A la guerra

Konstantin Savitsky spent the better part of a decade on this crowded railway platform, beginning in the late 1870s while the Russo-Turkish war was actually being fought. What he shows is the moment of departure, conscripts being loaded onto a troop train and the families pressing around them to say goodbye. There is no battle and no glory here, only the leaving. By the time he finished the large final version and hung it at the Wanderers' exhibition in early 1888, the war was ten years past, but the grief of the platform still read plainly enough that Ilya Repin, a hard man to please, said the picture had come out very well. Savitsky sets it all at the edge of the carriages, where a woman clings to a departing soldier.