1924
oil on canvas
58,6 х 76,5

The painting was first shown publicly at the exhibition of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AARR) in 1925 under the name “Session of the Rural Communist Cell in the Theatre. Medvenka, Kursk Province.” This is the settlement, the home territory to which the artist returned during the starving 1920s. At this time the Party set the task of political enlightenment of the peasantry and demanded permanent Communist agitation and propaganda in the countryside. One of these activities on the stage of a club was depicted by the artist. In the club in Medvenka there were many interest groups. They put on choral presentations and shows. The picture shows stage already prepared for a show. The unique “spectator’s” position of the artist could explain the naturalness and accuracy of what is going on. This picture is a unique group portrait. All the participants shown here are real historical figures of the Medvenka provincial political life. One of them, depicted in the corner at the half-open door wrote the following testimony in the 1950s: “All the personages are …true portraits. The stage is accurately depicted, right up to the fact that to the right of the curtain we see the figure of a man in a peaked cap…Really, on the curtain…drawn earlier by E.M. Cheptsov there is the depiction of a sower, a symbolically depicted disseminator of enlightenment…”