The Student Girl

The Student Girl (Курсистка) is a painting by Russian realist painter Nikolai Yaroshenko, known in two versions, written in 1883. One version of the canvas is currently in the collection of the National Museum Kyiv Art Gallery, and the other is in the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts.

History
The painting was first presented to the public at the XI Traveling Exhibition in 1883. The demonstration of the painting provoked heated discussions both about its artistic merits and about the role of women in Russian society of the 19th century. Soviet art historians put forward a hypothesis according to which it was Nikolai Yaroshenko's painting The Student Girl that forced Ilya Repin to abandon his original plan and create a new version of his painting They Did Not Expect Him, which later became widely known.

The painting depicts Anna Diterikhs, a student at the natural sciences department of the Bestuzhev Women's Courses in St. Petersburg, later a children's writer and publicist, the wife of the publisher and public figure Vladimir Chertkov, a close friend of Leo Tolstoy. Some researchers called the painting “Student” the first image of a female student in Russian painting. Vladimir Prytkov, candidate of art history and author of a monograph on the work of Nikolai Yaroshenko, believed that this painting is a poetic symbol of young Russia, to which the future belongs.