The riddle of "Poor Liza" by Kiprensky: why this picture aroused special feelings in the artist

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1792 N. Karamzin's sentimental story was published "Poor Lisa", and 35 years later artist Orest Kiprensky wrote a painting of the same name on the plot of this work. It was based on the tragic story of a young peasant girl, seduced by a nobleman and abandoned by him, as a result of which she committed suicide. Many considered Karamzin's words “And the peasant women know how to love” as a key phrase explaining the idea of Kiprensky's painting. However, the artist also had deeply personal motives that made him turn to this topic.

The title "Poor Liza" really refers primarily to the story of Karamzin. By the time the portrait was painted - 1827 - interest in this work had already subsided, but the artist considered it necessary to remind the public of the girl's tragic fate. There is a version that this picture was a tribute to the memory of Karamzin, who passed away in 1826. According to the plot of the story, after the death of her father, a poor peasant woman is forced to work tirelessly to feed herself and her mother. In the spring, she sold lilies of the valley in Moscow and met a young nobleman there, Erast. Feelings flared up between them, but soon the young man lost interest in the girl he had seduced and left her. And later she found out that he was going to marry an elderly rich widow in order to improve his condition. In despair, Lisa drowned herself in a pond.

Karamzin's story became a model of Russian sentimental literature, and at the beginning of the 19th century. sentimentalism was replaced by romanticism. Romantics proclaimed the triumph of feeling over reason, spiritual over material. In Russian painting of that time, the tendency gradually becomes dominant to reveal in the person being portrayed not so much his social status as to reveal the psychological depth of the character. Kiprensky depicted Liza yearning, with a red flower in her hands - a symbol of her love. However, the girl's experiences were close and understandable to the artist, not only because of her ability to empathize with the literary character, but also for personal reasons.

The exact data on the date of birth and father of Kiprensky have not been preserved. Biographers suggest that he was the illegitimate son of the landowner Dyakonov and his serf Anna Gavrilova. To hide this fact, after the birth of his son, the landowner gave the girl in marriage to the courtyard Adam Schwalbe and gave them freedom. From Schwalbe, the artist took his patronymic, he called him his father all his life. But there are several versions about the name Kiprensky. According to one of them, it comes from the name of the town of Koporye, near which Dyakonov's estate was located on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. According to another version, Kiprensky owed his surname to the fact that he was born under the "star of love" and was named after the goddess Cypride (Aphrodite), the patroness of lovers.

One of the first biographers of the artist N. Wrangel wrote: “He has always been a dreamer, not only in art, but also in life. Even the origin of his illegitimate son, as in the novel, foreshadows a life full of adventure. There were indeed many mysteries in the biography of Kiprensky, and one of the first was the secret of his birth. The artist knew about the plight of his mother, and therefore he perceived the story of poor Lisa as personal, as an extrapolation of the history of his family. His position in society and the future was very uncertain due to the grace of his father, who paid tribute to Cypride.

According to the researchers of Kiprensky's work, while working on the portrait of Poor Liza, he thought about his mother, whose fate was dramatic due to her disenfranchised position and social inequality with her chosen one. Kiprensky's mother, just like the literary heroine, became a victim of the laws of serfdom. Therefore, the artist well understood the real reasons that ruined poor Liza. Otherwise, he could not depict a peasant woman whose love had no future, since no one reckoned with her feelings.

The mystery of the artist's birth is not the only mysterious episode in his biography: how an Italian homeless girl became the muse and wife of Kiprensky