He became interested.
“But where are there such masters,” he asked, “who still understand that special type?”
“Nowadays they are very rare,” I tell him (and at that time they lived in the strictest hiding). “In the village of Mstera there’s a certain master Khokhlov, but he’s now very advanced in years, he can’t be taken on a long journey. There are two men in Palekh; they, too, are unlikely to come, and besides that,” I say, “neither masters from Mstera nor masters from Palekh are any good for us.”
“Why is that, now?” he persists.
“Because,” I reply, “they don’t have the right knack: Mstera icons are drawn big-headed and the painting is muddy, and in Palekh icons there’s a turquoise tinge, everything tends towards pale blue.”
“In that case,” he says, “what’s to be done?”
“Myself,” I say, “I don’t know. I’ve often heard that there’s a good master in Moscow named Silachev: he’s known among our folk all over Russia, but his work is more in the style of the Novgorodians and the court painters in Moscow, while our icon is done in the Stroganov manner, with the brightest and richest colors, and only the master Sevastian from the lower Dniepr can please us, but he’s a passionate wanderer: he walks all over Russia doing work for the Old Believers, and where to look for him nobody knows.”
The Englishman listened with pleasure to all these reports of mine and smiled, and then replied:
“You’re quite astonishing people, and, listening to you, it’s even gratifying to realize that you know so well everything that touches on your ways and can even understand art.”
“Why shouldn’t we understand art, sir?” I say. “Artwork is a divine thing, and we have such fanciers from among the simplest muzhiks as can not only distinguish, for example, between different schools of icon painting—Ustiug or Novgorod, Moscow or Vologda, Siberia or Stroganov—but even within one and the same school can distinguish without error between the work of one well-known old Russian master and another.”
“Can it be?” he asks.
“Just like you telling one person’s handwriting from another’s,” I reply, “so they look and see at once who painted it: Kuzma, Andrei, or Prokofy.”
“By what signs?”
“There’s a difference in the way the outline is transferred, and in the layering, and in the highlighting of the face and garments.”
He goes on listening; and I tell him what I know about Ushakov’s work, and about Rublev’s, and about the most ancient Russian artist Paramshin, whose icons our pious tsars and princes gave to their children as blessings and instructed them in their wills to cherish these icons like the apple of their eye.18
The Englishman straightaway snatched out his notebook and asked me to repeat the name of the painter and where his works could be seen. And I reply:
“It’s no use, sir, to go looking for them: there’s no memory of them left anywhere.”
“What’s become of them?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “maybe they turned them into chibouks or traded them to the Germans for tobacco.”
“That can’t be,” he says.
“On the contrary,” I reply, “it’s quite possible, and there are examples of it: in Rome the pope in the Vatican has folding icons painted in the thirteenth century by the Russian icon painters Andrei, Sergei, and Nikita. This miniature with multiple figures is so astonishing, they say, that even the greatest foreign artists, looking at it, go into raptures over its wondrous workmanship.”
“But how did it end up in Rome?”
“Peter the Great made a gift of it to a foreign monk, and he sold it.”19
The Englishman smiled and fell to thinking, and then said softly that in England they keep every painting from generation to generation, and that makes clear who comes from which genealogy.
“Well, but with us,” I say, “there’s most likely a different education, and the connection with the traditions of our ancestors is broken, so that everything seems new, as if the whole Russian race had been hatched only yesterday by a hen in a nettle patch.”
“But if your educated ignorance is such,” he says, “then why are those who preserve a love for your own things not concerned with maintaining your native art?”
“We have no one to maintain it, my good sir,” I reply, “because in the new art schools everywhere a corruption of the senses is developed and the mind is given over to vanity. The model of lofty inspiration is lost, and everything is taken from the earth and breathes of earthly passion. Our newest artists started by portraying the warrior-angel Michael as Prince Potemkin of Taurida, and now they’ve gone so far that Christ the Savior is depicted as a Jew.20 What can be expected from such people? Their uncircumcised hearts may portray something even worse and worship it as a deity: in Egypt, after all, they worshipped a bull and a red onion; but we’re not going to bow down before strange gods, or take a Jewish face for the image of our Savior, and we even consider these portrayals, however artful they may be, as shameful ignorance, and we turn away from them, because our fathers said that ‘distraction of the eyes destroys the purity of reason, as a broken water pump spoils the water.’ ”
I finished with that and fell silent, but the Englishman says:
“Go on: I like the way you reason.”
“I’ve already said everything,” I reply, but he says:
“No, tell me what you mean by your notion of inspired representation.”
The question, my dear sirs, was quite difficult for a simple man, but, no help for it, I went ahead and told him how the starry sky is painted in Novgorod, and then I began to describe the decoration of St. Sophia in Kiev, where seven winged warrior-angels, who naturally do not resemble Potemkin, stand to the sides of the God of Sabaoth; and just below are the prophets and forefathers; on a lower level, Moses with the tables; still lower, Aaron in a miter and with a sprouting rod; then come King David in a crown, the prophet Isaiah with a scroll, Ezekiel with a shut gate, Daniel with a stone; and around all these who stand before God, showing us the way to heaven, are depicted the gifts through which man can reach that glorious path, namely: a book with seven seals—the gift of wisdom; a seven-branched candelabra—the gift of reason; seven eyes—the gift of counsel; seven trumpets—the gift of fortitude; a right hand amidst seven stars—the gift of vision; seven censers—the gift of piety; seven lightning bolts—the gift of the fear of God. “There,” I say, “is an uplifting picture!”
And the Englishman replies:
“Forgive me, my good man, but I don’t understand you. Why do you consider it uplifting?”
“Because this picture says clearly to the soul what a Christian ought to pray and yearn for, in order to ascend from earth to the unutterable glory of God.”
“But,” he says, “anyone can comprehend that from the Scriptures and prayers.”
“By no means, sir,” I reply. “It is not given to everyone to comprehend the Scriptures, and the uncomprehending mind can be darkened even in prayer: a man hears the exclamation, ‘Awaiting Thy great and rich mercies,’ and immediately thinks it’s about money and starts bowing greedily. But when he sees the picture of heavenly glory before him, then he thinks on the lofty prospects of life and understands how that goal is to be reached, because here everything is simple and reasonable: a man should first pray that his soul be given the gift of the fear of God, and then it will proceed lightly from step to step, assimilating at each step the superabundance of higher gifts, and in those moments of prayer, money and all earthly glory will seem to a man no more than an abomination before the Lord.”