Walking on the Volga Boris Kustodiev (1878-1927)

Description of Boris Kustodiev’s painting "Walking on the Volga

Kustodiev conceived the idea for the painting while staying at the Hermitage Hotel, whose windows overlooked the Volga embankment. This particular hotel served as a prototype of the festival of life that was depicted by the artist: cozy kiosks with sweets, street tea parties, piers with steamboats, the Resurrection Cathedral visible on the other bank of the Volga, and all this space filled with burghers and merchants, in general, with purely Kustodievian characters.

And if you listen attentively you can hear, it seems, a romance coming from somewhere, which brings to mind Ostrovsky’s "Bespridanitsa. Larisa and Paratov and the others are about to appear... On the whole, the picture of provincial life, depicted from the height of the second floor, produces a truly pacifying, strangely harmonious impression.

Kustodiev was not in vain nicknamed "the Imagineer of Life". Like Gogol, he wants to portray through the detail the character of the Russian nation, to convey his longing for a bygone Russia with its unhurried patriarchal way of life on the eve of the events of the twentieth century. Going on vacation to Kostroma Province one day, he first saw a fair which struck him with its brilliance and variety of interesting faces to the core. Hence the implicit desire of the artist to depict the festive side of people’s life - perhaps not without the influence of the creator of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

Still, Kustodiev is a modernist painter by nature, and this can be seen in his detached, slightly ironic depiction of everyday life, which can be seen here and there. At the purely artistic level the Art Nouveau style is expressed by a certain conventionality, we can even say, the unreality of the depicted. When looking at Kustodiev’s paintings, you can’t tell at once whether you are looking at the image of a busy street, or just a bright decoration, or a pattern on a tapestry.