The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The Englishman didn’t believe it, but I stepped forward and explained the whole difference to him: that nowadays the work of worldly artists is not the same; they work in oils, but for icons the colors are delicate, being mixed with egg; in oil painting the work is done in brushstrokes and looks natural only from a distance, but here the paint is applied in thin layers and is clear even close up. Besides, a worldly artist, I say, can’t transfer the drawing satisfactorily, because they’re trained to represent the flesh of the earthly, life-loving man, while in sacred Russian icon painting there is portrayed the heavenly type of the face, concerning which a material man cannot even have any real notion.

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?”