you can't take your eyes off it; you just want to keep looking and looking at it. No one has managed to achieve the simplicity and purity of conception which Levitan achieved at the end of his life and I do not know if anyone else will ever achieve anything like it.'113
In 1886 Levitan made the first of several trips to the Volga steppe. These marked the start of a new epic style in his landscape painting, completely different from the intimate and lyrical approach to nature in his earlier landscapes of the Moscow provinces. The first of these epic canvases was Evenings on the Volga (1888), where the steppe-land's broad expanse is suggested indirectly by the dominating presence of the sky. Chekhov, too, was inspired by a visit to the Volga steppe-lands at this time. His approach to landscape in 'The Steppe' (1887), the first story to bring him literary fame, was very similar to Levitan's:
A wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills lay stretched before the travellers' eyes. Huddling together and peeping out from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground, which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the violet distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or where it ends…114
Enthused by the steppe, the two men thought of travelling together to Siberia, and Chekhov included his friend in his plans for the trip to Sakhalin. Levitan was in the entourage of friends and family who accompanied the writer on the first leg of his trip. But he did not go with Chekhov to Siberia, deciding in the end that he could not leave his lover and her husband for that long. Chekhov was annoyed at Levitan (it was perhaps the cause of his cruel satire in 'The Grasshopper' which broke off their relations for three years). In several letters from Siberia Chekhov told his sister that the artist was a fool to miss out on the scenery of the Yenisei, on the unknown forests and the mountains of Baikaclass="underline" 'What ravines! What cliffs!'115
Like Chekhov, Levitan was drawn towards Siberia's penal history. In his Vladimirka (1892) (plate 23) he combined landscape art with a social history of the steppe. It was Levitan's attempt to achieve in painting what Chekhov had achieved in Sakhalin. The idea of the painting had come to levitan on a hunting trip with his lover, the young artist Sofya Kuvshinnikova (the one described by Chekhov in
'The Grasshopper'). The painter had chanced upon the famous highway near Boldino in Vladimir province. Levitan had just been staying with Chekhov and Chekhov had told him of his trip to Sakhalin, so perhaps this influenced the way he saw the road.116 'The scene was pregnant with a wondrous silence', recalled Kuvshinnikova.
The long white line of the road faded as it disappeared among the forests on the blue horizon. In the distance one could just make out the figures of two pilgrims… Everything was calm and beautiful. All of a sudden, Levitan remembered what sort of road this was. 'Stop,' he said. 'This is the Vladimirka, the one on which so many people died on their long walk to Siberia.' In the silence of this beautiful landscape we were suddenly overwhelmed by an intense feeling of sadness.117
Looking at this scene, as Levitan portrayed it, one cannot fail to feel the desolation - it is haunted by the suffering of those distant prisoners, by people like Volkonsky, who for three hot summer months had dragged his heavy chains along the Vladimirka to Siberia.
Chekhov's 'Steppe' is also dominated by this atmosphere of suffering. Its boundless space seems inescapable - a prison in itself. The landscape in the story is stifling and oppressive, without sound or movement to disrupt the tedium. Time seems to come to a standstill, the scenery never changes, as four men cross the steppe in a 'shabby covered chaise'. Everything is subdued by a feeling of stagnation and desolation. Even the singing of a woman in the distance sounds so sad that it 'made the air more suffocating and stagnant'.118
Chekhov's ambiguity toward the steppe - seeing both the beauty and the bleak monotony of its vast space - was shared by many artists and writers. There were many, on the one hand, who took pride and inspiration from the grandeur of the steppe. In the epic history paintings of Vasnetsov and Vrubel, for example, the heroic stature of the legendary figures of the Russian past is thrown into relief by the monumental grandeur of the steppe. In Vasnetsov's painting After Igor's Battle with the Polovtsians (1880), the notion of the epic is carried entirely by the vastness of the steppe, for what commands the eye is the lowered line of the horizon. Similarly, in his Bogatyrs (1898), it is the landscape which is the real subject of the painting, rather than
the legendary warriors from which it takes its name. This is emphasized by the central bogatyr, who puts his hand against his brow to gaze farther into the distance. Vrubel's panneau of the legendary ploughman Mikula Selianovicb (1896) is similar in this respect - the strangely inert peasant figure is raised to epic status by his relationship with the landscape. For these artists the national character had been shaped by the open plain: the Russians were as 'broad and unrestrained' in nature as the boundless steppe. This was the view which Gogol took in his 'Thoughts on Geography', published in his collection Arabesques in 1835. He also expounded it in his story 'Taras Bulba', where the vast size of the steppe is used as a projection of the Cossacks' open nature and expansiveness. Many artists thought that the boundless plains were a spur to contemplation and religious hope - its infinite horizon forcing people to look upwards to the sky.119 Chekhov, too, was inclined to fantasize that 'giants with immense strides such as Ilia Muromets' were still alive and that, if they were, 'how perfectly in keeping with the steppe… they would have been!'120
On the other hand, the sheer monotony of the never-ending steppe drove many Russian poets to despair. Mandelstam called it the 'watermelon emptiness of Russia' and Musorgsky, 'the All-Russian bog'.121 At such moments of despair these artists were inclined to view the steppe as a limitation on imagination and creativity. Gorky thought that the boundless plain had
the poisonous peculiarity of emptying a man, of sucking dry his desires. The peasant has only to go out past the bounds of the village and look at the emptiness around him to feel in a short time that this emptiness is creeping into his very soul. Nowhere around can one see the results of creative labour. The estates of the landowners? But they are few and inhabited by enemies. The towns? But they are far away and not much more cultured. Round about lie endless plains and in the centre of them, insignificant, tiny man abandoned on this dull earth for penal labour. And man is filled with the feeling of indifference killing his ability to think, to remember his past, to work out his ideas from experience.122
but it was not just the peasant who became more dull from living on the steppe. The gentry did as well. The loneliness of living in a
country house, miles away from any neighbours in that social class, the lack of stimulation, the interminable hours without anything to do but stare out of the windows at the endless plain: is it any wonder that the gentry became fat and sluggish on the steppe? Saltykov-Shchedrin gives a wonderful description of this mental slumber in The Golovlyov Family (1880):
[Arina] spent most of the day dozing. She would sit in her armchair by the table where her grubby playing-cards were laid out and doze. Then she would wake with a start, look through the window and vacantly stare at the seemingly boundless fields, stretching away into the remote distance… All around lay fields, fields without end, with no trees on the horizon. However, since Arina had lived almost solely in the country since childhood, this miserable landscape did not strike her as in the least depressing; on the contrary, it even evoked some kind of response in her heart, stirring sparks of feeling still smouldering there. The better part of her being had lived in those bare endless fields and instinctively her eyes sought them out at every opportunity. She would gaze at the fields receding into the distance, at rain-soaked villages resembling black specks on the horizon, at white churches in village graveyards, at multi-coloured patches of light cast on the plain by clouds wandering in the rays of the sun, at a peasant she had never seen before, who was in fact walking between the furrows but who seemed quite still to her. As she gazed she would think of nothing - rather, her thoughts were so confused they could not dwell on anything for very long. She merely gazed and gazed, until a senile drowsiness began to hum in her ears again, veiling the fields, churches, villages and that distant, trudging peasant in mist.123