UNIT 6
Farewell to Rus
Pavel Dmitriyevich Korin was a Russian painter and art restorer. The biography of Korin shows an accomplished Soviet painter and a prominent art figure. Pavel decided that he should live by Ivanov's example and devoted his whole life to a single large painting, but the job he had considered the main work of his life was left unfinished.
In 1925 Korin witnessed the intercession of Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow in the Cathedral of the Dormition of Moscow Kremlin. All people of importance in the Russian Orthodox Church, usually suppressed by the Soviets, were present. After the event Pavel decided that his magnum opus would be named Requiem, or Requiem for Russia, and would depict the intercession of Patriarch Tikhon and show the Russia that was lost after the October Revolution.
Korin feverishly paints people present at the burial service for Tikhon, often the last survivors of families of Russian nobility, or dissident priests, soon to be destroyed. Rumors about the dangerous painting soon became a matter of NKVD interest. In 1931 Maxim Gorky advised Korin that the name Requiem for Russia was too strong to be accepted and recommended a change to Rus that is going away, but usually translated as Farewell to Rus. Gorky argued that the painting showing the last parade of the Orthodox Church, showing the tragedy and at the same time the misery of all those people who soon will disappear into irrelevancy is an acceptable and even desirable for the Government. Korin agreed with the new name of the painting.
For forty years Korin worked on the painting. He produced dozens of large (more than the life size) well finished paintings that he preferred to name etudes for the Farewell to Rus masterpiece, worked on composition. He ordered a huge canvas, designed a special stretcher for it, spends years coating the canvas with multiple layers of the special underplays. Korin was combining the ancient methods of the icon paintings with the science of art restorations and claimed the painting prepared by his methods should survive hundreds, possibly thousands of years without the need for restoration.
He had not put a single brushstroke on the canvas - forty-two years of the preparational work was not enough for Pavel Korin. It might be considered an extreme case of procrastination, but the huge canvas became a popular art exhibit in the Korin Museum. Many consider it as an art masterpiece in its own right, similar to the Black Square of Kazimir Malevich.