Painting. “Girl student” by Nikolai Yaroshenko

Date of creation: 1883

Dimensions: 131 x 81 centimeters

Location: Kiev Art Gallery (Kyiv, Ukraine)

The work “Girl student” is one of the responses of Yaroshenko, who was always sensitive to popular unrest, to another change in the usual way of life. Just as, responding to the people’s grief about those arrested and repressed, he wrote “Life is Everywhere”, so “Female Student” is born from popular confusion – women were finally allowed to study, something is changing, something is ending, and this is scary. “Female Student” shows us a young woman hurrying to school. She is dressed modestly, in a dark dress with a white collar, on her shoulders a light, blue-tinged cloak, on her head a black cap. The woman holds her textbooks under her arm, just like all students in the world do, and her arm is slightly awkwardly bent – ​​it is unusual for her, perhaps even a little scary, to step over the familiar foundations.

Under her feet is a wet, shiny pavement. Apparently, it has just rained. To her left and to the right of the viewer is a wall, on the other side the picture is not limited by anything, going off into seeming infinity. The woman’s face is the most remarkable thing in the picture. She is very young, she has a narrow chin, beautifully arched eyebrows. She looks slightly to the side, not at the viewer, and her gaze is absentminded and a little confused, as if she is not quite sure of what she is doing. This picture was the first depiction of a Russian woman student, and its entire composition is built in such a way as to show that there is nothing threatening in this, nothing that should cause alarm.

Just a student among other students, a young girl, frightened by her own courage, but overcoming fear for the sake of education. There is nothing superfluous in the painting, small details that matter are drawn – the girl’s face, the book, the awkwardly bent arm – and everything else is blurred, slightly floating in the damp autumn haze, because it is unimportant and only shades the main image and the main message of the work.