Vsevolod Garshin begins his essay on the 15th Association of Itinerants Exhibition with his thoughts on the value of art and the importance of not so much technical details as the emotional impressions a viewer receives from a work of art. He holds that a certain period is best characterized not by a separate exhibition, but by several large artworks shown at it. Such are the paintings “Christ and the Sinner” by Vasily Polenov and “Boyarynya Morozova” by Vasily Surikov. Women are the central characters in both – in the first case a woman with “a naïve face of a child not realizing her fall” and “expecting to be stoned and torn to pieces by the crowd”. The second is very different from the first, it is boyarynya Feodosiya Morozova, whose face is “gaunt from prolonged fasting, soul-searching and apprehensions of the past days” and who is presented to the viewer as a “vehement believer devoted to one treasured dream” of protecting her religion and upholding the spiritual convictions of the OldBelievers.
Key words: V.M. Garshin, V.D. Polenov, V.I. Surikov, “Christ and the Sinner”, “Boyarynya Morozova”, female image, the second half of the19th-century painting.