Date of creation: 1888
Dimensions: 212 x 106 centimeters
Location: State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia)

Nikolay Yaroshenko was a Russian Itinerant artist, an extremely versatile personality. He preferred portraits and narrative scenes (usually from the life of the peasantry, with the so-called “popular melancholy”), worked in the style of realism, sometimes causing many disputes and extremely diverse reactions with his paintings, both from viewers and critics. The work “Everywhere Life” is his most scandalous painting, which caused a seething and fermentation of minds, accusations of idealization and whitewashing of ordinary criminals, as well as offensive teasing such as changing the title to “Everywhere Tendency”. It depicts a prisoner’s carriage, greenish, peeling, stopped at some station. Its inhabitants are crowding around a small barred window.

A woman in black with a serious, sad face – most likely a widow. A bearded peasant, a Cossack with a moustache and forelock, a soldier in a cap, looking out from behind into the white light. A small child, who is being held by a common effort at the window. And below, near the carriage, pigeons are bustling about. The prisoners are throwing something to them – crumbs, probably – and the pigeons are milling about, pecking on the ground what they have not yet managed to pick up. The faces of the people looking at them are glowing. The child is happy about the birds, the others are yearning for freedom, envying the pigeons and their ability to fly away wherever their eyes look. Nowhere is their innocence assessed, but they certainly do not look like villains. There is no hint of a rare smile, of the fact that the joy of ordinary kind little things like feeding pigeons is unusual for them.

Behind their backs, in the darkness of the carriage, the silhouette of another prisoner is visible. He is outlined against the window in the pose of the hero of “The Prisoner” from another painting by Yaroshenko. The whole work seems faded – the sky is gray, the pigeons do not seem very bright either, the platform is grayish, and the carriage has long been shabby – and only the faces of the people attract the eye, standing out from the general grayness. They are illuminated by an inner light.