“Great” - “significant” - “great” again: how Vasily Vereshchagin’s place in the Soviet culture of the 1920s and 1960s was sought

Vasily Vereshchagin’s cultural reputation has been popularly viewed and scholarly treated as a narrow space between two dominant genres in his artistry - battle scenes and ethnographical (or even Orientalist) paintings. Since the 1950s, the former has prevailed, so the narrative formula khudozhnik-batalist (“the battle painter”) has become an obvious cliché to characterize Vereshchagin’s role in art history, especially within the context of 19th-century Russian realistic painting. Based on both archival and published sources, the article traces the academic, ideological and personal circumstances that led to the development of this discursive concept from the 1920s to the 1960s. It also shows how controversial the final evolution of this concept was when it became a stereotype during the years of late Stalinism. But making Vereshchagin “one of the greatest battle painters in the world art history” (as art historian Andrey K. Lebedev proclaimed in his fundamental monograph published in 1958) has also led to his recognition as one of the greatest Russian classic painters, which was rather more disputable. In the Soviet hierarchy of classic artists, Vereshchagin did not achieve high status until the late 1930s, due to his bourgeois background and colonialist implications of his work, found and then castigated by some Marxist critics. Nevertheless, he was perceived as close (sometimes confusingly) to the circle of Peredvizhniks, and was considered to share a common ideological and aesthetic program with them. Such ambivalence can be seen as a sign of Vereshchagin’s artistic marginality. However, we can argue that, due to the relation to the Peredvizhniki movement and his ideological and stylistic unity with it (as was scholarly established by A. K. Lebedev’s studies in the 1930s - the 1960s), Vereshchagin’s personality and heritage were given a long-awaited permission to claim a distinct place in Soviet culture.