Mark Matveyevich Antokolsky was born in 1843 in Vilna into the family of a Jewish innkeeper. From the age of 13 he studied woodcarving. In 1862 Antokolsky enrolled as an auditor at the Academy of Arts, where he met Repin, Kramskoi and Stasov, which influenced the young sculptor's views on art.
A philosophical mindset, subtle psychologism and a particular understanding of realism with which Mark Matveyevich approached his work were not a principle of illustration — they allowed him to look more deeply at the world and determined the themes of his future sculptures. Domestic genres did not inspire him, unlike complex, contradictory characters, of which the figure of Mephistopheles is one.
"Mephistopheles" was conceived as a contrast piece to the sculpture "Christ Before the People", on which the master worked in the 1870s. Christ is depicted brought before the people's judgment, with bound hands, a bowed head and simple garments. In the calm, humble pose there is a sense of confidence and unshakable strength. Antokolsky's "Mephistopheles", however, is not so much the embodiment of evil incarnate as an image of corrosive self-examination, doubt, and wisdom acquired through the agonizing experience of inner emptiness and human skepticism; as the artist himself saw it, it is a product of modernity, a symbol of the 19th century, the embodiment of the world's sorrow. The main dynamism, as in the sculpture of Christ, is concentrated inward. But in the case of Mephistopheles — it is not strength and certainty; there lurks doubt and hidden tension.
The composition is built on sharp angles — from the shard of stone on which the figure sits to the figure itself. The sculptor reveals the complex and ambiguous image through plastic means: a head with a wedge-shaped chin and sharp facial features, deep-set mocking eyes, a sharp hooked nose, tightly pressed thin lips frozen in an eternal smile of fatigue and sarcasm, long bony fingers, a deliberately hunched and emaciated body, angular outlines of elbows and knees, and protruding collarbones. Tension, criticality, venomous sarcasm and drama are perceived as a凝luster of frozen negative energy. By using nudity as a device, Antokolsky makes Mephistopheles universally human and timeless, removing any tie to a specific historical era.
The journal "Novoye Slovo" wrote of the sculpture: "In this Mephistopheles one positively feels the naked soul of our brilliant and sick century, in all its greatness in the realm of thought, with all its torments in the realm of feeling, with its merciless analysis, unbelief and cold despair."
Antokolsky himself, describing the concept to V. V. Stasov in 1885, wrote: "I drew my 'Mephistopheles' not from Goethe, but from real life — he is our type — nervous, irritable, sick; his force is negative, he can only destroy, not create; he knows this well, and the more he realizes it, the deeper his embitterment." Later he said that the "need to reproduce" this image "was so strong that, having made it, I liberated my soul."
The marble sculpture "Mephistopheles" can be seen in Hall No. 32 of the Russian Museum, and its reduced copy is in the Tretyakov Gallery.
