This is a story about the extraordinary destiny of Sophia Kramskaya, a daughter of the artist Ivan N. Kramskoy, who sat for the Portrait of an Unknown Woman (also known as “The Unknown Woman”, “An Unknown Lady” or “Stranger”). It is about the personal obscure tragedy of a girl from the school textbooks, whose portrait is familiar to everyone. It’s a shame that no one talks about her imprisonment.
Sophia (Sonya) Kramskaya, an only girl among her brothers (and thus probably the father's favourite), was presumably born in 1866 (according to other sources – in 1867). She studied in an ordinary school, but early felt an interest in painting due to the creative atmosphere of the family home. Father tried to develop the artistic skills of his daughter and became her first teacher. In childhood Sonya was considered charmless among the friends, but got prettier in her youth, as it happens to many girls. However, she has always been the most favorite model for the father. Even when her hair was cut because of illness and uneven crew cut grew on her head (Sonya tried to cover it with a lacy kerchief), the teenage daughter appeared as a real beauty with bottomless eyes on the paintings of her father.
Being of the same age with the daughters of Pavel M. Tretyakov (a founder of the Russian State Tretyakov Gallery) – Vera (in marriage Ziloti) and Sasha (in marriage Botkina), Sonya was very friendly with them. Vera Ziloti later remembered:
“Sonya was not pretty, but she had intelligent, dynamic face, and was racy, cheerful, and extraordinarily talented in painting. By 16-17 years Sonya ... got prettier, the hair overgrew. Her figure became long, thin. She beautifully danced. Her gladness, wit and “entrain” (fr. charisma, charm) attracted many admirers”. Sonya was really very elegant – Repin, a student of Kramskoy, admired her figure, Albert Benoit seriously courted her, but in his 30 years he seemed too “old” for Sonia at her sixteen. She found another fiance – Sergey Botkin, a young doctor, representative of the well-known medical dynasty. The relatives celebrated an engagement of newlyweds. Overjoyed, Kramskoy wrote the magnificent companion portraits of the bride and groom...
As the saying goes – man proposes, but God disposes. Sergey Botkin fell suddenly in love with his bride’s friend Alexandra (Sasha) Tretyakova. The betrothal was dissolved, and soon Sasha Tretyakova married the former fiance of her playmate. Sonya Kramskaya found the strength to maintain friendly relations with her. But this incident plunged Sonya in melancholy for a long time. Painting saved Sophia. Sixteen year old girl hurled herself into work and began to show a truly professional success.
“Between Sonya and her father was a rare friendship turning into mutual adoration”, – wrote Ziloti. In 1884 Kramskoy with his daughter went to travel abroad to distract Sonya from spiritual torments (and at the same time to treat his heart – he was already very ill). Traveling in France, Sophia developed a taste for the picturesque sketches en plein-air. A year later after traveling Kramskoy wrote: “My daughter, the famous ... giddy young thing, begins to give me great hopes that she already has some painterly talent”. Kramskoy knew that he would die, and the daughter has not set to her feet and found herself. Shortly before his death Ivan Kramskoy worried about the fate of Sofya, he said: “She is a girl, but as strong as a cher maitre. I think about this sometimes, and start to be scared ... her personal life threatens to turn into a tragedy”. Sofia recovered from the blow really a long time, did not fall in love and get married. She contracted a marriage with the St-Petersburg lawyer George Yunker only in at a mature age, in 1901, when her father was no longer alive.
Kramskoy despite his simple origin (he was a son of a clerk from little town Ostrogozhsk) was acceded at court, and even became there an insider painting the portraits of the imperial family members (Alexander III was a great democrat and preferred communication with ordinary people, especially – talented, to communication with the Romanovs’ kindred), and giving the lessons in painting for the Emperor’s daughters. His children also got on the inside at court. Sophia Kramskaya also performed a number of works capturing the Emperor, Empress, their children, especially the Crown Prince, and other relatives. But almost nothing has survived to this day. Something was destroyed or lost during the revolution, something of her own works was transferred to the Ostrogozhsk museum at the father’s birth-place along with his pictures, and when in 1942 a fire broke out in the museum, the portraits were destroyed along with most of his collections.
Sophia was a recognized portraitist, and she was just heaped by orders. Sadly the fate of many works which were located in private hands, homes and estates, defeated during the revolution, as well remained unknown. Sophia Kramskaya repeatedly and successfully participated in various art exhibitions of the highest level – in the Academy of the Fine Arts, in the Society of painters-watercolourists in the art department of All-Russian Fair in Nizhny Novgorod and others. She was known as a book illustrator, designing, for example, the publications for Pushkin's anniversary celebration. Her genre pictures were also remarkable. After marriage, Sophia Junker-Kramskaya much helped her husband, who was collecting materials about the Decembrists and was preparing a book-study of this period of history. The book has been never published...
Sophia’s husband died in 1916. And other troubles started soon – revolution, civil war, the death of her mother in 1919... But Sophia Ivanovna, who was already well over fifty, tried to adapt to a new life. Since 1918 she has worked in art-restoration workshops Glavnauka. She, who was deeply religious person, had to become the organizer of an anti-religious museum in the Winter Palace and had to illustrate the “History of religions” in publishing house “Atheist”. But she was a daughter of Kramskoy – the famous master of religious painting, creator of cupola painting in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral and the great Christian paintings! Sofia Ivanovna did especially not conceal her faith as well as her Christian desire to help a neighbour. A lot of her friends from the “old life” - the Smolny Institute’s old girls, ladies, just persons of noble origin suffered torments in Leningrad. Many of them really starved and were deprived of all – housing, property, services, and any income. The daughter of the artist helped them to get a job, even with the most modest salary, get translations, lessons, reprinting on the machine, in order to somehow survive. The elderly woman was charged with all this – and that she “was very religious”, and that she helped the friends...
Sophia Yunker-Kramskaya was arrested on 25 December 1930 and accused of the counter-revolutionary propaganda under Article 58-II of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. She was charged with creating nothing less than “counter-revolutionary groups from the former nobility, who set a goal to introduce their people in various Soviet institutions to the service to obtain information about the mood...” Everybody who was targeted in the investigation, talked about the artist’s religious commitment that complicated her situation. By the way, it was pointed in the case file that Sofia Ivanovna Yunker-Kramskaya was born on 21 August 1867 (date of birth indicated at the interrogation was at variance with the one that had been known previously from the letters of the artist's father – 1866, but it can be assumed that her father had better known it than the investigator from the bodies).
Yunker-Kramskaya was sentenced as a “foreign element” to 3 years of transportation in Siberia, but she suffered a stroke because of an emotional upset. She was sent to a prison hospital with severe paralysis. She was anyhow treated and four months later was sent with group of persons under arrest to Irkutsk. Semi-paralyzed woman reached Irkutsk, but three weeks later she was transferred to Kansk, a month later in degenerated condition - in Krasnoyarsk.
Yuncker-Kramskaya wrote a letter on 15 October 1931 from Krasnoyarsk hospitals to Yekaterina Peshkova, who supported the political prisoners. Sophia Ivanovna told about the serious illness and two surgery operations which she had during the deportation. She tried to prove that she benefited, that she always worked, in spite of the state of health: at Irkutsk - as an illustrator of books and communal farms’ magazines, at Kansk - as a photographer and retoucher in a local newspaper. The second stroke happened in Krasnoyarsk and paralyzed the left side of the body. Her request was to alleviate her guilt: if she can not go home to Leningrad, then let her at least be left in Krasnoyarsk till recovery and set her to work by all manner of means, because the right hand is valid and not broken by palsy. “I write the portraits and posters, slogans, signs, illustrations, know photographic retouching, coloring pictures, languages, I can work, I like to work... You can receive a confirmation about my working life from Elena Stasova; his father was so friendly with my late husband. She and comrade Lunacharsky can also give you information about the Museum of Kramskoy...”
There are some desperate lines at the end of the letter: “I could make the mistakes in my judgments, could incorrectly assess something, might crookedly estimate the state of affairs, but I did not commit any crime – and as I deliberately, so ardently love my country, after my husband's death (he was a Finnish citizen) – I changed my papers to Russian and already signed remission of claim regarding the property. It was ridiculous to do otherwise. Help me! I wrote an appeal for pardon to M.I. Kalinin. I ask for your kind assistance. I will justify mercy, if it be granted to me, I can assure you of this. I honestly worked for 40 years. It is so gravely – to feel myself so punished during the last, perhaps very short period of life... I gathered my last strength to write you all this...”
A petition was filed on 28 February 1932 for review of Yunker-Kramskaya’s case in connection with an incurable disease and also due to the fact that the exile “does not constitute ... a social danger”. Sofia Ivanovna returned to Leningrad on 25 March 1932. On 31 July 1932 Yuncker-Kramskaya wrote a letter of thanks to Y.P. Peshkova, saying that she was going to work as long as the forces permitted. The artist died in 1933 in mysterious circumstances. Allegedly she pricked her finger when scaling the herring, and according to her brother “died from the fish’s poison”. She was rehabilitated for absence of a crime in the act only in 1989.
The State Archive of the Russian Federation kept her letter:
“My dear Yekaterina Pavlovna, please, let me to send you these few lines. I was liberated! If you would only know what deep sense of gratitude fills out my mind and soul. I do not know, I'm sorry, if I have a right to write everything about my sense of gratitude, but I follow my inner to do it... Please, don’t complain that I do it, if it’s not supposed to, I do not know, but it was impossible to refuse to follow that the soul needs! I am again here in Leningrad, where I spent my long working life – and now I'm back, maybe I will be able to start working a little bit, as far as my strength will allow me to recover due to the possibility to work again! I do not even know to whom I could talk about what I feel and how I am grateful. But I write to you, thinking that this would to be done through the high institutions, which representative you are. Well, maybe it's not need to you or anybody, maybe it is not accepted, but I would like to repeat: I am infinitely grateful that you believe in my sincere repentance, and my honesty of old social worker, and my ardent desire to make amends by my work of any kind of gaffes and unconscious errors. And although I am, of course, still very ill and weak, I will be able to use the rest of my time before the inevitable end for the rehabilitation of my working name as itself and as the daughter of Kramskoy. Once again, please, forgive me if I do anything that goes out from the permissible scope.
Sincerely yours,
The artist S.I. Yuncker-Kramskaya”.
Перевод: Надя Нирванова