Dostoevsky portrait with beautiful frames. Psychological portraits of Dostoevsky's heroes

Vasily Grigorievich Perov
Portet F.M. Dostoevsky, 1872
Oil, canvas. Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow.

From the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s wife:

That same winter, P.M. Tretyakov, the owner of the famous Moscow Art Gallery, asked his husband for the opportunity to paint his portrait for the gallery. For this purpose, the famous artist V.G. Perov came from Moscow. Before work began, Perov visited us every day for a week; caught Fyodor Mikhailovich in a variety of moods, talked, challenged him to argue, and was able to notice the most characteristic expression in his husband’s face, precisely the one that Fyodor Mikhailovich had when he was immersed in his artistic thoughts. One could say that Perov captured in the portrait “a moment of Dostoevsky’s creativity.” I noticed this expression many times in the face of Fyodor Mikhailovich, when it would happen that you would go in to see him, notice that he seemed to be “looking into himself,” and leave without saying anything. (A.G. Dostoevskaya. Memoirs. - M.: Fiction, 1971)

In May 1872, V. G. Perov made a special trip to St. Petersburg to paint a portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky on Tretyakov’s instructions. The sessions were few and short, but Perov was inspired by the task before him. It is known that Tretyakov treated Dostoevsky with special love.
The portrait is executed in a single grayish-brown tone. Dostoevsky sits on a chair, turned in three quarters, crossing his legs and squeezing his knee with his hands with interlaced fingers. The figure gently sinks into the twilight of a dark background and is thereby removed from the viewer. Considerable free space is left on the sides and especially above Dostoevsky’s head. This pushes it even deeper and closes it in on itself. A pale face protrudes plastically from the dark background. Dostoevsky is dressed in an unbuttoned gray jacket made of good, heavy material. Brown trousers with black stripes highlight the hands. In his portrait of Dostoevsky, Perov managed to portray a man who feels alone with himself. He is completely immersed in his thoughts. The gaze is deepened into oneself. A thin face with finely traced light-and-shadow transitions allows you to clearly perceive the structure of the head. Dark brown hair does not disturb the basic scheme of the portrait.
In terms of color, it is interesting to note that the gray color of the jacket is perceived precisely as a color and at the same time conveys the texture of the material. It is set off by a spot of white shirt and a black tie with red speckles.
The portrait of Dostoevsky was sufficiently appreciated by his contemporaries and was considered the best of Perov’s portraits. Kramskoy’s review of him is known: “Character, power of expression, huge relief<...>the decisiveness of the shadows and a certain sharpness and energy of the contours, always inherent in his paintings, in this portrait are softened by an amazing color and harmony of tones." Kramskoy’s review is all the more interesting because he was critical of Perov’s work as a whole.

Vasily Grigorievich Perov
Portet F.M. Dostoevsky, 1872
Oil, canvas. Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow.

From the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s wife:

That same winter, P.M. Tretyakov, the owner of the famous Moscow Art Gallery, asked his husband for the opportunity to paint his portrait for the gallery. For this purpose, the famous artist V.G. Perov came from Moscow. Before work began, Perov visited us every day for a week; caught Fyodor Mikhailovich in a variety of moods, talked, challenged him to argue, and was able to notice the most characteristic expression in his husband’s face, precisely the one that Fyodor Mikhailovich had when he was immersed in his artistic thoughts. One could say that Perov captured in the portrait “a minute of Dostoevsky’s creativity.” I noticed this expression many times in the face of Fyodor Mikhailovich, when it would happen that you would go in to see him, notice that he seemed to be “looking into himself,” and leave without saying anything. (A.G. Dostoevskaya. Memoirs. - M.: Fiction, 1971)

V. G. Perov often turned to portraiture. At the request of Pavel Tretyakov, the artist painted a series of portraits of famous Russian writers, among which the most expressive was the canvas depicting F. M. Dostoevsky.

It should be noted that each portrait drawn by Perov is distinguished by the special depth of a person’s inner world, reflecting it with incredible accuracy. Perov's art embodies all the achievements of Russian painting in the genre of psychological portraiture.

“Portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky” was painted in 1872. The painting is distinguished by its masterfully executed portrait resemblance. The figure of the writer depicted in the picture appears to the beholder as drawn by light from the thick, impenetrable darkness. Immersed in sad reverie, Dostoevsky tensely covers his knees with his hands clasped together.

The writer’s appearance subtly reveals his characteristic mysterious detachment, concentration and depth of gaze. It was in this position that the author of “Crime and Punishment” stayed during his creative reflections and spiritual explorations.

The portrait was executed by the master technically perfectly. It combines unsurpassed brushstroke technique, high detail of individual elements and deep psychology of the image. Every detail of the model’s face is drawn with the smallest strokes, reflecting the majesty and depth of the author’s worldview.

The masterful distribution of shadows in the image creates the volume and realism of the image. The dark background was chosen by the artist in order to abstract the image of F. M. Dostoevsky from extraneous things. Perov shows the great significance of this figure for Russian and world literature in general.

In addition to the description of V. G. Perov’s painting “Portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky,” our website contains many other descriptions of paintings by various artists, which can be used both in preparation for writing an essay on the painting, and simply for a more complete acquaintance with the work famous masters of the past.

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Vasily Perov.
Portrait of the writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.
1872. Oil on canvas.
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

In the portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky, Perov simply and accurately expressed the psychological state that the verbal formula “withdraw into oneself” conveys. The figure, as if compressed in the dark space of the canvas, is depicted slightly from above and from the side. The turn of the head, closed facial features, gaze directed at an invisible point outside the picture create a feeling of deep concentration, “suffering” of thought. The hands are nervously clasped on the knee - a wonderfully found and, as we know, characteristic gesture for the writer, closing the composition and serving as a sign of internal tension. Perov's painting is devoid of coloristic effects and is almost monotonous in the elaboration of details, however, even in this one can read the desire to convince with the simple truth of the fact. But here we have before us a “fact” of a special kind: knowing who is depicted in the portrait, one can understand what is hidden behind the external asceticism of the image.

Judging by A. Dostoevskaya’s review, Perov “managed to notice the most characteristic expression in her husband’s face, precisely the one that Fyodor Mikhailovich had when he was immersed in his artistic thoughts. One could say that Perov captured in the portrait “a minute of Dostoevsky’s creativity.”

In May 1872, V. G. Perov made a special trip to St. Petersburg to paint a portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky on Tretyakov’s instructions.

“The sessions were few and short, but Perov was inspired by the task before him. It is known that Tretyakov treated Dostoevsky with special love. The writer was close to Perov in many ways. Sobko reports that Perov valued the novel “Crime and Punishment” most of all. And the artist created a portrait painting. She was so convincing that for future generations the image of Dostoevsky seemed to merge with the portrait of Perov. However, the portrait remained historical monument a certain era, a turning point and difficult, when a thinking person was looking for solutions to basic social issues. Dostoevsky was fifty-one years old when the portrait was painted. In 1871-1872 he worked on the novel “Demons,” and in 1868 “The Idiot” was written.

The portrait is executed in a single grayish-brown tone. Dostoevsky sits on a chair, turned in three quarters, crossing his legs and squeezing his knee with his hands with interlaced fingers. The figure gently sinks into the twilight of a dark background and is thereby removed from the viewer. Considerable free space is left on the sides and especially above Dostoevsky’s head. This pushes it even deeper and closes it in on itself. A pale face protrudes plastically from the dark background. Dostoevsky is dressed in an unbuttoned gray jacket made of good, heavy material. Brown trousers with black stripes highlight the hands. In his portrait of Dostoevsky, Perov managed to portray a man who feels alone with himself. He is completely immersed in his thoughts. The gaze is deepened into oneself. A thin face with finely traced light-and-shadow transitions allows you to clearly perceive the structure of the head. Dark brown hair does not disturb the basic scheme of the portrait.

In terms of color, it is interesting to note that the gray color of the jacket is perceived precisely as a color and at the same time conveys the texture of the material. It is set off by a spot of white shirt and a black tie with red speckles.

The portrait of Dostoevsky was sufficiently appreciated by his contemporaries and was considered the best of Perov’s portraits. Kramskoy’s review of him is known: “Character, power of expression, huge relief<...>the decisiveness of the shadows and a certain sharpness and energy of the contours, always inherent in his paintings, in this portrait are softened by an amazing color and harmony of tones.” Kramskoy’s review is all the more interesting because he was critical of Perov’s work in general.”

Lyaskovskaya O.L. V.G. Perov. Peculiarities creative path artist. – M.: Art, 1979. P. 108.

Perov was not familiar with F.M. Dostoevsky. And they lived in different cities. Nevertheless, their meeting, one might say, was predetermined not only by the similarity of the ideas that they professed and which fed their art, but also by the commonality of religious beliefs - the search for God not on the paths of an enlightened mind, but in their hearts. And therefore they saw in the church a salutary outcome from that “moral mud” in which the soul remains, crucified by passions and lusts.

Apparently, having intuitively sensed the similarity of the views of the writer and the artist, P.M. Tretyakov suggested to no one but Perov that he paint a portrait of Dostoevsky for his collection. In general, it must be said that the “portrait genre” is a separate page in creative biography artist, where the portraits of A. Rubinstein (1870), A.N. found their important place. Ostrovsky (1871), as well as portraits of V.I. created during 1872, that is, in the same year as “Dostoevsky”. Dalia, I.S. Turgeneva, A.N. Maykova, M.I. Pogodin and others. All these are not just beautiful paintings, distinguished by the depth of penetration into inner world models. Taken together, they represent a very significant phenomenon for Russian art, the height that the Russian psychological portrait has reached in its development. And this is another circumstance that prompted Tretyakov to turn specifically to Perov to paint a portrait of such a subtle psychologist, an expert on the hidden depths of the Russian soul, like Dostoevsky.

And yet, despite the internal closeness, the task facing Perov was unusually difficult, and it was determined not only by the scale of Dostoevsky’s personality itself, but also by the high demands placed by the writer on the art of portrait painting in general. In particular, he considered the “accuracy and fidelity” of reproduction only as “the material from which it is then created work of art" “In rare moments,” wrote Dostoevsky, “the human face expresses main feature your own, your most characteristic thought. The artist studies and guesses this main idea face, at least at the moment in which he copied, and it was not on his face at all.”

In other words, for Dostoevsky, the value of a portrait lay not in external similarity and not in reflecting only the character of the person being portrayed or even his psychology, but in expressing the maximum concentration of his spiritual world, which the writer considered “the highest half of the human being.”

And therefore, for him it is precisely this, this “higher half” of each individual person, his spiritual reality, that constitutes “the main thought of a person,” or, as he wrote in another article, “his main idea.” It was she who most attracted the writer himself, who revealed in his heroes “the primal reality of the human spirit, its chthonic depths, in which God fights with the devil, in which human destiny is decided.”

This “original reality of the spirit” of Dostoevsky, a man, as contemporaries noted, “insensitive and indifferent to everyday joys and worries,” was what interested Perov in the first place. And first of all, because for him, as is known, the “inner moral side” of the human being became more and more a priority both in life and in creativity, increasingly asserting itself as the programmatic setting of his art.

Hence this extremely restrained coloring of the picture, its strict, compact composition, freed from any surroundings. Even Dostoevsky’s chair, depicted in silhouette, in muted tones, is barely visible in the dark background painting. Nothing distracting or telling. On the contrary, starting from the model itself, the artist introduces a contemplative mood into the portrait, conducive to reflection, that is, to the co-work of the viewer. Therefore, the very position of the figure, with its angular outline, tenaciously grasped hands on the knees, is designed as a closed composition, concentrated in itself.

The unbuttoned frock coat - not very new, worn in places, rather rough, inexpensive cloth - slightly revealed the white shirtfront, hiding the sunken chest of “a sick, frail man, tortured by both illness and hard work,” as one of his contemporaries wrote about Dostoevsky. But for Perov, “illness and hard work” are just life circumstances in which Dostoevsky the writer lives and works day after day. In this case, the artist is interested in something completely different - Dostoevsky the thinker. And therefore, the gaze, without lingering on the torso, ascends to the face with the rhythms of verticals. Dostoevsky’s flat, wide cheekbones, sickly pale face is not very attractive in itself, and yet it can be said to magnetically attract the viewer. But, once in this magnetic field, you catch yourself not looking at the portrait itself: how it is drawn, how it is written, since the plasticity of the face, devoid of active sculpting, in the absence of sharp changes in light and shadow, is devoid of special energy, as well as soft, the subtle texture of the letter, which only delicately reveals, but does not emphasize the physicality of the skin. With all this, the pictorial fabric of the face itself, being woven from dynamic light, is unusually mobile. Now whitening the color, now shining through it, now outlining the shape with a light touch, now illuminating a high, steep forehead with a golden radiance, light thereby turns out to be the main creator of both the color painting of the face and its modeling. Moving, emitted in varying degrees of intensity, it is the light that deprives the plastic of monotony here, and the facial expression - of rigidity, causing that imperceptible, elusive movement in which Dostoevsky's secretly hidden thought pulsates. It is she who attracts, or rather, pulls into herself, into her bottomless depths.

“A great poet or artist,” Vas wrote, reflecting on Dostoevsky. Rozanov, is always a seer, and this is because he has already seen a lot that for other people remains at the level of possible, that for them is only a future probable fact.

Because of this, look how much anxiety there is in their face... what a preponderance of thoughtfulness over other people... what confusion in the midst of practical life, absent-minded inattention to it.” These lines were written years after the death of the writer himself, but how accurately they fit into Perov’s portrait. It seems as if they were even copied from him, the embodied image turned out to be so capacious.

Perov managed to capture and display on canvas that dramatic moment when some terrible truth with its tragic inevitability was revealed to Dostoevsky’s spiritual eyes and his soul shuddered from great sorrow and hopelessness. But for all that, in the gaze of Perov’s hero there is not even a hint of a call to fight. And this is also a very accurate fit into the image of a person who was never tempted by the “secret vision of evil,” but was crucified “for what would come or, at least, should come,” who suffered and believed “out of love, not out of fear.” Hence his awareness of the way of the cross for man, country and people. Hence his call: “be patient, humble yourself and be silent.” In a word, everything that Fyodor Mikhailovich called the “suffering consciousness” of the Russian people. And it is precisely this, this “suffering consciousness” of Dostoevsky himself, that permeates his pictorial image as “the main idea of his face.”

Perhaps because the spiritual reality of both the writer and the artist, although different in scale, was still of the same nature, Perov managed not only to notice the most characteristic things in Dostoevsky’s nature, but also to touch the most intimate in this man.