In Russia. Soul of the people.

In Russia: Soul of the People, begun in 1914 and now in the Tretyakov Gallery, is Nesterov's most ambitious and explicitly patriotic work, a monumental canvas that presents a procession of Russian people — peasants, monks, children, intellectuals — united in a spiritual pilgrimage across the Russian landscape. The composition was inspired partly by the approaches of Alexander Ivanov's The Appearance of Christ to the People and Aleksandr Andronikov Ivanov, but Nesterov's vision was emphatically contemporary: among the figures can be identified portraits of real individuals including Leo Tolstoy, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, and the monk-hermit St Seraphim of Sarov. The title — Soul of the People — encapsulates Nesterov's conviction that the defining characteristic of Russian national identity was spiritual rather than political or economic. The painting was begun as war broke out in 1914, giving its theme of national spiritual solidarity particular urgency.

Oil on canvas of exceptional dimensions, the work required compositional solutions for a processional frieze of figures moving through an expansive Russian landscape. Nesterov organises the crowd into a rhythmic horizontal progression while maintaining individual characterisation across dozens of figures. The palette is unified by the Russian landscape's muted greens and the Volga's silver-grey, with the varied clothing of the figures providing controlled chromatic variety.