Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ilya Yefimovich Repin was born on the 5th of August 1844 in the town of Chuguev, then part of the Russian Empire. His family lived modestly but comfortably among six children while walking the streets of this provincial town located about forty kilometers from Kharkov.
The resulting work Barge Haulers on the Volga was completed in 1873 and shown at the Vienna International Exposition the following year. Critics praised its raw depiction of human suffering and dignity which established him as a leader of critical realism choosing nature and character over academic formalism.
He felt their work lacked moral or social purpose key factors in his own art despite finding great utility in Parisian techniques. He wrote to his friend Vladimir Stasov about the liberty of impressionists like Manet and Monet calling their truth infantile yet admiring their handling of light and color.
Leo Tolstoy visited Repin's small studio on Bolshoi Trubny street in Moscow in 1880 and their friendship lasted thirty years until Tolstoy died in 1910. Repin regularly painted Tolstoy working barefoot in fields or reading under trees at Yasnaya Polyana.
In 1899 Repin acquired land near Kuokkala about forty kilometers north of Saint Petersburg where he built The Penates estate with Natalia Nordman. When Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917 after the October Revolution the border closed around his property and he refused to return to Soviet Russia.