The Portrait

“The Portrait” is a novella by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol from the cycle “Petersburg Tales.”

The main hero, Chartkov, begins his creative career as a modest and unnoticed painter. His only passion is art. For a high purpose, he is able to endure deprivation and material hardships. A change in his life comes unexpectedly and is connected with the purchase of a strange portrait from a shop at Shchukin Yard. Chartkov pays for it his last two kopecks. It is a portrait of an old man in Asian clothes—apparently unfinished, yet captured with such a powerful brush that the eyes in the portrait looked alive.