For seven weeks in the spring of 1835, the Russian painter Pavel Fedotov kept a journal. He was, in these months, still an officer serving in the Finland Regiment of the Imperial Guards in St. Petersburg, but he was ultimately to become known as Russia’s most celebrated early realist painter. The journal preserves in unusual depth of detail the monotony and perpetual sameness which characterized life for the nineteen-year old officer as he grew his painterly skill. Examining it, along with a small cluster of the artist’s paintings and drawings, shows that the repetitiousness found in the journal also characterized Fedotov’s painting practice. Time and again, the artist added details to his works that emphasized the durational aspect of the single depicted moment. Tropes of visual and narrative extensiveness, these elements parallel what the intellectual Petr Chaadaev called in these same years “the stifling embraces of time.” Both were concerned to emphasize a new restless futility they perceived among a generation of Russian men, one that can be linked to a problem in these men’s relationship to time itself. Utilizing excerpts from Fedotov’s previously untranslated journals and letters, as well as the literary and philosophical works of his contemporaries, this article investigates how temporality was experienced in newly problematic ways and develops a new interpretation of the social organization of time along gendered lines.
