Nikolay Feshin was born in Kazan to the family of a woodcarver and since childhood, had been helping his father to make iconostases. He graduated from the Kazan Art School and in 1901 entered Ilya Repin’s studio at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Despite the great influence and authority of his teacher, Feshin, having well mastered the principles of realism, was able to go beyond them. “I could not be a direct follower of Repin, because my requests in art were completely different. A high level of technique mastery (painting skills)… will always be dominant in art. Over time, the subject loses most of its meaning but its excellent execution retains its value”, wrote the artist.

He participated in the Itinerants’ exhibitions but did not consider himself to be a member of their union. 

Feshin was not attracted by the images of tribunes, orators and crowd leaders. He tended to choose his favourite form of interior portraiture, where the atmosphere of studies revealed characters primarily as thinkers. Lenin is depicted at his desk and it seems he is shortly distracted from reading to look at the person who entered the study. The composition is asymmetric due to the fact that his figure is shifted to the right of the centre. This gives dynamics to the picture.

The 1918 portrait of Lenin was the first painted portrait of the Soviet state leader. This picture, like the portraits of Karl Marx, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leo Trotsky, Feshin painted by the order of the Political Department of the Red Army for the hall of the Soviets of Workers’ and Red Army Deputies.

While immediately after the revolution the artist tried to fit into the radically changed system of values, after a while life in the new country became unbearable for Feshin. The spiritual decline in the late 20s was more and more in evidence. Feshin wrote about that period in his autobiography as follows: “One felt the ground slipping away from under their feet, no one knew what tomorrow would bring. <…> I felt how day by day I was wasting my creative energy, because art was used only for propaganda purposes. <…> Work lost all meaning and many fell into an unbearable melancholy”. In 1923, the artist emigrated to New York with his family.