'There are tears (of grief) at the very heart of things.'

At long last, assignment #2
Associating Polenov's work with contemporary police brutality and child prostitution is within the literary convention of the 'fallen woman', employed as a tool with which to expose the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of a social system that creates, uses, and then abuses her.
(The Wanderers and Critical Realism in 19th-Century Russian Painting, Pg.104,para. 4. Jackson, David Manchester University Press, 2006)
Please here refer to Polenov's Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1887, to which the above quote is in reference to; as well as Max Beckman's Woman Taken in Adultery. Both of these can be found in the right hand column.
If you (dear reader) are familiar with the assignment you are aware that the above quote was to some extent randomly selected. I did select the book based on it's title, which jumped out at me as I was scanning a library shelf.
The first thing that comes to mind, repeatedly, when I read the sentence is a passage written by Fyodor Dostoevsky which appeared in the April, 1863 issue of Vremya. I am using it as it appears in David Magarshack's fine introduction to Modern Library's The Best Short Stories of Dostoevsky. Please consider this my first 'image'.
When you look at these outcasts of society, you feel that for a long time to come the prophesy will not be fulfilled for them; that for a long time there will be no palm branches for them, nor white robes; that for a long time they will call in vain to the throne of the Almighty, 'How long, O Lord!'
But they know this themselves, and so far they have been protesting against the wrongs society has inflicted on them by forming all kinds of dark religious sects. We are surprised at the folly of people embracing such superstitions, but we fail to realize that what we see here is a rejection of our social formula, an obstinate, unconscious, instinctive separation, a separation at all costs, for the sake of salvation, a separation accompanied by a feeling of disgust with us, and fear, too. These millions, abandoned and driven away from the rich man's table, jostling and crushing each other in the outer darkness in which they have been flung by their more fortunate brothers, are groping blindly to knock at the gates- any gates, looking desperately for a way of escape from the suffocating dark cellar. Here we are witnessing a last desperate attempt to hold together in a community among themselves, prepared to abandon even the semblance of human beings, so long as they can have a life of their own, so long as they can keep out of our way.
Anyone who has ever visited London has probably been to the Haymarket, if only once. This is the quarter which is at night crowded with women of the street. In the Haymarket I saw mothers who had brought their young daughters, girls who were still in their teens, to be sold to men. Little girls of about twelve seize you by the hand and ask you to go with them.
Along with this come thoughts about the same author's unabashed addressing of the same issues in The Insulted and Humiliated and Crime and Punishment, and perhaps even abstractly in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. In Crime and Punishment (written in 1865/'66) another fitting scenario is described. Part 3, chapter IIV: Sonia, a harlot, visits Raskolnikov on an errand for her stepmother. To her surprise the room is also occupied by Raskolnikov's mother and sister, as well as his friend Razumihin and a doctor, Vossimov. In the awkward situation that ensues Raskolnikov insists on placing Sonia beside his mother and sister, and introduces her on equal terms. This puts the predominately lower-middle class group at a bit of a loss. Later on in the story Sonia and Raskolnikov serve to lead each other to redemption. Through this Dostoevsky illustrates the spiritual fortitude of a human being downtrodden and forced to sell her body for meagre profit (though Raskolnikov observes that she can't keep it up indefinitely). This is one of the most powerful themes in Russian art- that redemption reaches deeper than man ever can dive.
Consequently Dostoevsky also exposes the 'hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of a social system that creates, uses, then abuses her'. However a more ready example is to be found in Georges Rouault. At the same time that [Rouault's] prostitutes did not live comfortably in their own bodies, they had dignity; their faces expressed anger rather than complete humiliation. In short, they were, as Stephen Schoesser has written, 'figures whose dignity consists in the fact that they know themselves as masked and misjudged by others.' Like clowns.., these prostitutes know the reality of their nakedness underneath their sequined dresses. And latter in the same essay, The mass cultural practises of the new Paris--strolling down the boulevards, shopping for the latest fashion, reading the newspaper gossip, taking in a show at the Moulin Rouge--had transformed the city into a world where seeing and being seen were paramount. Such practises produced the world as an image or picture, transforming everyday life into a spectacle. (Mary Louise Roberts, 'Tears at the Heart of Spectacular Paris: Rouault's Prostitutes.' In 'Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958.' Ed. Stephen Schloesser. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. University of Chicago Press, 2008.) Please reference Rouault's Fille, or Femme aux Cheveux Roux in right hand column.
End of first part.