Short answers, pulled from the story.
Repin's most celebrated works include Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873), Religious Procession in Kursk Province (1880-1883), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880-1891). He also produced more than three hundred portraits of major Russian literary, artistic, and political figures.
Repin was born in Chuguev, a town in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, now located in Ukraine. He identified as a Russian born in Little Russia, the name applied to Ukraine at the time, though he felt affinity with both Cossacks and Ukrainians.
The 1885 painting, depicting the tsar in horror after killing his son with his sceptre in a demented rage, was seen by some critics as a veiled attack on Tsar Alexander III, who had brutally suppressed opposition following a failed assassination attempt. It was vandalized twice and removed from exhibition at the tsar's request before eventually being returned to public view.
Tolstoy came to Repin's Moscow studio in 1880 to introduce himself, beginning a friendship that lasted thirty years until Tolstoy's death in 1910. Repin painted multiple portraits of Tolstoy at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, depicting him in peasant dress working in fields, and his final visit there was in 1907 when Tolstoy was 79.
When Finland declared independence from Russia following the October Revolution of 1917, the border closed and Repin, appalled by the Bolsheviks' violence and terror, refused to return. In 1925, Stalin sent a delegation including Repin's former student Isaak Brodsky to persuade him to come back, but Repin refused, even though it meant missing his own jubilee exhibition in Leningrad that year.
The Penaty Memorial Estate is the country house Repin built near the village of Kuokkala in the Viipuri Province of Finland, about forty kilometres north of Saint Petersburg, beginning in 1899 with his common-law wife Natalia Nordman. Repin lived there for thirty years, hosted weekly Wednesday receptions for leading Russian artists and intellectuals, died there in 1930, and was buried on the grounds. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.