Stepan Razin

Surikov began "Stepan Razin" in 1906 and continued working on it for years, its final version held at the Russian Museum. Razin was the Cossack leader of the massive 1670-71 uprising against Muscovite authority — one of the great rebel figures of Russian history, celebrated in folk songs and popular memory as a fighter against oppression. Surikov depicts Razin in his boat on the Volga, not in battle but in a moment of brooding reflection — the rebel chieftain contemplating a horizon as dark and uncertain as his fate. The subject was politically charged at the time of painting: the 1905 Revolution had shaken Russia, and the figure of Razin carried obvious contemporary resonance as a champion of popular resistance to autocratic power. Surikov spent years on the painting, producing numerous studies of the Volga landscape and Cossack figure types, and the work shows his characteristic depth of research into the human and geographical specifics of his historical subjects.

Surikov places Razin in the stern of a large boat, surrounded by his Cossack companions but psychologically isolated in his brooding. The Volga landscape — vast, atmospheric, the famous wide horizon — provides a setting of appropriate scale. The painting's colour is dominated by the greys and ochres of the river landscape under an overcast sky, a deliberate avoidance of heroic brightness.