The Battle of Telish and V. Vereshchagin’s Painting Defeated. Memorial Service: Perception and Assessment by Eyewitnesses, Contemporaries, and Descendants

The article describes an episode related to the unsuccessful attack of the Life Guards Jaeger Regiment on the Turkish positions near the village of Telish on 12 October, 1877. The regiment lost a significant part of the rank-and-file and command staff. The wounded left on the battlefield were brutally tortured by the Turks, who did not want to fulfil the terms of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war signed earlier by their country. Four days later, Telish was captured by the Russians, and the scale of the tragedy of the Jaeger Regiment became obvious to the military command. The author analyses the reaction to the Turkish atrocities on the part of the rank-and-file and command staff of the troops, journalists, and artist Vasily V. Vereshchagin, who visited the scene of the tragedy and created an emotionally intense canvas Defeated. Memorial Service on this subject. A comparison of the visual and literary texts of Vereshchagin makes it possible to better imagine the artist’s intentions. The article presents the assessments of contemporaries who saw the painting at the exhibition of Vereshchagin’s works held in St Petersburg in 1880 and in Moscow in 1883. The author analyses both published and previously unpublished sources, opinions of representatives of different (governmental, military, artistic, and intellectual) elites. The author offers an explanatory model for the negative attitude of the ruling elite to Vereshchagin’s works, comparing his work with K. Makovsky’s painting Bulgarian Martyresses, which fits into the pan-European trend of sexualization of military violence. The article builds a comparative series for both Vereshchagin’s battle paintings (French battle painters Horace Vernet, Édouard Detaille, and Alphonse de Neuville) and images of the “horrors of war” (Jacques Callot, and Francisco Goya).

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