There is, for instance, a picture there by Doroschenko which bears the harmless title "Everywhere is life." It might, yes, it ought really to hang in the gallery of the Parisian, for it is a work of Christian spirit. Convicts are feeding doves from the railroad car which is carrying them into exile. As a painting it is excellent. The light falls full upon the whirring pigeons in the foreground and upon the convicts pressing their faces against the iron bars of the window of the car. One sees through the window, and notices on the far side of the car another barred window at which a man is standing and looking out. The interior of the car is almost dark. The group of convicts in the foreground consists of a young man, evidently the guilty one, and his wife, who is following him into exile with their year-old child on her bosom. For the sake of the child, and to please him, they are feeding the doves. A bearded old man looks on pleased, and a dark-bearded younger man, too, whom one might sooner believe guilty of some slight misdeed. But upon the face of all these exiles lies so childlike a brightness, so evident a sympathetic pleasure in the joy of the child, that one rather doubts their guilt than the fact that they are still capable of good-natured human feelings. And yet this picture of Christian pity has not been bought for the Parisian. For it is well understood, in spite of its harmless title, what its meaning is. "Everywhere is life" should read, "Everywhere is pity, everywhere humanity, except among the police, in the state, and in an autocracy." What guilt can these good little folk have committed--looking there so kindly at a child that cooingly feeds the doves--that they should be torn from their native hearth and be sent to the icy deserts of Siberia? The young father--perhaps he went among the people teaching that a farmer was a man as well as the policeman (pristav). And one thinks with a shudder of the two thousand political convicts of the year before that were sent into the department of Irkutsk....
Such is the Russian genre. It is full of references, but is never a mere illustration of some tendency or other. The painter does not make the solution of his problem easy, and does not speculate on the cooperative comprehension of the observer, who is satisfied if he finds his thoughts indicated. No, such a Russian genre picture is perfect in the characteristic of the heads, in perspective, in the distribution of light and atmosphere. The purely picturesque, to be sure, is more evident in the landscape. And in this the Russians do astonishing work. They have the eye of the child of nature for the peculiarities of the landscape--an eye which we in the West must train again. What west European writer could have been in a position to write nature studies like Leo Tolstoï's _Cossacks_, or like the "Hay Harvest" from _Anna Karenina_? And one might also ask, What west European has so studied the forest like Schischkin, the sea like Aiwasowsky, the river and the wind like Levitan? There is a picture of Schischkin's in the Tretyakov Gallery, "Morning in the Pine Forest." A family of bears busy themselves about an enormous fallen, splintered pine. Everything is alive; the comical little brown fellows are quite as true to nature as the moss in the foreground and the veil of mist before the trees in the background.