Everything is clear with Tolstoy and Yasnaya Polyana. Yasnaya Polyana – the family estate of the Volkonskys, Tolstoy received it in 1847 after the division of property between brothers and sisters. The writer could not imagine his life without him. “Without my Yasnaya Polyana, I can hardly imagine Russia and my attitude towards it,” he wrote. And Repin became a landowner only in 1892, when he bought the Zdravnevo estate near Vitebsk. But he then he immediately entered the taste of a new life. In Zdravnevo, the artist planted new trees in a linden alley, under it the banks of the Dvina were strengthened, outbuildings were erected, and the main manor house was rebuilt according to Repin’s drawings.
Now “Zdravnevo” is a museum-estate of Repin. In July, you can see the exhibition “The Manor Culture in the Works of LN Tolstoy and IE Repin” (curated by Elizaveta Alekseeva). Two museums are doing it together – the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local Lore (“Zdravnevo” is its branch) and the Leo Tolstoy State Museum – this is not the first joint project for them.
It is almost impossible to say that Tolstoy was a role model for Repin in organizing estate life. But the image of Yasnaya Polyana and the life of the writer “on earth” probably influenced the artist’s decision to start a life on the estate. Repin visited Yasnaya Polyana more than once, stayed with the Tolstoys for a long time. And I was able to observe not only Lev Nikolayevich, going behind a plow or riding a horse, but also his various household hobbies. RESERVE ARMY. Kuzminskaya, the sister of Sofya Andreevna Tolstoy, described them in her memoirs: “But Lev Nikolayevich was not only interested in bees. Coffee-radicchio. He was very interested in planting spruce forests.” In a word, Repin had someone to draw inspiration from.
It is no coincidence that, having bought Zdravnevo, Repin shares his impressions of life on the estate with Tatyana Tolstaya, the eldest daughter of Lev Nikolayevich. Both she and the writer Zhirkevich AV the artist talk about the arrangement of the estate. The newly made landowner enters the economy with his head. According to Zhirkevich, in 1892 “during the summer he alone began two portraits of his daughters.”
However, in Zdravnev, Repin painted the paintings “Autumn Bouquet”, “Hunter”, “Dawn on the Dvina”, “Mowers in the Field”, “Young Man in the Village” and many others. Among the exhibits of the exhibition are a self-portrait of the artist in 1894 and a portrait of LN Tolstoy in an armchair 1909. Also in the exhibition, the Tolstoy Museum promises to display rare photographs, manuscripts, documents, drawings and paintings, in a way or other related to the life of the farm.
Where is the nest of the nobility, where is the land of the artist? But one way or another, the estate turned from a place of action into a protagonist of Russian literature and Russian art. So the current exhibition in Zdravnev brings the life of the estate before the eyes of the audience, inviting Repin and Tolstoy as guides.
