names an art museum in Saratov for his grandfather, persuades Alexander III to allow Ilya Repin to exhibit his controversial painting of Ivan IV with his son
You might be asking, was his grandfather worthy of an art museum? And you might also be asking, who was this Repin character, and why was his painting of Ivan IV so controversial?
The first question is difficult to answer (is there a metric for determining whether someone is worthy of having a museum named in their memory?), but Aleksei Petrovich's grandfather was none other than Aleksandr Radishchev (1749-1802), the writer whom Catherine II banished to Irkutsk and who, in the end, drank poison when rumors swirled of the possibility of a second exile.
