Piccoli soldati, bravi uomini, dov'è la gloria?

'Piccoli soldati, bravi uomini, dov'è la gloria?' — 'Little soldiers, brave men, where is the glory?' — is one of Serov's most direct political works, painted in 1905 in the immediate aftermath of the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 9, when tsarist troops fired on peaceful workers and petitioners outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, killing hundreds. Serov was present near the palace that day and was profoundly shaken; he resigned his honorary membership of the Imperial Academy of Arts in protest. The Italian title suggests the work was possibly produced for or exhibited in an Italian context, or reflects the pan-European character of anti-war sentiment in 1905. The phrase 'little soldiers, brave men, where is the glory?' is a bitterly ironic address to the ordinary soldiers who fired on their own people — men who were themselves victims of the system that deployed them. This work is one of the few moments in Serov's career when his political convictions broke directly into his artistic production. He was generally not a politically programmatic painter — his portraits and figure studies maintain a kind of humanist observation that transcends ideological position — but 1905 was a year in which such neutrality was impossible. The work joins a tradition of anti-militarist art that includes Goya's Disasters of War and the social realism of the Peredvizhniki.

Oil on canvas likely executed with the expressive urgency characteristic of Serov's works made in response to specific emotional and political stimuli. The subject — soldiers, possibly depicted in the immediate aftermath of violence — would require a different handling than his portrait commissions: more gestural, more willing to sacrifice surface refinement for emotional force.