Ilya Yefimovich Repin his whole life was a sincere lover of Gogol’s writings. Not infrequently, in his works he turned to the images from the writer’s books. His first illustrations were pencil drawings for Diary of a Madman made in 1870. Later Repin created a whole series of pictures based on Gogol’s Little Russia cycle, which, according to his contemporaries, put the artist on a par with the writer in terms of creative pitch and humour.

Solokha and Deacon is one of the master’s last works painted already at the sunset of his life. The picture is dated 1926 when Repin was over eighty. It is a kind of illustration to Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas stories and was done by the artist in his Penaty estate. After the revolution of 1917, the borderline between the USSR and Finland was drawn so that Repin’s house in the village of Kuokkala was cut off from his home land. In his inadvertent emigration, the painter again returned to his beloved author’s bright images of Little Russia.

The central character of The Night Before Christmas, blacksmith Vakula, flies to St. Petersburg riding the devil to get gold-embroidered slippers to his sweetheart Oksana. Solokha, the main character’s mother, is a witch. On Christmas Eve, she flies on a broom and collects stars from the sky into her sleeve. When the witch comes back home descending via the chimney, she shrugs off her warm jacket and turns into a corpulent Ukrainian beauty.

Guests begin coming to Solokha’s home and she hides each of them in coal sacks because none of the visitors want to be seen. One of the visitors is Deacon Osip Nikiforovich. While he is trying to play around with the sweet hostess there is a knock at the door. Ilya Yefimovich Repin depicted the moment of the sly deacon wooing the charming beauty.

Gogol’s text was a source of inspiration for the artist but based on it, he created a work with a clear story of its own. In the centre of the composition are images of Solokha and the deacon. The figures are pushed to the foreground for the viewer’s attention to be focused on them. Round-faced, corpulent, broadly smiling Solokha, her body coquettishly curving towards the deacon, is looking playfully at him, while he pretends to be embarrassed covering his face with his hand.

Repin is extremely laconic in his picture. There are no coal sacks where hapless guests are hidden, neither is there anything to suggest that Solokha is a witch. The artist is not after the intricacies of the narrative, he is attracted by the cheerfulness, lightness and playfulness with which Gogol’s heroine reacts to what is happening.

The painter creates images of real, tangible people. The characters’ gestures and postures leave no doubt about what is going on and make the picture lively and dynamic. The figures are moulded with careful yet expressive brush dabs and therefore have volume. The interior of a Ukrainian wattle and daub hut is given little attention to by the artist, his depiction of a wall with a window, a table and a stove in the background is fairly schematic.

The history of the canvas is known due to the inscriptions on its reverse side. It was purchased from the artist’s daughter Vera Ilyinichna Repina by a Vl.Iv. Pavlov. In 1932, the first owner brought the canvas to Russia. Then, in 1938, it was purchased by F.M. Grenstrond who a year later handed it over to the government. The picture arrived at the Simferopol Museum of Fine Arts in 1956 from the Directorate of Art Exhibitions and Panoramas of the USSR Ministry of Culture.