Vasily Perov. The last tavern at the outpost.
1868. Oil on canvas.
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

A work that reflected the level of spiritual ascent of the artist himself was his canvas “The Last Tavern at the Outpost” (1868). The picture is painted in gloomy colors, and only bright flashes of fire beat in the windows, ready to burst out. The tavern, this “den of debauchery,” as Perov himself believed, appears on the canvas as an image of rampant passions that devour a person, his soul. This hellish fire filled all the floors of the establishment, all the space enclosed within its walls, and even touched all the nearby buildings. And all around there is cold, horses stagnant in the cold, a woman wrapped in a scarf, sitting alone in a sleigh.

Judging by the chaotic rhythm of the sleigh tracks ironing the snow, the establishment is not empty either day or night. No one drives past him, so as not to relieve his soul for the last time before returning home. And therefore the tavern becomes more and more inflamed with its passionate fires, and the world around, freezing, plunges more and more into darkness.

And very close by there was a wide road that leads out of the city. It rises along the hill, past the border pillars, past an inconspicuous church, lost behind the trees, as if hidden by them from the stench of the world. It stands, tiny, near the road, on the right, at the very top of the hill. And here, on the same line, the artist places a retreating convoy, from which no one turned towards the church. the horses, hanging their heads, as if ashamed, ride past. The convoy turns sharply to the left, leaving behind thick shadows that, covering the road, stretch like a black train along the ground.

It is noteworthy that the scale of the church given by the artist suggests its extreme distance. And at the same time, the distance between the outpost and the temple is unusually small, due to which its image turns out to be spatially close. As a result, there is a blatant discrepancy between the scale of the church and the boundary pillars, which immediately grow to incredible, gigantic sizes, indicating a clear loss of the image of the church from the overall perspective of the building. And yet there are no violations here. This effect is caused deliberately, and it is achieved by using a technique as old as the world - introducing another, new perspective for the image of the temple, which, thus, finds itself in a completely different spatial environment. Compositionally, Perov places a small church at the base of lines running upward from it. On the right is the outline of an obelisk rising with ledges, and on the left are the diagonals of snow-covered roofs. The spatial environment thus composed, identified with the celestial sphere, begins to exist as if in reverse perspective, growing in an ascending direction. And the light that fills it, in the same way increasingly flaring up as it moves away from the horizon, gains its strength, under the pressure of which the night shadows recede. And then the horizon line, coinciding with the top of the hill overshadowed by the temple, becomes the borderland not so much between heaven and earth, but between light and darkness. And therefore, the church turns out to be a key link in the composition, which incorporates images of two worlds: the earthly one, with its hellish destructive passions, and the upper one, which opens in reverse perspective to the spiritual space of the church, with its enlightenment and purity. Despite all their contrasting juxtaposition, independence and even self-sufficiency, the images of the first and second plans are nevertheless given not in isolation, but in close contact with each other. And even more than that - with the identification of the connecting link between them, represented by the image of that very wide road that lay very close by, giving everyone a choice of path: to destruction or salvation.

Unfortunately, contemporaries saw in the film only an “accusatory plot.” While here the focus was, according to Perov himself, on the “inner, moral side” of human existence, which was most important to him.

Never before has Perov risen to such generalizations. And the very idea of ​​choice as a person’s moral self-determination has never before been formulated so clearly and openly in Russian art.

The painting “The Last Tavern at the Outpost,” summing up everything that the artist had done in previous years, became in many ways a milestone, and not only for himself. Having based his art on a religious principle, the artist raised the genre itself to such a height at which evil begins to be understood not only and not so much socially, but morally, as a deadly ulcer that corrupts human souls. The moral dimension of evil is what Vasily Perov brought to Russian art. The pathos of the master’s art lies not in the exposure of evil as such, but in the necessity and ability of man within himself to resist evil, in the affirmation of that inner, spiritualized power that is capable of raising a person above adversity, sorrow and humiliation.

Drowned woman. 1867

ABOUT! How pale and pitiful this description of mine is compared to reality!!! I don’t have enough skill or power of words to even approximately convey this soul-tearing cry, this despair of a great sinner who has realized her lost life!!” - Perov recalled.

Despite the fact that Fanny died of consumption and that the woman in the picture has a wedding ring on her hand, the image of the “lost great sinner” from the story and the drowned woman from the picture turned out to be combined together, so that viewers familiar with Perov’s story have no doubt that that the drowned woman is a fallen woman who “has been eaten up by the environment,” which gave rise to one of the researchers to note: “With the entire emotional structure of the picture, its intense drama, Perov speaks of the tragedy of a pure soul. He idolizes her, like Dostoevsky Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment, a year before the Drowned Woman, which appeared in print.”

The picture has another literary parallel - the poems of Thomas Hood, an English poet highly valued by Perov. According to Perov’s only biographer, the idea of ​​the Drowned Woman was inspired by Hood’s poem Song about a Shirt:

Seamstress! Answer me what you can

Compare with your dear?

And bread is more expensive every day,

And hateful hunger worries,

The lonely bed rots

Under the cold of autumn rains.

Seamstress! behind your back

Only the dusk makes the noise of the rain, -

You slowly with a pale hand

You sew for peace of mind

Canvas that is folded in half,

A shirt for the darkness of the grave...

Work, work, work,

As long as the weather is bright,

As long as stitches without counting

The needle plays, flying.

Work, work, work,

Until she died.

Written in the same “dreary” meter as many of Nekrasov’s poems, The Song of a Shirt really resonated with Perov’s hopeless genres, although the fate of the heroine of the poem remains unclear, but tragic. By the way, another poem by Hood, The Bridge of Sighs, tells about a girl who threw herself into the Thames, unable to bear the hardships of life.

One way or another, The Drowned Woman is one of those pictures in front of which the viewer must inevitably think about poverty, misfortune, desperate suicides, fallen women, human callousness, etc., although this work by Perov is one of the least narrative.

It was Troika and the Drowned Woman, together with Farewell to the Dead, that gave rise to talk about Perov as a “poet of sorrow.” But at the same time, faith in the correction of evil by the power of truth alone, through a clear demonstration of this evil, began to fade away. Perov remained the leader of “critical realism,” but a lonely leader. Apparently, he himself was aware of this, since at the end of the 1860s other motives that were not characteristic of the former “singer of sorrow” began to appear in his work. For example, the Scene by the railway, where a bunch of men and women look at the locomotive in amazement, is a far-fetched plot, indicating only that Perov again “can’t find a place for himself.”

Scene by the railway. 1868

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

In the same year as the Drowned Woman, a small painting, The Drawing Teacher, begun in Paris, was completed. It was written as a memory of Perov's colleague, draftsman Pyotr Shmelkov. The poor teacher whiles away his days alone, earning a living by giving private lessons and fixing eyes and noses drawn by aspiring artists. The single-figure composition, which is rarely seen in paintings of that time, is close in genre to another painting painted two years earlier, The Guitar Player. These paintings show the existence of ordinary people who are neither victims of evil nor its sources, but simply live and get by, but this life is joyless, and why is unclear. It is interesting that it is about these two paintings that we unexpectedly find a positive judgment from the camp most hostile to Perov - from Alexandre Benois: “If I knew that for some reason they died... The Arrival of the Governess or the Procession of the Cross, I would be very and was very upset. I’ll also add the wonderful Bobyl (by the way, Serov’s favorite picture with the Drawing Teacher).”

Perhaps these two paintings are Perov’s rare version of the genre, which allows us to recreate the worldview of the artist himself, who went through a period of hope and realized the utopian nature of the possibility of a quick “correction” of life by showing its ugliness “in pictures.”

Drawing teacher. 1867 Study

Ivanovo Art Museum

Guitarist-boobyl. 1865

State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

The result of these sentiments was the painting The Last Tavern at the Outpost. Outskirts. Anxious winter twilight. The street, flowing through a narrow gate, goes far into the wide expanse of fields. The road occupies the entire width of the foreground, which is why the viewer seems to be drawn into a kind of spatial funnel: the road soars steeply upward, the vertical movement is, as it were, picked up by the pointed pillars of the outpost and then by a barely noticeable flock of birds. The first shot is emphasized by sleighs blocking the road, but this is only a temporary stop. It allows you to see the dejected figure of a woman in a sleigh, a freezing dog, and the dim windows of a tavern under the sign “Parting.” In the gray, cold twilight, the windows sparkle with a lukewarm light, but these are not the cozy lights of a home on a frosty evening street. Behind their alarming, cloudy redness one can discern a drunken stupor.

Perov uses the dissonance of cold and warm tones: the reddish light of the windows is extinguished by the thick winter twilight, and the lemon-yellow sunset takes on an icy hue. All movement in the picture is directed towards the luminous sky, but the sky is as inhospitable as the uncomfortable street and the ominous tavern.

By forcing the gaze to glide along the furrows of the road, the artist gradually inspires a languid desire along with the feeling of the impossibility of breaking out of this dull monotony. Here, unlike previous paintings, there is no narrative at all, and there is even nothing to “complete” in the imagination, except perhaps to remember Nekrasov’s lines that

Behind the outpost, in a wretched tavern

The men will drink everything down to the ruble,

And they will go, begging along the road,

And they will groan...

But even this plot turns out to be reduced only to the burning windows of the tavern. Because “nothing happens” here, it becomes especially sad. The female figure in the sleigh expresses nothing; the dog, which in previous films was given the role of perhaps the most active character, does not howl, bark, or run, but simply stands, its fur ruffled by the drifting snow. When at least something happened in Perov’s paintings, and what was happening was evidence of evil that could be overcome and overcome, it was assumed, at least, that this evil was quantifiable, it could be named, it could be pointed out. And here it becomes literally ugly, that is, without an image, innumerable and indefinable. Instead of the nominative, meaningful function of a word, its intonation acquires paramount importance. This is the music of melancholy, despondency and indifference, a monotonous life where there is nothing to stop your gaze on. It is not dull, not nondescript, but generally “nothing at all.”

In the foreground on the left in the picture there is a broken twig, exactly the same as in Troika. This detail, apparently “seen” by Perov in nature and automatically repeated in two paintings, seems to mean nothing except the artist’s inattention to small details, but at the same time it can cause annoyance - “it’s the same everywhere!” , including to the life depicted by Perov, which seems to be focused on “an arshin of space.” Also, over a long period of time, it is repeated in different paintings (Tea drinking in Mytishchi, A boy preparing for a fight, A fisherman), for example, the same clay jug.

BIOGRAPHY OF VASILY GRIGORIEVICH PEROV

Vasily Grigorievich Perov was born in the city of Tobolsk in 1834. His father was the provincial prosecutor Baron G.K. von Kridiner. But, having been born before his parents’ marriage, the artist received the surname of his godfather - Vasiliev. True, for some reason he did not like her, and subsequently the artist adopted the nickname given to him in childhood for his success in penmanship.

Perov received his first painting lessons at the Arzamas school of A.V. Stupin - the best provincial art school of that time. At the age of 18, he moved to Moscow and entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

“Sermon in a Village” is one of Perov’s first paintings, for which he received a large gold medal at the school and the right to a scholarship to travel abroad.

In the painting “Sermon in the Village,” created in the year of the abolition of serfdom, when disputes about the relationship between peasants and landowners continued, Perov depicted a scene in a rural church. The priest points upward with one hand and with the other at the plump, unpleasant landowner dozing off in a chair; The young lady sitting next to her is also not listening to the sermon, she is carried away by what some well-groomed gentleman is whispering in her ear.

In 1862-1864 the artist went abroad. After visiting the museums of Germany, Perov settled in Paris. There, his pictorial language and color scheme change, and the edification and rationality of his early work recede into the background. In Paris, Perov the lyricist and Perov the psychologist emerged, as evidenced by such works as “Svoyar” and “The Blind Musician”.

“It is absolutely impossible to paint a picture” without knowing the people, their way of life, their character, without knowing the types of people, which forms the basis of the genre,” writes Perov. And without having served his five years abroad, he asks for permission to return to his homeland.

Perov works a lot in the studio, not showing his new paintings, not understood by his comrades, written off from the “ship of modernity” by critics. During these years, Perov, a historical painter, was born. He turns to gospel stories and folklore.

CONTENTS OF THE PICTURE “THE LAST TUB AT THE OUTPUT”

Composition

However, Perov’s most important work of this period was the painting “The Last Tavern at the Outpost” (1868) - one of the largest works both in his work and in Russian art.

In the painting “The Last Tavern at the Outpost,” the landscape merges with the everyday scene and reaches Perov’s maximum intensity and expressiveness.

Perhaps in no other work by the master does the overall pictorial solution of the composition carry such a semantic and emotional load and does not subjugate the narrative elements of the image to such a degree. In the twilight of the city outskirts, horses, sleighs, and the motionless figure of a waiting peasant woman wrapped in a scarf are barely visible.

The feeling of melancholy and anxiety is most facilitated by the contrast of darkness and the red-yellow spots of light bursting out of it: from the dimly glowing snow-covered windows they seem to break through the evening shadows, thinning out in the light strip of sunset that illuminates the deserted distance.

In essence, Perov here goes beyond the limits of his inherent local pictorial system. A compositional detail is two border pillars at the outpost, crowned with double-headed eagles. In the context of the content of the canvas, they were supposed to evoke certain associations in the viewer. It is no coincidence that during these years the illegal poem by the poet V.S. Kurochkin “The Double-Headed Eagle” was popular in democratic circles, in which the “heraldry, bilingual, two-headed All-Russian eagle” was called the culprit of “our disasters, our evils.”

It is important, however, that the emphasis on this detail (the pillars are clearly drawn on a light strip of sky), which seems to go back to didactic techniques for explaining the meaning of the image, does not violate the organically integral pictorial structure of the picture with its expression of human experience.

A sharp wind pierces a teenage girl, freezing in a sleigh, pitiful in her helplessness. Colorful contrasts are brought here into a single color harmony, conveying to the viewer the emotional mood of the picture.

The artist tells his story in an excited dramatic tone; he speaks to the viewer in the language of painting and colors, shunning dry details. The road beckons into the distance, beyond the gates of the outpost, home. When? This nagging feeling of anticipation is conveyed with great impressive force.

Judging by the chaotic rhythm of the sleigh tracks ironing the snow, the establishment is not empty either day or night. No one drives past him, so as not to take his soul away for the last time before returning home. And therefore the tavern becomes more and more inflamed with its passionate fires, and the world around, freezing, plunges more and more into darkness. And nearby there was a wide road that leads out of the city. It rises along the hill, past the border pillars, past an inconspicuous church, lost behind the trees, as if hidden by them from the stench of the world. It stands, tiny, near the road, on the right, at the very top of the hill.

And here, on the same line, the artist places a retreating convoy, from which no one turned towards the church. Horses, hanging their heads, as if ashamed, ride past. The convoy turns sharply to the left, leaving behind thick shadows that, covering the road, stretch along the ground like a black train.

Perov discovered himself here as a subtle master of the psychological landscape. He had long ago learned to subordinate the landscape to the task of expressing the ideological meaning of the picture.

The storyline here is very simple and in itself insignificant. At the same time, the landscape part of the canvas turns out to be extremely developed. The important “participants” in the action are the road that goes into the deserted winter distance, and this distance itself, alluring and eerie.

Here the qualities that emerged in previous genre paintings finally crystallize. The space of the picture seems united and animated, fluid and endless. The contours of houses, sleighs, figures of people and animals, immersed in the evening twilight, lose their clarity.

Color spots cease to be just the distinctive properties of objects, they acquire emotionality and expressiveness - they light up, go out, and sometimes flicker.

Their most important feature now is the “sound,” which depends on the saturation of the colorful pigment and the aperture ratio. A kind of musical-picturesque theme is formed, for example, by the spots of luminous windows, varied in tone.

The image of the outskirts of the city is subject to the internal movement of the plot; it forms the most important part of a complex narrative series.

It is noteworthy that according to the artist, the scale of the church suggests its extreme distance.

And at the same time, the distance between the outpost and the temple is unusually small, due to which its image turns out to be spatially approximate. As a result, there is a glaring discrepancy between the scale of the church and the boundary pillars, which immediately grow to incredible, gigantic sizes, indicating a clear loss of the image of the church from the overall perspective of the building. And yet there are no violations here.

This effect is caused deliberately, and it is achieved by using a technique as old as the world - introducing another, new perspective for the image of the temple, which, thus, finds itself in a completely different spatial environment. Compositionally, Perov places a small church at the base of lines running upward from it. On the right is the outline of an obelisk rising with ledges, and on the left are the diagonals of snow-covered roofs.

The spatial environment thus composed, identified by the celestial sphere, begins to exist as if in reverse perspective, growing in an ascending direction. And the light that fills it, in the same way growing more and more intense as it moves away from the horizon, gains its strength, under the pressure of which the night shadows recede. And then the horizon line, coinciding with the top of the hill overshadowed by the temple, becomes a borderland not so much between heaven and earth, but between light and darkness. And, consequently, the church turns out to be a key link in the composition, which incorporates images of two worlds: the earthly one, with its destructive passions, and the heavenly one, which opens in reverse perspective to the spiritual space of the church, with its enlightenment and purity. Despite all their contrasting juxtaposition, independence and even self-sufficiency, the images of the first and second plans, nevertheless, are given not in isolation, but in close contact with each other. And even more than that - with the identification of the connecting link between them, represented by the image of the very wide road that ran nearby, giving everyone a choice of path: to destruction or salvation.

And yet, no matter how developed the landscape aspects are here, “The Last Tavern at the Outpost” is not a lyrical landscape, but a brilliant example of genre painting in its most complex and most refined form.

Unfortunately, contemporaries saw only an “accusatory plot” in the film. While here the focus was, according to Perov himself, on the “inner, moral side” of human existence, which was most important to him. Never before has Perov risen to such generalizations. And the very idea of ​​choice as a person’s moral self-determination has never before been formulated so clearly and openly in Russian art.

The painting “The Last Tavern at the Outpost”, summing up everything that the artist did in previous years, became a milestone in many respects, and not only for himself. Having based his art on a religious principle, the artist raised the genre itself to such a height at which evil begins to be understood not only and not so much socially, but morally, as a deadly ulcer that corrupts human souls.

The moral dimension of evil is what Vasily Perov brought to Russian art. The pathos of the master’s art is not in the exposure of evil as such, but in the necessity and ability of man to resist evil within himself, in the affirmation of that inner, spiritualized power that can lift a person above adversity, sorrow and humiliation.

The last tavern at the outpost. 1868 Oil on canvas 51.1 x 65.8 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery,

V. G. Perov with great skill creates works that touch on deeply dramatic, even tragic themes. The painting "" is the most perfect work in terms of artistic images and pictorial merits in Perov's creative heritage.

The winter road, dotted with sleigh runners, goes to the horizon. Along the road there are small wooden houses on the outskirts. In the distance you can see the pillars of the city gates with double-headed eagles. At the door of the last tavern outpost, two teams of teams stand waiting for their owners.

Apparently they have been here for a long time. Sitting in the sleigh, wrapped in a scarf against the cold wind, is a lonely female figure, she is patiently, submissively waiting. In “The Last Tavern at the Outpost” there is a feeling of aching melancholy and sorrow from the joyless lot of the peasants, leading to the tavern in search of the only oblivion. An outwardly simple painting has great dramatic tension. Bluish-gray snow, unsightly dark houses with reddish-yellow lights from blind windows, on the horizon, behind them, the black silhouettes of the buildings of the city outpost evoke a feeling of anxiety.

The whole picture, maintained in a single key, conveys a feeling of loneliness and cold. If in the foreground among cold colors there are warm tones, then towards the horizon they become colder and colder. This also conveys the feeling of twilight falling on the city. A frosty wind sweeping along the wide street covers the standing sleighs and house windows with snow and pierces the peasant woman waiting in the sleigh to the bones. The emotionality of the landscape reveals the content of the painting - the tragic doom of the Russian peasantry.

The strengthening of the emotional role of landscape in general becomes characteristic of Russian literature and painting during this period. For Perov, the emotional landscape became a means of revealing the psychological characteristics of characters and events.
N. F. LYAPUNOVA V. G. Perov (M., Art, 1968)

Vasily Perov. The last tavern at the outpost.
1868. Oil on canvas.
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

The work that reflected the level of spiritual ascent of the artist himself was his canvas (1868). The picture is painted in gloomy colors, and only bright flashes of fire beat in the windows, ready to burst out. The tavern, this “den of debauchery,” as Perov himself believed, appears on the canvas as an image of rampant passions that devour a person, his soul. This hellish fire filled all the floors of the establishment, all the space enclosed within its walls, and even touched all the nearby buildings. And all around there is cold, horses stagnant in the cold, a woman wrapped in a scarf, sitting alone in a sleigh.

Judging by the chaotic rhythm of the sleigh tracks ironing the snow, the establishment is not empty either day or night. No one drives past him, so as not to relieve his soul for the last time before returning home. And therefore the tavern becomes more and more inflamed with its passionate fires, and the world around, freezing, plunges more and more into darkness.

And very close by there was a wide road that leads out of the city. It rises along the hill, past the border pillars, past an inconspicuous church, lost behind the trees, as if hidden by them from the stench of the world. It stands, tiny, near the road, on the right, at the very top of the hill. And here, on the same line, the artist places a retreating convoy, from which no one turned towards the church. the horses, hanging their heads, as if ashamed, ride past. The convoy turns sharply to the left, leaving behind thick shadows that, covering the road, stretch like a black train along the ground.

It is noteworthy that the scale of the church given by the artist suggests its extreme distance. And at the same time, the distance between the outpost and the temple is unusually small, due to which its image turns out to be spatially close. As a result, there is a blatant discrepancy between the scale of the church and the boundary pillars, which immediately grow to incredible, gigantic sizes, indicating a clear loss of the image of the church from the overall perspective of the building. And yet there are no violations here. This effect is caused deliberately, and it is achieved by using a technique as old as the world - introducing another, new perspective for the image of the temple, which, thus, finds itself in a completely different spatial environment. Compositionally, Perov places a small church at the base of lines running upward from it. On the right is the outline of an obelisk rising with ledges, and on the left are the diagonals of snow-covered roofs. The spatial environment thus composed, identified with the celestial sphere, begins to exist as if in reverse perspective, growing in an ascending direction. And the light that fills it, in the same way increasingly flaring up as it moves away from the horizon, gains its strength, under the pressure of which the night shadows recede. And then the horizon line, coinciding with the top of the hill overshadowed by the temple, becomes the borderland not so much between heaven and earth, but between light and darkness. And therefore, the church turns out to be a key link in the composition, which incorporates images of two worlds: the earthly one, with its hellish destructive passions, and the upper one, which opens in reverse perspective to the spiritual space of the church, with its enlightenment and purity. Despite all their contrasting juxtaposition, independence and even self-sufficiency, the images of the first and second plans are nevertheless given not in isolation, but in close contact with each other. And even more than that - with the identification of the connecting link between them, represented by the image of that very wide road that lay very close by, giving everyone a choice of path: to destruction or salvation.

Unfortunately, contemporaries saw in the film only an “accusatory plot.” While here the focus was, according to Perov himself, on the “inner, moral side” of human existence, which was most important to him.

Never before has Perov risen to such generalizations. And the very idea of ​​choice as a person’s moral self-determination has never before been formulated so clearly and openly in Russian art.

The painting “The Last Tavern at the Outpost,” summing up everything that the artist had done in previous years, became in many ways a milestone, and not only for himself. Having based his art on a religious principle, the artist raised the genre itself to such a height at which evil begins to be understood not only and not so much socially, but morally, as a deadly ulcer that corrupts human souls. The moral dimension of evil is what Vasily Perov brought to Russian art. The pathos of the master’s art lies not in the exposure of evil as such, but in the necessity and ability of man within himself to resist evil, in the affirmation of that inner, spiritualized power that is capable of raising a person above adversity, sorrow and humiliation.

Marina Vladimirovna Petrova.