Terror and Art

How an artist's unfinished masterpiece survived Stalin to become a cult icon

April 12, 1925 – It was twilight when the procession began. Almost 50,000 people were massed inside the solid pink walls of Donskoy Monastery. They stood with candles, crying and singing beneath a clear violet sky. Along the far side of the wall, the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church were walking with the casket of Patriarch Tikhon, the last, great defender of the Church against Bolshevik rule.

The artist Pavel Korin observed the procession from the crowd. Near him a group of beggars were singing “a strange, ancient melody.” An adolescent boy's “wild, piercing alto” howled from his “pointed, wolflike face.” Korin would never forget the words he sang: “We lift our hearts on spears.”

Korin picked up his sketchpad and began to draw.

As Korin watched Tikhon's haunting farewell, he decided to create a monumental canvas, the likes of which had not been seen since Vasily Surikov's epic Boyarina Morozova of the 1880s. Like Surikov, who depicted the schism of the seventeenth century, Korin planned to frame Tikhon's funeral as a greater moment in the Church's history: the final act before its destruction. The painting was to be called Requiem.

In a time of church closures and mass repressions, Korin managed to compose a monumental ode to Orthodoxy, and stay alive. Through the darkest years of Stalin's Terror, Korin produced dozens of different oil portraits in preparation for the work. He continued working on the painting off and on until his death in 1967.

But Korin's masterpiece was never finished; he never even touched a paintbrush to the 40-square-meter canvas. For decades, it stood empty in his studio, as one observer put it, “like a tomb.”

Korin's complete Requiem portraits, and many of his drawings, are now on display at the State Tretyakov Gallery for the first time. After languishing for decades in Korin's studio-turned-house museum, they have been returned to their original condition by Tretyakov restorers. The exhibition, titled “Requiem: Towards a History of The Passing of Rus,” seeks to cement the work's rightful place in Russian art. It presents Requiem not simply as an unrealized dream, but as an ode, an inspiration, and a daring act of remembrance.

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religious art had been at the center of Korin's life since his childhood. The artist was born in 1892 to a family of icon painters in the Vladimir region. After studying at the local icon school, he earned a place at the icon workshop in Moscow's Donskoy Monastery, where almost two decades later he would witness Tikhon's funeral. He found a mentor in Mikhail Nesterov, who was then painting the frescoes in the Sts. Martha and Mary Convent. Korin joined the project on the invitation of Yelizaveta Fyodorovna, the Empress's sister. Korin deeply admired Yelizaveta: decades later, he still displayed photographs of her on his desk. Several of the nuns in her circle would become his subjects in Requiem.

In 1925, Korin was struggling to find his place in the artistic firmament of the new Soviet regime. He was reserved, serious, and deeply religious, a teetotaler with calm blue eyes and a perpetually furrowed brow. Praising Korin's “spiritual and moral qualities,” Nesterov called him “the last of a dying breed.” Korin preferred Michelangelo to agitprop; when a group of Futurists threw out plaster casts of ancient Greek statues, he salvaged them and displayed them in his own studio.

Tikhon's funeral filled the young artist with new purpose. The scene reminded him of two of his favorite works: Alexander Ivanov's nineteenth century painting The Appearance of Christ before the People, and Nesterov's Symbolist Rus: The Soul of the People, created in 1916. His painting's subject was to be “the Church's last ceremony” (“Церковь выходит на последний парад”), he told a friend.

As Korin made sketches at Donskoy, his pencil fixed on the tall, grave form of Archdeacon Kholmogorov. Kholmogorov was renowned for his voice; Korin called him Russia's best bass after Fyodor Shalyapin. But such quick sketches were not enough: Korin needed the men who had been at the funeral to pose for him.

At the time, the Bolshevik anti-religious campaign was in full swing. From 1922 to 1923, Tikhon (who had been elected to the Patriarchate in 1917) was imprisoned in Donskoy Monastery by the Soviets, and those who declared their allegiance to him faced execution. In the decade after Tikhon's death, most of the Church's property was seized, and its clergy were either sent to labor camps or shot. In 1918, there were 50,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the Soviet Union; by 1935, there were just 500.

The Church also faced threats from within. After Tikhon's arrest, a “Renovationist Council” formed under the leadership of the notorious Metropolitan Sergius. The breakaway sect (also called “the Living Church”) praised Marxism and allied with the Soviet state, which in turn infiltrated it with secret police. In 1923 the Living Church deposed Tikhon as Patriarch.*

Metropolitan Trifon Turkestanov (1929).

How could Korin earn the trust of a community under siege? Nesterov came to his aid, convincing Metropolitan Trifon Turkestanov, his confessor at the Bogoyavlensky Cathedral, to sit for the young artist. In the resulting oil portrait, Trifon appears as a small, hunched figure in brilliant crimson, with his eyes turned toward the heavens. Trifon secured Korin the access he needed, introducing him to other prominent figures in the Church.

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on september 3, 1931, Korin was working on Requiem in the small Arbat studio he shared with his brother when he received a visit that would change his life. A messenger told him that Maxim Gorky, the Soviet literary titan, had just arrived. He rushed down his studio's steep staircase to meet the great man, and helped him up the rickety steps. Gorky was deeply impressed by Korin's studies for Requiem. Like Nesterov, he was taken with Korin's culture and gravitas, and proclaimed him a “great artist.”

“Why must I entertain so many fools?” Gorky would say when weary. “Bring me Korin.”

At a time when it was difficult for ordinary Soviet citizens to travel abroad, Gorky invited Korin and his brother Alexander on a tour of France, Germany and Italy. After the trip, Gorky converted an old laundry on Malaya Pirogovskaya ulitsa into a spacious new studio for Korin, which the latter filled with his gleaming icon collection. Gorky also helped Korin obtain the mammoth canvas he needed for Requiem.

“You're on the verge of something great,” Gorky told Korin in 1934.

Meanwhile, he convinced Korin to change the work's official name to something less eulogizing. “Give it a chance,” (Дайте ей паспорт) he urged. “Call it ‘The Passing of Rus' (Уходящая Русь).” From then on, this was the painting's official name, which Gorky thought had a more neutral air. Rather than an act of mourning, it became simply a historical document. Korin, however, continued to call it “Requiem.”

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korin considered a number of settings for Tikhon's funeral, including an exodus scene set in the mountains and an outdoor procession in the Kremlin. He eventually settled on the interior of Uspensky Cathedral, the Kremlin's famed white and gold church. Gorky helped him gain access to Uspensky, and in 1935 Korin sketched the interior frescoes.

He planned the painting to be a tapestry of both notable Church figures and national archetypes: peasants, beggars, and the traditional character of the holy fool. For the latter, Korin recruited a blind singer from a Moscow church, who is pictured conducting an invisible orchestra.

Rather than placing the scene in the middle of the service, the painting captures its final moment, when those assembled in the cathedral are about to process outside. The faces of those assembled are turned toward the exit, located beyond view; they are caught in a moment of expectation, as if waiting for something or someone.

Rather than eliding the divisions that plagued the church, Korin incorporated them in the composition. One of the men he met through Trifon was Fyodor Bogoyavlensky, a rebellious young monk. Bogoyavlensky was the ringleader of a secret, counter-Renovationist brotherhood at the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery. This underground circle included several of the painting's other subjects, such as the monastery's wizened head, Megunmen Mitrofan, who appears brandishing a cross, and Schemamonk (elder monk) Agafon, who peers out from under the hood of a striking black and gold robe.

In Korin's final plan, the brooding, long-haired Bogoyavlensky appears directly opposite the Soviet collaborator Sergius, his nemesis. Korin painted a portrait of the stout, bespectacled Sergius in 1937, the bloodiest year of Stalin's Terror. Though the Renovationist movement eventually collapsed, Sergius was picked by Stalin to lead the Church during World War II, during the dictator's opportunistic reconciliation with religion.

Korin's sympathies lay with Bogoyavlensky, whose image he would use again as a heroic martyr of Novgorod in his Alexander Nevsky triptych. In a later interview, Korin called Sergius a “traitor.” Nevertheless, he gave the future Patriarch a regal treatment in flowing purple and gold robes.

Korin enlisted a wide variety of models, including a crippled man who sat outside the entrance of the Bogoyavlensky Cathedral; upon seeing his fierce gaze, Gorky remarked that they looked like Tolstoy's eyes when he was angry. After the man posed for three days, Korin's wife Praskovya had to rid the studio of lice. Other subjects included Famar, a nun from the Sts. Martha and Mary Convent beloved by Moscow's intelligentsia. She sat for Korin in 1935, weary but unbroken in a white habit. In all, Korin eventually created 29 oil portraits.

In the mid-1930s, Korin threw himself into the project with ever greater passion. In April 1935, he attended a performance of Hector Berlioz's Requiem in the House of Columns. During the concert, he wrote a note to himself: “Remember ‘The Day of Wrath.' What glory! If only the painting could be like this.”

Commissar Kliment Voroshilov urged Korin to abandon the project, warning that it appeared to be “a hymn to the Church.” Pressure was put on Gorky to abandon his religious patron: “Here you are supporting Korin, and he's going to church.” Gorky would always reply, “Leave him alone. He knows better than you what he needs.”

Archimandrite Father Nikita (1936).

On the eve of the Great Terror, Korin's sheltered status came under threat. In June 1936, Gorky died, leaving the artist without a protector. For the next few years, Korin lived in fear. Praskovya packed him a bag of linen and crackers and hung it by the door so that he could take it with him when he was arrested.

Most of the clergy depicted in Requiem were exiled, imprisoned, or killed. Schema­monk Father Agafon died in a labor camp; Megunmen Mitrofan was arrested, sent to serve outside Moscow, re-arrested and probably shot in a Moscow prison; the priest Sergius Uspensky was shot and buried in a mass grave at Butovo. The nun Famar died in the 1940s of complications from time in the camps.

Nevertheless, Korin continued quietly working on Requiem; the feared arrest never came. Like many of his time, Korin never committed his inner thoughts to paper, and the reason he was spared can only be guessed. “Soviet art needed great figures, and he was too talented, too important to touch,” said curator Vera Golovina. “Or perhaps it was just luck.”

Korin was haunted by his subjects' fates. In a 1963 interview with journalist Genrikh Gunn, he told of what happened to the young monk Fyodor Bogoyavlensky in the cells of Lubyanka: “They interrogated him, beat him, pulled out the hairs of his beard, beat his legs… Do you know what it's like to have your legs beaten?” Fyodor died under unknown circumstances in the early 1940s.

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korin stayed busy throughout the forties, painting a mural for the never-realized Palace of Soviets and continuing his job as head of the restoration workshop at the Pushkin Museum, a job he'd held since the early 1930s. After the war, he restored war trophies taken from Dresden and helped design the Komsomolskaya and Novoslobodskaya metro stations, which earned him a Stalin Prize in 1952.

After Stalin's death, Korin gained more official commissions and prizes. At the same time, he and his Requiem became a cult icon for the free-thinking artists coming of age during Khrushchev's Thaw. Young talents such as Dmitry Zhilinsky and Viktor Popkov were pioneering a new, more humanistic kind of realism. For them, Korin's studio was a “place of pilgrimage,” art historian Maria Reformatskaya said in an interview for the exhibition catalogue.

“The enormous, untouched canvas stood there, almost frightening in its whiteness,” she recalled. “We really felt as if ‘Birnam Wood had come'* in the guise of those black and gray portraits, with their stern, powerful gazes.”

Scaffolding remained around the monumental canvas, so that Korin would be able to begin his final version of Requiem at any moment. But he never did. Occasionally, visiting young artists offered assistance. He always refused. “No, I'll do it myself. So long as my hand isn't shaking, I can do it myself,” Zhilinsky remembered Korin saying.

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some of the Requiem portraits were displayed publicly during Korin's lifetime, including at the artist's first solo show at the Tretyakov in 1963. The ill-fated subjects were not identified, however, labeled simply “monk” or “nun,” and the full story of the portraits' creation was never told.

In 1965, the artist traveled to New York for the opening of a personal exhibition, which featured some portraits from Requiem. An American journalist asked how he'd been allowed to create the series in the Soviet Union.

“I've never asked anyone's permission about what and how I could paint,” he replied.

But mostly, the portraits were confined to his studio, which he donated to the Tretyakov Gallery after his death. The Tretyakov's restoration workshop labored for three years to remove dirt and mold from the paintings and restore their yellowed varnish. They also restored the two-ton blank canvas. “Most people didn't even realize what a state the paintings were in until the original colors started to emerge,” said head restorer Alina Churkina, sitting in the workshop's sunlit studio.

Churkina is the daughter and granddaughter of the two men who posed for Korin's Father and Son portrait of a pair of ordinary worshipers. Her father worked in Korin's studio, and later took over as the head of the Pushkin Museum's restoration team. Asked if Korin would be pleased with the restoration of his work, Churkina frowned. “It's hard to say,” she said. “Pavel Dmitriyevich was very, very strict.”

“I think we didn't hurt anything, at least,” Churkina's colleague Natalia Koblyakova said with a smile.

Korin's house museum is currently closed for renovation; when it reopens, the restored Requiem series will move there for permanent display.

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on november 26, 1967, Novodevichy Convent's Uspensky Cathedral was packed with flowers, candles and worshipers. Four days earlier, Pavel Korin had died. The crowd at the funeral included Zhilinsky and Popkov, the young artists who inherited his mantle.

Amidst all the tragedy that befell Korin's heroes, there was one bright spot. One of the clergy who presided at his funeral was Metropolitan Pimen, who had been a young hieromonk when Korin painted his portrait in 1935. He lived a long life, becoming Patriarch in 1971. In 1988 he led the celebration of the 1000-year anniversary of the baptism of Kievan Rus, an event now considered the effective end of the Church's prosecution in the Soviet Union.

In Korin's Requiem sketches, Pimen looks directly at the viewer, a psychologically penetrating technique the artist borrowed from Repin. Although perestroika was still decades away, Pimen's clear, unwavering gaze seems to hold the spirit of the Church, and perhaps the key to its regeneration.

A 1939 photo shows Korin sitting in his studio, his face in shadow as he looks down at the floor. To his left is his magnificent portrait of Sergius; behind him is the canvas he would never touch.

Why Korin never finished his masterpiece will remain a mystery. Some critics suggest that after Stalin's death he was simply too old and tired, or that he never resolved the proportions; others, that he meant to leave it blank all along.

“Everything that was to be portrayed on the artist's canvas passed through it and departed to another world,” wrote exhibition designer Yury Avaakumov. “The life of an entire country that had lost its faith passed through, leaving the artist's canvas as clean and bright as it was when he began.” RL

* A move the modern Orthodox Church considered invalid; in 1981 Tikhon was canonized.