Somnambula

Somnambula, painted in 1871 and held at the Tretyakov Gallery, depicts a sleepwalking woman — a figure that connects to Romantic traditions of nocturnal feminine mystery while allowing Kramskoi to explore states of consciousness that lay between sleep and waking. The somnambulist was a figure of considerable cultural interest in the nineteenth century, associated with the new science of hypnotism and suggestion, with Romantic ideas of the subconscious, and with the operatic tradition (Bellini's opera of the same name had been enormously popular since the 1830s). For Kramskoi, a painter preoccupied with inner life and the representation of psychological states, the sleepwalking woman offered a subject that was simultaneously naturalistic and uncanny. The work belongs to the same early 1870s period as The Mermaids, showing his sustained interest in states of female consciousness that resisted ordinary waking description.

The somnambulist's condition requires Kramskoi to render a figure moving through space without conscious control — a state implied through pose, expression, and the quality of the figure's relationship to her surroundings. The nocturnal or dimly lit setting suits the subject. The painting uses soft, diffuse light to suggest the threshold between sleep and waking.