The Ostrogozhsk Museum of History and Art houses a work that is not typical of the art of Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy. It is a drawing titled “At Midnight an Angel was Crossing the Sky” imbued with poetry and romanticism.

This work was among the paintings and drawings donated to the Ostrogozhsk Art Gallery by the Kramskoy family in 1907. No comments of Ivan Kramskoy have been preserved (or perhaps have ever existed) as to why he decided to illustrate Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “At Midnight an Angel was Crossing the Sky”. However, it can be suggested that the painter was inspired by the mythical event described in the poem — the flight of an angel carrying the soul of an infant into the world of tears and sadness, with its yearning and wonderful wishes that cannot be fulfilled on Earth.

Over and over again, the painter turned to the motifs of emotional struggle and disquiet, with the most prominent of such works being the painting “Christ in the Desert” created in 1872. It was the culmination of Ivan Kramskoy’s thoughts who like many of his contemporaries, especially the intellectuals from St. Petersburg, contemplated the role of spiritual in the human life.

These were the thoughts of the 34-year-old Ivan Kramskoy. However, soon time, age, and life circumstances changed the artist’s beliefs dramatically. At the end of his life, Kramskoy was an Orthodox Christian and did not doubt the love and power of God. Throughout his career, Kramskoy painted churches, created numerous sketches and studies inspired by Gospel scenes, and painted icons many of which were kept at the Ostrogozhsk Museum until the bombing in July 1942. It is obvious that Kramskoy was fully aware of his great mission — serving art. Perhaps, this feeling was nothing else than the sound of that angel’s song that inspired him so much in the lyrical message of one of Russia’s most mystical poets — Mikhail Lermontov.