Tanais Gallery
Feodor Vasilyev. Thaw.
1871. Oil on canvas.
The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
(Author's copy: The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia).
In 1871, Vasilyev painted Thaw, which made him famous immediately.
In this picture the theme of a deeper social significance was sound.
The very motif - a dark muddy road receding into the distance - in combination with purely pictorial methods conveys the sense of deepness of space in the picture. The tense, almost monochrome tonality of the moist air, thawing snow, and the cold haziness at the horizon creates an atmosphere of gloom and depression. The man and the child walking along the road flooded with an overflowing brook seem lonely and lost amid the vast plain under the low cloudy sky. Just as lonely is the hut in the far distance standing off the road with no path leading to it. The allusion is apparent. The two motifs - the hut and the lonely couple - are linked by some inner psychological similarity revealed in the context of the picture and reminding one of countless villages lost in the expances of the country and of miserable wanderers on her endless roads.
The Thaw painted in the year of the First Exhibition of the Society of Travelling Exhibitions introduced Vasilyev into the avant-garde of Russian painting. He was admitted, as an extern, to the Academy of Arts and became a painter of the 1st degree.
The tzar family's (Prince Alexander, future Alexander III of Russia), ordered a copy, and the Society for Promotion of Artists awarded him first prize. Later Prince Alexander's copy was exponated on the 1872 London World Fair and won a medal. Vasilyev was admitted, as an intern, to the Imperial Academy of Arts (which, among other things, gave him an exception from conscription to the Army).
Boris Pasternak.
February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.
Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,
Race through the noise of bells and wheels
To where the ink and all you grieving
Are muffled when the rain shower falls.
To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,
A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,
Fall down into the puddles, hurl
Dry sadness deep into the eyes.
Below, the wet black earth shows through,
With sudden cries the wind is pitted,
The more haphazard, the more true
The poetry that sobs its heart out.
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