Gradually, new and not army acquaintances were started up. Fedotov became close friends with the Flug family, who lived very close to him, on Fifteenth Line of the Vasilievsky Island, in his own wooden house with a terrace and a large old garden: with Karl Gustavovich, his wife Charlotte Frantsevna, their children Karl Karlovich and Rosalie Karlovna, Julianovich, and Karl Gavrilovich, and Yegor Gavrilovich, an exchange notary, and along with them with some other relatives – Annette Severin, the cousin of Karl Karlovich, and the second cousin, Amalia Legrand.
The portrait of Yegor Gavrilovich Flug was not written normally, but usually it could not be written. There was nobody to put it: Yegor Gavrilovich, dear Georg-Gottfried, died quietly a year or two ago, and at the same time Fedotov sketched his head, lying on the grave pillow with loving care.
This picture, without changing anything in it, he used in a picturesque portrait.
The portrait conceived and arranged, as it would arrange any of their paintings. He placed the old man at the table with a lighted candle, so cleverly he managed to justify the unusualness of the lighting, which turned into a portrait from the drawing. All the space and part of the figure was immersed in a deep shadow, from which came only the face, a piece of the table, lit by a candle, and in Floura’s hand a sheet of paper, with which he blocked a candle from us, as if reading something or looking at this sheet.
Alive as if a man in his usual frock coat with neatly let out corners of the collar, standing next to a perfectly real table with a green cloth and a hotly polished candlestick on it – the Flug seemed to move away from us, fenced off by the mysteriously glowing rectangle of the leaf, and the look of his half-closed lowered eyelids the eye will never meet ours: he is already there, in a different world, detached from life and reminiscently withdrawn.
The very gesture of the model’s hand, the candle blocking the sheet of paper, the figure snatching its light, the face and the piece of the table and separating part of the space from the viewer, seem to alienate the alien world from the world of old age, the approaching death. The figure of the Flug merges with a dark background, as if emerging from non-existence. All this in space fluctuates, the contours are not defined, the volumes in those places where they merge with the shadow are immersed in the mist. Thanks to a special approach to the portrait task, the image expresses a tragic stiffness, achieving the effect of purely pictorial means.
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