In some sources you can read that on January 2, 1959, after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, one of the works of a prominent Russian artist was removed from the exhibition in order to avoid trouble. We checked to see if this really happened.

This is what the newspaper “Zerkalo Nedeli” reported in issue dated January 4, 2002: “There is a known case when, the day after the revolution in Cuba, employees of the Russian Museum in Leningrad removed a painting by artist Pavel Fedotov from 1844 into storage only because it was called “The Death of Fidelka.” Obviously, the painting had nothing to do with the events of the second half of the 20th century, but merely depicted a woman’s grief over the death of her beloved dog.”

Similar information can be read in publications "Case", "Our newspaper" and on resources Donschool, Prikol.ru, ushistory.ru, LiveInternet, LiveJournal, Facebook. Olga Derkach and Vladislav Bykov included the story in a collection of entertaining facts "Book of the century. 1901 - 2000" (2000), and the famous expert Boris Burda - in his book “The origin of the tyutelka. Small encyclopedia of funny things" (2010). On October 14, 2001, a question written based on this fact was voiced at the finale of the television show "Own game", and on October 29, 2004 the answer to the same question brought victory to the experts in the autumn series of games “What? Where? When?".

Pavel Fedotov’s work “The Death of Fidelka” (you can also find the names “Fidelka’s Death” and “Fidelka’s Illness”) is less known to the general public than his paintings “Fresh Cavalier”, “Major’s Matchmaking” or “Aristocrat’s Breakfast”. It’s not for nothing that we didn’t use the word “picture”, because... it’s not a painting. And you shouldn’t look for it in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg - it’s not there. But you can read about the work at Tretyakov Gallery website in Moscow, where it is stored: “In 1844–1846, Fedotov performed eight genre compositions in sepia. The artist himself called them sketches, intending to paint paintings. One painting, “Fresh Cavalier,” with a sepia-like plot, was realized. In 1850, she and seven sepias were exhibited at an exhibition in Moscow. At the same time, descriptions of these works compiled by the artist himself were published in the magazine “Moskvityanin”.

"In the morning, during tea, it turned out that one of the dozen dogs of the mistress fell ill. The tea was taken away from the table, it was replaced by a pillow on which the patient Fidelka was laid; having given her leeches and bandages, the mistress dealt with the whole house. With a shoe in her hands, she threatens the maid, already disheveled, to whom the nanny is lying. The son has already been brought to his knees with a study book from which he cuts out horses and, out of revenge, grabs a little dog running past to tie a piece of paper on its tail, which is already dangling on a thread in his mouth. The daughter, leaving her doll, which she was drinking tea on the table, and with torn ears runs under the protection of her father, who himself is saving himself from sodom, not forgetting, however, to take with him consolation - punch; at the door he came across a little dog: embittered, he kicked it away. The homemade Cossack dog, it seems, was also not spared by the owner’s favor. In the open door he could see the veterinarian, called, but amazed, indecisive: should he go in?”

The artist found Fidelka’s story funny and instructive, and he painted a sequel, the sepia “Consequence of Fidelka’s Death,” also in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery.”

So, it's sepia (a type of graphic technique that uses shades of brown), not a painting. The State Tretyakov Gallery, not the Russian Museum. On top of that, there is another work with a seditious title (“Consequence of Fidelka’s death”), about which nothing is reported in history. Are there too many inconsistencies? One thing is true: “The Death of Fidelka”, at least nowadays, is actually stored in the museum’s storerooms, from where periodically hits to the exhibition halls on the occasion of the next thematic exhibition.

At the end of November 2016, after death leader of the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro, the story about the incident in the museum has gained new popularity. And already on November 30, the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda - Novosibirsk” published interview the author of the earliest mention of this story (in the form question for a local intellectual game) - expert, doctor of biological sciences, professor Dmitry Zharkov. Let’s let him speak: “It was the early 1990s—1991 or 1992, now I don’t even remember exactly. I was then a student at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Novosibirsk State University. One day, for some reason, I picked up the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and saw a reproduction of that same drawing by Pavel Fedotov...

As a young man, I was hooked by the “politically incorrect” title. Of course, it was stupid to blame the painter for something: I perfectly understood where he was and where Castro was... But I decided that this work of art cannot be used, that is, its name cannot be spoken out loud, in the midst of our friendship with Cuba. Therefore, it seemed logical to me that the painting has been kept in storage since 1959 and is not put on public display.”

And although Zharkov did not find confirmation of his idea, the question he wrote on this topic was voiced at the Novosibirsk competitions, and after its publication on the Internet, the story ended up in "The book of the century. 1901 - 2000", thanks to which it became widely known, this time becoming the basis for television questions. Meanwhile, journalists contacted the press service of the Tretyakov Gallery and found out how things really stood. It turned out that Fedotov’s sepia was never on permanent display. “Sepias are afraid of light, so we exhibit them extremely rarely, so they are almost always in storage,” answered the museum staff, adding that the story of “The Death of Fidelka” is a figment of the imagination of fellow journalists.

Thus, the case with Pavel Fedotov’s painting, although funny, is still fake.