Volga wind. Volga, the Great Russian River through the eyes of Levitan

Fresh breeze. Volga, 1895

One of Levitan’s brightest and most festive paintings was not easy for him, and was completed after long and hard work. But no other picture, except perhaps Repin’s barge haulers, gives such an accurate and expressive description of the Volga.

Fresh breeze. Volga. Masterpieces of Russian lyrical landscape - Isaac Levitan. Official site. Life and art. Painting, graphics, old photos. - Fresh breeze. Volga, water, river, barges, steamship, blue water, ship, boat, Russia, clouds, happiness, shore. Isaac Levitan, painting, masterpiece, drawings, photo, biography.

Mikhail Nesterov about Isaac Levitan:

“It’s always pleasant for me to talk about Levitan, but it’s also sad. Just think: after all, he was only a year older than me, and after all, I’m still working. Levitan would have worked too, if it weren’t for the “bad luck” early death would not have taken away from us, all who knew and loved him, all the old and new admirers of his talent, a wonderful artist-poet. How many wondrous revelations, how many things in nature that had not been noticed by anyone before him would have been shown to people by his keen eye, his big, sensitive heart. Levitan was not only a wonderful artist- he was a faithful comrade-friend, he was a real full-fledged person..."

A.A. Fedorov-Davydov about Isaac Levitan:

"Isaac Levitan is one of the most significant not only Russian, but also European landscape painters XIX century. His art absorbed the sorrows and joys of his time, melted what people lived by, and embodied creative quest artist in lyrical images native nature, becoming a convincing and full-fledged expression of the achievements of Russian landscape painting..." »

Alexander Benois about Isaac Levitan:

“The most remarkable and precious among Russian artists who brought the life-giving spirit of poetry into callous realism is the untimely deceased Levitan. For the first time, Levitan attracted attention to himself Traveling exhibition 1891. He had exhibited before, and even for several years, but then he did not differ from our other landscape painters, from their general, gray and sluggish mass. The appearance of " Quiet monastery"produced, on the contrary, surprisingly vivid impression. It seemed as if the shutters had been removed from the windows, as if they had been opened wide, and a stream of fresh, fragrant air poured into the stuffy exhibition hall, where there was such a disgusting smell from the excessive number of sheepskin coats and greased boots..."

The Volga met the artist unfriendly.

“I was extremely disappointed,— Levitan wrote to Chekhov. - I was waiting for the Volga , as a source of strength artistic impressions, and instead of this, she seemed so sad and dead to me that my heart ached and the thought came to me: should I go back? And in fact, imagine the following continuous landscape: the right bank, mountainous, is covered with stunted bushes and cliffs, like lichens. Left... completely flooded forests. And above it all grey sky and strong wind. Well, just death... I sit and think, why did I go? I really couldn’t work near Moscow and... not feel alone and face to face with a huge expanse of water that could simply kill... Now it started to rain. This was just what was missing!..”

Levitan rented a room from two lonely old women. I wanted to wait for the weather to change. But, as luck would have it, that year there was a continuous stream of rain. They pounded tirelessly on the roof, keeping them awake at night, and during the day a gray drizzle hung in the air all the time. In the absence of the sun, natural colors “did not sound”; the water and shores merged into a continuous and indistinct mass. Gray and brown shades consumed the space. It was almost impossible to work in the air: the sickly Levitan quickly got wet and cold, his stiff, trembling fingers did not obey him. The clay banks of the Volga, like a sponge, were saturated with water, and there was no way to build the artist’s famous white umbrella into them. Forced to be inactive during the day, Levitan could not sleep for a long time at night and sometimes envied the friendly snoring of his mistresses behind the wall. A well-known melancholy was approaching - a terrible guest that more than once placed Isaac Levitan on the threshold of life and death.

The writer Konstantin Paustovsky tried to get used to Levitan’s circumstances and convey in words what the artist could have felt on his first unsuccessful Volga trip, when blue dream met with gray reality:

“Dawn was lost in the impenetrable wastelands of the night, where an inhospitable wind ruled. Levitan was overcome with fear. It seemed to him that the night would last for weeks, that he was exiled to this dirty village and doomed to listen all his life to wet birch branches whipping against the log wall. Sometimes he would go out on the threshold at night, and the branches would hit him painfully in the face and hands. Levitan got angry, lit a cigarette, but immediately threw it away - the sour tobacco smoke set his jaws.
On the Volga the persistent slavish clatter of steamship wheels could be heard as the tugboat, blinking its yellow lights, dragged stinking barges up to Rybinsk. The great river seemed to Levitan the threshold of a gloomy hell..."

The artist never found contact with the river. The special, almost intimate, closeness necessary for the birth of a lyrical landscape did not arise between the landscape and Levitan. The river seemed alien and unreasonably hostile to him. Disappointed and defeated, he returned to Moscow, confident that he was unlikely to be drawn to the Volga in the future.

But, thinking that the Volga “let go” of him forever, Levitan was mistaken.

Fresh breeze. Volga (1891-1895)

This beautiful canvas is filled with wind, a fresh wind, persistent and stubborn. Who knows whether its gusts will scatter the flying light clouds in the endless high sky stretching over the equally endless blue of the great river, or perhaps they will catch up with new clouds that will soon hide the clear face of the sun from us and cast a heavy dark shadow on the river expanse? The wind blows cheerfully and cheerfully across the wide expanse of the famous Levitan landscape, strains the mighty sail of a self-propelled barge, nails the smoke of steamship pipes to the water, and covers with busy ripples the majestic element of the recently so smoothly balanced Volga waters. White-winged gulls fly low and low over the river...
Fresh breeze! Volga!
Although windy, it was a fine summer day. Somewhere to the side, outside the canvas, the sun is shining, and the white sail of painted bark illuminated by it stands out solemnly against the blue background of the sky. The bark tilts heavily and barely noticeably under the wind blowing into its stern. Its elegant red side sparkles festively over the blue water, expressively contrasting with the whiteness of the sail and the oncoming passenger steamer. A small boat with a lone oarsman rocking on an unsteady wave emphasizes the truly epic size of the barks, tikhvinoks and belyans slowly moving along the green shores, whose huge rudders eloquently testify to the intelligence of our distant ancestors, who got things going for centuries. The composition of the picture seems to draw us into its cheerful, cheerful atmosphere, as if the fresh Volga wind is really blowing at the back of our heads, so that, having washed us with its quivering breath, it rushes forward into the picture, into its boundless, elusive distance, into its jubilant beauty.
There was a time when in the works dedicated to creativity wonderful poet Levitan's Russian nature, the same words were varied in every way, as if capable of interpreting the innermost essence of his landscapes: “quiet sadness” ... “thoughtful sadness” ... “heart-aching melancholy” ... “high sorrow” ... Some -who believed that a difficult childhood and unsecured youth left their clear imprint on all subsequent work of the artist; others saw Levitan's notorious pessimism as a reflection of gloomy conditions public life during the years of political reaction; Still others looked for the key to understanding Levitan’s paintings in the peculiarities of the artist’s painful psyche, in his melancholic mental makeup. It would be possible to dispute these statements or agree with them, but only under one indispensable condition: if the legacy of the great Russian landscape painter really fit into this characteristic, if the definitions we named really exhausted all the enormous emotional richness of his work, in which so often , the cheerful, life-affirming major note sounds so clearly and expressively.
Levitan was in love with Russian nature, and this enthusiastic admiration of the realist artist for the objective beauty of the surrounding world contained a magical healing property that gave him the strength to overcome mental depression and attacks of melancholy generated by severe heart disease, the difficulties of everyday struggle, and a painful social atmosphere. After all, even those of his works in which the elegiac principle predominates are full of high and bright feelings: Levitan always found in nature highest resolution the dark thoughts weighing on him, the guarantee of the final triumph of good and bright forces, the beauty of life over the oppressive feeling of melancholy and hopelessness.
Levitan visited the Volga four times. The legendary Russian river had long attracted him, and long before his first trip its image, glorified in folk songs, beckoned his imagination. “I,” he wrote to Chekhov, “was waiting for the Volga as a source of strong artistic impressions.” And what? Levitan suffered a grave disappointment. Either the stormy, cold summer hid the solemn expanses of the Volga boundless distances behind the gray net of stubborn rains, or the artist himself was not internally prepared to perceive and express a nature that he had not yet comprehended, or his state of mind did not find consonant echoes and “contacts” in the Volga landscape. One way or another, having arrived on the Volga, Levitan experienced a feeling of bitterness and annoyance. Here is a typical excerpt from the same letter to Chekhov:
“I was waiting for the Volga as a source of strong artistic impressions, but instead it seemed so dreary and dead to me that my heart ached and the thought came to me: should I go back? And in fact, imagine the following continuous landscape: the right bank, mountainous, is covered with stunted bushes and cliffs, like lichens. Left... completely flooded forests. And above all this there is a gray sky and a strong wind. Well, just death... I sit and think, why did I go? I really couldn’t work near Moscow and... not feel alone and face to face with a huge expanse of water that could simply kill... Now it started to rain. This was just what was missing!..”
Days passed, long, languid days... And suddenly the ancient and eternal Volga, all transformed, unexpectedly spread out in front of Levitan under the high tent of the bottomless sky, slightly swaying in the rays of the evening sun. There were no stunted bushes or lichen-like cliffs to be seen. A huge expanse of water, “which can simply kill,” appeared to Levitan in all the inexhaustible wealth of its unique artistic motives, in the finest and most refined variations of the now forever famous Volga “Levitan” scale. The Volga “overcame” Levitan, and Levitan “overcame” the Volga.
The singer of Central Russian, mainly Moscow, nature became the singer of the great Russian river, and his Volga landscapes, which captured in intimately lyrical, then in epically monumental images the endlessly changeable, but invariably beautiful sovereign appearance of the queen of Russian rivers, forever merged in our perception with that real the appearance of the Volga, which has long lived and lives in the popular imagination.
...In the foggy haze of the sunset, the Volga majestically and lazily stretches its quiet waters below us, as if resting in this enchanting solemn evening hour (“Evening. Golden Reach”)... It’s soon night. The river quietly splashes on the low meadow bank, in the sleepy peace of the motionless waters, the high sky after sunset glows reflectedly (“Evening on the Volga”). Only now has the rain stopped pouring and, although the day is still breathing bad weather, through the gray clouds carried by the wind and the leaden-cold clouds hanging over the river, no, no, and the yellowish glow of the still invisible sky breaks through (“After the Rain. Reach”). The sun has gone below the horizon, and its farewell rays finally illuminate the whitewashed walls of the distant monastery, from the bell tower of which the pacifying bell of the evening service is heard (“ evening call, evening Bell"). And finally, the bright and sparkling final chord of the entire Volga cycle—“Fresh Wind. Volga!..
“A smile even appeared in your paintings,” Anton Pavlovich Chekhov remarked with satisfaction to Levitan, who sensitively sensed a new ringing note in his friend’s work.
The baseless, erroneous judgment that Levitan’s paintings were painted directly from life, without preliminary sketches and sketches, as God bestowed upon him and as a momentary impulse of whimsical inspiration prompted him, has long been refuted. Each canvas by Levitan is a landscape painting, not a view copied from life, but a generalized image of nature, which sometimes “ripened” for years within the walls of his studio. Almost five for long years Levitan did not remove from the easel and his last picture Volga cycle, begun a year after his fourth and last trip to the Volga, and only in 1896 he decided to show it to the public at the XXIV exhibition of the Association of Itinerants. Isn’t this a creative skill voluntarily taken upon oneself, not highest limit heightening the artist’s sense of responsibility for his work to himself, to the audience and, above all, to the Volga, so amazingly beautiful on this fine summer day, saturated with a fresh wind, forever imprinted in the memory...
All my creative life Levitan marched with the Itinerants. A student of A.K. Savrasov, he was full of love and respect for the one who, in his words, “created the Russian landscape.” Savrasov, Levitan wrote in his obituary for his beloved teacher, unlike his predecessors, elected “no longer exclusively Beautiful places plot for his paintings, but on the contrary, trying to find in the simplest and most ordinary those intimate, deeply touching, often sad features that are so strongly felt in our native landscape and have such an irresistible effect on the soul. From Savrasov appeared lyricism in landscape painting and boundless love for his native land.”
In these words of Levitan one can clearly hear an open recognition of his own artistic pedigree, a deliberate and conscious emphasis on the starting positions of his personal creative path.
A student of Savrasov, and then of Polenov, a successor to the remarkable traditions of Russian realistic landscape, Levitan raised Russian landscape painting to an unprecedented height, equalized its achievements with the achievements of Russian everyday life, history and portrait painting in the works of such geniuses as Repin, Surikov, Serov. His creativity, permeated with a feeling of boundless love for native nature, to her national beauty and poetic originality, developed in line with the advanced democratic traditions of our art, and even refined bourgeois aesthetes were forced to admit that although there are no figures in Levitan’s landscapes, still “the thought involuntarily comes that if there were figures in them, then these would be figures, taken from Peredvizhniki painting."
The fullness of life, the wide and cheerful freedom of song, its truly heroic scope, in which not a single deliberate external effect, not a single superfluous detail can be noticed, captivates the viewer with the painting “Fresh Wind. Volga". And how can we disagree with M.V. Nesterov, a peer, fellow student and friend of Levitan, who clearly defined historical place this wonderful painting:
“Perhaps not a single painting, except Repin’s “Barge Haulers,” gives such a bright, precise characteristics Volga".
But the Volga is Russia...

03.07.2015

Isaac Levitan - Fresh wind. Volga.
Year of creation - 1895
Canvas, oil.
Original size - 72 × 123 cm
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Along with other paintings from 1895, “March” and “ Golden autumn", painting "Fresh wind. Volga" is considered one of Levitan’s most striking and festive paintings. The idea of ​​this painting was born to the artist in 1890, when he was in Plyos, and the painting was completed only five years later. It was exhibited at the 24th exhibition of the Association of Mobile art exhibitions(“Itinerants”) in 1896. The painting depicts the Volga River on a sunny, windy day. On the right side on foreground there is a self-propelled barge with a large sail, towards which a white passenger steamer is sailing. There is also a boat with a lone rower in the foreground, and a city in the distance in the background. "Fresh breeze. Volga" is a painting by Russian artist Isaac Levitan (1860-1900), painted in 1895. The painting is part of the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. The size of the painting is 72×123 cm.

The concept of the painting “Fresh Wind. Volga" was born in 1890, and only 5 years later the artist was satisfied with the result. Creative search required a lot of work and perseverance while Isaac Levitan worked on his canvas. Having finished, I achieved incredible expressiveness of the landscape and depth of the work. Differing from many other works of the artist by its rare optimism and dynamics, this picture will certainly please admirers of Levitan’s work. On the canvas we see a sunny, windy day. The ripples, like the trembling of waves, inspire elation and draw the viewer into the rich colors and river movement wonderful canvas. The content of the picture tells about the undying life of the great Russian river. Its full flow is depicted in expressive colors. The viewer watches how calmly and gracefully the steamboats move along the river, how the tiny boats move briskly, how the unceasing wind drives light clouds over the water and plays with white foam on its surface. It intensifies and speeds up the barge, filling it with new and new strength sail.

The plot is also complemented by heavy, unkempt barges that the tugboat takes to the shore. The clouds stretching beyond the horizon, a city and a ship visible in the distance create a feeling of infinity. A bright palette of colors creates an atmosphere of cheerfulness and cheerfulness. The greenery of the shore is combined with the predominant colors of the sky and water, blue and blue shades, White color clouds, sails and passenger ship. The bright colors of the elegant painted bark and the dark brown shades of heavy barges add color. The canvas is filled with grandeur and spaciousness. Considering that the motif of peace and static beauty of nature predominates in Levitan’s work, we note an important motif and distinctive feature There is energy and movement in this painting.

Description of the presentation by individual slides:

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Russian language lesson Preparation for essay-description based on the painting by I.I. Levitan “Fresh Wind. Volga” prepared by: teacher of Russian language and literature Ismagilova E.R. MBOU "Kugushevskaya OOSH ZMR RT" http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/

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A word about the artist Isaac Ilyich Levitan was born in 1860 in the Kovno province /now Lithuania/ into an educated, intelligent family. The poor family was large /4 children/. Soon Levitan's family moved to Moscow. Isaac's mother died suddenly, and his father soon died too. At the age of thirteen, Levitan entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He studied with Savrasov and Polenov. Thanks to his talent and hard work, Levitan graduated from college with flying colors. He is a great Russian landscape painter who revealed to his contemporaries the modest beauty of Russian nature. The artist had a special, to the point of tears, love for nature. http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/

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A word about the artist In 1898, Isaac Levitan was awarded the title of academician of landscape painting. The artist teaches at the Moscow School of Painting, where he himself once studied. His paintings were successfully demonstrated at the World Exhibition in Paris and at an exhibition in Munich. But soon Levitan’s health deteriorated sharply. I have heart problems and treatment abroad doesn’t help much. On August 4, 1900, Isaac Levitan died. Levitan lived only forty years. Nevertheless, in painting he created his own style of Russian landscape, rightly called Levitan's. http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/

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A word about the artist “Volga period” It is impossible to list everything autumn days, applied by him to the canvases. True, Levitan wrote several “spring works,” but this spring felt like autumn. For the first time, light and shine appeared in his Volga works. Chekhov also told him about this: “Your paintings already have a smile.” The Volga landscapes created by Levitan are diverse. Solemn silence and majestic peace emanate from the paintings “Evening on the Volga”, “After the Rain. Ples" and others http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/

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Analysis of the painting 1. What can you say about this painting? 2. Pay attention to every detail shown in the picture. 3. What kind of water, what kind of sky is depicted? 4. What do you see on the left, right, in the background? 5. The artist was able to show different ships in one picture. Name them. 6. Tell me, on what basis can we conclude that there is a fresh wind on the Volga? 7. What impression did the picture make on you? With the painting “Fresh Wind. Volga” Levitan said a new word in Russian landscape painting. In it, the landscape is not at rest, but in motion. http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/

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Vocabulary and stylistic work I. Artist - author of the picture, painter, master of the brush. A painting is a canvas, a work of art. Depicted - described, showed, drew, conveyed. II. The clouds turn white in the sky (like smoke). The white steamer floats (like a swan). Seagulls fly over the water (like snowflakes). The water shines (like silver). http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/

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Oral history according to the essay plan Essay plan. 1. General information about the artist I.I. Levitan and the themes of his paintings. 2. general characteristics paintings (theme, time of year, what colors predominate) 3. Description of details (ships different types, Volga water, sky, shore) 4. Evaluation of the painting. The feelings it evokes, the impression it makes. Isaac Levitan painted his painting entitled “Fresh Wind. Volga" in 1895. The picture is very rich in content, has expressive colors and even elegance. The artist provides the viewer with an image of a full-flowing river in Russia, on which life does not fade away. The color scheme is quite contrasting and is made in cool tones, mainly blue color water flows perfectly with green shores. The sky is also full blue all shades, and thanks to the clouds, there is a feeling of large space. http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/

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An approximate story based on the painting by I.I. Levitan is a wonderful Russian artist who painted many amazingly beautiful paintings of nature. He was a true master of the brush. Any of his works is a real masterpiece. One of them is “Fresh wind.” Volga "". In the painting by I. Levitan "Fresh wind. Volga" depicts a fine summer day on the banks of the Volga River. The sun is shining. The sky is blue-blue. And fluffy white clouds float across the sky. You look at the picture and feel how the fresh wind pushes the clouds forward. There is a feeling of freedom and flight. High blue sky is reflected in the water with blue-silver reflections, and from this the water becomes saturated blue. In the foreground of the artist’s canvas we see a boat, and in it a fisherman, who is probably returning from fishing. Seagulls circle around him. Birds fly low, near the water, hunting for fish. There are old ships at the pier. The tug steamer moves heavily, churning the water, pulling huge barges behind it. One of them has a sail raised, and it seems that it is about to set off. Beautiful “barks” walk smoothly, decorated folk ornament. On the left is a white steamship. He swims like a swan. In the background, almost along the horizon, the outlines of distant buildings, forests and fields are visible. The picture is dominated by cheerful, bright hues, it is all permeated with light and air. You look at the picture and it becomes easier to breathe. The fresh wind that swept over the Volga seemed to breathe new strength into it. It seems that you will now board a ship and sail along the wide Volga. Levitan’s painting, fanned by the breath of the Volga wind, evokes joyful feelings and immerses us in the world of beauty. http://linda6035.ucoz.ru/