Far and Near

Ilya Efimovich Repin is one of the most famous Russian painters—his “living” portraits, genre compositions, and artistic style of brushwork impressed and still impress the connoisseurs of art. He turned out to be a talented memoirist as well. His autobiographical book is a portrait of an entire era in Russian history. V.V. Stasov, a musical and art critic, spoke about the book like this: “This is a miracle what kind of thing!.. This is how one should write…” Our edition includes the autobiographical part of the book “Far and Close.” In it, there are recollections of childhood, the years of studying at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, of his teacher and friend I.N. Kramskoy, and of the work on his first major work—the painting “Burlaks on the Volga.”