Крестьянская девочка

1876–1877

Mamontov’s letter, homesickness and the first sketch for the “Bogatyrs”

In Polenov’s Paris studio he and Repin re-read a letter from Savva Mamontov calling the artists to Moscow; the letter sharpened his homesickness (“Alone, alone and alone!”), and it was there that the first painted sketch of the “Bogatyrs” was made.

November 1877

Wedding to Alexandra Ryazantseva

Before leaving for Paris he had proposed to Ryazantseva; the wedding took place in November 1877 in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul of the Semyonovsky-Alexandrovsky military hospital in St Petersburg.

1878

He moves to Moscow, the city of his life’s work

In 1878, his resolve strengthened by Mamontov’s letter, he moved to Moscow, the city to which most of his creative life would be tied: he settled in a small flat in 3rd Ushakovsky Lane near Ostozhenka, walked the city for hours admiring the Kremlin and St Basil’s, and until 1885 the family changed rented flats in Moscow six times.

1878–1880

Mamontov’s commission for the Donetsk Railway

Repin brought him to the house of Savva Mamontov, who commissioned three fairy-tale pictures for the boardroom of the Donetsk Railway — “The Battle of the Russians with the Scythians”, “The Flying Carpet” and “The Three Princesses of the Underground Kingdom” (the princesses of gold, precious stones and coal); the princess Coal, a modest dark-haired girl in a black dress, was especially successful.

1878–1890 · Career