Portraits of the military gallery of the winter palace. Military gallery
- (now part of the Hermitage), a collection of portraits of Russian commanders and commanders of participants in the Patriotic War of 1812 and Foreign Campaigns of 1813 14 (written in 1819 by the English portraitist J. Doe with the participation of Russian artists V.A. ... ... Saint Petersburg (encyclopedia)
In St. Petersburg, an exposition of 322 portraits of Russian commanders of the period of the Patriotic War of 1812 and participants overseas trips Russian army 1813 14. Opened on 25.12.1826 (6.1.1827). Artists: J. Doe, A. Polyakov, V. Golike ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
In St. Petersburg, an exposition of 322 portraits of Russian military leaders during the Patriotic War of 1812 and participants in foreign campaigns Russian army 1813 1814. Opened December 25, 1826 (January 6, 1827). Artists: J. Doe, A. V. Polyakov, ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary
Military gallery of the Winter Palace ... Russian spelling dictionary
G. Chernetsov, 1827 ... Wikipedia
Military gallery Winter Palace, E. P. Hau, 1862 The Military Gallery is one of the galleries of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The gallery consists of 332 portraits of Russian generals who participated in the Patriotic War of 1812. Portraits by George Doe ... ... Wikipedia
Military gallery- of the Winter Palace (now part of the Hermitage), a collection of portraits of Russian commanders and military leaders who participated in the Patriotic War of 1812 and the Foreign Campaigns of 1813-14 (painted in 1819-28 by the English portraitist J. Doe with the participation of ... ... Encyclopedic reference book "St. Petersburg"
This term has other meanings, see Winter Palace (disambiguation). Palace Winter Palace ... Wikipedia
Mikhail Bogdanovich Barclay de Tolly Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly Fragment of the portrait of Mikhail B. Barclay de Tolly by ... Wikipedia
Books
- Military Gallery of the Winter Palace, Rennes EP. The edition is timed to the 200th anniversary of the victory of Russia in the Patriotic War of 1812. In it the reader will find images of all 336 portraits made for the Military Gallery in the 1820s. J. Doe ...
- Military Gallery of the Winter Palace, V.M. Glinka, A.V. Pomarnatsky. 1981 edition. The preservation is good. In the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace there are three hundred thirty-two portraits of the commanders of the Russian army - participants in the campaigns of 1812-1814, which began ...
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"I will take you to the museum," my sister told me ... "
Today I invite you to the museum. But, the museum is too big, so only a piece of it.
Hermitage Museum. How long have you been there? Petersburgers are infrequent, on occasion. Every few years. Sometimes - once ... in a lifetime.
This time I was amazed at the renovated Gallery. She became light again! Let's talk about her ...
Photo from the official website of the Hermitage.
Historical reference:
The military gallery of 1812 was created in 1826 according to the project of K. Rossi in the front part of the Winter Palace. It precedes the Great Throne (Georgievsky) Hall. The walls of the gallery are decorated with 12 stucco laurel wreaths with the names of the most important battles of 1812-814. More than 300 portraits represent the heroes of the war with Napoleon, who glorified Russia with their exploits.
The grand opening of the gallery took place during the reign of Nicholas I, on the anniversary of the expulsion of the French from Russia - December 25, 1826. Soldiers of cavalry and infantry regiments marched through the gallery past the portraits of military leaders, under whose command they valiantly fought in 1812-1814.
Therefore, we walk through the same hall, past the same paintings as Alexander Sergeevich!
It amazes me personally! Especially in this hall, I walk with special piety ... And I read:
Grigory Grigorievich Chernetsov sketched this in the year of its opening:
And then it was slightly reconstructed and the ceiling, for example, became different. Here is a painting by E.P. Gau, 1862.
The last reconstruction deprived us of seeing the gallery for a while.
Due to the significant deterioration of the roof of the Gallery in 1812 (the last renovation was carried out in the 1960s), the Directorate of the State Hermitage decided to reconstruct the roof and skylights. After the repair of the skylights in January 2001, the installation of a new roof began. And the ceiling shone again!
Up to the ceiling - portraits of Heroes.
For example, Golenishchev-Kutuzov. But, not the same, not field marshal Mikhail Illarionovich, he is in the next picture. And Pavel Vasilievich, then became the military governor-general of St. Petersburg, is also cool!
And here, for example, a representative of a glorious surnamePalen Pavel Petrovich von der
(1775-1834), Count, General of the Cavalry (still Lieutenant General). Interestingly, he is also the son of the military governor-general of St. Petersburg P.A. von der Pahlen, erected on 22.2.1799 in the dignity of count.
And this is just cat... The representative of the famous family of the Hermitage cats. Which are fed at the expense of the Hermitage. And they, occasionally, overcoming satiety, will deign to work ... :))
We saw only one hundredth part of the Hermitage. Come back often!
And I was pleased to see that my favorite impressionists were in place, in place, and knights in Lilliputian armor.
On the third floor I approached Renoir's girl. "Hello, girl," I said, "how long have I seen you ..."
“Oh, hello,” she replied and laughed cheerfully, “why didn’t you come for so long? We missed you…"
My eyes were moist. And my heart felt warm and calm ... :)
I will come again ... After all, they are waiting for us here ... Very much.
The Russian people displayed unparalleled courage, heroism and steadfastness in the struggle against the hordes of Napoleon, who had enslaved almost all the peoples of Europe before their invasion of our Fatherland. Contemporaries and descendants recalled with admiration the exploits of Russian soldiers. The Patriotic War of 1812 was sung in beautiful poetry by Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin and Lermontov. LN Tolstoy captured her in the grandiose epic War and Peace. The statues of Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly at the Kazan Cathedral, the Triumphal Narva Gate, erected in honor of the Guards returning to the Fatherland in 1814, and the Alexander Column on Palace Square remind of her. Among the memorial structures erected in memory of 1812, the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace, which is currently on the display of the State Hermitage, is a kind of monument. There are three hundred thirty-two portraits of the commanders of the Russian army - participants in the campaigns of 1812-1814, which began with the invasion of French troops into Russia and ended less than two years later with the victorious entry of the Russian army into Paris.
The portraits were painted in 1819-1828 by the English portraitist George Doe and his Russian assistants - Alexander Vasilyevich Polyakov and Vasily (Wilhelm August) Alexandrovich Golike.
The premise of the gallery was created by the architect K.I. Rossi in a very haste manner, from June to November 1826, on the site of several small rooms in the very middle of the front part of the Winter Palace - between the White (later Gerbov) and the Great Throne (Georgievsky) Halls, next to with the palace cathedral.
The grand opening of the gallery took place on December 25, 1826, the day that has become an annual holiday since the Patriotic War in memory of the expulsion of Napoleon's hordes from Russia. In addition to the courtyard, the opening ceremony was attended by numerous veterans of past military events - generals and officers, as well as soldiers of the guards regiments stationed in St. Petersburg and its environs. awarded with medals for participation in the campaign of 1812 and for the capture of Paris. During church service in the palace cathedral, which preceded the consecration of the gallery, the soldiers of the cavalry regiments were built in the White Hall, infantry - in the Great Throne. Then both of them marched through the gallery in a solemn march past the portraits of the commanders, under whose command they valiantly fought in 1812-1814.
The painting by G.G. Chernetsov captured the view of the gallery in 1827. The ceiling with three skylights was painted according to sketches by D. Scotti, along the walls there are five horizontal rows of bust portraits in gilded frames, separated by columns, full-length portraits and doors to adjacent rooms. At the top of these doors were twelve stucco laurel wreaths that surrounded the names of the places where the most significant battles of 1812-1814 took place, from Klyastitsy, Borodin and Tarutin to Brienne, Laon and Paris. The gallery depicted in the picture differed from the modern one only by the absence of choirs, peculiar chandeliers in the form of huge laurel wreaths, and by the fact that it was somewhat shorter. In addition to more than three hundred portraits painted by Dow, Polyakov and Golike, the gallery already in the 1830s placed large equestrian portraits of Alexander I and his allies - King of Prussia Frederick Wilhelm III and Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. The first two were painted by the Berlin court artist F. Kruger, the third - by the Viennese painter P. Kraft.
Such as Chernetsov portrayed her, the gallery existed for almost eleven years. The fire that started in the Winter Palace on the evening of December 17, 1837 and raged here for three days, destroyed the decoration of all the halls, including the Military Gallery. However, not a single portrait was damaged - they were taken out by the guards soldiers who selflessly saved them from the fire. In 1838-1839 the gallery was redecorated according to the drawings of the architect V.P. Stasov. In this form, it has survived to this day.
In Soviet times, the gallery was replenished with four portraits of the ranks of the company of the palace grenadiers - a special unit formed in 1827 from veterans of the Patriotic War and carrying an honorary guard duty in the palace. These portraits were painted from life by D. Doe in 1828. They are interesting and dear to us as extremely rare portraits of ordinary participants in the war of 1812-1814. These are the same hero-soldiers who, continuously fighting, passed from the Russian border on the Neman to Borodino, and in Europe, the chief of the General Staff, Prince P.M. Volkonsky, ordered his portrait to Dow. During the session, the king entered the room. He was struck by the similarity of the portrait and the speed with which the artist worked. Soon Dow received an invitation to come to St. Petersburg to complete many portraits of Russian generals for the Military Gallery in the Winter Palace.
The offer was tempting. In addition to painting the portraits ordered by the tsar, Dow, undoubtedly, could count on the position of a fashionable artist of the imperial Russian court and aristocracy. He agreed and a few months later, in the spring of 1819, arrived in St. Petersburg.
None of the palaces in Europe had a portrait gallery like the one that was supposed to decorate the Winter Palace. The Waterloo Memorial Hall, which was being created at that time in Windsor Palace, with its twenty-eight images of kings, military leaders and diplomats, could only suggest the War Gallery, which was supposed to house more than three hundred portraits.
Main Headquarters received an order from Alexander I to prepare lists of persons whose images were to be painted for the gallery. The condition was the participation of these people in hostilities against the French in the campaigns of 1812, 1813 and 1814, who were already in the rank of general or promoted to general shortly after the end of the war for distinctions shown in battles.
This rule was not always observed from the very beginning. True, in accordance with it, we will not find in the gallery portraits of D.I. Lobanov-Rostovsky and A.S. There is also no portrait of the future Decembrist MF Orlov, promoted to general in Paris, just taken by the Russians, precisely for participating in the negotiations on his surrender. But the portrait of Count Arakcheev ended up in a place of honor in the gallery, although, as you know, this all-powerful temporary worker, not only in 1812-1814, but in his entire life, did not participate in a single battle. For his favorite, the king found it possible to make an exception.
The gallery has remained unchanged since its restoration after the fire in 1837. Therefore, along with the portraits of the heroes of the twelfth year revered by the national memory, we, in addition to Arakcheev, see in her portraits of such reactionaries as Benckendorff, Sukhozanet, Chernyshev and others, who played the darkest role in the political and military history Russia. Together with the valiant military commanders, many courtiers rather than military people are captured here, as well as staff hangers-on or generals, not glorified for bravery in battle, but eloquent in their reports and obsequious to their superiors. There are those whose cruelty towards soldiers and embezzlement of the embezzlement have left their mark on the memory of their contemporaries. It is not for nothing that one of the valiant participants in the Patriotic War of 1812 wrote about the Military Gallery: “How many insignificant people are crowding out there a few who are justly worthy to go over to the respect of grateful posterity! Eyes run up, until you find and stop at the true heroes of this folk epic. "
The lists of generals compiled by the General Staff were transferred to the chairman of the Military Department of the State Council, Count Arakcheev, who represented them to Alexander I, after which they were approved by the Committee of Ministers and, finally, were reported to the Inspection Department of the General Staff, which was supposed to notify the generals about the need to come to the workshop for posing. Dow, where copies of approved lists were also sent.
Soon after Dow's arrival in St. Petersburg, in the huge workshop assigned to him in the Shepelevsky Palace (located on the site of the New Hermitage), Russian military leaders who posed for the artist began to replace each other. They were probably the first to spread the news about the Englishman's art, about the amazing speed with which he works, creating extremely similar and effective portraits in two or three sessions.
Dow has lived in Russia for almost ten years and has done more than one hundred portraits here. What information about this man do his contemporaries - Petersburg acquaintances tell us about this man? Exactly none, not a word. No one left us even the most cursory description of his appearance, manners, did not write down statements about our country, which so generously paid for his work. This can only be explained by the fact that Dow did not get close to the Russian people. He never visited, did not communicate with anyone outside of his profession. From the first days of his life in St. Petersburg, he worked hard and tirelessly, standing for many hours in front of an easel, now in his palace workshop, now in the rich houses of private customers. And such isolation did not come from an unlimited devotion to art - people who closely watched him soon realized that Dow possessed an all-consuming passion for money. It was with this passion that the Englishman came to Russia and served only her eagerly for all the years he lived here.
Was this undoubtedly talented artist always like this? Apparently not. George Doe, son of the engraver Philip Doe, was born in London in 1781. He studied at the London Academy of Arts, from which he graduated twenty-two years old with a gold medal, was well educated - he studied ancient literature, spoke four European languages. His godfather and eldest friend was the talented genre and landscape painter George Msland, who died in a London debt prison in 1804. Three years later, Doe wrote a biography of George Moreland and published it at his own expense.
After graduating from the Academy, Dow created a series of paintings in which he sought to capture "in faces and figures" the expression of strong human feelings. Such are the "Possessed", "The Negro and the Buffalo", "The Mother Saving a Child from the Eagle's Nest" and others. Ten years later, Dow took up portrait painting, which soon brought him fame - among the customers were representatives of the royal house and the highest aristocracy. After his stay in Aachen, he spent the winter on the continent, in Germany, in Coburg and Weimar, where he painted a number of successful portraits, including the portrait of Wolfgang Goethe. However, now Dow craved not so much fame as big money.
It was no longer a young man who had once grieved over the fate of George Morland and was indignant at the cruelty of the creditors who had killed him; the world of businessmen and traders that surrounded Dow, whose religion was the worship of gold, forced the artist to part with the illusions of youth.
What could be more tempting than huge guaranteed earnings for many years? For each portrait painted for the gallery, Dow received a thousand rubles in bank notes (about 250 rubles in silver) - a significant amount for that time. The most famous Russian artists were paid three to four times less for a portrait of this format.
As reported in one of the magazine articles of 1820, Dow painted about eighty portraits for the gallery during his first year in Russia. In the autumn of the same year, he showed four of the best of them at an exhibition at the Academy of Arts, next to the portraits of the Duke of Kent, the Spanish general Olava, the London actress O'Neil as Juliet, painted before his arrival in Russia, and others. orders completed by Dow in St. Petersburg.
An exhibition of 1820 with a few but carefully selected works by Dow earned him the title of "Honorary Free Associate" of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and, which was much more important for him, played the role of a kind of advertising. Many members royal family, courtiers and ministers, well-born nobles and guards officers wanted to be painted by an English artist and vied with each other to order their portraits to him. And he managed to write everyone, not missing a single advantageous offer, he worked like a man possessed.
For the first two or three years, Dow worked alone, strengthening his fame. Then, in a large apartment he rented in Bulant's house on Palace Square, a whole workshop was created to reproduce portraits of his work, each of which was supposed to bring the author as much profit as possible. First, engravers called from England settled here - Doe's son-in-law, Thomas Wright, and his younger brother, Henry Doe, who began to reproduce in excellent engravings in dotted and black manner the works of their relative. The demand for these sheets, which were printed in London from boards made in St. Petersburg and brought to St. Petersburg for sale, was great, despite the high prices: good prints cost twenty to twenty-five rubles in bank notes. They were acquired by the depicted themselves to give to loved ones, their relatives, colleagues and subordinates, the headquarters and departments that they headed, educational establishments, where they studied, etc. They were finally acquired by lovers of engravings in Russia and abroad.
In 1822 it became apparent that the pace of creating portraits for the gallery needed to be accelerated. Generals who served in or near St. Petersburg, as well as those who were in the capital on business, have already visited Dow's workshop, and the Inspection Department of the General Staff did not always know the place of residence of the retired generals, and even more so where to look for the heirs and relatives of those who had passed away by the start of Doe's work. Therefore, the military newspaper "Russian Invalid" (No. 169) published a message about the creation of the Military Gallery in the Winter Palace, accompanied by an appeal to retired generals and relatives of the already deceased with a request to deliver their portraits to St. Petersburg for copying in the size necessary for the gallery.
The archive has preserved many letters from various parts of Russia - from generals Shestakov from Elizavetgrad, Kazachkovsky from Tsaritsyn, Velyaminov from Tiflis, Sabaneev from Tiraspol, etc., reporting on the sending of their previously made portraits to the General Headquarters or directly to Dow's workshop, explaining, that they cannot come to the capital, being busy with the service, for ill health or for long distance. Of course, not everyone dared to shake bad roads for many weeks - and they were very bad everywhere - heading to St. Petersburg from the Caucasus, Ukraine, the Volga region or Volhynia only to pose for the artist two or three times. It was not so easy for the commanders of brigades, divisions, corps, and especially for the old retired generals, wounded in battles, who lived out their days on estates, often in remote "bear corners", to undertake such a trip, which was also not cheap. Many even from Moscow sent portraits made there, although the journey from one capital to another of a traveler in the rank of general, who was provided without delay at post stations with a relatively comfortable overnight stay and the most playful horses, took only three or four days.
The transfer of the portraits to the General Headquarters was accompanied by a variety of written comments. For example, General Ignatiev, sending a portrait painted by Kinel from Moscow, reported: "Looking at it up close, it seems not the best, but far off it is a completely different action, and most importantly, it has a great similarity." And General Sanders, sending his portrait from Dorpat, painted in 1811, only asked to add two medals received for the war of 1812 on it, obviously, he did not receive new awards.
The letters from relatives who were forwarded to St. Petersburg with portraits of generals who had already died were quite peculiar. Thus, the widow of the Don Cossack I.F. the hair has become a little gray. "
Sometimes looking for relatives who could own the right portrait lasted for many months. So it was with the search for the image of MI Kutuzov's long-term friend, childless Lieutenant General NI Lavrov, who commanded the 5th Infantry (Guards) Corps in 1812-1813 and died on a campaign in Germany. By the time the search for his portraits began, the general's widow had also died, but the Inspection Department received news that the deceased's sister lived in the Kromskoye district of the Oryol province, and turned to the civil governor for assistance, who equipped her with a district police officer. The lengthy "explanation of the widow of the warrantor Katerina Ivanova to the daughter of Somova" has been preserved in the archive. It says: "My late brother did not allow anyone to copy portraits from him, and for this reason, this portrait did not happen either with me or with his late wife." On this "explanation," the Chief of the General Staff P. M. Volkonsky imposed a short resolution: "If there is no portrait, then the matter is finished." However, the memory of General N.I. Lavrov is preserved in the gallery in the form of a frame covered with green silk with his rank, initials and surname engraved on a gilded plaque.
It happened that for a long time they also searched for living generals who were still in active service. It was with difficulty that the location of the commander of the 4th reserve cavalry corps, Lieutenant-General Count P.P. Palen (Palen 1st), who received leave for treatment, was found out. The main headquarters wrote inquiries to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which issued him a foreign passport, then turned to his younger brother, also General P.P. near Mitava. The search took more than six months, after which the general said that when he was in St. Petersburg, he "would not miss taking advantage of the permission" to be written by Dow. Indeed, his portrait in the gallery has the artist's signature.
Yes, exactly so, for the creation of each portrait, a special permission was required, or rather, the approval of the king. We have already mentioned that Arakcheev reported to Alexander I about the lists of generals whose portraits were supposed to be painted for the gallery. This temporary worker, having surrendered the post of Minister of War to Barclay de Tolly in 1810 and received a new appointment as chairman of the War Department of the State Council, remained a member of the Committee of Ministers, to whom he reported on the lists approved by the tsar. We have not come across in the archival documents any indication of a case when the Committee of Ministers would “take away” someone already approved by the tsar. However, not all of the lists included by the Inspection Department were approved by Alexander I, and someone was excluded from almost every list at the behest of the tsar. This happened with generals Passek, Musin-Pushkin, Padeisky, Rodionov, Krasnov, Vlasov, Volzogen and a number of others. Sometimes the “rejection” was accompanied by motivation. About Vlasov it is said: "Was under investigation", about Wolzogen: "As being in a foreign service." More often, there is a note: "The sovereign did not deign to be placed in the gallery." This, for example, is said about Suvorov's favorite General IK Krasnov, who died of a wound received on the eve of the Battle of Borodino. More fortunate was General OV Ilovaisky (Ilovaisky 10th). On his letter from Novocherkassk, where he says that "he intends to arrive in St. Petersburg after the surrender of the post sent to the army," there is a sharp resolution: "There was no order to come." However, permission was apparently granted later, as the gallery contains a portrait of this general with Doe's signature and the note: "Painted from nature."
Finally, the lists submitted by the General Staff to Arakcheev were not complete without missing the names of sometimes very famous generals, especially if they were killed in the war or died after it, but before the lists were compiled. In 1824, among the portraits ordered by Dow, the names of such famous military leaders as K.F. Baggovut, who was killed at Tarutin, P.A. But even after the opening, there were no portraits of M.M.Borozdin, V.A.Sysoev, E.K.Kryshtofovich, I.A. In the middle of the 19th century, the military historian General A.V. Viskovatov compiled a list of 79 persons whose portraits would have an undeniable right to be placed in the gallery, but were not included in it for unknown reasons.
But back to Dow activities... The message of the "Russian invalid", which spread throughout Russia, undoubtedly worked. After this publication, the supply of portraits to the General Staff or directly to the artist's name, which had to be copied in the format accepted for the gallery, increased sharply. And it is no coincidence that at this very time two young assistants to Dow appear in Bulant's house - Alexander Polyakov and Vasily (aka Wilhelm) Golike. It was on them that the greedy Englishman shifted this work, in rare cases only "correcting" the already made copies, touching them with several strokes of his skillful brush, but without fail receiving an established fee of a thousand rubles for each portrait.
Did Dow risk it? Little or no. Probably, his calculation was as follows: since a person did not come to pose, then there are many chances that he will not appear in St. Petersburg at all, and, therefore, will not make claims to the mediocre portrait. It should also be noted that in accordance with the ranks that the depicted persons had in 1812-1814, and not during the creation of the gallery, the portraits should have been placed in it so that the entire lower row, most convenient for viewing, and a significant part of the second row was occupied by the highest generals - seventeen generals from infantry, from cavalry, from artillery and seventy-nine lieutenant generals. For the rest of the second and for the three upper rows, poorly visible to the viewer, portraits of major generals were intended. Most of the portraits copied in Dow's workshop belonged to the latter category. Of course, in those cases when a person who was only a major general in 1812-1814, by the time the gallery was created, took a prominent position - he received the rank of adjutant general of the king or a leading position in any department, as was the case with Zakrevsky, Benkendorf, Levashov, Witt and others, or if it belonged to the highest aristocracy - in these cases, Dow painted the portrait himself, not sparing labor and talent. And the place of the portrait was in the second row, in full view of the gallery visitors.
Recall that in each row of the gallery there are seventy bust portraits (except for the upper one, in which there are 62), of which, in our opinion, Dow himself painted only about 150 portraits.
The posthumous images of the faces of the top generals who were supposed to be placed in the bottom row, for example, portraits of Platov, Dokhturov, Bagration and others, he probably performed himself or, at least, to a large extent "passed" with his brush. Only seventy-four portraits bear Doe's signature.
We will add that no one on the part of the General Staff and the Winter Palace Administration, which was supposed to be in charge of portraits for the gallery, for many years did not show a critical attitude to Dow's work. Both of these departments were ready to encourage the rapid production of portraits in every possible way, not at all interested in the quality of their execution, because the tsar himself wanted to see the gallery open as soon as possible, and he also chose an artist to create it. Dow reported on the execution of the next order, and this was enough for him to be paid the set amount.
Dow's Russian assistants were constantly busy copying portraits made by the patron, but not intended for the gallery. We know, for example, that the provincial noble assemblies and government agencies ordered large, tall, portraits of Alexander I, which were copies or minor versions of paintings already written by him for the royal palaces, and paid for each two to three thousand rubles in banknotes. Such works Dow only corrected and signed, and they were performed by the same Polyakov and Golike.
Finally, on the easels of young artists, one after another, copies were replaced from portraits of generals, made by Dow for the gallery, as well as from portraits of dignitaries and aristocrats, made by him for private orders. These repetitions, sometimes numerous, were ordered by the depicted themselves, members of their families and the institutions they headed, where the order was paid from state funds or from funds collected by subscription among officials. Let us recall that among the painted by D. Dow were portraits of A.A. Arakcheev, A.N. and D.V. Golitsyn, V.P. Ermolov, E. F. Kankrin, I. I. Dibich, I. F. Paskevich, P. M. Volkonsky, A. I. Chernyshev, M. S. Vorontsov and others who played a prominent role both under Alexander I and in the early years of the reign of Nicholas I.
There is also known more than one case when Dow gave the originals written for the gallery to especially noble and wealthy customers, generals, of course for a very large sum, and a copy was sent to the gallery, again executed by Polyakov or Golika, fully paid by the treasury as the original.
Copies, copies, copies - hundreds of copies were made in Dow's workshop by unknown artists, day after day, month after month, year after year.
How was their work paid? Maybe Polyakov and Golike lived in contentment and, taking advantage of happy circumstances, just like their patron, saved a lot of money for a "rainy day"? No, the dry and callous Englishman treated Polyakov and Golik with amazing heartlessness. To whom could they complain? What could Golike count on, besides the work of a copyist, although he was free, but did not have an art education and, according to a contemporary, “a poor and timid man who did not know his own worth”?
It was even worse for Polyakov, a serf and powerless youth, who was completely subordinated to the English painter by his master, a wealthy landowner, General P. Ya. Kornilov. Having concluded an agreement in 1822, according to which Polyakov entered "study and work" with Dow until his departure to England, General Kornilov was not in the least interested in whether the promise to let the serf painter go to the evening classes of the Academy was being fulfilled, whether the foreigner himself was teaching him anything. master, and in general how he lives. And Dow took care to completely isolate the serf artist from outside world: he lived in Dow's apartment, ate with his servants, worked here from morning till night and often "suffered from chest pain" from overwork in an unhealthy environment, and during the days of illness the Englishman inexorably calculated the pitiful rubles owed to Polyakov.
Here is the calculation of the "remuneration" of the serf artist. According to the agreement concluded with his owner, he was to receive eight hundred rubles in bank notes a year. From this sum, Dow deducted four hundred and fifty rubles for a meager table, and Polyakov sent two hundred rubles in the form of a rent to his master. One hundred and fifty rubles a year remained for clothes, shoes, linen, a bathhouse, etc., from which there were also deductions for days of illness. And this despite the huge profits that Dow brought in the amazingly fast and accurate work of a bonded copyist.
In the last years of his stay in the studio, Polyakov painted one tsarist portrait a day - he worked out his annual salary per day! He worked in all alone... He was forbidden to meet even with Golika, who was in another room of the same apartment. Both of them all day saw only their countless canvases - copies, replacing them.
In the mid-1820s, Dow reached the zenith of fame, he was surrounded by honor and inundated with orders. On an engraving by Bennett and Wright after a drawing by A. Martynov, printed in 1826, Dow is depicted in his workshop in the Shepelevsky Palace, where Russian military leaders and numerous representatives of high Petersburg society posed for him. Before us is a large hall, flooded with light from the bunk windows overlooking the Winter Canal. A stucco ceiling with a palace crystal chandelier, marble columns, a tiled stove topped with a vase, brilliant patterned parquet flooring - this is the interior of this workshop, in which we see Dow preparing to paint a portrait of Alexander I. pose - this is how we know him in the many times repeated portraits signed by Dow, and in Wright's engraving - he stopped against the background of doors, behind which the perspective of Raphael's Loggias opens. Dow, rushing to meet him, in a tailcoat suit, with a brush in his right hand, must be inviting Alexander to go into the depths of the workshop to take a place in front of the easel, facing the light. All the walls of the workshop hall are covered with the finished works of the English portrait painter; here, as it were, an exhibition of his works. The three upper tiers of the "exhibition" consist of fifty-seven portraits made for the Military Gallery. Placed in this way, they gave the visitor of the workshop a clear idea of what the gallery walls would look like. Below are large-format canvases, among which we can easily recognize portraits of Grand Duke Nicholas, his wife with children, Kutuzov, Barclay de Tolly, Ermolov, Prince Menshikov, Speransky. Next to them - full-length, generational, half-length - portraits of secular beauties, sanitary workers, generals, depicted against the background of elegant interiors or romantic landscapes.
We do not see in the engraving another wall of the workshop hall overlooking the Millionnaya, but it is partially reflected in the large mirror to the right of the door to the Loggia, and is also covered and covered with ready-made portraits. In the background, between the stove and the door, at the top, Doe's painting “Mother Rescuing a Child from an Eagle's Nest” is clearly visible. In this workshop, among the many ceremonial portraits, she seems strange, alien to the tinsel shine of uniforms, orders, ball gowns that surrounds her and reminds of the time when her author created paintings according to his own design, when he set himself completely different tasks.
It can be said with confidence that not a single Russian artist, not only in the 1820s, but also at a later time, did not know such magnificent conditions for work that were created for the Dow by the court and official St. Petersburg. They surrounded the English portraitist with honor, gave him fabulous earnings and extolled his works not only in salon chatter, but also in print - with the cheeky and lively pen of Thaddeus Bulgarin.
At the same time, there was another - critical - attitude towards the works and personality of Dow on the part of Russian people close to art. They condemned the commission to a foreign artist of such a deeply patriotic business as the creation of portraits of the Military Gallery. Why will a foreigner create this monument to the greatest victories of Russian weapons that liberated Europe from the yoke of Napoleon? Couldn't they have called Russian artists to fulfill this task? The expression of this opinion in the press was P. P. Svinin, editor-publisher of the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, who first expressed it, albeit in a very restrained form, shortly after Doe's work was shown to the general public in the fall of 1820.
In an article devoted to the exhibition at the Academy of Arts, having examined in detail the works of Shchedrin, Varnek, Vorobyov, Martynov, Egorov, Shebuev and others, which were exhibited at it, especially highlighting the painting of a young, still unknown student of the Academy - Karl Bryullov, Svinin goes on to the works of foreign painters, among which dwells on one Dow: “The general attention was attracted by the portraits of Mr. Dow (Dow. - Auth.), To whom the whole room is dedicated, both for the excellent art of the artist, and because each of the Russians saw in him the artist, to whom fate had given the happiness to pass on to posterity the faces of Russian generals who led the armies, which in 1812 reflected the innumerable hordes of Napoleon ... Dov has an extraordinary the ability to write quickly and grasp the similarities of faces ... It is a pity that he is in a hurry and does not work out his works in such a way that, having lost the resemblance (that is, when the faces depicted on them die. - Auth.), they could remain pictures ... ".
In this article, the editor of Otechestvennye zapiski did not dare to speak out directly against the choice of the courtyard and limited himself to the critical remarks given here. But in another article, published in the same issue of the magazine, the reader read bitter lines condemning the preference given to foreigners, and hardly directed at another address: that it overshadows the very knowledge of painting. It is enough to be a foreigner and come from Paris, Vienna, Berlin to rob money arbitrarily ... foreign artists they are decisively gaining the upper hand over the Russians in their special ability to display their talent well. "
As you know, the activities of Svinin as a journalist as a whole were rightly criticized by his progressive contemporaries, but his attitude to the fine arts, it seems to us, deserves a different assessment. A tireless collector of works of Russian painting and monuments of Russian antiquity, Svin-in, on the pages of his magazine, introduced the general public for the first time to accessible only a few collections of art belonging to private individuals, covered the exhibitions of the Academy of Arts, paying particular attention to the works of Russian painters, talked about arts located in the provinces, brought out the talents of the people.
Sometimes exaggerating the abilities of the "nuggets" discovered by him - Slepushkin, Grebenshchikov, Vlasov and others, P. P. Svinin, however, was able to appreciate the talent of the Chernetsov brothers, whom he carefully and disinterestedly took care of. He also unmistakably determined the creative potential of V.A.Tropinin, then a little-known serf portraitist. Since 1820, Svinin became an active member of the newly founded Society for the Encouragement of Artists, which, especially in the first decades of its existence, played such a positive role in the development and popularization of Russian art.
Probably if Dow had limited his activities in St. Petersburg to the execution of portraits for the Military Gallery and the role of a fashionable portrait painter of high society, like many who came to Russia before and after him foreign artists, Svinin would not go beyond the quoted remarks about the admiration of the Russian aristocracy before everything foreign and about Dow's painting, which seemed sketchy and hasty to the editor of Otechestvennye zapiski. But the entrepreneurial habits of the English artist, his unbridled desire for profit and the exploitation of the labor of Russian painters found a stern prosecutor in Svinin, who patiently collected materials to speak with them when the opportune moment came.
Dow continued to find new ways to multiply his income. He was no longer content with the profits from the sale of prints and countless pictorial copies of his works. The workshop on Palace Square is replenished by artists G. Geytman and A. Ton, who reproduce Dow's works in lithography - a method that is faster to complete and cheaper than engravings. At first it was only an expansion of the "trade assortment". But after a while, the workshop made a large-format lithographic reproduction of a portrait of Alexander I in full-length, soaked in varnish and pasted on the canvas with the front side (while the strokes and other features of lithography became invisible), the reproduction could be painted oil paints and sell for painting, which was already a direct fraud.
The death of Alexander I in the fall of 1825 did not change the privileged position of Dow, in front of which a new "gold mine" was opened. Government agencies were in a hurry to order him portraits of the new tsar. The Naval Department alone wished to have thirty large portraits, which Polyakov wrote in a month.
The inflow of such orders, undoubtedly, was helped by the eloquent advertising of the "Northern Bee". Describing his visit to Dow's workshop in August 1826 and praising the portrait of the new tsar, Thaddeus Bulgarin wrote: “The artist has already received many demands for it from different places from Siberia to London and Paris. By the way, the Duke of Devonshire wished to decorate one of his palaces with it ... "And six months later, in the same" Northern Bee "an ad was placed:" Wishing that a significant part of the loyal subjects could enjoy the faithful image of his beloved monarch, Mr. Dov removed the most similar copies and decided to distribute them throughout the vast empire, delivering on demand not only to nonresident public places, but also to individuals. " Can we, reading these unctuous lines, doubt who "made the most similar copies" in such numbers?
Probably, it was this overload of Dow and his assistants with orders "from the outside", which brought a huge income to the greedy Englishman, was the reason that, almost eight years after the start of his work in Russia, more than a hundred bust portraits of Russian generals had not yet been completed. But this ke postponed the date of opening the gallery. On December 25, 1826, there were two hundred and thirty-six portraits on its walls, and one hundred and six frames, under which the names of the generals already stood, remained empty, covered with green reps. On the front wall, opposite the entrance to the pre-church one, under a canopy, a full-length portrait of Alexander I was temporarily placed, which in the future was to be replaced with the image of the tsar on a horse. Despite such a seemingly obvious "malfunction" in the performance of the task undertaken, Dow was present at the opening of the gallery in the retinue of Nicholas I and was the "hero of the day", on whom the tsar's congratulations and courtesies and courtiers' flattery were poured out.
The end of the case was approaching, for which the Englishman had been invited to Russia. The gallery was in urgent need of completion. Dow's assistants worked hard on the bust portraits. The master himself had to paint seven large portraits of commanders and allied autocrats, which, undoubtedly, did not pose any particular difficulty for such an experienced painter, especially since he had already worked a lot on some of them - Kutuzov, Barclay de Tolly and Alexander on horseback. ...
However, with the opening of the gallery, all the finished portraits became available for viewing, and it was not necessary to have a particularly keen eye to see how unequal they were in their artistic qualities. But that didn't really bother Doe. Confident in the strength of his position, he hoped, and probably rightly so, on the strong impression that the numerous portraits in the spectacularly decorated room made on everyone, and also on the fact that, as already mentioned above, two rows well accessible to the eye were occupied by excellently written by himself portraits, while those placed above were drowned in the twilight of a St. Petersburg day or in scant reflections wax candles... Looking at the bottom two rows - one and a half hundred clearly visible portraits, the viewer could be convinced of how Dow successfully coped with the difficult task of creating a large number of flattened images of a single size. And although Dow worked in a romantic manner fashionable for that time, striving to ensure that his heroes had a "victorious" look, in the portraits he himself painted, we always feel the character of a person, his personality subtly noticed by the artist.
There is reason to believe that in connection with the impending departure from Russia, Dow in 1826-1827 was more concerned with increasing his already huge incomes. True, in the capitals Western Europe an honorable reception and lucrative orders awaited him - over the years of work in St. Petersburg he was elected a member of the Florentine, Dresden, Stockholm and Paris Academies, and the best of his portraits, reproduced in engravings and lithographs, were already in all major collections of the world, contributing to his further glory. But still, one could hardly count on such a scale of his "artistic" activity as in Russia. And Dow publishes an announcement in Petersburg Vedomosti that his workshop accepts orders for portraits of Alexander I, Nicholas I and his wife in any format and in any quantity. At the same time, he makes the Gostinodvorsky merchant Fedorov his commission agent and, through his mediation, sends batches of works by Polyakov and Golike to the Makaryevskaya fair in Nizhny Novgorod.
The Autumn Exhibition of 1827 at the Academy of Arts looked like Dow's triumph. His works were allocated the best room - a conference room, the walls of which were entirely covered by more than one hundred and fifty portraits. Twenty of them depicted members of the royal family; eight - foreign aristocrats, scientists, writers; ten - Russian dignitaries. About one hundred and twenty of the bust portraits of generals written for the gallery were also placed here.
"Northern Bee" devoted an article to the exhibition, in which Doe's portraits rave reviews were given. “Even those who are not disposed to praise Mr. Dov as he deserves,” Bulgarin noted, “admit that he writes heads perfectly, and we will add that his layout, color, drapery and drawing correspond to his main art ... We honor Dov as one of the first artists of our time ... Dov's diligence and ease of work are second only to his talent. "
In the book "Notes of the Fatherland", published a few weeks later, there was also a review of the exhibition, written by Pig. Starting with the works of Dow, which the visitor saw first, the critic paid tribute to them, but recognized high dignity only for three portraits - Mordvinov, Speransky and Sukhtelen ... Most of the others seemed to him "like sketches sketched on the canvas with a bright, bold brush, without the slightest processing." At the same time, Svinin noted that "the blackness that most of the portraits of the Military Gallery have already dressed in, also comes from the haste with which they were painted without preparation, which is known in painting as a la prima, and moreover, the power of the asphalt will always overcome all other colors." Further Svinin writes: “While our periodicals vied with each other to extol the works of Mr. Dov, while noble and wealthy Russians tried to make fat sacrifices to him, I alone remained invariably at my conclusion about Mr. Dov's excellent talent and his unforgivable negligence. brushes in those works that he leaves in Russia; I alone dared to remind compatriots that we also have artists full of talents, demanding their patronage ... ”Following this, the critic examines in detail the works of Russian artists shown in other halls of the exhibition, with special praise dwelling on the works of Kiprensky, Tropinin, Shchedrin, Ivanov , brothers Chernetsov, Venetsianov and his students.
Let us say by the way that Svinin was undoubtedly right in noting the unfavorable technical state of Dow's work. After the opening of the Military Gallery and its receipt by the custodians of painting in the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, more than two hundred portraits were returned in batches to Dow's workshop in one year for "fixing" - they really darkened and cracked from excess asphalt.
By the tone of the cited article, one can assume that by that time Svinin had already collected enough material to speak in any instance against Dow. Probably the most powerful trump card was Polyakov's request for intercession and release from bondage in the Dow workshop, prepared not without his moral support, to the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. In this document, the serf painter not only talked about the difficult conditions of his life and exploitation, which he had been subjected to for many years, but also reported that Dow systematically deceives customers, passing off copies of his portraits made by his assistants for copyright repetitions, and thus makes a lot of money. Numerous references to specific facts and to persons who could confirm them made Polyakov's request a real indictment.
On February 3, 1828, Dow's “reprehensible actions” were discussed at a meeting of the Society for the Encouragement of the Thin People, chaired by one of its founders, Secretary of State PA Kikin (formerly a general, a participant in World War II, whose portrait is in the gallery). It was decided not only to try to free Polyakov from serfdom (and thereby from Dow's workshop), for which they had already collected two thousand rubles, but also immediately report on the behavior of the English artist to Nicholas I, who was considered the patron of the Society, with a special memorandum.
The accusation was so serious that the king answered very quickly. By his order, the Minister of the Court, Volkonsky, turned to the owner of Polyakov, General Kornilov, with a request for how much he wanted to receive for the release of his freeman to his serf artist, and at the same time demanded from PA Kikin all documents concerning Dow's “reprehensible actions”. The Society immediately presented a new, detailed memorandum, in which it outlined various trade scams and deceptions known to us when fulfilling orders of the court department, the royal family and private individuals, concluding that Dow acted “not like an artist who thinks about honor, but like a merchant who had the purpose of his stay in Russia only one accumulation of money and, dissatisfied with nothing, started into commercial enterprises, even impermissible. " In this regard, Dow's actions were called bluntly "criminal deception", and the tsar's attention was drawn to the harm caused by the monopoly of painting imperial portraits for palaces and government institutions seized by an Englishman, which robbed many Russian painters of earnings.
Separate testimonies were added to the memorandum: the merchant Fedorov - about the sale of copies of the work of Polyakov and Golik for the originals of Dow, lithographer and engraver Geytman - about the production of a lithographed portrait of Alexander I for Dow to paint it with oil paints and, finally, the testimony of the academician of painting Venetsianov - about Dow's dishonesty, shown by him in the execution of the portrait of Prince Golitsyn.
There was every reason for bringing Doe to justice. However, this did not happen. On the contrary, it was at the time when the materials of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists became known to Nicholas I, that Dow was awarded the honorary title of "first portrait painter" of the imperial court. But after a short time, the situation changed. Either the tsar received some additional information about Dow's unseemly behavior, or the outrageous facts collected by the Society for the Encouragement of Artists began to be discussed too widely, but in early May 1828, the English painter was ordered to immediately leave Russia. Dow left very modestly, without wires or publicity.
Svinin's leading role in exposing Doe is undeniable. He spoke openly about his active participation in this - in articles published in 1828, and in letters that have come down to us to private individuals. There is also no doubt that for Svinin the meaning of the fight against Dow was not only to free Polyakov from his workshop, but also to show Russian society all the harm arising from the blind preference of foreigners for domestic talents.
Concluding the story about the creation of the Military Gallery, it remains for us to add that in February 1829 Dow returned to St. Petersburg to complete the full-length portraits of Kutuzov, Barclay and Wellington. It was at this time that the last (twenty-one) portraits, made more than a year ago by Polyakov and Golike, were taken to the Winter Palace and placed in the gallery. Thirteen portraits remained unfinished by the orders of the General Staff. But Dow's workshop no longer existed, and this group was never written, - the frames with thirteen surnames remained empty, covered with green reps. Most of the generals named on the framework had already died by this time, but some, like A. N. Potapov, I. D. Ivanov and A. A. Yurkovsky, continued to serve and occupied a relatively prominent position.
Already feeling sick, Doe returned to London. He died on October 3, 1829, forty-eight years of age in his sister's house, leaving a capital of one hundred thousand pounds sterling (about a million rubles in gold).
As for Alexander Polyakov, fate never smiled at him. The issue of liberation from serfdom seemed to have been resolved as early as March 1828, when General Kornilov replied to a letter from the Minister of the Court that he agreed to receive any price that the tsar would set. All that remained was to complete the formalities. But on June 10 of the same year, the general died in the camp of Russian troops under the walls of the besieged Turkish fortress Zhurzha, and the matter passed to his heirs. The latter were in no hurry to give Polyakov "freedom". The decision dragged on for more than five years, and only the end of Polyakov's course at the Academy of Arts, where he was sent by the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, and the need to confer the title free artist moved this business off the ground. According to a new letter from the Minister of the Court, the heirs of Kornilov gave freedom to Polyakov in October 1833 and received a "gift" for this - a snuffbox worth three thousand rubles.
Probably, the years 1828-1833 were the only relatively calm years in the life of a serf artist. He finally escaped from Dow's workshop, bondage relations with the landowners did not particularly disturb him - the young Kornilovs did not demand anything from him, except for the payment of the annual quitrent. He could study and work to order. At work on a woman's portrait, Polyakov is captured on the only image of him that has come down to us - a sketch by G. Chernetsov, relating precisely to these years.
However, Polyakov was often ill - six years of backbreaking work and a life full of hardships affected. In 1834, he increasingly had to ask for help from the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. On January 7, 1835, Polyakov, at the age of thirty-four, died of consumption. They buried him at the expense of the same Society. The inventory of Polyakov's property that has come down to us speaks of his extreme poverty. Probably due to non-observance of some formalities, the certificate for the title of a free artist, a document that could undoubtedly bring great joy to the dying Polyakov, was never issued to him, although it lay ready in the office of the Academy for more than six months.
Regarding the work of Polyakov, it was not long ago expressed the opinion that he was a talented and mature master and that many of the beautiful portraits of the Military Gallery were painted by him, and not by Dow. This statement is clearly wrong. The signature works of Polyakov, executed by him before entering the Dow workshop and during the first years of his stay in it, are now kept in the funds of Kostroma regional museum fine arts, speak of his very modest talent. All these portraits, depicting numerous members of the family of General Kornilov, with obvious truthfulness and some expressiveness, are very monotonous, dull in color and weak in the field of anatomy - in the structure of the shoulders, arms, body proportions, etc. Looking at the early works of Polyakov, we we have the right to say that he could become a good artist, do not fall, in your misfortune, twenty-one years of age in bondage to Doe. Here he also lost what little he achieved in Kostroma, studying in his youth with the mediocre artist Poplavsky.
Polyakov's tragedy is not what Dow betrayed his original, supposedly excellent work for their own, which never happened, but in the fact that endless copying of someone else's drawing, movements of someone else's brush, color seen by someone else's eye, copying fourteen or more hours a day, which lasted for six years, killed serf painter individual creativity, taught him to a cliche from which he could never leave. This is a tragedy, and for the artist it is much more terrible than the need to create under a false name, but still create. Such work for a young painter is an inevitable creative death.
If Dow had passed off at least one portrait, executed by Polyakov from life, as his work, then, of course, contemporaries, and above all Svinin, would not have hesitated to talk about it. Polyakov himself would have written about this in a complaint about Dow's hard life and work. No, that was not the case. And the Englishman did not need to go to this case to cheat. While he was making a name for himself, he worked alone. Then he painted excellent portraits of Sukhtelen, Witt, Langeron, Yuzefovich and many others. And then, already having assistants, Dow made those portraits that were supposed to be in the gallery in plain sight, and, as we have already said, he instructed Polyakov and Golik to write copies of images of generals who had died or lived without a break in the provinces.
The fate of Golike turned out quite well. He was a free person, and this did not give Doe opportunities to make him bear the same heavy picturesque corvee in which the Polyakov withered. After the departure of the English artist from Russia, Golike entered the Academy of Arts and graduated in 1832. Until the end of his life (1848), he worked in St. Petersburg as a secondary portrait painter, sometimes receiving lucrative commissions. But on Golik, many years of copying in Bulant's house left its stamp, which the Academy could not erase. In 1834, he painted a self-portrait with his family and the deceased already Dow, a work in which only the faces were to some extent successful for the artist. The execution of this portrait testifies to the fact that Golike obviously did not harbor hostile feelings towards his patron. The appearance of Dow, created by him, probably corresponds to nature: before us is a cold, strong-willed man, who fixed an attentive and cruel gaze at the invisible model that he draws ...
Let's dwell on some data gleaned from the track records of those whose portraits are in the gallery.
First, let us touch on the question of how many people from the generals of the Russian army were not alive or were not in active service at the beginning of work on the gallery's portraits, that is, five years after the end of the war. Records indicate that in the campaigns of 1812-1814, twenty-three generals were killed or died of wounds; during the same time seven died of diseases. In the first peaceful five-year period of 1814-1819, forty-six generals were dismissed, seven were expelled from their posts, forever left without a new appointment. At this time, twenty-two generals, representatives of the older generation, died - Barclay de Tolly, Vintsingerode, Gamper, Dokhturov, Platov, Panchulidzev, Stavrakov, Tormasov, Shkapsky, Shukhanov and others. Having started their military service in the 18th century, they almost continuously continued it in Moldova and Wallachia, in Bohemia and Moravia, in Finland and other places - wherever military operations took place until 1812.
During the wars of the early 19th century, the death rate of soldiers from disease was two to three times higher than the number of those killed and died from wounds. The reasons for this situation were the poorly organized food of the soldiers on the march, their uncomfortable, tight clothes - very cold in winter and the excruciatingly hot summer, the heavy burden on the march, the disgusting state of the hospitals. For representatives of the highest command personnel, the ratio of the numbers turned out to be the opposite. This is understandable: they moved only in a carriage or on horseback, were provided with winter clothing, ate well, usually spent the night in a warm place and under a roof, treated them in a timely manner and thoroughly.
Of the three hundred thirty-two generals who commanded units and formations in 1812-1814, whose portraits are displayed in the Military Gallery, eighty fought under the leadership of Suvorov or served under his command. Six of them fought on the Kinburn Spit in 1787, three - participated in 1789 in the defeat of the Turkish army at Foksani and Rymnik, twenty-seven - in 1790 stormed Izmail, thirty-nine - fought in 1794 in Poland; seventeen generals were participants in the Italian and Swiss campaigns of 1799. Some were fortunate enough to be companions of the great commander not in one, but in several campaigns.
For the military leaders, students of Suvorov, the Patriotic War of 1812 was the time of the highest patriotic upsurge and the full use of the accumulated combat experience. But for most of them, the 1812-1814 campaigns were their last. The period of political reaction that began after the Congress of Vienna was marked in the army by a turn towards the Prussian traditions of brutal drill, parade ground shagistika, "frunt acrobatism" and any suppression of the initiative - a turn towards the complete oblivion of the Suvorov and Kutuzov traditions. Combat generals, for whom the soldier was a companion and comrade, and not "a mechanism provided by the charter," became unnecessary, they survived "at rest" under the pretext of age, wounds and health upset during the campaigns.
Looking through the data on the service of forty-six generals who left or were dismissed in 1814-1819, we learn that twenty-one of them belonged to Suvorov's associates. And if you add to this twenty more comrades-in-arms of the great commander from among those killed during hostilities or who died from 1812 to 1819, it turns out that already five years after the end of the war with Napoleon, half of those who rightfully could would be considered the successor of the advanced traditions of the Russian military school, although many of those who found themselves in retirement were only forty-five to fifty years old. This deliberate "cleansing" of the ranks of the generals from persons who had great combat experience, and the attitude to military affairs prompted by this experience continued in subsequent years, already under Nicholas I. A. I. Herzen wrote: "The prosaic autumn reign of Nicholas ... needed agents, not assistants, executors, not advisers, messengers, not warriors ... "
What was the military education of the generals who participated in the 1812-1814 campaigns? It turns out that only fifty-two people studied in Russian military schools, in the few cadet corps that existed at that time.
A significantly larger number (eighty-five people) began their service with the lower ranks of the guard and, having reached the senior of the non-commissioned officers, the sergeant rank, were released into the army by officers, most often captains. It should be remembered that, according to Peter I, the guard established by him was a select model unit that served as a kind of military school - at that time the only one for the infantry and cavalry. Noble youths were supposed to enter the guards regiments into active service as soldiers. Fifteen-year-old "undersized" passed this service from the "foundation" and, only having accumulated the necessary knowledge of regulations and combat skills, received a non-commissioned officer's rank, which gave the right to be promoted to officers of army regiments. However, since the reign of Anna Ioannovna, the nobles have found various ways to get around this law, which is burdensome for them. In the second half of the 18th century, when compulsory military service for nobles was abolished, but it was necessary to have an officer's rank in order to occupy some position in society, the custom was established to enter the sons of noblemen into the lists of the guards regiments even as infants. Thus, by the age of fifteen or sixteen, they had already "served" as many years as was required for the promotion of an officer, after which, if desired, it was always possible to retire.
Of course, in order to be enrolled in the service from childhood, and even in the guard, one had to have an influential patron - a "merciful", as they said then. Remember, given by Pushkin at the beginning of the story " Captain's daughter”The story of such a record directly to the guard by the sergeant of Petrusha Grinev, who was still“ in the womb ”. It is immediately said that this entry was made "by the grace of the Guards Major, Prince B., a close relative of ours." Is it any wonder when the father of sixteen-year-old Petrusha decides to send him to active service, the hero of the story does not doubt that a free life of a Guards officer awaits him in St. help of the same prince B. will be promoted to warrant officer of the guard. However, the stern father decides differently: “What will he learn while serving in St. Petersburg? Shake and hang? No, let him serve in the army, let him pull the strap, and smell the gunpowder ... ”And Petrusha went to the Orenburg region, where he soon received the rank of an army ensign.
We have already said that among the generals - participants in the Patriotic War, whose portraits are placed in the gallery, eighty-five people were released from non-commissioned officers of the guard by officers to the army, and some of them at a very early age: for example, Count A.I. Kutaisov received the rank of the captain's army at twelve years old, K.I.Bistrom - at fourteen, I.V.Sabaneev - at sixteen, Baron A.V. Rosen - at seventeen, etc. and governors, was immediately equated with army company commanders deserved in battles.
But those who served in the guard and after being promoted to officers made their careers even faster. They were constantly in sight of the court, not only at divorces and parades, but at balls and in drawing rooms, in which success sometimes replaced military prowess. Of course, in this case, too, noble and influential relatives or other connections in “ high society". It is no coincidence that among the seventy-four generals who have served their whole lives in the guards or who have gone over to the army only to command regiments, brigades and divisions (often in order to improve their shaken affairs with the proceeds from them), we find the youngest generals, representatives of the most noble noble families: Bakhmetevs, Borozdins, Vasilchikovs, Velyaminovs, Volkonsky, Vorontsovs, Golitsyns, Gorchakovs, Levashovs, Olsufievs, Talyzins, Chernyshevs, Chicherins, Shuvalovs.
True, even among the army men there were lucky ones who were "enchanted" by influential relatives, registering them, albeit in army regiments, but also almost from the cradle. However, there are only a few of them. For many years most of them were pulling on the difficult non-commissioned officer's strap. When the production of officers finally came, the life of such a campaigner did not at all become like a holiday. It was very difficult, adequately supporting the "honor of the uniform," to exist on one officer's salary. At the beginning of the 19th century, the ensign received only two hundred rubles a year, the captain - three hundred and forty, the colonel - nine hundred. Army regiments participated in continuous wars and constantly marched from one border to another. True, after the decline in battles, production to the junior ranks went quite quickly, but only desperate brave men and rare lucky ones advanced above the major and the lieutenant colonel. No matter what feats an army campaigner performs, he will hardly be able to get a regiment in command if a young officer who was transferred from the guard, who did not smell gunpowder, wants to take this place. After all, behind the Guardsman there is an influential family, and the army authorities will try to render her a service, expecting support from this family in their promotion. Let us recall the typical army officers from Tolstoy's "War and Peace" - the valiant, modest and very middle-aged Captain Tushin and Major Timokhin. And if such an officer still managed to reach the rank of major general (salary - 2 thousand rubles a year), then he rarely rose above the brigade commander.
As an example of such a happy version of the career path of an army officer, one can refer to the biography of General V.V. Eshin. He was promoted to cornet (junior officer rank in the cavalry) only after seven years of service as a non-commissioned officer. And when, in the rank of headquarters captain, as a reward for the rare bravery shown in the battles of 1805, he was transferred to the guard, two years later he asked to return to the army regiment. Service in a brilliant regiment stationed in the capital was beyond the means of an officer who had nothing but a salary. Yeshin was promoted to major general only in 1813, at the height of hostilities, in which he was invariably distinguished by courage and command. At that time he was in his forty-second year, and he had served for more than twenty-five years. In the rank of major general, a valiant cavalryman and died twelve years later, having served as brigade commander for eight years and only four years before his death he finally received a division.
Approximately the same is the career path of one of the heroes of the Battle of Borodino, P. G. Likhachev, who was seriously wounded in hand-to-hand combat at the Raevsky battery. He spent twelve years as an army non-commissioned officer and spent another fourteen years almost entirely in battles and campaigns, moving from the rank of ensign to major general.
The future field marshal MB Barclay de Tolly went from cornet to general for twenty-one years, having distinguished himself many times during this time in campaigns against the Turks, Swedes and Poles. Such sluggishness in production is explained by the fact that before us are not well-born nobles, the rich, who had connections and patronage, but the children of small or completely homeless nobles or retired officers in small ranks.
But they, although seedy, sometimes owning only a dozen serf souls, are still noblemen. And only in one service record of a general, a participant in the battles of 1812-1813, we read: "... from the soldiers' children." We are talking about Major General F.A.Lukov.
Finally, among the Russian military leaders of those years, there were people who began service in foreign armies and were accepted into the Russian troops as officers, sometimes of considerable rank. It is known how hospitably foreign nobles, especially those with a big name, were hospitably greeted in Russia under Catherine II and Alexander I. Among the thirty people who transferred from foreign service and were generals in 1812-1814, eighteen bore the titles of princes, dukes, earls, marquises and barons. Of these, five were French who emigrated to Russia after the Great French Revolution of 1789-1794, six officers left the Prussian and Polish service, the rest were Dutch, Hanoverians, Danes, Saxons, Austrians, Hessecs, Neapolitans, Venetians, Sardinians, Corsicans. Many of them, like Count Lanzheron, having served in the Russian troops for decades, never learned to speak Russian; others, like Count Beynigsen, never accepted Russian citizenship.
It is interesting to note how intricately the entries were made in the formular lists about the origin of some persons with foreign surnames, who were Russian subjects since childhood. So, about General A. A. Skalon, who was killed near Smolensk, it is said: "A French nation from the gentry, a native of Russia, who took an oath of allegiance to the Lutheran law"; briefly about General Patton - “the Austrian nation”; about Baron Levenstern - "a native of Wirttemberg-Stuttgart"; about General Rossi - "the Italian gentry, a staff officer's son"; about Baron Duca - "a Serbian nation of nobles, a native of the city of Ancona."
These are the most general information about the origin, military training and service of those generals whose portraits are in the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace.
Answering the constant question of visitors to the Hermitage, I would like to inform you that if a member of the Decembrist secret society from among the generals whose portraits we see in the gallery was one S.G. Volkonsky, then among the convicted Decembrists there were five sons of generals, as if to select troops of Napoleon. However, images of only two - P. P. Konovnitsyn and S. E. Gangeblov - found a place in the gallery. Both portraits, most likely, owe their placement here under Nicholas I to the insignificant role that the sons of Konovnitsyn and Gangeblov played in the events of 1825.
There are no portraits of generals Bulatov, Ivashev and Sutgof, whose sons were prominent figures in a military conspiracy against the autocracy, in the gallery, and it seems fair to us to briefly mention the military service of these worthy representatives of the Russian generals.
The eldest of them is Mikhail Leontievich Bulatov (1760–1825). He began his service, like many middle-class nobles, as a 15-year-old private in the Izmailovsky Guards Regiment and, having passed the ranks of non-commissioned officers, for 20 years was released as a lieutenant in the army infantry. Education in the formal list is indicated very modestly: "Russian literacy and reading, theoretical and practical mathematics knows." Beginning in 1783, Bulatov participated in hostilities in the Caucasus and the banks of the Danube, either in the ranks, or as quartermaster in Potemkin's army, built batteries near Izmail and stormed this fortress, for which he was noted by Suvorov himself. More than once he was sent to take maps, in particular, areas bordering with Prussia and the shores of the Gulf of Finland; apparently, practical mathematics meant primitive cartographic work. Thirty-nine years old, Bulatov was promoted to major general and in 1808, being the chief of the Mogilev infantry regiment, was sent to Finland, where, as part of the division of N.A.Tuchkov (Tuchkov 1st), he participated in a number of battles, showing his usual courage ... But, on April 15, seconded from a division with a detachment consisting of three battalions of various infantry regiments, a half-squadron of hussars, hundreds of Cossacks, who had several guns at his disposal, Bulatov was attacked at Revolax by the four-strongest detachment of the Swedish General Kronstedt. After a hot battle, firing the last volley from the guns, the general ordered the remnants of his battalions to break through from the encirclement with bayonets. At this time, he was wounded by three bullets at once, fell from his horse and woke up in captivity. Having undergone a serious operation in Stockholm - a bullet struck near the heart, Bulatov was released from captivity a year later, acquitted by a military court and soon sent to the Moldovan army. Here, commanding the vanguard, he took Isakchu and Tulcha by storm and occupied Babadag. Under the command of Prozorovsky, Bagration, Kamensky and Kutuzov, General Bulatov for three years participated in the battles of Rasevat, Tataritsa, Ruschuk and received a number of military orders - Anna I degree, George III degree, Vladimir II degree and the golden sword "For Bravery". In July 1812, Bulatov's corps was moved to the west, he participated in the Patriotic War, in the defeat of the Saxon and Polish units at Kladov, Gornostaev, Volkovysk; in 1813-1814 Bulatov distinguished himself in battles near Dresden and during the siege of Hamburg, and again he was twice seriously wounded. During his military service, General Bulatov received twenty-eight wounds.
At the end of the war with France, Bulatov commanded troops in Bessarabia. In 1823 he was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1824 he was appointed governor general of Western Siberia. He died suddenly in Omsk in May 1825.
The archive has preserved evidence related to the history of the creation of the Military Gallery, confirming the unceremonious attitude of staff officials bordering on rudeness towards some generals, in particular, towards Mikhail Leontyevich Bulatov.
Arriving in St. Petersburg on business at the beginning of 1823, he submitted a report to the Inspection Department, referring to an article in "Russian Invalid" and asking to give him the opportunity to immediately be written by Dow, since he was soon obliged to leave the capital for his place of service. To this seemingly so natural request, the well-deserved sixty-three-year-old warrior received an answer that said: “The portraits are written only from those gentlemen generals who participated in the war with the French, who will be followed by a special imperial command, but your superiority is not yet It was".
The second oldest is Major General Pyotr Nikiforovich Ivashev (1767-1838). The beginning of his military service is typical of a wealthy nobleman of the late 18th century with good connections in the capital. Eight years old, Ivashev was recorded directly as a sergeant in the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment and at twenty years old he was released as a captain in the Poltava Light-Horse Regiment.
The young man was well educated for his time, according to the formal list he knew, apart from Russian, "French and German, geometry, civil and military architecture and drawing." In addition to the combat duties, mastered with distinction during the assault on Ochakov, Ivashev soon had a chance to learn the sapper service - to prepare fascines, assault ladders and arrange bresh-batteries for the assault on Izmail, in which he again distinguished himself with courage and was wounded. An active, intelligent and courageous young officer endeared him to Suvorov and quickly, according to his suggestion, received the ranks of seconds - and prime-major, in 1794 - lieutenant colonel, in 1795 - colonel. Ivashev successfully fulfilled the troublesome post of quartermaster general of Suvorov's headquarters and at thirty-one years of age, in 1798, was promoted to major general. Soon he retired "due to an accident that happened."
Probably, it was in the years that followed that Ivashev wrote extensive amendments to Anting's work about Suvorov, which the great commander himself instructed him to make. In 1807, Ivashev was elected head of the provincial militia (militia), which he successfully and quickly formed, for which he was awarded the Order of Anna, II degree. In 1811, Ivashev again entered the service. This time he became the head of the 8th district of communications, which included the provinces of Estland, Kurland, Livonia, Vilna, Minsk, Mogilev, Smolensk and Pskov, that is, almost the entire territory of the future invasion of Russia by Napoleon's armies. Naturally, at the beginning of hostilities, Ivashev was appointed director of military communications of the army in the field. Subordinated to him were five pioneers, one mine company, and three thousand militia soldiers used as labor. They erected earthworks, built and then destroyed bridges, and repaired roads. Ivashev's form indicates participation in the battles at Vitebsk, Ostrovna, Smolensk. For the fearlessness shown in the Battle of Borodino, he was awarded the Order of Anna, 1st degree. For the battle at Tarutin, under the leadership of the general, routes were prepared for the night advance of the Russian troops, and during the battle he directed columns along them and installed artillery in positions. “Then, with the pressured rapid movement of the army against the retreating enemy, - we read in Ivashev’s formulary list, - afterwards he prepared the routes and crossings over the rivers lying there, across the Dnieper and Berezina”. He took part in the battles at Maloyaroslavets and near Krasny, and “in 1813, holding the same position, he was in the battles at Lutsen, Bautzen ... and during the capture of the city of Pirna, in the battle at Dresden and Kulm. In 1814, during the blockade of the Hamburg fortress and its occupation by Russian troops. "
Fifty years old, in 1817, Ivashev retired again and settled permanently near Simbirsk in his estate. Here he actively engaged in agriculture, treating serfs with a rare humanity for that time. Undoubtedly, the character of an enlightened father influenced the worldview of his only son, the Decembrist Vasily Petrovich Ivashev.
Only a year younger than Ivashev was the father of the Decembrist Alexander Nikolaevich Sutgof, who played a very prominent role in the event on December 14 on Senate Square. Major General Nikolai Ivanovich Sutgof, or Sutgov, as he himself signed, was a man of modest origin, perhaps not from the nobility, as the formal list reads: "From the officials of the Grand Duchy of Finland." At fifteen years old, Sutgof was enrolled in the civil service as a clerical officer, but three years later he switched to the military with the rank of lieutenant of the 4th Finnish Jaeger Battalion. For his distinction in the war with the Swedes in 1788-1789, he was transferred to the Life Grenadier Regiment (then not a Guards Regiment), where he rose to the rank of Colonel and was appointed commander of the Voronezh Musketeer Regiment, which was soon renamed the 37th Jaeger Regiment. At the head of this unit, Sutgof fought from 1808 to 1811 with the Turks. In his form, the battles near Girsov, Babadag, Rasevat, Silistria, Tataritsa, Brailov, Shumla, Ruschuk are named, participation in them was awarded the Orders of George and Vladimir IV degree. From these campaigns Sutthof emerges unscathed, but, having crossed from the Danube to the western border, where he initially fights with the Poles and Saxons, and then with the French, he receives several wounds: under Katzbach - light in the chest, under Leipzig - with a rifle bullet in his right leg and buckshot to the left. During the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, the colonel was awarded the golden sword "For Courage", the Order of Vladimir III degree and the Prussian "Pour le mérite".
On February 2, 1814, Alexander I signed a decree on the promotion of Sutgof to major general. On the same day, the 8th Russian Infantry Division, attached to the army of the Prussian Field Marshal Blucher, who did not suspect that Napoleon was close to his main forces, was unexpectedly attacked by the French, and in a battle near the village of Montmery, Colonel Sutthof was wounded by a saber in the head and taken to captivity. However, the victories over parts of the Blucher army from January 30 to February 3 did not change the fate of Napoleon. On March 18, the Russians and their allies take Paris by storm, and soon Sutthof, freed from captivity, learns that it has been two months since he was promoted to major general. The 8th Infantry Division returns to its homeland, settles in apartments in Poland in August, and in April 1815 sets out on a campaign to France again. Napoleon fled from the island of Elba, and on June 3, 1815, the Sutthoff brigade crosses the French border, being late, however, for the battle at Waterloo. The division participates in the blockade of the Metz fortress and in August starts off again on a campaign, already to permanent apartments in the town of Korop, Chernigov province.
Fatal for Sutgof, 1825 found him in Moscow as a brigade commander in one of the divisions of the 5th Infantry Corps. The only son made, it seemed, such a successful career - at the age of twenty-four he was a lieutenant of the guard and in command of a company. And suddenly the news about the events of December 14 ... Convicted and sentenced to life hard labor, a former guards lieutenant, shackled, was sent to Siberia, and his father, after long and humiliating troubles, gets a commandant's place in Helsingfors. It is very likely that this appointment was helped by the knowledge of the languages "Russian, French, German, Swedish and Finnish" recorded in his form.
The portrait of General Sutgof could not be found, as it was not possible to establish the date of his death. It is only known that he was dismissed from the “enrolled in the army” by order of Nicholas I on January 4, 1834.
Finally, mention should be made of Lieutenant General Prince Alexander Vasilyevich Siberian. His name appears in two archival documents known to us - in the list of portraits commissioned by D. Doe, compiled in August 1826, and in the second, compiled, apparently, by the architect C.I. Rossi for those portraits that have not yet been received from the painter. but already marked - where exactly, in what row and order they should be placed in the gallery.
The last list includes 106 portraits, 105 of which are in the form of canvases or empty frames covered with silk with signed ranks, initials and surnames. There is only one thing missing - Lieutenant General A. V. Sibirskiy. Who could have deleted him from the list, excluded from the list of worthy premises in this peculiar pantheon of Russian military glory? Obviously, only Nicholas I.
But for what sins could such a punishment befall a Siberian? The information we have collected speaks first of all about an honest battle path. Here it is in the most concise outline. He was born in 1779 and, being the son of a general, was registered at birth as a non-commissioned officer in the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment. Active service began for a well-born youth at the age of sixteen with the rank of major in the Black Sea Grenadier Corps. At nineteen years old he is a lieutenant colonel, twenty-one years old - a colonel, and at twenty-four - the commander of the Narva Musketeer Regiment, at the head of which he first falls into the fire of battles in 1805 near Krems and Austerlitz, where he was wounded three times at once. In 1808-1809 Siberian fought in Finland with the Swedes at Kuhayoki, Orovais, Torneo and for the difference in last fight promoted to major general. Then he was appointed chief of the Mogklev infantry regiment instead of General Bulatov.
In the Wittgenstein corps, which protected the path to St. Petersburg from the French, Sibirskiy met the war of 1812. With his regiment, he participated in the battles at Klyastitsy, Svolye, Polotsk, for the second time at Polotsk and on the Berezina. In 1813 he fought at Lutzen, Bautzen and Reichenbach, where he was seriously wounded in the right arm and in the side, after which he was sent to Warsaw for treatment. Over the last campaigns Siberian awarded with orders George III degree, Anna I degree and diamonds for the golden sword "For Courage" received earlier.
The war ended, and peaceful combat service began. Since 1822 Sibirskiy was the chief of the 18th Infantry Division in southwestern Russia. Is it not here that one should look for the reasons for the anger of Emperor Nicholas against him? The testimonies of contemporaries we have collected indicate that the 18th division, at a review in the fall of 1823, was assessed by Alexander I as excellent in combat and that the Vyatka infantry regiment especially distinguished itself, looking at the evolution of which the tsar - a great connoisseur of front-line training - exclaimed: “Excellent! Just like a guard! " - and granted the regiment commander three thousand acres of land. The division chief also distinguished and praised this regimental commander in his orders that have come down to us. And the colonel was none other than Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, the leader of the Southern secret society, who was arrested in his apartment in the town of Linz on December 14, 1825. In the same regiment served a member of the secret society, Major N. I. Lorer, who was arrested in Tulchin on December 23. And another regiment of the same division - Kazan - was also commanded by a member of the secret society, Colonel P.V. Avramov, who was arrested on December 19. Pestel in six months will be sentenced to death, the other two - to twelve years of hard labor each.
And here's what is interesting to note. Following their arrest, they demanded formular lists from the head of the division, which were sent to St. Petersburg and preserved in the investigative files of the Decembrists.
Of course, on January 1, 1826, with which the lists are dated, Sibirskiy already knew, like everyone around him, about the December 14 uprising in St. Petersburg and about the arrest of many conspiratorial officers. The last column of the formal lists was the question: "Is it worthy for promotion or why is it not certified?" Other generals, who in these troubling days filled out the forms of their arrested subordinates, left this question unanswered, otherwise they left it out completely, without entering it into the form's schedule, or, finally, wrote: "By the highest order, he is imprisoned." And the prince of Siberia assured with his signature in all three forms the clearly deduced “worthy”, although, of course, he understood that this word was not very appropriate now: how worthy is it when he is arrested, taken under escort and imprisoned in a fortress in St. Petersburg as a state criminal !. ...
Apparently, Nicholas I knew the general's attitude to Pestel, Avramov, Lorer, the tsar did not forgive him his long-standing praises to the "exemplary" commander of the Vyatka regiment and the words "worthy" in the forms of those arrested ...
* * *There is a lot of evidence in Russian journalistic and memoir literature of the 1820s - 1830s about the impression the gallery made on its contemporaries. But, entering the gallery, everyone first of all remembers the first stanzas of Pushkin's beautiful poem "The Leader":
The Russian tsar has a chamber in his palaces:
She is not rich in gold, not velvet;
It is not in her that the diamond of the crown is kept behind the glass;
But from top to bottom, full length, all around,
With my brush free and wide
It was painted by a fast-paced artist.
There are no country nymphs, no virgin madonnas,
No fauns with cups, no full-breasted wives,
No dances, no hunts, but all cloaks and swords,
Yes, faces full of belligerent courage.
In a crowded crowd, the artist placed
Here the chiefs of our people's forces,
Covered in the glory of a wonderful march
And the eternal memory of the Twelfth year.
And, I think, I hear their bellicose cries.
Many of them are gone; others whose faces
Still so young on a bright canvas
Already grown old and dying in silence
The head of the laurel ...
These lines introduce the shadow of the great poet into the gallery with us.
It is quite natural that the Military Gallery attracted Pushkin's attention more than other monuments of the Patriotic War erected in his time. It was a widely conceived and talented monument to Russian military leaders - from the brigade commander to the commander-in-chief, and in their person - to the Russian military art and the entire Russian army, which Pushkin highly esteemed, whose exploits he was proud of.
United in 1812-1814 by a powerful patriotic impulse, the originals of the portraits were not, however, similar in the way they traveled in life.
The portraits of the Military Gallery depict a huge variety of streets that bore the imprint of senile wisdom, military pride, selfless courage, battle excitement or class arrogance, courtyard intrigue, pampered sybarism, stupid fruntomania.
Here the broadest field for thought was presented to such an inquisitive observer as Pushkin. He, a delicate physiognomist and psychologist, should have been attracted by this huge collection of sharply captured and excellently written artistic characteristics. It is not for nothing that the poet writes: "Often I wander slowly between them ..." And in one of the original versions of this stanza we read: "And often, in silence, I wander between them ..."
When, in what years, under what circumstances did Pushkin come here? This question, naturally, is asked by many visitors when they come to the gallery and remember the poems of the great poet.
We know that Pushkin first visited the gallery not earlier than June - July 1827, when he arrived in St. Petersburg after eight years of exile to the south of Russia and the Pskov province. At this time, the gallery was one of the news and attractions of the capital, a lot was written and talked about, visitors were eager to inspect it, this monument of military glory and portrait art.
An indirect indication that Pushkin in 1827-1828 got acquainted with the portraits of the Military Gallery, we find in the first chapter of "Travel to Arzrum", where, talking about a meeting with General Ermolov in Orel, the poet says that he "strikingly resembles a poetic portrait written by Dov. "
The inspirational description of the Military Gallery in the poem "The Leader" is contrasted with the description of other palace halls and, mainly, the Hermitage gallery, and this is not accidental. We know that V.A.Zhukovsky lived for many years next to the Winter Palace, in the so-called Shepelevsky house, and Pushkin constantly visited him. Together with Zhukovsky, the poet could, through the Hermitage halls overlooking the Neva, and the so-called Lamotov pavilion, through the internal passages to the Winter Palace and visit the Military Gallery. At the same time, Pushkin, naturally, felt the contrast in the decoration of the halls he had just passed with the somewhat harsh, military character of the portrait Gallery of the figures of 1812.
In addition, Pushkin often visited the Winter Palace itself, with his close friend, the maid of honor AO Rosset, and later, by her husband, Smirnova, the “black-eyed Rosseti”. Before getting married in 1832, she lived in the maid of honor rooms on the third floor, overlooking the Palace Square. Here, at AO Rosset's, a circle of people close to Pushkin often gathered, mainly writers, consisting of V. A. Zhukovsky, P. A. Vyazemsky, V. F. Odoevsky, M. Yu. Vielgorsky and others. Pushkin could also visit the Military Gallery and other halls of the palace and the Hermitage in the Rosset society, this was allowed during the absence of the tsar, during the periods when Nicholas I and his family lived in the Anichkov Palace.
There is no doubt, however, that especially often the poet had to visit the Winter Palace from the beginning of 1834, from the time when Nicholas I "granted" him as a chamber-junker of his court. No matter how much Pushkin was burdened by this title, no matter how he shied away from fulfilling the duties of a courtier, intolerable to him, he more than once had to appear here dressed in a chamber-cadet uniform, next to his beautiful wife, at various ceremonies - exits, receptions, divine services, balls. One of the poet's close friends, A. I. Turgenev, describes in a letter dated December 7, 1836 his visit to the Winter Palace on the name day of Nicholas I: “I was in the palace from 10 o'clock to 3 1/2 and was amazed at the splendor of the courtyard, the palace and the costumes of the military and ladies, I found many apartments new and decorated in excellent taste. The singing in the church is amazing. I didn't know whether to listen or look at Pushkin and those like her. But are there many of them? The wife of a clever poet and her decoration overshadowed others. " We can say with confidence that Pushkin was in the palace that day. According to the conditions of the then etiquette, the wife could hardly appear in the palace church without him. And this, of course, happened more than once.
In the outwardly brilliant and correct, but inwardly alien and hostile court environment, Pushkin felt heavy and lonely. This feeling of personal loneliness and alienation from the environment was artistically refracted in the poem "The General", written in 1835, dedicated to the portrait of Barclay de Tolly, one of the best in the gallery.
We can imagine how, during a solemn divine service in the palace cathedral, Pushkin, leaving his wife to vainly show off her dress against the background of court uniforms and intricate curls of church gilding, one goes into the nearby Military Gallery. He walks slowly along the line of portraits, sparsely lit from the upper windows with the gray gleam of a winter St. Petersburg day. The muffled sounds of chants from the cathedral are heard. The sentry grenadiers stood motionless at the door of the St. George Throne Hall. The lonely figure of the greatest Russian poet moves through the gallery, he peers into "faces full of militant courage." His gaze is focused, he creates. There are lines about heavy loneliness in an alien crowd:
Oh people! a wretched race worthy of tears and laughter!
Priests of the minute, fans of success!
How often does a person pass by you
Who is the blind and violent age swearing at ...
It is here, in the gallery, that the image of Pushkin still lives. Here he accompanies every visitor who, upon entering here, recalls:
Often I wander slowly between them
And I look at their familiar images,
And, I think, I hear their warlike cries ...
Pushkin was already 13 years old, he was finishing his first academic year at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, when the invasion of Napoleon's hordes into Russia began. An inquisitive teenager carefully peered into what was happening. Here is how the Lyceum comrade of Pushkin, his close friend, the future Decembrist II Pushchin, describes this time: “Our Lyceum life merges with the political epoch of Russian folk life: the storm of 1812 was being prepared. This event had a strong impact on our childhood. It began with the fact that we saw off all the guards regiments, because they passed by the Lyceum itself; we were always here, when they appeared, we went out even during classes, admonished the soldiers with heartfelt prayer, hugged our relatives and friends; The mustachioed grenadiers from the ranks blessed us with the cross. Not one tear has been shed here ... When the hostilities began, every Sunday one of the relatives brought in reports; Koshansky read them to us loudly in the hall. The newspaper room was never empty during class-free hours; Russian and foreign magazines were read vying with each other, with incessant rumors and debates; We were keenly sympathetic to everything, fears gave way to raptures at the slightest glimpse for the better. Professors came to us and taught us to follow the course of affairs and events, explaining something else that we do not understand. "
So it was in the days of the war, in the adolescence of Pushkin. But further, in his youth and maturity, the poet was constantly interested in 1812, thought and wrote about it. As only a few, the most mature, contemporaries, he understood the worldwide significance of the heroic struggle of the Russian people against the French invaders - a struggle at the cost of the blood of our soldiers that saved not only Russia from the threat of foreign domination, but after that played a huge role in the liberation of the peoples of Europe from yoke of Napoleon.
Pushkin clearly understood pi the close connection of this great epic with the entire subsequent period of the political history of Russia. No wonder the poet's progressive contemporaries divided their lives into two sharply different parts - before 1812 and after him. Victories over an enemy who had not known defeat before caused a huge rise in Russian national consciousness. The victorious people understood what great things they could do, and after that they felt with particular keenness the injustice and backwardness of the political system of feudal Russia. We know that the Decembrists, to whose worldview Pushkin was so close, called themselves "children of 1812".
There is no doubt that the spiritual development of the great poet was largely due to the experience of his homeland in 1812. The proud consciousness of the mighty spiritual strength of his people, characteristic of Pushkin, could not be so complete without the great trials and victories of the Patriotic War.
Pushkin's interest in 1812 was continuously supported by what he saw and heard. Russia in the 20s and 80s of the XIX century was replete with memories of great events, and the gradually rebuilt Moscow, burned down in 1812, also reminded of them.
There were also numerous direct participants in the Patriotic War, with whom Pushkin communicated. Recall that among his friends and good acquaintances were Kaverin, Chaadaev, Batyushkov, the Raevsky and Davydov brothers, Katenin, F. Glinka, F. Tolstoy, Krivtsov, M. Orlov, Perovsky and others who served as officers in 1812-1814, that such people close to the poet, like Zhukovsky and Vyazemsky, were in the people's militia and participated in the Borodino battle.
In addition to these constant interlocutors of Pushkin, from whose lips he undoubtedly heard stories about various events of the "eternal memory of the Twelfth Year", the poet met participants in recent battles wherever his fate threw him. In Tsarskoe Selo and on the Caucasian waters, in Kishinev and in Odessa, in the landowners' estates of the Pskov outback, in Moscow and in Petersburg, in the camp near Arzrum, in Tiflis and in Orenburg, in any society - in a secular living room, in a restaurant hall, for at the card table and at the post station, - everywhere Pushkin met people who served under the command of Kutuzov or Barclay, Kulnev or Raevsky, Ermolov or Neverovsky and who were ready to remember the recent years full of dangers and glory. In addition, in the capitals and in the remote provinces of Russia, at that time there were all sorts of images of the victories of 1812, varied in artistic merit, and even more often - portraits of military leaders, which were largely painted copies, engravings and lithographs from the portraits we are familiar with. "Quick-eyed artist", D. Doe.
Pushkin especially highly appreciated courage in a person and was always keenly interested in the specific circumstances of a perfect feat, in all kinds of manifestations of selflessness and courage. One of his contemporaries, a military officer, writes that “Alexander Sergeevich always admired the feat in which life, as he put it, was at stake; he listened with particular attention to the stories about the war episodes: his face flushed and pretended to be greedy to learn any special case of self-sacrifice; his eyes shone and suddenly he often wondered. " Naturally, the wars of 1812-1814, so rich in examples of the valor of Russian generals, officers, soldiers, and from this side, invariably occupied the poet.
There are many direct indications of the interest with which Pushkin treated the memoirs of the participants in the Patriotic War. As a young man, in Tsarskoe Selo, he listens to the stories of the Life Hussar officers and himself dreams of abusive glory; in 1820-1821 in Chisinau he asks about Borodin and the capture of Paris by the local postmaster, retired Colonel Alekseev; in January 1834, we find him in a room in the Petersburg hotel of Demut, enthusiastically talking with HH Raevsky (son) and Grabbe on the same topics, and in the summer of 1836 - the last year of the poet's life - in the same hotel - talking with a participant in the war with the French " cavalry girl "Durova on the publication of her notes. There are many such evidences of Pushkin's constant interest in the events of the Patriotic War. Among them will be, by the way, the fact that materials about the struggle between Russia and Napoleon were present in all four issues of Sovremennik published by Pushkin.
Let us remember how many times in different years the theme of the Patriotic War was raised in Pushkin's work. Without giving an exhaustive list of these works, let us name: "Alexander I", "Napoleon", "Memories in Tsarskoe Selo" (1814), chapters VII and X "Eugene Onegin", "Slanderers of Russia", "Borodino anniversary", " Blizzard "," Roslavlev "," Note on public education "," October 19 "(1836). And each time this or that side of the great events of the recent past was illuminated with the sharpness, laconicism and skill characteristic of Pushkin - not a participant, but a witness and a historian.
This is how the unfinished story "Roslavlev" describes the mood of the Moscow noble society on the eve of the war with Napoleon. Numerous fashionistas, egoists and cowards abruptly change the usual praise of everything French for a superficial and false admiration for all Russians and, with loud "patriotic" chatter, run to the rear. Pushkin vividly showed the true love for Russia of the common people and the advanced nobility, going to defend their homeland. In the center of the narrative is the image of a heroic Russian girl, with excitement following the military events and ready to sneak into the enemy camp and kill Napoleon in order to save her fatherland.
Pushkin rightly believed that the burning of Moscow by its inhabitants was one of the most important events in the 1812 campaign. The great feat of the people excited and moved the poet. He returned to him more than once in the poems "Napoleon", "The Slanderers of Russia" and in Chapter VII of "Eugene Onegin", where, as if casually mentioning the Petrovsky Palace near Moscow, in which, after fleeing from the Kremlin, Napoleon escaped from the fire, a poet full national pride, gave a picture of the unfulfilled hopes of the conqueror:
Here, surrounded by its oak forest,
Petrovsky castle. Gloomy he
Recently proud of fame.
Napoleon waited in vain,
Intoxicated with the last happiness,
Moscow kneeling
With the keys of the old Kremlin.
No, my Moscow did not go
To him with a guilty head,
Not a holiday, not an accepted gift,
Oka was preparing a fire
An impatient hero.
Henceforth immersed in thought,
He looked at the formidable flame.
And here is a picture of the victorious return of Russian troops from a campaign, seen in his youth by Pushkin himself, reproduced in the story "Snowstorm":
“Meanwhile, the war with glory was over. The porridge shelves were returning from abroad. The people ran to meet them. The music played the conquered songs: "Vive Henri-quatre", Tyrolean waltzes and arias from Joconda. The officers, who had gone on a campaign almost as youths, returned, having matured in the bad air, hung with crosses. The soldiers talked merrily among themselves, intervening every minute in the speech of German and French words. Unforgettable time! Burden of glory and delight! How hard the Russian heart beat at the word fatherland! How sweet were the tears of the date! "
Finally, Pushkin dedicated the poems "Before the Holy Tomb ..." and "The General" to the two leading commanders of the Patriotic War, Field Marshals MI Kutuzov and MB Barclay de Tolly.
The first of them is especially interesting as evidence of the great poet's almost reverential attitude to the memory of Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov and the high appreciation of his military leadership talent.
The circumstances under which this poem was written are as follows. The political situation in the spring and summer of 1831 was so tense that it seemed any the next moment France may appear, which almost openly threatened Russia with war. England also showed its unfriendliness. The situation was especially aggravated after a series of failures of the Russian troops, caused by the mediocrity of the commander-in-chief Diebitsch and his assistants Tol and Neigardt, which was interpreted by European enemies as symptoms of the impotence of the Russian army, which, it seemed to them, would be easy to cope with.
Pushkin anxiously followed the increasingly complicated political situation. He devoted a lot of space to analyzing it in letters to friends, and in one of them, dated June 1, we read: "Europe will be upon us anyway." It was at this time that the story of one of the poet's acquaintances refers to how, having met Pushkin on a walk, gloomy and alarmed, he asked: "Why are they sad, Alexander Sergeevich?" And I heard in response: "Yes, I read all the newspapers." - "What is it?" - "But don't you understand that now the time is almost as formidable as in 1812."
Involuntarily, the question arose of who could stand at the head of the Russian army in the event of an attack by France and adequately repel it. There were no such generals in the ranks of the army of Nicholas I. Pushkin bitterly understood this. The poet knew the Tsar's favorite Paskevich too well and soberly assessed him limited opportunities... Numerous Germans were even more mediocre and did not enjoy the confidence of the country and the army.
In his reflections, Pushkin turned to the recent past, similar in political situation and rich in so many glorious names. At the same time, naturally, before all others, the majestic image of MI Kutuzov, a skilled military leader and a prominent statesman, stood before him.
At the end of May, the poet visited the tomb of the great commander in the Kazan Cathedral, known to every Leningrader, and soon after that he creates stanzas of a heartfelt poem:
Before the tomb of the saint
I stand with my head drooping ...
Everything is asleep all around; some icon lamps
In the darkness of the temple gilded
Pillars of granite masses
And their banners are overhanging a row.This lord sleeps under them,
This idol of the northern squads,
The venerable guardian of the sovereign country,
The subduer of all her enemies,
This rest of the glorious pack
Catherine's eagles.Delight lives in your coffin!
He gives us a Russian voice;
He repeats to us about that year
When the popular faith voice
He called out to your holy gray hair:
"Go, save!" You got up and saved ...Hearken, and today is our faithful voice,
Stand up and save the king and us
O formidable old man! For a moment
Appear at the door of the coffin
Appear, breathe in delight and zeal
The shelves you left behind!Appear to your hand
Show us in the crowd of leaders,
Who is your heir, your chosen one!
But the temple is immersed in silence,
And the quiet of your abusive grave
Unperturbed, eternal sleep ...
It should be noted that the last two stanzas, which speak of Pushkin's anxious moods in 1831, of his distrust of the military associates of Nicholas I, were not published during the poet's life. And the previous stanzas became known to the general public only in 1836, when, in connection with the publication of the poem "The Leader", Pushkin was accused of underestimating the role of Kutuzov in the Patriotic War. Then, in the 4th volume of the Sovremennik magazine, published by him, the poet placed "Explanation", in which he revealed his attitude to the actions of the late field marshal and cited the first three stanzas of the poem "Before the tomb of the saint ...". In this "Explanation" we read:
“The glory of Kutuzov is inextricably linked with the glory of Russia, with the memory of the greatest event in recent history. His title: Savior of Russia; his monument: the rock of St. Helena! His name is not only sacred to us, but shouldn't we still rejoice, we Russians, that it sounds in the Russian sound?
And could Barclay de Tolly complete the career he had begun? Could he stop and propose a battle at the mounds of Borodin? Could he, after a terrible battle, where the unequal dispute was equal, to give Moscow to Napoleon and stand idle on the Tarutinsky plains? No! (Not to mention the superiority of the military genius). Kutuzov alone could offer the Battle of Borodino; Kutuzov alone could give Moscow to the enemy, Kutuzov alone could remain in this wise, active inaction, putting Napoleon to sleep in the conflagration of Moscow and waiting for the fateful moment: for Kutuzov alone was clothed in a popular power of attorney, which he so wonderfully justified! ..
The glory of Kutuzov has no need for anyone's praise, and the opinion of the poet can neither elevate nor humiliate the one who deposed Napoleon and lifted Russia to the level at which the dream appeared in 1813 ”.
We see that in his "Explanation" Pushkin was almost the first in our literature, long before L.N. him as a genius commander.
The genius of Kutuzov, of course, manifested itself most vividly in the leadership of the struggle of the Russian people against the hordes of French invaders during the Patriotic War. But Pushkin, like all his contemporaries, also knew other, earlier, remarkable military deeds of Kutuzov, which prepared him for the difficult and responsible role of the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces of Russia in 1812. Visiting the Military Gallery, looking at the portrait of Kutuzov, which occupied one of the central places in it, as now, the poet, in all likelihood, recalled the most glorified gray-haired commander of the campaigns of 1805 and 1811, when Kutuzov was placed in extremely difficult conditions and both once solved the problem with amazing skill.
Since these campaigns are much less known than Kutuzov's activities in the Patriotic War, we will briefly remind the reader of them.
In the fall of 1805, Kutuzov was given command of the army moving from Russia to help the Austrian allies. After a two-month forced march, while already in Bavaria, Kutuzov learned that a group of Austrian troops, to join with which he was in such a hurry, surrendered to Napoleon without a fight. With 40 thousand fighters who made up the first echelon of his army, Kutuzov found himself almost face to face with 160 thousand of Napoleon's soldiers. The French commander sought as soon as possible to crush the Russian troops, exhausted by the march, weighed down by carts and artillery. To connect with his second echelon and the Austrians, who were also in the rear, Kutuzov began a retreating march along the Danube.
The French were on their heels, transferring the Mortier corps to the other side of the river, which was supposed to prevent Kutuzov from crossing the Danube near the town of Krems. The brilliant rearguard battle of Bagration at Amstetten, which upset and stopped the advanced units of the French troops, made it possible for Kutuzov to get ahead of the enemy for a whole transition, breaking away from him, cross the Danube at Krems, destroy the bridge and collapse on the approaching Mortier literally in front of the enraged but powerless to help his marshal Napoleon.
It seemed that now it was possible to calmly move towards the goal - the next bridge over the Danube was 100 kilometers away, near Vienna, it was guarded by selected Austrian units and was mined. But the French mastered him by cunning, without a fight, and Murat with a thirty-thousand-strong vanguard rushed across the Russians, who continued their movement.
Near the village of Shengraben, Kutuzov set up a detachment of five thousand of General Bagration with the task of delaying the enemy. Murat, not knowing what forces were in front of him, struck up negotiations on an armistice, skillfully drawn out by Kutuzov, who went farther and farther. Napoleon, who approached with the main forces, realized that Murat had been outwitted, and threw him onto the Russian screen. For a whole day, Bagration heroically fought with an enemy six times outnumbered, broke free from the encirclement and, with trophies in the form of a repulsed enemy banner and 400 prisoners, two days later joined Kutuzov, who was already approaching Olmutz, the place of concentration of Russian and Austrian troops.
The brilliant march was over. Kutuzov covered 425 kilometers, retaining not only the combat capability of the army, all the artillery and carts, but also inflicting a series of heavy blows on the enemy. Kutuzov's actions aroused the admiration and surprise of his contemporaries, the French Marshal Marmont called the movement from Braunau to Olmutz "classically heroic."
In 1811, an even more difficult and responsible task was set before Kutuzov. Since 1806, Russia has been at war with Turkey. The commanders in chief on the Danube were successively Generals Mikhelson, Kamensky, Prozorovsky and Bagration, who, however, did not achieve decisive success.
In May 1811, Kutuzov was appointed commander-in-chief. At his disposal were only 45 thousand fighters scattered on the thousand-kilometer line of the Danube, against 100 thousand Turks. Meanwhile, circumstances demanded a quick and complete defeat enemy army: a new clash with Napoleon was clearly brewing, and divisions fighting on the Danube were needed on the western border of Russia. A lasting peace with Turkey would ensure success in the fight against the French.
Having quickly worked out an original and bold plan of action, Kutuzov concentrated his troops in the area of the Rushchuk fortress, destroying a number of other fortifications that scattered his insignificant forces. By skillful maneuvers, combined with the spread of false information about his weakness, the Russian commander-in-chief lured the Turks out of the fortresses into the field, drew their main forces to Ruschuk, and here on July 5 he struck them a cruel blow, although he had only 15 thousand fighters against 60 thousand of the enemy. The conduct of this battle is an example of military leadership, worthy of special study.
However, after the victory, instead of the pursuit expected by the fleeing Turks, Kutuzov stood at Ruschuk for three days, blew up its fortifications and crossed with his army to the northern bank of the Danube. The emboldened Turks, deciding that the Russian forces were exhausted in the battle, strengthened their army to 70 thousand and again rushed to Ruschuk. Here, in the amount of 50 thousand, they crossed the river after Kutuzov, the rest of the forces were supposed to guard the food and military base on the southern bank. This was what the Russian commander wanted. Now he went on the offensive again. Having transferred Markov's corps to the Turkish coast, he with a swift attack took possession of the Turkish base camp and took the rear of the Grand Vizier's army on the northern bank of the Danube under fire from Turkish cannons, pushing it from the front and pressing it to the river. Cut off from their communications, deprived of food and ammunition, the Turks soon began to endure hunger and hardship. On December 7, 1811, after two months of the blockade by Kutuzov's troops, they surrendered.
In May 1812, in Bucharest, with the active participation of the Russian commander, a peace was concluded, according to which Bessarabia was freed from the Turkish yoke and joined Russia. The destruction of the Turkish army snatched from Napoleon's hands one of the trump cards of his game. He counted on an alliance with the Sultan during the invasion of Russia and was furious when he learned about. military and diplomatic success of Kutuzov.
It seems to us beyond doubt that both of these celebrated campaigns were well known to Pushkin from the numerous friends and acquaintances who participated in them. Let us recall at least General IN Inzov, such a frequent interlocutor of the poet in 1820-1823, one of Kutuzov's close associates in 1805 and 1811. Let us recall that in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, during the years of Pushkin's life there, the name of Kutuzov was on everyone's lips, to whom this region owed its accession to Russia. And it is natural to think that it was not only 1812 that the great poet had in mind when he spoke of the "superiority of the military genius" of Kutuzov over the military talent of Barclay.
In the portrait in the Military Gallery, Kutuzov is depicted in the classic pose of a commander, with an imperious gesture directing the Russian troops to pursue the retreating hordes of Napoleon across the snowy plain. In a general's uniform and a fur-lined overcoat thrown over one shoulder, Kutuzov stands under a snow-covered pine tree - a symbol of Russian winter. The gray-haired head is not covered; next to it, on the drum, lies a soft cap-cap. The old field marshal, three times wounded in the head, avoided wearing heavier headgear.
Kutuzov, portrayed by Dow, is somewhat rejuvenated, smoothed and simplified. There is no painful obesity of a feeble body, in which such a courageous and active spirit lived, which is characteristic of the 67-year-old military leader, which is more than once described and sketched in the last years of his life. There is also no calm, soulful wisdom characteristic of Kutuzov in the expression of a wrinkled face, for which the soldiers in 1812 called their dear and close commander "grandfather".
Note that among the friends of the great poet for more than 10 years was the beloved daughter of MI Kutuzov, the widow of a general and diplomat, Elizaveta Mikhailovna Khitrovo.
The Khitrovo family kept numerous relics associated with the memory of the great commander, which Pushkin, who often visited her, undoubtedly saw. Among these items were, for example, the field marshal's pocket watch, which he used on the day of the Battle of Borodino. Probably, from the lips of his friend, Pushkin heard a lot of family legends and stories about her late father.
Describing the relationship of E. M. Khitrovo to her friends, among whom, besides Pushkin, were Zhukovsky, Gogol and others, P. A. Vyazemsky wrote: “Among the heart qualities that distinguished E. M. Khitrovo, perhaps the first place should take, that she was the unchanging, firm, unconditional friend of her friends. It's no wonder to love your friends; but in her friendship rose to the point of valor. Where and when it was necessary, she fought for them, defended them, not sparing herself, not fearing adverse consequences for herself ... "
After the death of Pushkin, E.M. She bitterly mourned her famous friend, in whom only a very few women of her society saw the glory and pride of Russia.
We now turn to the poem "The Leader", dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Bogdanovich Barclay de Tolly. It was painted in the spring of 1835 under the impression of a portrait in the War Gallery. Omitting the part that we have already given, which contains the description of the gallery, let us turn to the lines relating directly to Barclay:
But in this harsh crowd
One attracts me the most. With a new thought
I will always stop in front of him - and do not bring
From my eyes. The longer I look,
All the more we languish with heavy sadness.
It is written in full height. The brow is like a naked skull,
Shines high, and, hesitates, lay down
There is great sadness. Around - thick haze;
Behind him is a military camp. Calm and gloomy
He seems to be looking with a contemptuous thought.
Did the artist bare his thought,
When he portrayed him as such,
Or it was involuntary inspiration, -
But Doe gave him that expression.O unhappy leader! Your lot was harsh:
You sacrificed everything to a foreign land to you.
Impenetrable to the sight of the wild rabble,
In silence, you walked alone with a great thought,
And, in your name, a sound alien to dislike,
Chasing you with my screams
The people, mysteriously saved by you,
I swore at your sacred gray hair.
And the one whose sharp mind comprehended you,
To please them, I slyly censured you ...
And for a long time, strengthened by powerful conviction,
You were unshakable before the common delusion;
And halfway down I had to finally
Silently surrender the laurel crown,
Both the power and the plan, thought out deeply, -
And it's lonely to hide in the regimental ranks.
There, an outdated leader, like a young warrior,
Lead the merry whistle heard for the first time,
You threw yourself into the fire, looking for the desired death, -
That's awful! ..
Explaining his point of view on the position of Barclay de Tolly in 1812, Pushkin wrote in the already mentioned "Explanation":
“Should we really be ungrateful to the merits of Barclay de Tolly, because Kutuzov is great? Is it possible, after twenty-five years of silence, poetry is not allowed to pronounce his name with sympathy and emotion? You reproach the poet for the injustice of his complaints; you say that Barclay's merits have been recognized, appreciated, and awarded. So, but by whom and when? ... Of course, not by the people and not in 1812. The minute when Barclay was forced to give up command over the troops was joyful for Russia, but nonetheless hard for his stoic heart. His retreat, which is now a clear and necessary action, did not seem at all like that: not only did the bitter and indignant people grumble, but even experienced warriors bitterly reproached him and almost called him a traitor to his eyes. Barclay, who does not inspire power of attorney to the army, subject to him, surrounded by enmity, sickened by malignant speech, but convinced of himself, silently walking towards the secret goal and yielding power, not having time to justify himself before the eyes of Russia, will forever remain in history a highly poetic person. "
We see that, creating "The Leader", the poet pursued the noble goal of rehabilitating the memory of the long-dead Barclay, whose role in 1812 Pushkin's contemporary press was completely silent about. The only article in the Moscow Telegraph, published in 1833, expressing a view similar to the poet's view of the activities of the undeservedly forgotten military leader, brought the journal into trouble from the censorship and even the threat of closure, which Pushkin, of course, knew about. It was necessary to have great independence and courage in looking at historical figure to perform this poem.
However, reading a poem remarkable in thought and form, we should not forget for a moment that its theme - heavy loneliness in an alien and hostile crowd - reflected, as already noted above, the great poet's own painful feelings, just in these years break out of the St. Petersburg "secular" environment. In 1835-1836, the lonely figure of Barclay was especially close to Pushkin. "The Leader" is one of the works of the great poet, in which the tragic notes of the approaching catastrophe are distinctly heard - Pushkin's unequal duel with the hostile world, headed by the tsar and the chief of gendarmes Benckendorff.
And is it possible, while maintaining objectivity, to say that Russia was a "foreign land" for Barclay? It seems to us - no. Coming from Livonia, being the son of a military officer of the Russian service, honest Barclay never separated himself from Russia, in his mind, even in the most bitter moments, Russia was not a "foreign" land. He served her, giving all his abilities, fought for her and shed blood, but Russia also rewarded him, distinguished him as few, except for a short period of the summer and autumn of 1812, for which there were special, unique reasons.
The career path of Barclay de Tolly is not entirely usual. He went to the rank of colonel for more than 20 years, although, participating in many campaigns against the Turks, Poles, Swedes, he was always distinguished by courage and management. But then I moved on much faster. In 1806-1807, Barclay stood out as a staunch vanguard and rearguard commander, who knew how to withstand the onslaught of the French with small forces or to push them himself. In 1808-1809 he took part in the Russian-Swedish war and made the most difficult crossing of the ice across the Gulf of Bothnia to Sweden with the corps, for which he was promoted to the rank of general from the infantry (infantry) 48 years old. In 1810 he was appointed Minister of War. In this position, Barclay developed an energetic and fruitful activity to reorganize and increase the size of the army, preparing it for a decisive confrontation with the French. Since 1806, on his own initiative, he has been developing an operational plan future war with Napoleon, based on a systematic evasion from a decisive battle, retreat into the interior of the country, the gradual exhaustion and breakdown of the enemy's troops and inflicting a fatal blow on him only when the balance of forces changes in favor of Russia.
Is it necessary to explain, however, that in 1812, during a period of unprecedented patriotic upsurge, Barclay quite naturally could not be the person whom the people and the army would consider their leader. They did not know Barclay, like Kutuzov or Bagration: having quickly advanced, he was not the commander-in-chief in any of the previous campaigns. Against him spoke and this little popularity of the troops, and the foreign name, and the inability to speak with the soldiers, and, finally, the absolutely necessary, but so not satisfying the feeling of patriotism, the tactics of retreat, which seemed sacrilege precisely because it came from Barclay.
Barclay had a hard time going through the distrust of the army and the appointment of Kutuzov. In the Borodino battle, he was clearly looking for death. Dressed in a uniform embroidered with gold, in all orders and ribbons, with a huge plume on his hat (this is how Dow is depicted), representing a target noticeable to the enemy, Barclay was constantly in sight of the enemy and more than once personally led the regiments to the attack. “You threw yourself into the fire, looking for the desired death,” - Pushkin writes about this very day.
Exceptional courage, management and composure displayed under Borodino, at once restored Barclay's good name in the army and reconciled with him many recent haters. Soon, an acute form of fever put the general out of action for more than six months. In 1818, commanding one of the armies, he laid siege to and took the Tory fortress. Then, at the head of the Russian and allied forces, he participated in a number of battles, especially distinguished himself at Konigswart, Leipzig and Paris. He was awarded money, estates, all the highest orders, titles of count and then prince.
It was no accident that Barclay's portrait attracted the great poet's attention - it is one of Dow's finest works. The visitor remembers the lonely figure of the general with a calm, pensive face for a long time. Its background is not just a "military camp", as Pushkin wrote, but a camp of Russian troops near Paris and a panorama of the city itself, surrounded by heights taken from the battle by the Russian army on March 18, 1814. The choice of such a background was not accidental - for leading the storming of Paris, Barclay de Tolly was promoted to field marshal general.
Let us also remind the reader that the statues of Kutuzov and Barclay, erected in 1837, after the death of the poet, near the Kazan Cathedral, were known to Pushkin. Having visited the workshop of the sculptor Orlovsky in March 1836, the poet saw the statues of both generals and once again expressed his view of their role in the Patriotic War in one expressive line of the poem "To the Artist":
Here is the initiator Barclay, and here is the performer Kutuzov ...
We see how well Pushkin knew the events of 1812-1814. And, passing through the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace, the poet undoubtedly remembered them, about the Russian commanders who managed to defeat the hordes of Napoleon. It was not for nothing that in The General he found a poetic and proud name for these generals: “the chiefs of our people's forces”.
However, in the last years of his life, in front of Pushkin, who was especially often in the gallery, when looking at some portraits, other, personal memories should have come up.
After all, out of dozens of frames from extremely similar portraits, not only "familiar images" looked at Pushkin in historical terms, but people who were personally familiar to him. The days of his youth, long-term exile, Petersburg and Moscow life were associated with them. Among them, Pushkin saw both friends and numerous enemies. In a word, here, in the gallery, along with the memories of 1812, the poet naturally also saw various pictures of his life, full of intense struggle and creative activity.
We arrange our story in the order of the appearance of these people in Pushkin's life, although often relations with them will lead us into a whole series of subsequent years, sometimes until the most fateful year 1837, after which we will again have to return to earlier periods.
There are no country nymphs, no virgin madonnas,
No fauns with bowls, no full-breasted wives
No dancing, no hunting, - but all cloaks, but swords,
Yes, faces full of belligerent courage.
A.S. Pushkin
332 portraits of generals who showed courage during the Patriotic War of 1812 adorn the Military Gallery stretching from the Coat of Arms to the Great Throne Hall of the Winter Palace. According to the project of Karl Rossi, by 1826 several small rooms for various purposes were combined to create a portrait hall. Since the opening of the gallery was bound to take place on December 25, the day of the expulsion of Napoleon's army from the Russian land, the work on creating the interior of the hall and painting portraits was carried out in a rather haste manner. And yet, on the opening day, many places on the walls of the gallery were empty, draped with cloth. Nameplates on them designated heroes, whose portraits were soon to take their places.
After the festive service in the Palace Church, followed by the consecration of the gallery, soldiers of the infantry and cavalry marched through it with a solemn parade, saluting the portraits of their heroic commanders.
It is worth noting that all these portraits were created by one artist - the Englishman George Doe, who was assisted by Alexander Polyakov and Wilhelm Golike. The list of generals was compiled by the Inspection Department of the General Staff, but some names were deleted from there personally by Alexander I without explaining the reasons. Historians suggest that the emperor removed the servicemen who showed sympathy for the Decembrist uprising from the gallery of honor.
The fire of 1837 completely destroyed the interior of the Military Gallery. However, surprisingly, every one of the portraits of the heroes was saved from the fire. During the restoration, the architect Vladimir Stasov enlarged the gallery by almost 6 meters, making it even more significant and solemn.
The list of generals who were honored to decorate the gallery of the Winter Palace with their portraits was formed in 1820. Given the huge scope of work, George Doe immediately began writing them. Alas, it turned out that by that time many of the generals from the list had already died, or were so old that they did not want to make the difficult journey along the Russian roads from their provinces to the capital, with the sole purpose of posing for the artist a couple of times. Therefore, many of them were painted from existing portraits sent to St. Petersburg from all over the country by the generals themselves, or their relatives. There are several curious cases when a wife sent a portrait of her husband during his youth, with a cover letter: "Despite the fact that my husband died in venerable years, I can testify that over the years he has not changed at all."
WAR GALLERY OF THE WINTER PALACE(Military Gallery 1812) in St. Petersburg, art exposition portraits, which immortalized the memory of many heroes and participants of the Patriotic War of 1812 and the foreign campaigns of the Russian army of 1813-14. The gallery housed portraits of military leaders who had the rank of general and at the same time directly took part in hostilities, including in non-combatant positions. The lists of generals were compiled at the General Staff, presented personally to Emperor Alexander I and then approved by the State Council. To paint the portraits, the British portrait painter J. Doe was invited (undoubtedly his works are 100 portraits, including in the growth of Field Marshals General M. B. Barclay de Tolly, M.I.Kutuzov and Duke A. Wellington). He worked together with assistants A. V. Polyakov and V. A. Golike and other artists. Work continued in 1819-29, although the exposition was replenished later. In total it was written by St. 330 portraits, among them - portraits of P.I.Bagration, D.V.Davydov, D.S.Dokhturov, A.P. Ermolov, P.P. Konovnitsyn, Ya.P. Kulnev, A.I. Kutaisov, D. P. Neverovsky, M. I. Platov, N. N. Raevsky, N. A. and A. A. Tuchkovs, etc. Some of the portraits from the approved list were not painted for various reasons, instead of them frames were placed in the gallery covered with green cloth, with a nameplate. In the 2nd floor. 1830s the gallery contains equestrian portraits of Emperor Alexander I (artist F. Kruger) and his allies - the Prussian king Frederick Wilhelm III(artist Kruger) and the Austrian emperor Franz II [Franz II (I)] (artist IP Kraft).
The gallery occupied a room specially constructed for it in 1826 by the project of the architect K.I.Rossi between the White (later Heraldic) and the Great Throne (St. On the walls, next to the portraits, there are 12 stucco medallions framed with gilded laurel wreaths, with the names major battles Russian army in 1812-14. Generals and officers - veterans of the war with Napoleon, as well as soldiers of the Guards regiments awarded with medals for participating in the Patriotic War of 1812 and the capture of Paris were invited to the opening ceremony of the gallery on December 25, 1826 (6.1.1827), on the next anniversary of the end of the war.
During a big fire in the Winter Palace in 1837, the gallery's paintings were saved; by 1839, according to the drawings of the architect V.P. Stasov, the premises for the gallery were restored. In Soviet times, the exposition was replenished with four portraits of the officers of a company of palace grenadiers, formed in 1827 from veterans of the Patriotic War of 1812, painted by Dow from life back in 1828, and two paintings by the famous battle artist P. Hess, executed in the 1840s. for the Winter Palace: "The Battle of Borodino on August 26, 1812" and "Crossing the Berezina on November 17, 1812". Today the Military Gallery 1812 is part of the Hermitage.
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