A crowd of Cossacks roars with laughter around a rough table on the open steppe, tall lances and a pale sky behind them. At the center a young scribe in dark clothes writes with a quill while a bare-chested man leans over his shoulder, and a lute lies against the table's edge. Men in fur hats, red coats and white sheepskin press close, shouting suggestions. The legend dates to 1675: the Ottoman sultan Muhammad IV allegedly demanded the Zaporozhian Cossacks' surrender, and, led by Ataman Ivan Sirko, they laughed and dictated a defiant reply.

Ilya Repin heard the story in 1878, made his first sketch that year and spent thirteen years on the painting, traveling in Ukraine, collecting folk legends and studying archives. The Russian Museum says he painted the faces from live models: Sirko from General Mikhail Dragomirov and the scribe from the historian Dmytro Yavornytsky. Tsar Alexander III bought the picture and it hung in the Winter Palace until 1897, when Nicholas II donated it to the Russian Museum. It won gold medals at the international exhibitions in Munich and Budapest in 1895, and Repin was nicknamed "Gogol in colors." It is in the Russian Museum in St.

Petersburg.