The Laughter That Took Eleven Years to Paint
A sultan demands surrender in the most grandiose language imaginable. A band of Cossacks answers with the filthiest insults they can invent — and dies laughing while writing it.
According to a legend fixed in Ukrainian memory, in 1676 Mehmed IV, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, sent an ultimatum to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the fierce free communities living beyond the rapids of the lower Dnieper River. Despite Ottoman forces having recently suffered defeat at Cossack hands, Mehmed's letter piled on titles — ruler of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt, emperor of emperors — and ordered the Cossacks to submit without resistance. It was less a request than a performance of power.
The Cossacks, led by Ivan Sirko, answered in kind, but inverted. Their reply mocked every one of the sultan's titles, calling him things no polite record dares repeat in full, and refused submission with gleeful, profane defiance. No original of either letter has ever surfaced in Ottoman archives, and historians such as Daniel C. Waugh have traced how an older, more restrained correspondence between the sultan and Cossacks of Chyhyryn was transformed over the eighteenth century into this vulgar, wildly popular version, of which some seventeen variants circulated in Russian and Ukrainian sources.
Whether the letter was ever truly sent to Mehmed IV or is a piece of folk literature that only later attached itself to his name remains disputed. But the story's appeal was irresistible to nineteenth-century Russian imagination, which saw in the Zaporozhians a picture of primitive vitality and contempt for authority — a striking counterpoint to the more regimented subjects of the Russian state. Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novella Taras Bulba mentioned the episode in passing, helping cement its place in popular memory.
It was through Gogol's circle, and specifically through his association with the patron Savva Mamontov, that the Ukrainian-born Russian painter Ilya Repin encountered the tale and made his first sketches for a painting at Mamontov's home. Repin began the canvas in 1880 and did not finish it until 1891, gathering studies from stanitsa Pashkovskaya, Yekaterinoslav, and Kachanivka along the way, and recording the years of labor along the painting's lower edge. The historian Dmytro Yavornytsky, an expert on Cossack history, helped Repin get the details right.
The men who posed as roaring, tear-streaked Cossacks were not actual descendants of the Sich but friends of Repin and academics from Saint Petersburg University, drawn from Ukrainian, Russian, Cossack, Jewish, and Polish backgrounds — a quietly cosmopolitan cast standing in for a legend of fierce Cossack unity. When the painting was complete, Alexander III bought it for 35,000 rubles, a record sum for a Russian painting at the time.
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