So that, through the details of a realistic scene reproduced with consummate perfection, one catches a glimpse of a vision which symbolizes Russia, the country of Nekrasov, as well as that of Gorky, the fatherland of Dostoyevsky as well as of Tolstoy.
Having completed his "Haulage on the Volga," and won a traveling scholarship, Repin went abroad. He passed through the art-capitals of Europe, with the contempt of the barbarian of genius that he was. He simply loathed Italian art with "its conventional ad nauseam beauties," as he says in a leter to Stasov, and he found French art "empty and silly." In later years, he once remarked that Rodin's Balzac is no better than the primitive statues which decorate the Scythian tumuli in Southern Russia. Decidedly, Europe was not after the young painter's heart. He embodied his homesickness in his "Sadko in the Wonder-Realm of the Sea," the best canvas of those he painted abroad. It represents Sadko, the hero of a Russian Saga of the Novgorod cycle, at the bottom of the deep. He is surrounded by the lascivious forms of mermaids and nymphs, all queens of foreign lands, but Sadko's eyes are turned toward the modest Chernavushka, the emblem of Russia, who looks at him with shy longing from a dark recess of the deep.
Upon his return home, Repin became one of the most active members of the Society of Wandering Exhibitions. Not without the disapproval of his colleagues, he accepted a professorship at the Academy, now somewhat reorganized under the pressure of new ideas, by Count Ivan Tolstoy. He devoted most of his time and enthusiasm to his creative efforts. Paintings on contemporary subjects form the main bulk of his vast oeuvre. These paintings, in the words of an historian of Russian art, "together with the works of Tolstoy, Turgeniev, Goncharov and Dostoyevsky will hand down to later times a vivid and characteristic account of Russia . . . in all its completeness." Some of these canvases deal with the people of the countryside, that is, with the Russian people par excellence. Such are, in addition to "Burlaki," "The Recruit," "The Little Russian Dancers" ("Vechernitsi") and especially "The Church Procession in the government of Kursk," of which two versions are in existence. All of peasant Russia, bast-shoed, inarticulate, dull, over-governed, lives on this canvas, which is an implacable denunciation of Russian life. In other works, such as the "Nihilist cycle" consisting of three paintings, Repin is, like Turgeniev, the historian of the "intelligentsia." But seldom does he lose sight of the social issues
