Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka during the composition of the opera “Ruslan and Lyudmila”

Ilya Repin's Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka during the composition of the opera 'Ruslan and Lyudmila' (1887) depicts Russia's most important nineteenth-century composer at a decisive moment of creative effort — working on the opera (first performed 1842) that established the foundations of Russian national opera. Glinka is treated as a hero of Russian cultural nationalism: his work on Pushkin's subject was understood as a founding act for a distinctively Russian musical tradition. Repin, Russia's greatest Realist painter, brought his characteristic capacity for psychological portraiture to this retrospective imagining of the creative act. The work is held in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Repin stages the composition as a scene of creative absorption, with Glinka at the piano surrounded by the evidence of compositional work. The figure is rendered with Repin's characteristic psychological intensity — the expression of inner concentration — within an interior setting whose light and atmosphere he handles with great skill.