Russian peasants had a concept toloka (the art historian and museum curator Pyotr Dulsky [ru] (1879–1956) called this custom podmoga (подмога), "helping".

For example, the trough of cabbage stands on a box labeled "Kazan," and the viewer can only see the colorful skirt of the bent peasant woman on the left edge of the canvas, so he will not immediately understand what is depicted in this fragment.

[8][9] Peter Dulsky emphasized two main plans on the canvas: In the foreground on the left, a well-fed peasant woman stands with a cabbage and a knife.

[10] Behind the first plan, with a shift to the center of the canvas, is a scene of refreshment — a girl with a tray containing shot glasses of vodka is offering a drink to the workers and their assistants.

From the Academy and Repin he learned the moral principles that would guide his work for many years: sympathy for ordinary people, humanism, and a belief in the transformative power of art.

[18] The artist Nikita Sverchkov —Fechin's student at the Kazan Art School in 1909— described him as a slender young man with blond hair who walked with a light and quick gait.

[19] A contemporary claimed that Fechin was not handsome (he was even called "walnut cake" for his earthy complexion), but his charming smile made people like him.

[31][32] The artist and teacher Alexander Solovyov [ru] wrote in his memoirs that Nicolai Fechin arrived in Kazan from St. Petersburg in the fall of 1908, when he was transferred to the nature class.

[34] At the Kazan Art School, Fechin anticipated completing his final work, which he was not permitted to paint as a free student in academic workshops.

Especially their admiration increased when they saw the Kapustnitsa (Solovyov calls this canvas Kapustnik), which was placed in the assembly hall of the Kazan Art School to complete the work on it.

[35] The artist German Melentiev wrote in his memoirs that when Fechin placed his unfinished work in one of the halls of the art school, all approaches to it were blocked.

The students, fearing the artist's return, only had brief glimpses of the unfinished canvas, struggled to understand the subject, but were nonetheless struck by the master’s immense size and unconventional technique.

[36] On the contrary, the Soviet artist Moses Spiridonov wrote in his memoirs that Nicolai Fechin allowed his students to visit the workshop hall where the canvas was being worked on.

Only after some time did separate “details” (such as the boy at the trough with cabbage and the gray sky) begin to emerge, eventually forming a cohesive scene.

The memoirist commented on the “tangibility of the texture of the objects,” the unprecedented freshness, and the “novelty in the ways of conveying real reality.” Despite having visited numerous museums, including those in the capital, and having seen masterpieces by the greatest masters of the past, Spiridonov had never encountered paintings executed in such a peculiar, original, and unique manner.

[34][39] According to Petinova, Fechin sought typages in the villages surrounding Kazan (which contrasts with other researchers' data pointing to Pushkarka in the Nizhny Novgorod province), where he went for sketches.

She cited a quote she heard from a young man who came from the provinces, noting its immediacy: “This is the first category — this is our Fechin, well written, such a brushstroke, what a twist!”[56] Soviet art historian Iosif Brodsky, in his monograph Repin the Teacher, noted various influences on Nicolai Fechin's work during the period of the creation of Kapustnitsa: Repin's realism, impressionism, and naturalism.

[59] The Guide to the Research Museum of the Academy of Arts, published in 1965, noted in Nicolai Fechin's painting “a broad pictorial style and sharp expressiveness”.

On both canvases, in the left part of the painting, there is a large figure, the same horizon line with narrow strips of sky, a reproduced foreground, and the ground under the feet of the characters.

The researcher highlighted the artist's innovation, readiness to see the beauty in the village plot, and ability to reflect the impression of nature through pictorial means.

She believed that the painting has a semantic center—the figure of a full peasant woman in a high-lifted light skirt, who holds a cabbage sprout and a knife for shredding.

Its cheerfulness combined with monotonous physical labor evoked in the researcher's mind the female images of Fechin's contemporaries — Philip Malyavin, Abram Arkhipov, and Sergey Ivanov.

Golden-yellow and purple colors are contrasted, which, according to Galina Tuluzakova, should evoke associations with the translucency of rare rays of sunshine on a cloudy day.

Tuluzakova believed that here Fechin was anticipating the color contrasts of his Indigenous people's portraits, which he painted in Taos during the last period of his life.

In Kapustnitsa, the depth of the space contrasts with the flatness of the painting, the volumetry of the image of signs with the decorative, graphic with the painterly, naturalism with the conventional.

Tuluzakova even wrote that the author did not plan "a special activity of impact" of the painting on the viewer, so he harmonized the content and formal components.

To this end, Fechin meticulously selected types, gave them expressive poses, found the appropriate combination of colors, and assembled them on the canvas.

In his opinion, we can only speak of "natural representativeness", closeness to the manner of sketching and "optical mixing" of colors, in which "individual strokes are formed into a concrete real image".

If the use of "non-finito" painters only hints at the real object, bringing its image closer to abstraction, then in Kapustnitsa Nicolai Fechin's close attention "to the subject structure" is obvious.

[51] Dmitry Seryakov assigned Kapustnitsa to the ethnographic series in the artist's oeuvre, which is reflected in such genre paintings of his as Pouring [ru]and the earlier Cheremis Wedding.