boundless fields, stretching away into the remote distance… All around lay fields, fields without end, with no trees on the horizon. However, since Arina had lived almost solely in the country since childhood, this miserable landscape did not strike her as in the least depressing; on the contrary, it even evoked some kind of response in her heart, stirring sparks of feeling still smouldering there. The better part of her being had lived in those bare endless fields and instinctively her eyes sought them out at every opportunity. She would gaze at the fields receding into the distance, at rain-soaked villages resembling black specks on the horizon, at white churches in village graveyards, at multi-coloured patches of light cast on the plain by clouds wandering in the rays of the sun, at a peasant she had never seen before, who was in fact walking between the furrows but who seemed quite still to her. As she gazed she would think of nothing - rather, her thoughts were so confused they could not dwell on anything for very long. She merely gazed and gazed, until a senile drowsiness began to hum in her ears again, veiling the fields, churches, villages and that distant, trudging peasant in mist.123
The Russians have a word for this inertia -
p. 265).
Dobroliubov even claimed that the ‘most heartfelt striving of all our Oblomovs is their striving for repose in a dressing gown’.124 Goncharov made a careful point of emphasizing the Asian origin of his hero’s dressing gown. It was ‘a real oriental dressing-gown, without the slightest hint of Europe, without tassels, without velvet trimmings’, and in the true ‘Asiatic fashion’ its sleeves ‘got wider from the shoulders to the hands’.125 Living ‘like a sultan’, surrounded by his serfs, and never doing anything that they could be commanded to do instead for him, Oblomov became a cultural monument to Russia’s ‘Asiatic immobility’. Lenin used the term when he grew frustrated with the unreformability of Russian social life. ‘The old Oblomov is with us’, he wrote in 1920, ‘and for a long while yet he will still need to be washed, cleaned, shaken and given a good thrashing if something is to come of him.’126
6
In 1874 the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg hosted an extraordinary exhibition by the artist Vasily Vereshchagin, whose enormous battle scenes of the Turkestan campaign had recently returned with high acclaim from a European tour. Huge crowds came to see the exhibition (30,000 copies of the catalogue were sold in the first week) and the building of the Ministry became so cramped that several fights broke out as people jostled for a better view. Veresh-chagin’s pictures were the public’s first real view of the Imperial war which the Russians had been fighting for the past ten years against the Muslim tribes as the Tsar’s troops conquered Turkestan. The Russian public took great pride in the army’s capture of the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, followed by its conquest of Tashkent and the arid steppe of Central Asia right up to the borders with Afghanistan and British India. After its defeat in the Crimean War, the campaign showed the world that Russia was a power to be reckoned with. But Vereshchagin’s almost photographic battle images revealed a savagery which had not been seen by civilians before. It was not clear who was more ‘savage’ in his pictures of the war: the Russian troops or their Asiatic opponents. There was ‘something fascinating, something
deeply horrifying, in the wild energy of these canvases’, concluded one reviewer in the press. ‘We see a violence that could not be French or even from the Balkans: it is half-barbarian and semi-Asiatic - it is a Russian violence.’127
It had not originally been the painter’s aim to draw this parallel. Vereshchagin started out as an official war artist, and it was not part of his remit to criticize the conduct of the Russian military. He had been invited by General Kaufman, the senior commander of the Turkestan campaign, to join the army as a surveyor, and had fought with distinction (the only Russian painter ever to be honoured with the Order of St George) before receiving the commission from the Grand Duke Vladimir (the same who had bought Repin’s
There was a huge storm of controversy. Liberals praised the artist for his stance against all war.* Conservatives denounced him as a ‘traitor to Russia’, and mounted a campaign to strip him of his Order of St George.132 General Kaufman became so enraged when he saw the artist’s pictures that he began to shout and swear at Vereshchagin and
* Even Kaiser Wilhelm II, the most militarist of the German Emperors, told Vereshchagin at his Berlin exhibition in 1897:’
physically attacked him in the presence of his fellow officers. The General Staff condemned his paintings as a ‘slander against the Imperial army’, and called for them to be destroyed; but the Tsar, ironically, was on the liberals’ side. Meanwhile, the right-wing press was outraged by the fact that Vereshchagin had been offered a professorship by the Imperial Academy of Arts (and even more outraged when the artist turned it down). Critics attacked his ‘barbarous art’ on the racist grounds that no real Russian worth the name could paint such tribesmen as equal human beings. ‘It is an offence’, argued a professor in the journal
As his opponents knew, Vereshchagin was of Tatar origin. His grandmother had been born into a Turkmen tribe.134 For this reason he felt a close affinity for the landscape and the people of the Central Asian steppe. ‘I insist’, he once wrote to Stasov, ‘that I only learned to paint when I went to Turkestan. I had more freedom for my studies there than I would have had if I had studied in the West. Instead of the Parisian attic, I lived in a Kirghiz tent; instead of the paid model, I drew real people.’135 Stasov claimed that Vereshchagin’s feeling for the Central Asian steppe ‘could only have been felt by an artist from Russia (not a European) who had lived among the people of the East’.136
Bitter and depressed by the campaign against him in the nationalist press, Vereshchagin fled St Petersburg, where the police had refused to protect him from threats against his life. He left Russia well before the exhibition’s end. Vereshchagin travelled first to India, where he felt, as he wrote to tell Stasov, ‘that something draws me ever farther to the East’. Then he trekked through the Himalayas, pointing out in sketches which he sent back to his friend ‘the architectural similarities between Tibet and ancient Rus”.137 Stasov was forbidden to display these sketches in the public library of St Petersburg (even though he was its chief librarian).138 Under pressure from the right- wing press, a warrant for the arrest of the exiled painter was despatched to the border with Mongolia.139 The warrant was issued from the very building where Vereshchagin’s paintings were displayed, until they were purchased by Tretiakov (no academy would accept them). Banned for twenty
years from his native land, Vereshchagin spent the remainder of his life in western Europe, where his paintings were acclaimed. But he always longed to return to the East, and he finally did so in 1904, when Admiral Makarov invited him to join the fleet as an artist during the war against Japan. He was killed three months later on the
In Russia’s educated circles the military conquest of the Central Asian steppe produced two opposing reactions. The first was the sort of imperialist attitude which Vereshchagin’s paintings had done so much to offend. It was based on a sense of racial superiority to the Asiatic tribes, and at the same time a fear of those same tribes, a fear of being swamped by the ‘yellow peril’ which reached fever pitch in
