Cossacks crowd round a table, roaring with laughter as a scribe takes down their insulting reply to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV, a legend set in 1676 that may never have happened. Repin spent eleven years on the canvas, advised by the historian Dmytro Yavornytsky, with friends and Saint Petersburg academics posing as Cossacks. Alexander III bought it for 35,000 roubles.
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Repin recorded the years he worked on the picture along the lower edge of the canvas. A second, unfinished version is in the Kharkiv Art Museum.
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