Sentimental Value is one of those films you have to watch very closely. In the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s latest work, which swept the board at the European film awards and is nominated for eight Baftas and nine Oscars, stories are hidden in closeups, half-tones and peripheral objects. Some of these stories are so well hidden, in fact, that they aren’t even apparent to the people who made the film.
In one scene, roughly an hour in, the camera glides down a corridor, and suddenly there she is: a woman’s portrait on the wall. Anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union and later Russia between the 1950s and 2000s, like me, would recognise her instantly. She has been endlessly reproduced: as prints, embroideries, portrait medallions, even on boxes of chocolates. In Britain, people may have encountered her on the covers of various editions of Anna Karenina.
View image in fullscreen In wide circulation … a Russian postage stamp from 2012 shows Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Photograph: Alexander Mitrofanov/Alamy
Portrait of an Unknown Woman is a painting by Ivan Kramskoy, a celebrated Russian portraitist. Kramskoy began his career as a provincial retoucher before being admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. There, he went on to lead the Revolt of the Fourteen – a protest over the right to choose their subject for the Academy’s gold medal competition. The rebels later became known as the peredvizhniki, or the Wanderers, a group of artists who continued their protest by organising travelling exhibitions across the Russian empire.
In 1883, Kramskoy painted Neizvestnaya (the Romanised Russian for Portrait of an Unknown Woman), quietly hoping it would end up with Pavel Tretyakov, the founder of the Tretyakov Gallery – Russia’s leading museum of national art – and the guardian angel of the Wanderers. It didn’t.
To understand why, one has to look at the Unknown Woman through the eyes of her contemporaries. The woman is seated alone in an open carriage against the misty backdrop of St Petersburg – she is beautiful, but also carries an air of arrogance. For a woman, sitting alone was already a faux pas. The clothes made it worse: a fashionable velvet hat, a coat and muff trimmed with ribbons, gold bracelets. She had put on her Sunday best – something a society lady would never have done.
View image in fullscreen Screen print … a copy of Portrait of an Unknown Woman, left, as it appears in Sentimental Value. Photograph: Jørgen Stangebye Larsen
Reviewers called her “a cocotte in a carriage”, “a costly camellia”, and “one of the monstrous offspring of the great metropolis”. Tretyakov, who came from a conservative merchant background, was hardly eager to plant any monstrous camellias in his own house.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman was later acquired by a collector in Kyiv, and then by Pavel Kharitonenko, a Ukrainian sugar magnate. After the revolution, his property was taken over by the state. His Moscow house became the residence of the British ambassador – and the Unknown Woman eventually entered the Tretyakov Gallery, in violation not only of private property rights but also of Tretyakov’s own wishes.
After the second world war, the Soviet state sought to compensate the population for its immense suffering by granting a modest expansion of cultural life. With no real art market to speak of, private life became furnished with millions of cheap reproductions in gilt frames. The Unknown Woman was the runaway hit. She was mysterious amid the blunt visual language of Soviet symbols, bourgeois against the backdrop of grim everyday reality, and even a little sexy in a country whose official culture was resolutely prudish. She hung in almost every Soviet flat.
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