Barge Haulers on the Volga is painted in such a way that your first instinct is to look away. Twelve men drag a barge. Heat. Dust. Their faces are a whole literature on what crushing labor does to a human being.
Repin painted them in 1873, at twenty-nine. For two years before that he had traveled the Volga, sketching, talking with the haulers. He wanted to know who they were. They turned out to be all different: a former soldier, a defrocked priest, a boy who had somehow washed up among them.
Ilya Yefimovich Repin was born in 1844 in Chuguev, in the Kharkov region, the son of a military settler. He learned to draw from a local icon painter. In 1864 he entered the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg — and quickly became the best student of his generation. But academic painting, with its mythological subjects, left him unsatisfied. He wanted to paint Russia — alive, aching, contradictory.
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885) is a picture so terrifying that the chief procurator Pobedonostsev had it taken down from the exhibition. One man has just killed another. Both are still alive — the killer holding the dying man. This is not history; it is psychology.
The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan stands at the opposite pole: laughter, freedom, male brotherhood. Repin worked on it for twelve years, traveling to Zaporozhye expressly to study the types.
In 1900 he moved to Finland — to Kuokkala, to the estate called "Penates." There he received Gorky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. After 1918 Finland broke away, and Repin found himself an émigré against his will. In 1926 the Soviet government pressed him to come back. He refused. He died in 1930, never having returned.