Levitan's Lesson

Continuation of "A Picture Perfect Day in Plyos, Russia"


The tea has simmered, the walk has ended; it’s time to open the envelope in my pocket and discover what the perfect day has to teach me. . .  
  
It involves a man I've never met and will never meet.  A man who spent time in Plyos, 120 years before I arrived. A man whose work touched me before I even knew his name.


When I visited the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow for the first time, I bought only one item in the gift shop, a 5 X 7 print of Golden Autumn.  Of all the paintings I had seen that day, it was the one that I wished I could enter, to sit on the grassy river bank, to hear the jostling of the yellow and orange leaves as the breeze played hide and seek among their branches, to feel the sun on my face, to be warmed by Nature. A perfect day.


I wondered about the man who created it.  Issac Levitan, a painter of landscapes.      

"Self portrait," Issac Levitan
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I encountered him again in Plyos, as I wandered from room to room in his museum, seeing a re-creation of his apartment/studio, a small collection of his paintings, and learning about his journeys to the town to paint.  I imagined him climbing up a wooded hillside, strolling along the Volga's embankment, balancing on a precarious log across a meandering stream, searching for landscapes that "spoke" to him.   

My lesson does not lie in the telling of Levitan's story, except for three facts.  He experienced extreme poverty in his early life; he died 3 weeks shy of his 40th birthday, and he left "more than 1000 oil paintings, water colors, and other works on paper." 1000! (Issac Levitan)

When he was hungry and homeless in Moscow, why didn't he get a "real job," something, anything, to pay the bills?  Why not delay his passion for painting for a few years, when his life was more stable?  Put it off a while.  He was young.  There would be time for such an indulgence when he was older.  What made him think he could be a successful painter anyway? 


Doubts. Reality. Choices. For Levitan, the drive, the necessity to create, must have outweighed all the "cons" on his "What To Do With My Life" decision-making list.  The force of nature and his deep connection to it, must have propelled him forward, leaving little choice but to act.  Nine hundred and ninety-nine or so pieces of his art depict nature, devoid of any human forms.  Only one, Autumn Day Sokolniki, shows a woman walking on a path, dwarfed by the blowing trees and swirling clouds. Yet his own words reflect his feelings of inadequacy in doing justice to what he sees around him or feels in his heart.


"What can be more tragic than to feel the grandeur of the surrounding beauty and to be able to see in it its underlying mystery. . . and yet to be aware of your own inability to express these large feelings." 
-Issac Levitan

Still, he persevered.


 Levitan's lesson to me as a writer is to forge ahead, to honor the words that need to be voiced, valuing my uniqueness to express them. As his short life reveals in the gifts of art that he left us, life may not wait for the perfect day to get started or to keep going.


And what about you? Is there an envelope hidden in your pocket?

"Golden Autumn," Issac Levitan
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

To view more of Levitan's work, check this website:
http://www.artistsandart.org/2010/08/russian-landscape-painter-isaak-levitan.html