Until the end of his life filled with deprivation, Solomatkin is an artist of one theme, which varies in different life scenes, – the theme of the humiliated and insulted, those who gather near potatory houses, freezes at the back of a big city and get warm with a glass of vodka in taverns. Nevertheless, a man may always find some joy in this world. “A homeless artist, accustomed to the publicity of taverns and streets, had a passion for people who could decorate and transform the reality, aggravate the comic sides, touch with a sensitive song.” The connections of Solomatkin’s art with the traditions of grassroots artistic culture are rather not external, but internal – in his attitude towards life, in his approach to its interpretation. 

The theme of wandering artists arose in the artist’s work in the 1870s. Its completion was the image of the folk theater of Petrushka. The Radishchev Museum version is the latest, it was painted in 1882, a year before the artist’s death, and it presents a detailed narrative of people gathered around the puppeteer’s booth. In the characters’ features there is a grotesque, which is common of Solomatkin. 

Simple-minded spectators resemble lubok characters themselves, they are akin to the masks of folk puppet theatre. The crowd of spectators forms a closed compact group in the centre of the picture. Small fused brushstrokes sculpt small expressive figures that are well connected from the point of view of the plot and rhythm. Seemed to be outlined lubberly and a bit roughly, they are at the same time true and accurate, there is no satirical note, frequent enough for Solomatkin, in their characteristics. It has been noted more than once that the paintings of the 1870s-early 1880s, the best of what is known from the artist’s work that has sunk into oblivion, are partly biographical.