The Gospel of Mykola Ge: a great artist and eternity

GRANDSON OF A FRENCHMAN, SON OF A UKRAINIAN WOMAN

The history of Mykola Ge’s paternal lineage began in France. His great-grandfather, apparently fleeing the revolution, immigrated to Russia. He settled in Moscow, where he set up a factory. Then the genealogical tree sprouted a Ukrainian branch: the artist’s grandfather Osyp married a Poltava-born beauty named Daria Korostovtseva, the daughter of a local landlord. Daria took the place of Mykola’s mother, who died of cholera when he was just three months old. His mother’s maiden name was Sadovska, so Ge would always frantically try to prove during family debates that she was of Ukrainian, not Polish, descent. Also orphaned were Mykola’s two elder brothers, Osyp and Hryhoriy.

Mykola M. Ge was born in Voronezh on February 15 (Julian calendar), 1831. His father was a Russian army officer who, as fate would have it, participated in the capture of Paris in 1814. After he remarried, he took his family to Kyiv. Later, he bought an estate in the village of Popeliukhy, Mohyliv district, where Mykola spent his childhood. “This is a wonderful place,” Ge wrote later to his fiancee.

Reminiscing about his childhood, he devoted the tenderest words to his “nanny Natasha” (see V. Stasov, Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge: His Life and Works, Moscow, 1904). She and granny Darka were the light of his early years. Ge’s autobiographical notes from which art researcher Stasov generously quotes, are full of contrasts: there was darkness, not just light. His father, an enterprising and strict man, was regarded as a “convinced Voltairean,” but every Saturday he had some serfs, both guilty and innocent, whipped in the stables (“so they don’t get spoiled”).

Little Mykola loved horses but hated the stables. He felt deep sympathy for “nanny Natasha.” One day, Ogurtsov, the estate supervisor, a retired soldier whom all the servants feared, saw a girl kiss a teacher in the garden and brutally beat her up. This caused hardly a ripple: “human rights” were not a catchword in the age of Romanticism. “The words ‘buy and sell people’ embarrassed nobody at the time,” O. Smirnova-Rosset, a friend of Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol, notes in her reminiscences (A. O. Smirnova-Rosset, Reminiscences and Letters, Moscow, 1990, p. 36).

Take, for example, the teenaged servant Platoshka, who became Mykola’s friend: the elder Ge bought him for 25 rubles and brought him to Popeliukhy in a sack. Such things were difficult to forget. Mykola also remembered his nanny’s tears. Vladimir Stasov thought that Ge’s mild, “meek and, to a large extent, feminine character” was the result of being brought up by a woman. From his childhood he was no stranger to feelings of pity. Perhaps this explains why Ge’s paintings so often portray faces that bear the imprint of suffering.

STUDYING IN KYIV

When Mykola Ge was 10 years old, he was brought to Kyiv for schooling. In the early 1840s Kyiv did not extend past the Golden Gate. The red building of the university was still under construction on a barren piece of land. Life thrived mostly in the Pechersk district. Here, at the corner of Liuteranska and Levashivska streets, was Grammar School No. 1, where Ge was to acquire basic knowledge.

Again, his memoirs reflect the glimmer of light and shadows. “I have never been to prison,” Ge writes, “but when I read Dostoevsky, I found a remote resemblance to our previous school life in Kyiv.” At the same time he notes, “The teachers were the bright spots of our life.” He was especially delighted with Kostomarov. “He caused almost the entire city to love Russian history. Whenever he came running into the classroom, everybody became perfectly still, like in a church.” Thanks to Kostomarov, Ge came to know what ancient history was — the poetic nature of it literally bewitched him.

At the same time Mykola began reading books, especially by Charles Dickens and Walter Scott. He himself seemed to have a special glow. Little wonder that his drawing teacher Fyodor Beliaev told his former pupil much later, “I knew that you would become an artist. I never told you this because I did not want to tempt you: there is no greater affliction than to be an artist.” The teacher’s mysterious words can be interpreted in more than one way. Perhaps he simply considered himself a failure, or maybe he meant that the artist’s cross is too heavy for some people to bear because art requires sacrifices.

Lypky, where Grammar School No. 1 was situated, was Kyiv’s aristocratic quarter, where one could encounter the mighty of this world. Kyiv’s Governor General Bibikov would visit the local church, and Emperor Nicholas I once graced the school with his presence. Ge remembered a large signet ring on the tsar’s finger and a green military jacket that was so worn out at the elbows that the lining showed through.

A short time later the monarchs of Europe lost their peace of mind: the revolutionary year 1848 changed the face of the Old World. But Nicholas I did not have his “moment of truth” until Russia suffered a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War. Some historians, such as Natan Eidelman, have even suggested that the tsar willingly departed this life because he could not bear the disgrace of this catastrophe.

LOVE LETTERS

In 1847 Ge entered Kyiv University. Leafing through the reference book Kiev edited by F. Ernst and published in 1930, I found a line about the home of the philosopher Orest Novytsky (21, Tolstoy St.) in which the mathematics student Mykola Ge lived in 1847-1848. According to Ernst, he would “draw caricatures of bureaucrats” on the walls. Interestingly, members of the Kyiv-based Stara Hromada (Old Society) — Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykola Lysenko, Mykhailo Starytsky, and others — would later gather in this very house.

Ge left Kyiv soon and moved to the “Northern Palmyra,” as St. Petersburg was known, where he stayed with his brother Osyp, a student at the Mathematics Faculty at the University of St. Petersburg. But providence decreed that Mykola would take another sharp turn, when he stepped over the threshold of the Academy of Arts. Had he done so one year earlier, he might have met Taras Shevchenko, his fellow countryman, who was now serving his term as a soldier beyond the Urals.

But the academy still had Karl Briullov, Shevchenko’s teacher and Ge’s idol. When he was still a Kyiv schoolboy, Mykola would shower the university museum curator with questions about the great Karl’s Last Day of Pompeii. Now he was seeing it with his own eyes.

In the academy Ge met Parmen Zabila (or Zabello: 1830-1917), his former high school classmate. He was delighted, as though sensing that, thanks to Zabila, his life would see something new and untold. Indeed, Ge fell in love. Zabila had a sister named Anna (1832-1891), who lived in the village of Monastyryshche, Nizhyn district, Chernihiv province. Anna often wrote to her brother. Once Zabila showed his friend some of her letters, and Ge began writing to Monastyryshche. The romance by correspondence ended in marriage.

Ge’s love letters have survived. Some of them were sent from Popeliukhy, where Ge visited his father; others were mailed from St. Petersburg. In December 1854 the 23-year-old Ge wrote from Popeliukhy about his painting classes, reconciliation with father, and his intention to travel to Rome. In February 1856, on his way to Petersburg, he stopped in Monastyryshche, and there Mykola and Anna said the crucial words to each other.

Once in St. Petersburg, the happy Ge mentally confessed to his wife-to-be, “I will blow out the candle, go to bed, and this will be the time of my life. I will be recalling the time I visited you, especially Feb. 28. Thank God, I am an artist. I can see you very clearly, but this sensation is nevertheless cut short by the unpleasant feeling that I am still alone here now” (see Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge: Letters, Articles, Criticism, Reminiscences of Contemporaries, Moscow, 1978).

Anna, a young Ukrainian lady from Monastyryshche, fully corresponded to his ideal of a woman. “These days I’ve been reading so many beautiful things about women and I clearly see the ideal that I have created and found in you,” he writes in one of his letters.

Ge is “tremendously happy.” He daydreams, trying to imagine their married life, and these fantasies are very striking because they are full of altruistic feelings, a readiness to sympathize with the plight of others, and a desire for candor: “I know, my dear friend Anychka, that the plight of others will never leave you cold. We should not be egoists, we will do our best to be of use to others; we will not think that we have deserved this happiness. We are perhaps happy because we will be of service to others” (May 11, 1856).

Ge maps out a solid program for Anna and himself. “We are going to live like the common people, not like nobles,” he writes to his fiancee and advises her to collect the best articles from the journals Sovremennik and Otechestvennye zapiski, “so that you and I can read them when we here together.” He is also obsessed by the idea of self-improvement: “Eradicate the evil inside us.” About children he writes: “Children are splendid creatures. If only adults could learn from them and borrow their good features, such as sincerity and purity”! (May 1856).

Mykola Ge was now 25. It was 1856: the era of Nicholas I had ended, and Russia was entertaining hopes for reforms. Knowing Ge’s further destiny, it is important to remember the causes of his inner revolt, the never-ending struggle with himself, and his painful soul searching. When he was still in Kyiv, graduating with a certificate in education, he understood that inner freedom was something to be resisted: “I was graduating from school, aware of the injustice of the oppression of my personality, so I considered it my duty never to oppress anybody.”

In October 1856 Mykola and Anna were married in the Monastyryshche church.

For a long time I had not seen a blizzard of the kind I saw in Monastyryshche on the first day of March 2006. Of course, it is better to visit this place when spring has already arrived. But I had to go through Nizhyn, then there was a blizzard, and finally Monastyryshche. There once was an ethnographic museum in the village. It is not functioning now, nor is the old church with empty yawing windows. It is unlikely that Mykola and Anna were married in this church. When I asked about the painter Ge, the local history schoolteacher only shrugged her shoulders. She had heard about Ge but was clearly unable to point out even traces of the estate of his father-in-law Zabila.

IN SEARCH OF HIMSELF

Soon the Ge couple went abroad for 10 years. The Academy of Arts had awarded Ge a gold medal for the painting The Witch of Endor Evokes the Ghost of Samuel and a scholarship to travel to Italy. The couple chose an itinerary that enabled them to see Europe: “Garibaldi’s Italy” via Saxon Switzerland, Munich, and Paris, then Rome, Frascatti, Florence, and Livorno — these were the newlyweds’ addresses.

Both of Ge’s, Nikolai and Pyotr, were born in Italy. The artist painted landscapes, worked on ancient Roman themes, and mingled with Russian artists living in Italy. Vladimir Dahl’s son, who met the Ge family in Florence, reminisced that Mykola had been doing little painting. Instead, he could talk about Russia and its unenviable situation for hours on end. Good-natured and very affectionate to his little sons, Ge was full of “pro-Garibaldi” and “pro-Herzen” sentiments. He liked debating, unaware that he occasionally contradicted himself. The young Dahl could not resist taking a sarcastic stab at him: “His wife is a nice lady, and I am sure she often resets his hapless head in its proper place.”

In the summer of 1861, when Ge traveled to Ukraine to visit his relatives, he discovered Halychyna. In Lviv he met Bohdan Didytsky, editor of the newspaper Slovo. “Here, in Galicia, there is a very strong party of Ruthenians,” he wrote to his wife with surprise. “Yesterday I went to look for the Ruthenian party, and I spent the last night at their place. I also visited a Uniate church and was literally astonished that so many Little Russian things have survived for so many centuries among the people and in their rites. I heard an entire Evensong and saw that, like in Little Russia, women murmur something, while men offer prayers in a loud voice and sigh. Even their face types are Little Russian.”

He was happy to see that Halychyna and Little Russia were the two halves of a whole.

The period of his big creative success had not arrived. It took Ge, a follower of Briullov, too long to find himself. Impulsive and self-critical, he would begin paintings, only to drop everything and even fall into despair.

Then he completed The Last Supper on which he had worked for two years. In September 1863 the artist brought the picture to an exhibit at the Imperial Academy, an event that marked the starting point of his artistic fame.

The Last Supper touched off a wave of comments and debates. “Is it really Christ?” Fyodor Dostoyevsky asked angrily. “It is a common brawl among very common people. All this is false.” Natalia Grot, a contributor to Katkov’s Sovremennaia letopis, took Dostoyevsky’s side. “He (Ge — Author) is the first to rob the world’s greatest event of its divinity. Not only is everything human in the Savior’s face — there is nothing dignified, let alone exalted, in it.”

The artist was accused of sacrificing a biblical theme to “materialism and nihilism” and the latest theories of Christian interpretation. Reference was made to La Vie de Jesus by Ernest Renan: Ge was said to have illustrated not so much the Gospel as Renan’s book. The artist had depicted the Last Supper in a realistic key, revealing to viewers the great drama of a split among recently like-minded people.

One of the disciples, Judas, is abandoning his teacher. The small, shabby room is shrouded in darkness, but has a streak fiery light in the center. The facial features of the departing Judas are blurred. The apostles taking part in the supper — Peter, John and Andrew — are stunned: they are looking disapprovingly at Judas. Only Christ, who is reclining on a couch, with his head propped up, is looking down. He is completely lost in thought, as though he is absent. His outward calmness only underlines the depth of his suffering spirit.

Ge shows the traditional conflict between Christ and Judas in a very untraditional style. His Judas is not a contemptible traitor, who matter-of-factly switches sides for 30 pieces of silver. “He (the artist — Author) interprets Judas’s betrayal not as the action of an avaricious individual but as the sad result of differences between the creator of a new doctrine and his follower, who was unable to renounce ancient Judaism,” art historian Andrei Somov writes. Nikolai Saltykov-Shchedrin also gave a similar interpretation of Ge’s Judas as a “mysterious personality.”

Therefore, the question was not so much about betrayal as about a conflict of ideas, a rupture. In 1891 Ge again turned to the image of Judas (Judas: Conscience). Here again are broken canons and mystery: a lonely bent figure half illuminated by cold moonlight, and darkness ahead. This Judas is tormented by bitter remorse.

“They are used to seeing Judas as a traitor. But I wanted to see him as a human,” the artist said later, commenting on his concept. “This is a confused man, not a wicked man but a deeply unhappy one, as unhappy as millions of others, who made a fleeting mistake and did a lot of evil but then tormented themselves their whole life or committed suicide, as Judas did” (see the reminiscences of L. Kovalsky, a pupil of N. Ge, published by O. Zhbankova” in Zerkalo nedeli, Aug. 18-22, 2001).

To his contemporaries it seemed that the Christ figure in Ge’s canvas The Last Supper resembled Aleksandr Herzen, the painter’s idol. They met in Italy later, and Ge painted a portrait of this Russian political exile. When the artist was working on this painting in Livorno, Anna posed for him, and her features are easily recognizable in the face of Apostle John.

Mykola Ge was a thoroughly modern person. He even interpreted the Bible “in the modern sense.” Transcendental religious painting was alien to Ge, and he rebelled. This is why his pictures easily sparked allusions and passions in those who visited the exhibit at the Academy of Arts. It was anybody’s guess what the emperor would say about The Last Supper. Alexander II ordered the picture to be purchased for the academy’s museum and paid 10,000 silver rubles for it. Ge was awarded a professorship.