The Painting of the Letter: Cossacks Laughing At The Man

I was reading about this painting a few months ago, done by the Russian Repin over ten years ending about 1891; it was done in an era of popular Russian nostaglia for the mythology of the Cossacks, here writing a letter of insults in reply to a Sultan who insisted on Surrender. The article made some interesting cultural points.

First, it is one of the few major paintings in history to represent a lot of men laughing loud, not slyly smirking. The red faced fellow to the right of the scribe is actually laughing so hard tears are streaming across his face.

Repin was obsessed with nostaglia for the period. There is a political and social subtext for this nostaglia; this late stage of Czarist Russia had rapidly built the machinery of a police state, and had a profoundly horrible bureaucracy. The Cossacks are the subject of the Gogol novel Taras Bulba.

Tsar Alexander himself bought this painting.

The Cossacks had no aristocracy, or organized leadership exactly. When they became a threat to the state, they were crushed and absorbed. Their history is hardly a model for anarcho-socialism, but, like Pirates, their mythology functions as a nostalgia for lost freedom - they mistrusted reading, for example, regarding it as an unmanly language of accountants and bureaucrats, and usually found somebody to enslave to write their letters for them.

They were, after all, Cossacks.