The Mikhailovsky Palace

The questions What Is To Be Done?, put by Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his novel of the same name, and Who Is To Blame?, muted earlier by Alexander Herzen, were hotly discussed in intellectual circles. Russian artists were also members of these circles and these issues found their way into many of the sociocritical pictures now on display in the Russian Museum.

The true soul of emerging critical trend in painting was Vasily Perov (1833–1882). In his paintings he showed scenes from everyday life with striking acerbity in exposing. Together with the paintings Girl with Jag (1869), Orphaned Children at a Cemetery (1864) the theme of unhappy childhood came into the Russian painting.

Portrait of the Writer Ivan Turgenev (1872) displayed in the exhibition belongs to the best portrait paintings by Perov. In his later years the master was working at creating of immense images devoted to the national history (Pugachev’s Trail).