Ivan Susanin

Ivan Susanin, painted in 1914 — the year of the Great War's outbreak — engages with one of the foundational legends of Russian national identity: the story of the peasant Ivan Susanin who in 1613 led a Polish detachment astray in the winter forests of the Kostroma region to prevent them from capturing the newly elected Tsar Mikhail Romanov, sacrificing his own life in the process. The legend had been central to Russian nationalist culture since Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar (1836) established it as the paradigmatic story of peasant loyalty and self-sacrifice for the dynasty. Makovsky's late return to this subject in 1914 carries inevitable resonance with the outbreak of war — a moment when stories of loyal self-sacrifice for the nation had particular ideological currency.

Oil on canvas painted in Makovsky's late style, when he was working in his early eighties. The work may show some reduction in the virtuoso bravura of his mid-career period, but the fundamental competence of his historical figure painting remained intact through his final years.