Tragedy and Isaac Levitan’s Vladimirka Road

In 1892, Isaac Levitan created one of his most famous works, The Vladimirka Road. This 79 × 123 centimeter oil on canvas painting depicts a road with no end, somber and subdued. There is an impossibly vast empty sky, rivaled only by the impossibly vast and empty landscape below. The sole road at the center of the painting somberly stretches to meet an sparse horizon— a heartbreaking expanse of nothing. The muted blues and greys of the sky melt into the landscape’s dulled greens and brown. A solitary figure stands, forever frozen on an endless journey in the middle of the road. Sparse trees and clouds litter the scene, highlighting the emptiness of the rest of the space. The sprawling horizon is large and unending: the sheer space becomes oppressively large to the point of being claustrophobic. There is no visible source of light and this emphasizes the stagnant, unending nature. It is a painting painfully without time or end. In her article “Russia as Space,” Emma Widdis explains how the vast and boundless space of Russia plays an important role in national character with ideas of untapped potential and ‘becomingness’. But within The Vladimirka Road, Levitan takes this concept and brings it into a tragic light. This unending expanse suggests that travellers, like his solitary figure, are forever itinerants, unable to find a place to rest. However, in reality this road did have an end that many, including the artist himself, knew all too well: the Gulag of Siberia. Exiled from their homes, prisoners were forced to walk this road on their journey east. Levitan conveys not only the bleakness of the road’s use but the undoubted nostalgia and beauty that this soon-to-be inaccessible Russian landscape evoked when seen by men who knew they would never return. It is a grief over the loss of Russia that is unlike those of the Itinerant Movement and their ‘Problem Paintings’, such as Vasilli Perov’s “Final Farewell” (1865), which vividly depicts a funeral procession. For Levitan, however, there is a quieter despair: the ‘twilight mood’ of the fin-de-siècle. The ‘twilight mood’ of Russian painting, best represented by Levitan himself, showcases resigned, yet dignified despair. These are works that attempt not to fight against the inevitable dying of the light, but only capture its last moments of beauty before the irrevocable end. What makes Levitan’s work so impactful and lasting is its ability to portray this without the viewer’s full comprehension of the significance.

From the first viewing, unaware of Russian history, the painting is able to evoke the nostalgia and beauty of the landscape alongside the feelings of loss and quiet despair through the mood of the painting alone. Aristotle’s tragic elements of recognition, reversal of fortune, and katharsis are present in this one image. The reversal of fortune and recognition alike of Aristotelian tragedy is evoked through the exiles' plight. Their fortunes are changing with every step along the Vladimirka, away from Moscow and towards Siberia; their futures are irrevocably changing for the worse as they voyage through the landscape. With this irrevocable change, there is also recognition of their irrevocable loss. These exiles with never be able to return, they have lost their Motherland, a very part of their being. Through the painting’s heartbreaking beauty, Levitan is able to show the recognition of this loss in a resigned, but dignified manner, evoking emotions previously unknown to the viewers themselves—the irrevocable rejection and deprivation of their homeland. The Vladimirka Road is a perfect example of how feelings can act as a shortcut to process and understand—without a historical understanding of the painting, the feeling of loss is still present, unnamed and unexperienced

within this lifetime, causing the viewer to question whether the loss is, in fact, unexperienced.