philosophy. The Variable Press, 1995.

Grover, Stuart R. "The World of Art Movement in Russia." The Russian Review 32, no.

1 (1973): 28-42. doi:10.2307/128091.

Hilton, Alison. "The Exhibition of Experiments in St. Petersburg and the Independent Sketch." The Art Bulletin 70, no. 4 (1988): 677-98. doi:10.2307/3051108.

Ignatenko, Svetlana. “Nesterov and Ufa | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine.” Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 10 Jan. 2014. Web. Ivanov, Mikhail. "In the land of magic art. (Abramtsevo Estate)." Russian Life, March 2002, 44+. Academic OneFile. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A84237540/AONE?u=s8888903&sid=AONE &xid=3bb816c4.

Iovleva, Lydia. “Mikhail Nesterov in Search of His Russia | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine.” 9 Jan. 2014. Web. Ivanova, Olga. “Mikhail Nesterov’s Family in His Art | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine.” Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 11 Jan. 2014. Web. Jackson, David L. The Wanderers and Critical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art. Manchester University Press, 2006. Print.

Kahla, Elina. “Art as Glorious Deed: Creating the Community of Martha and Mary in Moscow.” The Russian Review, vol. 66, no. 1, 2007, pp. 73–94.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Dover Publications, 1977.

Karg, Josephine. “The Role of Russian Symbolist Painting for Modernity: Mikhail Vrubel’s Reduced Forms.” In The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art, 1st ed.

London: Routledge, 2015.

Klimov, Pavel. “Mikhail Nesterov. Quiet Truths | The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine.”

Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 13 Feb. 2016. Web.

134 Kovalevsky, Pierre. Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Print.

Kuprin, I.V. “Features of Ancient Russian Icon Painting (Особенности Древнерусской Иконописи).” Русский Язык За Рубежом, no. 1 (2016). http://www.russianedu.ru/russia/about/ikon.html.

Laos, Nicolas. The Metaphysics of World Order: A Synthesis of Philosophy, Theology, and Politics. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015.

Lebedev, Andrey. The Itinerants. Revised Edition. Leningrad: Pan Books, 1982. Print.

Lermontov, Mikhail. “The Demon.” In Narrative Poems by Alexander Pushkin & Mikhail Lermontov, 1st edition. New York: Random House, 1983.

Lerner, Vladimir, and Eliezer Witztum. “The Appearance of the Artist to the People: The Creativity, Personality and Malady of Alexander Ivanov (1806-58).” Journal of Medical Biography; London, vol. 13, no. 1, Feb. 2005, pp. 49–57.

Malmstad, John E. Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism. Studies of the Harriman Institute.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Russian and Soviet Painting: An Exhibition from the Museums of the USSR Presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977. Print. “Мемория. Михаил Нестеров - ПОЛИТ.РУ.” http://polit.ru/news/2014/05/31/nesterov/. Михайлов (Mikhailov), Алексей. Михаил Васильевич Нестеров. Жизнь и Творчество. 1958.

Miller, David B. Saint Sergius of Radonezh, His Trinity Monastery, and the Formation of the Russian Identity. Northern Illinois University Press, 2010.

Nesterov, Mikhail Vasilʹevich, and Pigarev, Kirill V. Davnie Dni: Vstrechi i Vospominaniia 2. izd.]. ed., Iskusstvo, 1959.

Nichols, Aidan. Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893-1966). CUP Archive, 1989. Print.

135 O’Regan, Cyril. Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic. Marquette University Press, 2009. Print.

Parpulov, Georgi R., Irinia V. Dolgikh, and Peter Cowe. “A Byzantine Text on the Technique of Icon Painting.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010): 201–16.

Pavlovich Kondakov, Nikodim. Icons. Parkstone International, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/reed/detail.action?docID=915185.

Pevny, Olenka. “In Solntsev’s Footsteps: Adrian Prakhov and the Representation of Kievan Rus’.” Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past.

BRILL. 85–108. Web. Pipes, Richard. “Russia’s Itinerant Painters.” Russian History 38, no. 3 (2011): 315–427.

Proffer, Carl R. and Proffer, Ellendea. The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology.

Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975. Print.

Rusakova, Alla A. Mikhail Nesterov. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1990.

Rutten, Ellen. “Mikhail Nesterov and Aleksandr Blok: Feminizing Russian Landscape around 1900.” The Slavonic and East European Review 84.2 (2006): 237–255.

JSTOR. Web. Rylkova, Galina. The Archaeology of Anxiety: the Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy.

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.

Salmond, Wendy R. “Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870-1917. Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity.” Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Strakhovsky, Leonid I. “The Silver Age of Russian Poetry: Symbolism and Acmeism.”

Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 4 (1959): 61–87.

JSTOR. Web. Stresova, Anita. “Byzantine Hesychasm in the 14th and 15th Centuries.” In Hesychasm and Art: The Appearance of New Iconographic Trends in Byzantine and Slavic Lands in the 14th and 15th Centuries. ANU Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13www4f.9.

136 Siljak, Ana. “Sigmund Freud, Sublimation, and the Russian Silver Age.” Modern Intellectual History, 2017, pp. 1–28., doi:10.1017/S1479244317000105.

Taroutina, Maria. “Iconic Encounters: Vasily Kandinsky’s and Pavel Florensky’s ‘Mystic Productivism.’” Postmedieval; Basingstoke, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 5565. ProQuest, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2015.48.

Uspensky, Boris Andreevich. The Semiotics of the Russian Icon. PdR Press Publications in Semiotics of Art ; 3. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976, p. 34.

Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl. Russian Realist Art: The State and Society : The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition. Ardis, 1977. Print.

Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl, et al. The Wanderers: Masters of 19th-Century Russian Painting : An Exhibition from the Soviet Union. Dallas Museum of Art, 1990.

Wachtel, Michael. Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of Vyacheslav Ivanov. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Waintrub, Alexander. “Speaking Icons.” Word & Image, vol. 18, no. 3 (Apr. 2012): 99-104.

Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity. 3rd Revised edition, Penguin Books, 2015.

Wenham, David, and A. D. A. Moses. “‘There Are Some Standing Here....’: Did They Become the ‘Reputed Pillars’ of the Jerusalem Church? Some Reflections on Mark 9:1, Galatians 2:9 and the Transfiguration.” Novum Testamentum 36, no. 2 (1994): 146–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/1561531.

West, James. “The Poetic Landscape of the Russian Symbolists.” Forum for Modern Language Studies XI, no. 4 (October 1, 1975): 289-304. https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/XI.4.289.

Wright, A. C. “Some Aspects of 20th Century Russian Painting.” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 11.4 (1969): 407–423. JSTOR. Web. Yiannias, John. “Orthodox Art and Architecture - Liturgy & Worship - Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.” https://www.goarch.org/-/orthodox-art-and-architecture.