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# Following the Example of Their Elders
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/po-primeru-starshikh/
- Published: 2025-11-12T18:24:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:28:05.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Museums, Observations, Mores

In the painting by Vasily Maximov (1844-1911) from the collection of the Irkutsk Regional Art Museum, we see a boy secretly drinking wine, unbeknown to his parents. The painting is called "Following the Example of Their Elders".

> Our youth love luxury, they are badly brought up, they mock authority and have not the slightest respect for their elders. Our children nowadays have become tyrants, they do not rise when an elderly person enters the room, they contradict their parents. Quite simply, they are very bad.

In principle, Socrates is right about everything. But he forgot to specify that children are merely what adults have made of them.

Maximov, the painter, did not forget this. Nor, of course, did the sculptor Shemyakin, with his monument "Children Are the Victims of Adult Vices". But it is far too ghastly, and we shall not look at it. Maximov, after all, expressed the thought more elegantly.