Pushkinian Elements in Isaak levitan's Painting "By the Mill-Pond"

Paul Debreczeny

In December 1884, when Isaak Levitan was twenty-four and still had difficulties earning a living as a painter, his former teacher Vasilii Polenov arranged for him and a number of other young artists to work as designers for a private opera house established by the wealthy patron of the arts Savva Mamontov. At first a somewhat amateurish enterprise, Mamontov's opera soon grew into a serious aspect of Moscow's cultural landscape. It was here that Fedor Shaliapin, one of Russia's most famous singers, was to find his true artistic identity. Up to that time theater design had been left to little-known craftsmen. Mamontov, falling in with the practice of Art Nouveau, employed outstanding painters and made the decor as integral a part of the performance as singing, acting, and music. Levitan participated in designing stage sets for Alexander Dargomyzhskii's Water-Nymph (Rusalka), based on Pushkin's verse drama, for Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov's Snow-Maiden (Snegurochka), Mikhail Glinka's Life for the Tsar (Zhizn' za tsaria), and Charles Gounod's Faust. For The Water-Nymph, which was put on as the theater's debut performance in January 1885, he painted the backdrop of the water-nymphs' underground palace. This revival of Dargomyzhskii's opera, written in 1855, met with great success; people went around singing the arias based on Pushkin's verses. It is characteristic that the students going to the red light district in Anton Chekhov's 1886 story "An Attack of Nerves" sing, ironically, the Prince's words in the last scene, "Here once upon a time I met with love, / A passionate and freely given love.”[1]

Levitan did not participate in stage design any longer than his financial circumstances required him to. By 1891, when his painting "A Tranquil Abode" (Tikhaia obitel’) brought him unprecedented critical acclaim, he had achieved financial independence as a landscape painter. On the other hand, conditions in Russia were deteriorating: wherever Levitan went in the countryside he could not avoid seeing the devastation of the disastrous famine and cholera epidemic of 1891-93. At the same time a new wave of anti-Semitism swept the country, and since he had already had to leave Moscow once to avoid deportation as a Jew, he had every reason to fear renewed persecution. All this caused the mood in his paintings to shift from the lyrical to the dramatic. This shift is clearly reflected in his 1891 picture "By the Mill-Pond" (U omuta).

"By the Mill-Pond" was begun in the summer of 1891, when Levitan and his companion, Soria Kuvshinnikova, stayed at the village of Zatish'e in Tver' Province. When they first arrived in Zatish'e, there were some rainy days, which they spent reading aloud from a couple of collections of Chekhov's stories. The story “Happiness" particularly captivated Levitan, and he praised it highly for its nature descriptions.[2] The weather soon cleared up, however, and they set out to roam the countryside in search of motifs for painting. Levitan's imagination was captured by the site of an erstwhile mill on a small river, where they stopped for a picnic lunch. Remnants of the mill were still visible, and the weir was blocking the flow of the water, forming a deep pond. The Russian word for such a deep pond, omut, brings to mind the saying V tikhom omute cherti vodiatsia, whose literal meaning is "Demons lurk in a deep pond." (The closest equivalent in English may be "Still waters run deep," in the sense that silent conspirators are the most dangerous.) As Levitan started sketching the scene, the Chekhov story he had just read, which recounts peasant superstitions, must have been on his mind, and he reported to Chekhov that "some interesting motifs have emerged."[3] In another letter to the writer he signed himself as "Levitan VII of the Nibelungs," hinting that he was dealing with the stuff of legends.[4] He and Kuvshinnikova came back almost every day to the mill-pond, which turned out to be on an estate called Bernovo, belonging to a certain Baroness Vul'f. One day the Baroness rode by, and when she saw Levitan sketching, she stopped and asked, "Do you realize what an interesting place you're drawing? It's the one that inspired Pushkin to write his Water-Nymph."[5]

The Baroness turned out to be a member of the family that owned Trigorskoe, close to the Pushkins' estate Mikhailovskoe in Pskov Province, where the poet was exiled in 1824-26. The head of the household at Trigorskoe in Pushkin's time was the widow Praskov'ia Aleksandrovna Osipova, who had a son and two daughters by her first husband, Vul'f. Pushkin flirted with the two daughters and became friends with the son, Aleksei Vul'f. He kept in touch with the family even after his exile ended, and visited their estates in Tver' Province, Malinniki and Bernovo, in 1828. In Bernovo they showed him the remnants of the old mill and told him a story connected with it. In earlier times a young feudal peasant, who served as coach driver for his master, fell in love with a miller's daughter and made her pregnant. When his cruel lord learned of this, he punished him by sending him off to serve in the army for twenty years. Having been separated from her beloved one, the miller's daughter grew so desperate that she threw herself into the mill-pond and drowned. The pond had become a feared, evil place in the eyes of the local peasants ever since.[6] This superstition accorded with the poverty and ignorance Levitan saw around him in the countryside, especially in that year of famine and wide-spread disease.

The story Pushkin heard in Bernovo of a pregnant serf mistreated by her owner must have reminded him of his own sexual involvement with one of his mother's serfs, Ol'ga Kalashnikova. As his most recent biographer, T. J. Binyon puts it, ''Though in 'The Country' Pushkin had taken a high moral line against country squires who debauched their serf girls—‘Here young maidens bloom / For the libertine's unfeeling whim'—he had now succumbed to the temptation himself, though his feelings for Olga were perhaps more than just those of a Iibertine.”[7] Her father, Mikhail Kalashnikov, had been the bailiff at Mikhailovskoe until January 1825, when he left for Boldino, an estate of the Pushkins in Nizhnii Novgorod Province, at their command, leaving his family behind for the time being. When he returned to Mikhailovskoe in April 1826 in order to take them to their new home, Ol'ga was well into pregnancy with Pushkin's child. How much Pushkin cared for her future is demonstrated by the letter he sent to his friend Petr Viazemskii in Moscow, asking him to look after her and supply her with money on the way to Boldino. Further he begged Viazemskii to take care of the future child, bringing it up perhaps at the Viazemskiis' estate at Ostaf'evo. "I swear I am ashamed," he added, "but it's a little late for that now."[8] Viazemskii did not see how he could take Ol'ga or her child away from Pushkin's parents, and advised him to write a "half-repentant, half-landownerish" letter to Kalashnikov, entrusting the fate of Ol'ga and her future child to him, and reminding him that he, Pushkin, would some day be his master.[9] Pushkin thanked Viazemskii for his advice and said he would take it.[10] On July 1, 1826, Ol'ga gave birth to a son, Pavel, who died two and a half months later, on September 15. Pushkin did not forget Ol'ga: when he came into his patrimony in 1830, he initiated the process of setting her free. Although she was still his mother's property, he finally succeeded in releasing her from serfdom in June 1831.[11] Ol'ga subsequently married a petty nobleman, Pavel Kliucharev. Push kin's continuing affection for her is evidenced by his willingness to serve as proxy godfather when she and Kliucharev had a son in 1833.[12] Thus Ol'ga, unlike the heroine of The Water-Nymph, did not drown herself, but Pushkin had a sense of guilt about her,[13] which was rekindled by the story he heard in Bernovo. It motivated him in taking up the theme of The Water-Nymph, first conceived in 1826 and completed in 1832.

For his verse drama Pushkin transfers the mill from the small river in Tver' to the Dnepr and makes the seducer of the miller's daughter a Prince. It has been shown that for his heroine's lamentations after she learns that the Prince intends to marry a woman of his own social class, and for her invectives against her rival, Pushkin borrowed a great deal from folk poetry; indeed the drama in general is structured around folk motifs.[14] The Water-Nymph is technically unfinished, but its incomplete nature accords with folk legends, whose events are shrouded in mystery. Evil lurks in the waters that swallowed the miller's daughter; an "unknown power" draws the Prince there; and even though his fate is not spelled out, bad omens unmistakably hint at it. As Levitan worked on the canvas of "By the Mill-Pond" and thought about Countess Vul'f’s story, his work on the stage design of The Water-Nymph was no doubt on his mind.

It is a curious coincidence that in July 1891, just when Levitan was working on his new major project, Chekhov, not having a Pushkin edition at hand, asked his painter friend in a letter if he could quote for him Pushkin's lyric "Remembrance." Levitan did not have a Pushkin edition in Zatish'e either, but he could recall, with near-perfect accuracy (replacing only tesnitsia with tolpitsia), the first half of the lyric:

Когда для смертного умолкнет шумный день,
И на немые стогны града
Полупрозрачная наляжет ночи тень
И сон, дневных трудов награда,
В то время для меня влачатся в тишине
Часы томительного бденья:
В бесдействии ночном живей горят во мне
Змеи сердечной угрызенья;
Мечты кипят, в уме подавленном тоской,
Теснится тяжких дум избыток;
Воспоминание безмолвно предо мной
Свой длинный развивает свиток;
И с отвращением читая жизнь мою,
Я трепещу и проклинаю,
И горко жалуюсь, и горко слезы лью,
Но строк печальных не смываю...[15]

Here is the poem in James Falen’s translation:

When day for mortal men in silence ends
And over all the city's quiet squares
The half-transparent shade of night descends
And sleep knits up the day with all its cares,
Within the hush to me the hours bring
An agonizing sleeplessness and woe:
Amid the idle night the serpent's sting
lnfects my venomed heart with sharper flow;
Dark visions seethe and floods of anguished thought
Assault the very corners of my soul;
Remembrance then, in wordless shadows wrought,
Unravels to my eyes her lengthy scroll;
And reading with disgust the sum of years,
I tremble as I curse the fatal signs,
And murmur bitter plaints with bitter tears,
But will not wash away those grievous lines.[16]

This remorseful lyric was written in May 1828, four months before Pushkin visited Bernovo and took up the theme of The Water-Nymph again. It reflects the poet's state of mind in the late 1820's, after his exile and before his marriage, which was a turbulent period of his life. Nicholas I had brought him back from exile but was making demands on him that he could not fulfill with a clear conscience; although he had not been a Decembrist, he felt he was betraying his Decembrist friends. Despair drove him to dissipation: he lost huge sums at cards,[17] he had three affairs with married women, one of them quite scandalous;[18] he contracted a sexually transmitted disease from a prostitute in April 1828 (a month before he wrote “Remembrance");[19] and he drank heavily.[20] Such is the strange nature of inspiration that in the same period he wrote some of his most poignant lyrics, several chapters of Onegin, and the superb Poltava.

It was a coincidence that Chekhov asked Levitan about "Remembrance" just in July 1891, but it was no coincidence that the painter could quote it from memory, for Pushkin's lyric conveyed his own frequent state of mind, driven as he was by undefined pangs of conscience. His sense of remorse, unlike Pushkin's, was not brought on by anything particular that he had done; it was more like a general state of anxiety. "I would like to convey the sadness spread over nature," he remarked on one occasion. "That sadness for some reason is a reproach to me."[21] This enigmatic remark is perhaps giving voice to corrupted modern man's Rousseauesque shame before unspoiled nature, but it can be understood only in the full context of Levitan's life. He was orphaned in his teens and was torn away from a potentially supportive Jewish community, about which he felt ambivalent; he had to put himself through school with such hardship that he went without dinner for days and slept under the bridge, which left him with a deep sense of insecurity; and at the Moscow School for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture he was made to feel inferior because he was painting "mere landscapes" that did not serve "the cause of the common people." In any case, the mood evoked by Pushkin's Water-Nymph and "Remembrance" resonated well with him, and it suffused the canvas he was designing in the summer of 189l.

First Levitan sketched the mill-pond in pencil, then painted it in watercolor, then proceeded to full-size sketches in oil. As Kuvshinnikova recalls, they had to borrow a cart on which to transport the large canvas to the site and back: Levitan took the driver's seat while she sat at the back holding the large canvas upright, in the same fashion as holy icons were carried from village to village.[22] As Levitan worked on sketch after sketch, the image acquired darker and darker tonalities and more and more of a dramatic character. Closest to the final painting is a sketch in Indian ink that fully conveys an anxious, disquieting atmosphere.[23] How much Levitan needed muted lighting for work in this period is evident from his letter of August 15, 1891, to Maria Chekhova about another painting: "I've begun a very important piece, and I am literally scared to miss one hour of work as I come close to finishing it. I'm painting on an overcast day, and if the same weather stays around for three or four more days, I'll be able to finish."[24] The sketches were made during the summer, and the picture was essentially completed in the fall. It was displayed at the 20th exhibition of the Society for Wandering Art Exhibitions in the spring of 1892, and was acquired by Pavel Tret'iakov for 3,000 rubles.

Employing folkloristic and literary allusions, Levitan implies that a past tragedy has given rise to evil forces lurking in the deep pond, only too ready to lure a new victim. There is no straight path in this picture: some of the logs that should form a walkway to the weir are missing, patched together with a half-hearted effort; to substitute for the damaged walkway, a plank is thrown on the ground toward the weir but is not fully aligned with it; the two boards that should meet the weir on the other side point down toward the pond instead; and the path on that side, curving off to the left in a mysterious way, is covered with planks as though to guard from an underlying morass. The scene is out of kilter. Clouds are advancing on us, and the setting sun's last glow is reflected in the pond, but not with a joyous play of light on the ripples: rather, it seems to radiate from inside the deep water. In this feature, which some critics thought was untrue to nature, Levitan comes close to the art of icons, where light emanates from the figures of Christ, the Holy Virgin, or of saints, rather than from the sun. In his painting, however, the light radiates from an ominous subaqueous force—the same "unknown power" that drew the Prince to the Dnepr inPushkin's Water-Nymph. Levitan does not need dramatis personae in the picture: he puts the mermaids under the water, letting only their vengeful spirit glow from the depth. He has created a visual equivalent to Pushkin's verbal art.

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill