Pavel Dmitrievich Korin was an artist, winner of the Lenin Prize, and winner of the USSR State Prize. Pavel Dmitrievich was born in the famous Palekh in the family of a hereditary icon painter, and studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture with Korovin and Malyutin. Subsequently, Korin directed the restoration workshop of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. He participated in the post-war restoration of paintings from the Dresden Gallery.

The researchers note that his works are distinguished by spirituality and strong-willed composure of images, monumental rigor and clarity of drawing, integrity of plastic form and intense color saturation.

The idea of “Farewell to Rus, ” a painting that would embody Holy Russia in a period of tragic changes, came to the artist during the funeral of Patriarch Tikhon in the Donskoy Monastery in 1925. The funeral took place with a large gathering of people and for many witnesses it was equivalent to saying goodbye to the former Russia.

In total, Korin worked on the painting from 1925 to 1959: until 1937 he painted portraits, and from 1935 to 1959 he worked on versions of the main sketch. Korin initially conceived the composition of his future painting in the form of a procession of people against a landscape background. After the artist got the opportunity to work in the Moscow Kremlin in the 1930s, he came up with a version of the sketch where the action takes place on Cathedral Square. But in the final version of the composition, he decided to place his characters in the interior of the Cathedral of the Dormition, a symbol of the Russian state.

The painter got his workshop thanks to the writer Maxim Gorky,

Until the last days of his life, the artist never abandoned the idea about the realization of a grandiose work. Nevertheless, the sketches were not transferred to the final canvas. The work with the artist’s title “The Interiors of the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin” came to Voronezh in 1951 from the Directorate of Art Exhibitions and Panoramas of the Committee for Arts Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR.