The night before he was arrested and jailed earlier this year, billionaire cosmetics magnate Vladimir Nekrasov appeared on Russian television to show the masterpiece from his art collection, Chagall’s “Lovers in Pink”. Highlights are on YouTube: burly Nekrasov points out the delicate couple in black against a rose background, heads inclined, outlines of clasped bodies complementing each other in melodic movement. Then he explains to a fashionable, whooping Moscow audience that the painting’s magical powers include helping girls find romance and men become warriors.

“Lovers In Pink” has long had an iconic role in Russia. Chagall painted it in his cramped flat in freezing, starving Petrograd in 1915, just after he had married his muse Bella Rosenfeld. Turning away from war and revolutionary ferment, he created a lyrical cycle – “Lovers in Green”, “Lovers in Grey”, each with its own sensual/spiritual tone – which stands unrivalled as a modern visual metaphor for love.

Suggestive of a bright inner life enduring amid Soviet oppression, the rapturous interiority of the “Lovers” cycle made it exceptionally resonant. Chagall fled Russia in 1922 and his work was banned, but “Lovers in Pink” flourished on the unofficial art market. Physicist Abraham Chudnovsky bought it in the 1950s to celebrate his marriage; becoming a collector, he said, was an affirmation of hope. Hidden in his apartment, the painting remained famous but unfamiliar. In 1978, KGB-sponsored thugs broke in to steal it; unable to recognise a Chagall, they bound and gagged Chudnovsky’s son and demanded it: he misdirected them to another work. Like its wily creator – Chagall was 91 at the time – “Lovers in Pink” survived, to become emblematic again in the 21st century.

All Russian artists, from tsarist Ilya Repin to contemporary conceptualist Ilya Kabokov, have a bitter-sweet response to their homeland and the piquant reactions they arouse there. But none had a richer, more intensely ambivalent relationship with Russia than Marc Chagall, who spent two-thirds of his life as an émigré, yet admitted that “in my paintings there is not one centimetre free from nostalgia for my native land”.

This went beyond sentimentality. Researching his biography, I was struck by how not only his canvases but my chief sources – poignant, bulging, chaotic boxes of Russian letters, written on thin paper in beautiful Cyrillic hand, then addressed in uncertain Roman script to destinations in Paris, Berlin, New York – anchored him there: Chagall carried these across continents over 70 years.

His passionate engagement with Russia both detonated his artistic genius and, when he was cut off from his source of inspiration, destroyed it – by forcing him into repetition and pastiche. Both aspects have been misunderstood. Moscow’s and St Petersburg’s contribution to the modernist experiment – recently showcased at the Royal Academy’s From Russia exhibition – is just emerging in our post-glasnost decade; with it, Chagall’s role as pioneer of 20th-century figuration falls fully into place.

Born in 1887 in Vitebsk, which was then in the Jewish pale of settlement on the edge of the tsar’s empire, Chagall broke away from the poor, drab surroundings of his childhood, only to recreate them in scenes with which he is forever associated – the wooden huts and synagogues, violinists and rabbis, of late 19th-century Russian-Jewish small-town life. In an age when many major artists fled reality for abstraction, Chagall distilled his experiences of suffering and tragedy in shtetl settings that fused the everyday with an imaginative world conveying both loss and the miracle of survival.

His first exile was in 1911 to Paris. Overnight his early “potato-coloured” palette disappeared as “I seemed to be discovering light, colour, freedom, the sun, the joy of living, for the first time”. For a young art student, there was no better moment: from Matisse and the Fauves had come the explosive liberation of colour from the constraints of naturalism; from Picasso and Braque, the flattened geometric shapes, broken spatial planes and shifting perspectives of cubism. Old artistic certainties were dashed; in the fragments lay infinite possibilities for new pictorial languages, fresh imagery, previously inexpressible emotions.

Chagall swooped on the pickings. Effortlessly assimilating every innovation, he layered on to cubism’s rigorous forms his incandescent, homesick dreams of Russia – samovars, onion-domed churches, flying milkmaids – in glassy, jewel-like colours, injecting a uniquely expressive, mystic sensibility into Parisian rationalism.

“Surnaturel!” muttered the critic Apollinaire, long before surrealism, of “I and the Village” and “To Russia, Asses and Others”. Audiences reeled at the erotic fantasy “Dedicated to my Fiancée”, featuring a girl hugging a bull, which was censored at the Salon – Chagall overpainted it hours before the opening. But the instant Chagall returned home in 1914, fantasy vanished. Back in Vitebsk he no longer needed Russian memories. Nor, it seemed, did Russia need him. Under Malevich and Kandinsky, radicals were pushing towards absolute abstraction: “Black Square”, “Composition VI”. Chagall’s figuration already looked bourgeois and individualistic. “Only stupid and uncreative artists protect their art with sincerity,” boasted Malevich. “Abandon love, abandon aestheticism ... We, suprematists, throw open the way.”

Chagall fought back – with a series of heavyweight “Old Jews” (“Jew in Red”, “Jew in Black and White”) modelled from the stinking beggars who slouched into his mother’s grocery shop, and their successors in his “Jewish Theatre Murals”; the “Lovers” cycle; jagged self-portraits; turbulent Vitebsk landscapes. Their dynamic strength and ironic distortions originate from his masterstroke – absorbing into his own narrative style the surging planes and fragmentation of his enemy’s suprematism. Thus he answered Malevich’s nihilistic spirituality with a humanism as transcendent, fixing on canvas the world of pre-revolutionary eastern Jewry in its last days.

Initially, Chagall welcomed the Russian Revolution. His paintings resembled posters – in “The Promenade” he unfurls Bella like a celebratory flag. He was briefly a commissar and ran an art school in Vitebsk; then Malevich arrived to teach there. Within months the banner “Suprematist Academy” floated over the door and Chagall was ousted, fleeing to Moscow and, through last-ditch Bolshevik connections, to Berlin in 1922. In his eight years marooned and marginalised in wartime Russia, he made the greatest paintings of his career. Smuggled out in a diplomatic bag via Lithuania, these sold round the world, revolutionary chic adding to their appeal.

“Perhaps Europe will love me, and with her my Russia,” Chagall wrote when he left. He settled in Paris and, to the distress of collectors, began making replicas of his famous Russian works, along with illustrations for Gogol’s Dead Souls. What really kept Russia alive for him, however, was his wife and model: “She was like no other. She was the Bashenka-Belloshka of Vitebsk on the hill, mirrored in the Dvina with its clouds and trees and houses.” Bella read aloud to him in Yiddish and Russian while he worked, making portraits that mirrored the couple’s hopes and despair: triumph in “Double Portrait with a Wineglass” (1918); fight for identity in “Bella with a Carnation” (1924); desperation and ebbing strength in “Bella in Green” (1934).

In August 1923, in a letter written during a stormy period, he feared he was asking too much – he wanted Bella, he said, using a Russian phrase, “to wake up in my own hangover”. She was the living connection to Russia that allowed him to develop as an artist in exile, in contrast to most Russian artistic émigrés, whose work withered.

“When I left Russia, I left behind the desire to compose: losing my country, I lost myself also,” said Rachmaninov. By contrast, for two decades Chagall remained a creator. Particularly in the 1930s, he flared into brilliance, in reaction to Nazi threats, with deeply assured, political works seeped in evocations of home. In “Nude over Vitebsk”, a monumental nude floats over a grey city alongside a church-sized bloody bouquet. “White Crucifixion” has a dead Christ in a Jewish prayer shawl, surrounded by shtetl Jews cowering from Nazi aggressors, in a painting drained of colour.

But then, in 1944, Bella died, the link with Russia snapped, and Chagall flailed around wildly to recall “stretches of my own Vitebsk and the time when I walked its streets, over rooftops and chimneys, thinking that I was the only one in the town and that all the girls were waiting for me, and that the graves in the old cemetery were listening to my voice, and the moon and the clouds were following in my path ...”

He had 40 years to live. He painted on, but, as in memories, objects, portraits, landscapes now lost their individuality and specificity of form; gone too was the commanding power that had made them iconic.

“In my imagination Russia appeared like a paper balloon suspended from a parachute. The flattened pear of the balloon hung, cooled off, and slowly collapsed over the course of the years,” he said. He became extremely productive and wealthy, but self-doubt gnawed.

In 1973, he was invited to revisit Russia. His quest was his “Jewish Theatre Murals”, locked in a Tretyakov storeroom – to which they returned until 1991. They were unrolled before Chagall and his third wife Valentina, and Chagall, noticing they were unsigned, demanded oil paint in turpentine to sign them. An awestruck Tretyakov curator watched as, “while someone scurried to get him the paint, he took another long look at his work, and said to Valentina Grigoryevna, ‘I was a good artist, wasn’t I?’”

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief visual arts critic. Her biography ‘Chagall: Love and Exile’ is published by Allen Lane on October 30