The Tkachyov brothers exhibited ‘A Russian Field. Tumultuous Years’ at an exhibition in Bryansk in 1990. 

Once she had told the artists this story, the woman asked them to portray the strenuous work carried out by those on the home front in a painting.

The brothers had already prepared studies and started on the canvas, when they received an unexpected letter from a former military intelligence officer, Konstantin Nazarov. He wrote that he had held onto a picture from a newspaper for a few years. The photograph was of women ploughing in a collective farm’s field. The officer admitted that this picture had shocked him to the core, “so much so, in fact, that I began to draw this monstrous, inhuman, exhausting labor myself.” He had sketched it out in pencil, but decided that he didn’t have the artistic ability to paint it on a large canvas. Therefore he asked the artists to bring his idea to life. In this way, the painting turned out to be a sort of act of social service.

In 1990, the finished painting was exhibited in Bryansk. Klavdiya Polyakova met with the artists. The elderly woman sat pride of place next to the painting. The artists later admitted that it was one of the most moving moments of their lives - their painting hanging next to the inspiration behind it.

Alexei and Sergei Tkachyov also recalled that the inspiration behind the disabled man was a real Ovstug resident, Nikolai Ivanchikov. After the work was finished, this man even gave the brothers his wooden leg, which he had made himself, as a souvenir.

‘A Russian Field. Tumultuous Years’ is part of the cycle of works ‘Motherland’. The Tkachyov brothers received the 2009-2010 Federal State Prize for Literature and Art for this cycle.