Fiction

The Terrible

On a spring afternoon in 2018, the man leaves Tretyakovskaya station in Moscow unable to remember why he’d come. His backpack, light on his shoulders, contains Dostoevsky’s The Double and a change of clothes. He hadn’t planned a long stay. He has no official business, no friends to visit. That morning he awoke from troubled dreams in his Voronezh apartment and travelled to the railway station and booked a seat for the next train to Moscow. For seven hours he read Dostoevsky and rested his eyes by watching the last of the dirty rasputitsa at the end of the spring thaw across long stretches of pastoral land and muddy roads. Fresh, pretty grass, the last patches of snow. Now, in the capital, the streets are purged of mud and dirt. Amid the aristocratic grandeur of Moscow centre, the stately mansion of Tretyakov gallery emerges like a castle from a half-remembered dream. In the gallery the man passes through a metal detector and is shocked by the blaring siren. The police officer searches him, finds some roubles in coins – the change from his train ticket. Later the officer will say the man appeared dazed, maybe daydreaming, but that the gallery admitted dreamers every day.

In 1913, Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on 16 November 1581 was slashed by a knife-wielding vandal. Beforehand, the assailant spoke to the paintings. He was deemed psychologically unwell. He struck the painting so brutally that his garden knife wedged into the wooden frame. The cuts can still be seen under X-ray. Ashamed, the gallery curator wrote a detailed breakdown of his finances, responsibilities, left a set of keys and killed himself by jumping before a moving train. For nearly two months, restorationists removed the canvas from the stretcher and plastered the seams, before Repin returned from Finland to repaint Ivan the Terrible’s face. He was previously banned from the gallery because, ever a perfectionist, he would come unannounced and retouch his artworks. As he worked, Repin blamed Kazimir Malevich and the iconoclastic suprematism movement that spiritualised geometry. The Russian avant-garde had no respect for tradition. Once he left, the head of Tretyakov despaired at the obvious new layer of paint. He stripped Repin’s fix-up job and did his own with watercolours and varnish. When Repin returned, he didn’t notice the work of another’s hand.

The man checks in his backpack and jacket. It’s late, Wednesday afternoon. The gallery is emptying. School excursions, clumping around teachers distributing jackets, are continuously told to lower their voices in the resonant hall. Synthetic fabrics swish. Tourists speak Russian or Central Asian languages. The man waits for a student convoy to leave and then enters the cafeteria. Compared with the grandeur of Tretyakov, the cafeteria, a relic of Soviet times, is austere and functional, selling borsch, pelmeni, salads, ice-cream. Even though he hasn’t eaten and has not drunk alcohol for many years, the man orders 100 millilitres of vodka and sits alone, drinking slowly, disgusted by the taste. Maybe there’s a virus inside him. He doesn’t feel like himself. He sits and drinks and wonders whether the vodka is killing or feeding this virus. He drains the last of it and rises slowly, but is not drunk. He feels remarkable clarity as he walks towards the exhibition halls and realises why he’s come and what he must do.

Repin’s painting scandalised Moscow society. Many believed he had rewritten history. They feared the haunted expression in the tsar’s liverish, deranged eyes. It portrays Ivan the Terrible cradling his son after allegedly bashing his skull with a sceptre. His son died three days later. The sceptre lies in the foreground, beside a pool of blood. Repin was inspired by bloodshed – Spanish bullfighting, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by revolutionaries, other bloody paintings. He saw Ivan’s murder of his son as an allegory for the senseless political violence stirring up Russian society. The painting is afflicted by craquelure, beginning at the edges, due to the use of animal glue, the formation of destructive metal soaps by acid fats reacting to salt and a catastrophic humidity event in 1922 when Tretyakov’s heating system malfunctioned during autumnal rains. These imperfections age the painting and require constant restoration work. Many years later, the organic materials continue to react poorly to the exposure.

It’s nearly closing time. Eight pm. Along the walls are paintings he recognises from old schoolbooks, movies, postcards. He briefly looks. A gilded shrine to Rublev. The bears of Shishkin and Savitsky he knows from a chocolate wrapper. The portrait of Alexander Pushkin his Russian teacher hung beside Lenin above the chalkboard. A sublime tempest of Aivazovsky’s Black Sea from the banks of Sevastopol – his laptop wallpaper. He passes them, unaffected by their allure. He finds Repin’s Ivan the Terrible isolated in the centre of a long gallery. He approaches the painting, lifts a balustrade and lunges the pole repeatedly into the artwork, smashing the glass, tearing canvas, shouting “I did not do it!” When the metal pole smashes the protective screen, glass scratches the painting, breaking away flecks of oil, lead white, zinc white, barium sulphate, blue cobalt, Prussian blue, resin, cinnabar, red ochre, red organic pigment, zinc yellow, brown ochre with manganese traces, green chrome pigment, green copper pigment, black iron pigment.

After seven years of restoration, Repin’s artwork returns to Tretyakov. In the long hallway are detailed images of the restoration process and methods used to remove all evidence of violence. But the evidence remains visible, under microscope and X-ray.

It isn’t his name. When authorities arrest him, the man confesses. They ask him why, and he shakes his head, gestures into air and says, “I was overcome by something.” Later, commentators will suggest the man was possessed. The gallery considers employing wandering psychiatrists to appraise visitor mental states. They will ask for his name. “Ivan,” he will say. “I must be Ivan.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as "The Terrible".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.