Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Having chosen the way of “poeticized realism” in art, Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov created paintings, hymns, paintings, songs. In Nesterowski paintings, quite often the landscape does not accompany the plot, but the plot contributes to the manifestation of the landscape idea. Admiring nature, its attraction is well read in the film “Two Frets”, inspired by the famous poem of AK Tolstoy.
In his best paintings, the artist sought to limit his spirituality. The Nesterov image of Russia is born in the confluence of the human soul and humanized nature as a human artist.
Turning to the folktale and legend of Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov, the way to finding the unity of man and nature, the poetic disclosure of its “soul” was made. It is known how fascinating Nesterov was fascinating when he was involved in illustrations at the beginning of his career in the 1880s.
An attempt to find the “soul” of Russian nature in fairy tale was made by the artist in the painting “Two Frets”. This is a landscape of a loving couple’s soul, and it is full of their spring happiness, their tender love. This is a landscape of fabulous lyrics and lyrical love song. And comparing it with the natural study for which it was written, we see the idealization of nature in the eyes of people who are in that happy state when the world becomes fabulous in all its reality. Here we see exactly the “landscape of the soul”, landscape-song, fairy tale.
Nesterovskaya nature is spiritualized. The image was conceived together: the theme should sound in the characters and in the landscape. This picture is a double portrait, a portrait-dialogue, in which two polar characters, like two melodies in music, are in the unity of counterpoint.
The artist was able to show how he loves “the Russian landscape, against which, somehow, you feel better and more clearly the meaning of Russian life and the Russian soul.”