Visions Overcame (Morning Visions), sketch

The story behind this sketch is Night, published in 1880 by the writer Vsevolod Garshin. Its hero locks himself in his Petersburg room from evening till dawn with a stolen revolver and goes over his whole life, finding nothing in it but lies, until a church bell and memories of childhood break in. Repin chose the hour before morning, when phantoms crowd in on the sleepless man and the lamp on his desk is still burning.

Garshin had been his friend. He sat for Repin in 1884 and lent his face to the dying tsarevich in Ivan the Terrible, and in 1888 he threw himself down a stairwell and died days later. The Smolensk museum sees Garshin's features in the man at the desk. The sketch was probably painted at Talashkino, Princess Tenisheva's estate near Smolensk, and it came to the museum from her collection in 1919.