SUMMARY:

In the summer of 1870, the painter Ilya Repin, who, in his words, “did not like travel or excursions of any kind,” goes against his nature and embarks on a several-month trip down the Volga River, in search of models and inspiration for what would become his first major work Barge haulers on the Volga. In this article, Molly Brunson proposes that this trip and the spatial realities of the journey as such are what define the expressive contours and produce the formal peculiarities of what is perhaps Repin’s most widely known realist masterpiece. Examining Repin’s sketches and memoiristic writing in the context of an extended visual engagement with the painting itself, Brunson considers how the artist’s unique orientation as both an outsider and a participant – manifest in the painting’s push and pull between distance and proximity, the epic and the contemporary, the aesthetic and the ideological – enacts a refinement of the progressive image of the “people.” Having sought out the authentic burlak, Repin discovers instead the complex and often paradoxical nature of the “people,” a concept that becomes more a composite projection of Repin’s own experience than a reflection of any exterior reality. Ultimately, Brunson argues for a nuanced understanding of Repin’s realism, one that disrupts the mode’s supposed commitment to verisimilitude and ideological content with the spatiotemporal and social disjunctions wrought, in the case of Barge haulers on the Volga, by the experience of travel.