Province. 1830s by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky: Artistic and Literary Sources

The article is the first to provide a comparative analysis of historian Sergei Knyazkov’s text The Town in the Nikolaevan Era and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s watercolour Province. 1830s, which was created to accompany the text in a table. Sets of such tables-­manuals on Russian history for schools were published by J. Knebel. It was established that Dobuzhinsky presented only the most characteristic features of the town from the text, such as a sleepy policeman. It was determined that the artist’s childhood memories of the summer months he had spent in Novgorod played a more important role in creating the image of a Russian provincial town. Moreover, it was determined that Dobuzhinsky used the sculpture Playing Knucklebones by N. Pimenov, the woodcut Cats as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Kuniyoshi, the etching View of Amsterdam from the North-­West by Rembrandt, and the painting The Rooks Have Returned by A. Savrasov as artistic sources in order to embody this image. The author came to the conclusion that various sources, especially artistic ones, were necessary for the master to create a collective and vivid image of a Russian provincial town of the first third of the 19th century. In addition, the author put forward a hypothesis that the use of Russian masters’ famous works as sources, Nikolai Pimenov’s sculpture and Alexei Savrasov’s painting, was due to the educational objectives that Dobuzhinsky additionally introduced into the watercolour Province. 1830s.