The Gospel of Mykola Ge: a great artist and eternity

PREACHER

Mykola Ge’s meeting with Leo Tolstoy signaled the beginning of a spiritual turning point in the artist’s career. Ge, who was tormented by questions pertaining to the meaning of life and the essence of faith, found himself a spiritual mainstay, for the master of Yasnaya Polyana professed the philosophy of forgiveness and nonviolent resistance to evil. Pavlo Skoropadsky reminisced, “Nikolai Ge was not only an artist but also a follower of Tolstoy. I can remember endless disputes with him about the writings of Tolstoy, who was just switching from belles-lettres to his spiritual and moral doctrine.”

Tolstoy’s article “On the Moscow Census,” which focused on the plight of the poor and downtrodden, touched Ge to the quick. Tolstoy wrote that all their misfortunes stemmed from “our dislike of the lowborn.” Ge quickly packed his things and left for Yasnaya Polyana. Tatiana, the writer’s daughter, believed that her father’s article helped steer the pagan Ge to Christianity and that Tolstoy and Ge, two great personalities who had had their fill of glory, saw that this could not explain the meaning of life and happiness.

I think Ge embarked on the road of Tolstoyanism even before Tolstoy himself, and he did it spontaneously and intuitively. It is impossible not to refer again to the letters that he wrote to his future wife in Monastyryshche, in which discussed the altruistic idea of forgiveness as the linchpin of his life. Even then, the young Ge preferred putting the spiritual component above the material one: is there any other reason why he, like Hryhoriy Skovoroda before him, escaped from the world, declined a job offered at the Academy of Arts, continued his painful search for moral truths and values, and, finally settled down in the rural boondocks?

In Yasnaya Polyana, Ge painted a portrait of Tolstoy, which shows the writer working at his desk (it is still hanging in the local museum). The writer is looking down — the artist chose not to show the eyes of the author of War and Peace. The light is falling on his face, the desk, and the hand that holds a pen firmly in a peasant-like grip. ‘Can’t human hands alone be a portrait?’ the artist asks rhetorically.

When the portrait was brought to Moscow, so many people wanted to see it that the small hall where it was being exhibited was crowded every day.

Ge adored Tolstoy. His daughter-in-law Kateryna noted in her diary that it verged on religious feeling. Ge often looked like a fanatical and zealous “sectarian,” who would not permit anyone to discuss Tolstoy’s works in his (Ge’s) presence. A superior-sounding preacher, who brooked no opposition, was awakened in Ge. Following Tolstoy’s suit, Ge took to manual labor, quickly mastering the trades of a stove- setter and an apiarist. He also became a vegetarian. Certain photos show him as a short, white-bearded man wearing a belted white linen shirt: he bore a striking resemblance to Tolstoy. People meeting the artist for the first time sometimes took him for “a blessed fool-for-Christ.”

On Oct. 11, 1884, Tolstoy visited Ge on his estate, Ivanivsky, and stayed for four days. We find an amusing account of this event in Ge’s letter to “dear Katia:”

“It was a wonderful day, warm, beautiful, and sunny. I was painting a picture when they called me for lunch. Suddenly I see Aleksandra, the housekeeper, opening the front door to none other than Lev Nikolayevich [Tolstoy] with a bundle on his back. We all rushed to kiss and hug this wonderful man. I dragged him to see Kolya, who had injured his leg and was lying in bed. Then we let L. N. wash and change. Then we sat down at the table and began a very cordial and sincere conversation. Every day, after the morning coffee, L. N. would walk to Ivanhorod and return by 4:00 p.m. We waited for him to share our dinner so that we could talk again and, above all, to listen to him. Undoubtedly, everything he said burned itself into my memory and heart, and I never had even the slightest disagreement with him. The time flew by so fast and unnoticeably, and now we are far apart.”

In Ivanhorod Tolstoy showed an interest in the work of the local state-run hospital. The hospital building is still standing, even though it is older than the village club, which is already lying in ruins.

In 1886 Ge renounced his property in the belief that he was thus atoning for his sins. He left all his property to his wife and children. Ge remained on the estate (“I go on living with them because they want me to”) but from now on he tried not to divide people into friends and foes.

There were quite a few examples of radical changes in the life of the Tolstoyans. One day Ge paid a visit to Prince Dmitry Khilkov at his estate called Pavlivka (now Sumy oblast). Khilkov, Tolstoy’s spiritual mentor, cut an odd figure: this lieutenant-colonel had handed over 400 desiatynas (1 desiatyna=2.7 acres — Ed.) of his land free of charge to the peasants, maintained ties with the Marxist Georgiy Plekhanov and the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, and even contributed to the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra.

Ge’s unconventional decision caused a rift in the family (a similar drama occurred later in Yasnaya Polyana). The elder son Mykola shared his father’s principles, while the younger one, Petro, sided with his mother Hanna, who even spent some time in his Moscow home. Meanwhile, the estate gradually became a true “commune.” The younger Mykola, who had graduated from Kyiv University’s Law Faculty, returned to farm on the paternal estate. He his common-law wife was a local peasant woman, who bore him a daughter named Parasia.

Ivanivsky also gave shelter to a niece named Zoya Ruban and her husband, who was also a Tolstoyan. She was supposed to be exiled to Siberia for her membership in the People’s Will, but after Tolstoy’s intercession she was allowed to stay at the estate, which was also home to another Tolstoyan, a retired officer named Teplov, as well as to the artist’s brother Osyp, who arrived here after his internal exile to which he had been sentenced for taking part in the Polish uprising of 1863.

Finally, the domestic storms blew over. But this did not mean that Ge had renounced his convictions. He was still a “preacher,” who frequently shocked his contemporaries with an interpretation of evangelical themes, which was far from canonical. His paintings were often removed from exhibitions. Russia’s Prosecutor-General Pobedonostsev wrote to the tsar that Ge “wastes his talent on vulgarizing evangelical history.”

Meanwhile, Ge dreamed of completing and exhibiting a series of seven paintings, called “The Martyrdom of Christ.” The first painting, The Last Supper, was to be followed by other canvases entitled Departure after the Supper, The Garden of Gethsemane, The Judgment, What Is the Truth?, Judas, and The Crucifixion. Tolstoy believed that some of these paintings “constituted an epoch in Christian art.” How fervently he defended the canvas What Is the Truth?, how vehemently he tried to persuade Tretiakov that this was innovative art!

In this painting a complacent Pontius Pilate shows his superiority to Jesus whose portrayal is unusual. This time, too, the artist chose to violate the traditional canon of depicting an entirely divine Christ. This is precisely the way a person “who was tortured all night long and is going to be tortured again” should look, Tolstoy commented. But the fire of truth, spirit, and love makes Jesus beautiful from the inside. Critics wondered why Christ “showed no features of a leader.” The artist had no intentions of painting a “leader” — he was interested in a “divine martyr.” We see the sharp conflict between the brutally material, well-fed, and corporeal self, and intensely spiritual, almost ascetic, self-denial.

The Crucifixion, which Ge conceived in 1884, ten years before his death, stirred up no less acrimonious debates. In his diary the Kyiv-based artist Stepan Yaremych, a longtime resident of Ge’s estate, describes the master when he was working on this painting:

“I can see him very clearly in a shirt made by Maria Lvivna, with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, standing at the easel. A sure hand is tautly outstretched. An obedient brush is moving quickly across the canvas, either skimming over it or striking it with force. Large beads of sweat cover his magnificent Socratic brow, and he, completely dead to the world, is entirely in the thrall of the visions that assault him. Sometimes he even saw hallucinations. Once, when he was under the influence of a haunting vision, he lost his sense of reality: he began to conjure up the soaring apparition of Christ, who came down to kiss the emaciated bandit, who blissfully smiles back in his death throes” (S. Yaremych, “Tolstoy and Ge” in L. N. Tolstoy and N. N. Ge. Correspondence. Moscow-Leningrad, 1929, p. 35).

Ge repainted The Crucifixion many times, for he frequently suffered from professional dissatisfaction. When the painting was finally exhibited, the president of the Academy of Arts, Grand Duke Vladimir, could not resist exclaiming, “But this is a massacre!”

Indeed, Ge made spectators shudder. He wanted to jolt their consciousness and conscience with his picture of Christ’s sufferings. Next to Jesus on another cross is a brigand whose face shows the light of spiritual awakening and penitence that makes its way through the horror. The riot of colors was designed to increase the expressiveness of the crucifixion scene.

It is said that when Tolstoy came to Moscow to see his friend’s painting in a private studio, he gazed at it for a long time and then hugged Ge, and the two of them burst into tears like children. “For the first time everyone saw that crucifixion is an execution, and a horrible one at that,” Tolstoy said.

FACING ETERNITY ALONE

Apparently, Mykola Ge’s artistic revolt was the reason why he was not invited to take part in finishing the interior of St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv, work on which began in 1885 and ended after the artist’s death. Viktor Vasnetsov painted the cathedral’s central nave. According to art historian F. Ernst, Vasnetsov borrowed the cathedral painting pattern from ancient Byzantine churches, but the actual style of his painting has nothing to do with Byzantine or ancient Kyivan art:

“The artist’s search for national Russian roots and his tendentious mixing of ancient Kyivan Rus’ with the later Muscovite state resulted in a lot of Northern Russian saints being painted on the cathedral walls, who had nothing in common with Kyiv and Volodymyr’s era, among them even the ‘Saint’ Andrei Bogolubsky, who sacked Kyiv in 1169, and in the depiction of Kyivan princes and ‘saints’ as Northern Russian boyars or merchants with very long beards, mawkishly idealized boyar women, etc.” (See Kyiv: A Reference Book, Kyiv, 1930, pp. 267-68).

Ge mercilessly criticized Vasnetsov’s work. He once noted that there was something childish in the saints portrayed by Raphael. Conversely, Vasnetsov’s Holy Virgin is holding the infant Christ, who has nothing childlike about Him (“no child in the child”)!

Mykhailo Nesterov, who also painted St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, reminisced that one day, when he and Vasnetsov were relaxing on the balcony, they saw a horse-drawn carriage racing down Volodymyrska Street, carrying Ge and a young man, who looked like an artist. The occupants of the carriage clearly saw Vasnetsov and Nesterov. But when the carriage passed by, none of the four artists even nodded hello to each other. Nesterov wrote later that he could not forgive himself for this episode. All of them were very different, albeit great, artists.

Ge often visited Kyiv. What especially attracted him was Mykola Murashko’s painting school and his students to whom he eagerly lectured on art. He invited many young artists to his estate, where they stayed for long periods. Ge established close contact with Stepan Yaremych. Among the visitors to Ivanivsky were O. Kurinny, S. Kostenko, H. Diadchenko, V. Zamyrailo, and L. Kovalsky. Some of them wrote reminiscences about the master, while Kovalsky took a few priceless photographs: Ge at the apiary, his house, and his studio hung with easily-recognizable pictures, including Conscience, Portrait of Petrunkevych, and Golgotha.

Serhiy Shestopal, one of the remaining residents of what is now the Shevchenkove estate, tells me that he once managed the village club located in Ge’s house. He can remember a forest painted on the walls and a glazed skylight in the ceiling that let sunshine into the room (In June 1891 Ge wrote to Tolstoy: “...I am breaking through a window in the studio ceiling.”) When he was young, Shestopal’s grandfather would help the artist to install stoves. “Once a brick slipped out of the artist’s hands and hurt my granddad’s toe,” Serhiy adds with a smile (and perhaps with a touch of pride in his voice).

Actually, Mykola Ge’s estate did not escape the ravages of time. Only two graves have survived. Hanna Petrivna died three years before her husband and was buried in the garden. Ge departed this life in the last days of spring 1894. He died suddenly. He came back home late one night after visiting his younger son in Nizhyn, told his family to sit down at the table, and then, the event about which Ge had once written in a letter occurred: “It’s time to go home, i.e., to die.”

When I asked a woman working in the backyard of a house where Ge’s grave was, she motioned somewhere off to the side, “Over there, behind the barn.” There was a path behind the barn, leading to a quiet, picturesque nook that used to be part of the artist’s garden. Now it is overgrown with birch and pine trees. Ge’s brother Hryhoriy, also an Academy of Arts alumnus, painted a picture of this place — I saw a reproduction of it in the 1894 issue of the journal Artist. Nearby are two hillocks of earth and a wooden bench. This instantly reminded me of Yasnaya Poliana and the modest grave of Leo Tolstoy.

As time went by, a lovely monument was erected on Ge’s estate among the empty houses in honor of the artist whom Professor George Shevelov considered by far the most eminent figure of late 19 th century Ukrainian art. Interestingly, a few dozen of Ge’s paintings were stored in the fonds of the All-Ukrainian Historical Museum (now the National Art Museum of Ukraine) until 1934. That year they were transferred by a government decision to a picture gallery (now the Kyiv Museum of Russian Art), where they are still hanging. Among the artist’s works is Portrait of the Boy Solomka, which so intrigued Shevelov that he devoted several pages to it in his article “Paris and Kyiv” (1990) written after his visit to Kyiv and Ge’s estate.

Shevelov was interested in the Ukrainian roots of Mykola Ge’s painting, and he made a very interesting and convincing typological comparison between Shevchenko’s poetry (“the eschatological Shevchenko”) and Ge’s evangelical themes.

“Ge’s religious canvases are an unprecedented phenomenon in Russian art,” the researcher concludes. “Their sources must be sought outside Russian pictorial art of The Day or even outside Eastern European painting” (See Yu. Sherekh, Tretia storozha [Third Guard], Kyiv, 1993.) Shevelov’s central idea is that both Shevchenko and Ge are artists of a universal theme, and there were many similarities in the way the poet and the artist interpreted it. This conceptual approach is Shevelov’s intellectual proposition to new generations of researchers.

Towards the end of his life Ge painted a self-portrait that expressed and summarized his intense spiritual life. Resembling a biblical prophet, Mykola Ge faced eternity alone. The expression in his wide-open eyes-the eyes of an “old child” — is directed at each of us.