Levitan’s Mood

Valentin Serov painted him in 1893 in the studio: dark coat, one pale cuff, a chair arm used as a rest, the face of a man who has already walked farther than the room. Margarita Chizhmak’s timeline for the Tretyakov Gallery Magazine places that winter portrait beside Vladimirka, shown the same season at a Peredvizhniki exhibition. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls Levitan a Lithuanian-born Jewish painter and a founder of the Russian “mood landscape.” The phrase is a critic’s handle. The canvases are more specific. They are weather as a kind of thought, and thought as a kind of weather. You do not go to him for a crowd. You go to him for a place that will not tell you what to feel, and then makes you feel it anyway.

He was born on 18 August 1860, 30 August New Style, in Kibarty — now Kibartai, in Lithuania — into the family of a railroad employee, Ilya Abramovich Levitan. The family moved to Moscow in the early 1870s. In 1873 Isaac entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, following his brother Adolf. He studied landscape with Alexei Savrasov from 1874, later with Vasily Perov and Vasily Polenov. His mother died in 1875; his father in 1877. Chizhmak is plain about what followed: poverty, homelessness, nights spent at the school, a stipend for canvas and paints, tuition waived. Talent, here, is not a fairy tale. It is a committee noticing a boy who would otherwise disappear. The first press mention comes with student landscapes at a Peredvizhniki show in 1877. The life is already the work’s climate: modest means, a gifted eye, a city that could expel him.

Autumn Day. Sokolniki, 1879, is a wet path, tall trees, a woman walking away. Pavel Tretyakov bought it from a student exhibition, and with that purchase began to watch the young painter. The park is Moscow; the weather is already Levitan’s. Not a vista arranged for pride. A direction to walk, a season that has started to undress the branches, a figure so small she is almost a note in the margin. In May of that year Jews were expelled from Moscow. Levitan had to leave for the village of Saltykovka. The picture and the edict share a year. The canvas does not illustrate the edict. It only shows a public path that can look, if you know the year, like a place you might have to leave. Begin here if you want the student who is already a poet of damp air.

The 1880s are labour. He draws for magazines, illustrates a Kremlin guidebook, attends Polenov’s watercolour mornings, paints at Savvinskaya and Ostankino. In 1884 the school dismissed him with the diploma of an unranked artist; the Peredvizhniki, the same year, showed Evening on Tilled Soil. Loyalty to Savrasov, by then in disgrace at the school, had already cost him. The facts are dry. The pictures from these years are not. They are close looking: a trail, first greenery, a church wall, the kind of motif that will not decorate a palace and therefore has to be loved for itself. Chizhmak’s timeline is a list of addresses. Under the list is a painter learning that a Russian landscape does not need mountains. It needs attention.

In the summer of 1885 he stayed near Babkino, where the Chekhovs were living in the Kiselyovs’ house. Soon he moved in with them. Chizhmak records a utility room converted into a workshop, which he called a “henhouse,” and days of sketches mixed with hunting, fishing, fancy-dress balls. The house in the 1885 picture is ordinary timber, a country fact. Friendship with Anton Chekhov is not a footnote for tourists. It is two arts of understatement sharing a table. A later Tretyakov essay on their crossed destinies notes that Chekhov wanted fewer Turgenev-length nature passages, and that Levitan’s landscapes are likewise terse beside Ivan Shishkin’s elaborate forest catalogues. The comparison is just. Shishkin gives you every blade. Levitan gives you the hour. Both are kinds of truth. They are not the same kindness.

Birch Grove was begun at Babkino in 1885 and finished in 1889. Sun on white bark. Green that is almost edible. No horizon to escape into, no figure to rent you a mood. The grove is the whole room. This is plein-air looking that has decided not to become a postcard. Birch, in Russian painting, is an easy national emblem. Levitan does not salute it. He lets light invent the trunks, one after another, as if naming them would be vulgar. If Sokolniki is a path through a public park, the grove is a privacy made of trees. You are not invited to a story. You are invited to stand in spotted shade until the spots become the point.

The Volga years change the scale. In 1887 he reached the river for the first time; in 1888–90 Plyos, a small town, became a habit. Evening. Golden Plyos and After Rain. Plyos, both 1889, both now in the Tretyakov, are the first large compositions built from those studies. Tretyakov bought them in 1890. Britannica still names Evening, Golden Ples among the works that made the mood landscape visible. Gold, here, is not jewellery. It is late light on water and timber, a town that has stopped announcing itself. Plyos gave him a wooden church he would later set on a headland in Over Eternal Peace. A place, once loved, can migrate from canvas to canvas like a remembered sentence.

It felt as if windows were unshuttered and flung wide open, and a stream of fresh, sweet-smelling air rushed into the stuffy exhibition room.

Quiet Abode, shown at the nineteenth Peredvizhniki exhibition in 1891, made him public. Benois’s windows are a critic’s metaphor, not a description of brushwork, and they still tell you what the room felt. A monastery, a path, a hush that is not empty. Chizhmak notes membership in the Peredvizhniki that year, and a summer at estates near Tver that fed later, darker canvases. Success, for Levitan, is not a change of subject. It is permission to let the subject be quieter. The abode is a place you approach. Gleb Pospelov, discussed in later Tretyakov writing on Evening Bells, would call such motifs a land sheltered from storms, where the soul thaws. Treat the critic as a companion, not a caption. The paint still has to do the thawing.

Vladimirka, 1892, is a road. The Vladimir Highway ran east from Moscow; it was known as a route along which prisoners were sent toward Siberia. Chizhmak places the picture with Vesper Bell among the works of a summer near Vladimir, in a year when Levitan himself was ordered, in September, to leave Moscow again as a Jew, and returned only by friends’ pleading. He donated Vladimirka to Tretyakov in March 1894, after the collector had bought Over Eternal Peace. A letter survives in the timeline’s telling: take the painting, he wrote, and calm me and her. The road is almost empty. Sky occupies most of the canvas. A small figure, a distant post. Nothing in the paint shouts exile. That is why it hurts. History, here, is a pale track that does not end in the frame.

Evening Bells, also 1892, is the other temperature of that year: a monastery across water, late light, a way toward shelter. If Vladimirka is a road that takes you away, this is a crossing that might take you in. The two pictures are not a pair he titled as such. Hung in the mind together, they are a breath in and a breath out. Bells, in the title, are sound the oil cannot make. You supply them. Levitan often asks for that collaboration. The landscape is completed in the viewer’s weather. A stuffed exhibition room, Benois said of a different canvas, wanted air. Evening Bells is air with a destination.

The same spring of 1892, Chizhmak records a falling-out with Chekhov over the story “Grasshopper,” whose triangle was read as a portrait of Levitan and Sofia Kuvshinnikova. They stayed at odds until January 1895. The quarrel is not the art. It is a reminder that the quiet pictures were made by a man with a life that could bruise. Kuvshinnikova had been companion and fellow sketcher on the Volga. The work outlasts the gossip, as it should. What matters for looking is smaller: these years are when the lyrical landscape learns a historical horizon without becoming a pamphlet. A road. A monastery. A lake that will soon be larger than both.

Over Eternal Peace, 1894, is the large thought. A wooden church on a green headland, a few crosses, a lake like a pale floor, cloud occupying the real estate of heaven. Studies came from Ostrovno and Udomlya in Tver province; the church type had already been seen at Plyos. Chizhmak calls the finished composition the embodiment of the thirty-three-year-old artist’s ideas and emotions, the centrepiece of the oeuvre. A Tretyakov essay on his landscapes quotes Levitan writing to Pavel Tretyakov that all of his personality was in it, all of his psyche, all of his content. The English is the magazine’s. The claim is the painter’s. Look at the disproportion. The church is true and tiny. The water and sky do not console it. They simply continue. Mood, if that is still the word, has become scale.

All of my personality is in it, all of my psyche and all of my content.

Then, as if the lake had used up winter, the year 1895 turns bright. At Gorka, the Turchaninovs’ estate, in a studio built for him, he painted March, Fresh Wind. The Volga, and Golden Autumn, all now in the Tretyakov. March is thaw as a kind of joy: wooden wall, blue shadow, a track going soft, sunlight that has remembered yellow. Chizhmak groups these with a “cheerful” run of pictures. In June of the same year, the same timeline records a suicide attempt in a spell of neurasthenia. The sentence belongs in the life. It does not caption the snow. Heart disease had already been diagnosed. The bright canvases are not a cure. They are what a sick man could still see when the light was good. Reconciliation with Chekhov came in January, through Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik. Melikhovo visits resumed. Friendship, like thaw, is a weather that can return.

Golden Autumn, 1895, is the other famous brightness: birches in yellow, a dark river, a sky that is actually blue. Schoolrooms love it, which is not a reason to condescend. Easy gold is still gold if the river is allowed to be cold. The trees on the left are a curtain. The water is a path that does not need walkers. After Over Eternal Peace, this canvas can look like a holiday. It is a different accuracy. Autumn, for Levitan, is not only decline. It is a few days when the country is lit from inside the leaves. Tretyakov bought March and Golden Autumn in 1896. The collector who had taken the lake of eternity also wanted the thaw and the yellow. That appetite is a kind of criticism. It says the oeuvre is a climate, not a single temperature.

Golden Autumn

The last years are work against a failing heart: Valaam and Finland, Munich Secession, Diaghilev’s Russian and Finnish show, teaching, a passport and permission to live in Moscow in 1899. He painted Spring Flood, moonlit roads, Tempest. Rain, and began the large Lake that would remain unfinished in the Russian Museum. Chizhmak counts about forty unfinished paintings and three hundred sketches at his death. He died on 22 July 1900, 4 August New Style, in Moscow, and was buried in the Jewish Dorogomilovo cemetery; in 1941 the remains were moved to Novodevichy, near Chekhov. The last finished piece, the timeline says, was Hay-making in the Tretyakov. Proximity in a cemetery is not a metaphor you need to lean on. The two men had already shared Babkino, a quarrel, a thaw. The graves only keep the appointment.

Crimea, in 1886, is a useful contrast to the later lake. Chizhmak says he spent two months there — Yalta, Massandra, Alupka, Simeiz, Koreiz, Bakhchisaray — and brought back about sixty sketches. Shown at the Moscow Society of Art Lovers, they sold, and the sale turned his finances. The southern light is not his famous weather. It is proof that he could live by looking when looking was still a student’s gamble. The same summer he was back at Babkino with the Chekhovs. Two climates in one year: Crimean rock, then a henhouse workshop in a Moscow-region village. The oeuvre would remember the village more than the resort. That is not a failure of the Crimean trip. It is a temperament. He needed a place that could be quiet without being empty. Plyos, later, would be that place written larger, on a river that behaves like a thought.

Europe, for him, was intermittent and never the point. Chizhmak’s 1890 journey — Berlin, Paris, Nice, Menton, Venice, Florence — produced Italian and Mediterranean studies, some now in the Tretyakov. He gave a Springtime in Italy to the actress Maria Yermolova. In 1894 there was Vienna, Nice, Como, Paris again; in 1897, Italian and German resorts under doctor’s orders, Alpine views, a chain of mountains. The sick man’s geography is not a grand tour. It is a landscape painter carrying his eye into other people’s weather and still returning, in the major canvases, to a Russian river, a Russian thaw, a Russian lake. Savrasov and Polenov had already taught him that the modest motif could hold. Italy did not convert him to ruins. It sent him home with a sharper sense of what home looked like when it was not trying to be Italy.

Teaching, at the end, is the other quiet. In 1899 he led students to Sokolniki, Kuskovo, Novogireevo, rented country lodges so they could paint from nature, worried over Sapunov and Petrovichev at a Peredvizhniki opening. The boy who had slept at the Moscow school was now the man making sure other boys had a field. Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich visited the studio. A passport finally made Moscow legal. None of that captions Over Eternal Peace. It does explain why the late pictures can feel both private and generous: a lake that does not need you, and a teacher who did. Paolo Trubetskoi made a small bronze of him; Teresa Ris a gypsum bust. The sculptures are later company. The paintings remain the conversation.

What later criticism named a mood landscape is, on the wall, simpler and harder. A Tretyakov essay on his landscapes says a “Levitan landscape” is usually a nearly deserted place — a creek, a path, groves rolling in on a diagonal — with a high sky that has a life of its own. Winter snow is rare. Transitional seasons are not. The tinge of sadness the same essay finds even in the lyrical pieces is not a brand. It is what happens when eternity is allowed into a modest motif without a church having to shout. March and Golden Autumn prove the sadness is not mandatory. They also prove that brightness, in his hands, is still a kind of attention, not a poster. Shishkin will give you the bark. Aivazovsky will give you the wreck. Levitan gives you the hour in which a place seems to know you are there and does not perform.

Begin with Golden Autumn if you want the door that looks like pleasure. Stay for March if you want snow that has started to think about water. Then give Over Eternal Peace the time a lake takes. Vladimirka is the historical road that still pretends to be only dirt. Evening Bells is the other way to walk. Sokolniki is the student already in possession of damp air. The birch grove is sun without a speech. He is not Shishkin, and he is not Aivazovsky. He is the painter for whom a Russian place becomes a mood without ceasing to be a place. After him, a landscape can be quiet and still be the loudest thing in the room.