Nazi Germany reached the Volga River in late fall of 1942. Hitler was intent on crossing the Volga, completing the conquest of Stalingrad, and capturing the rich oil fields of the Caucasus. It is widely accepted in historical circles that the Soviet Union would have been defeated had Stalingrad been a German victory, and the Third Reich’s forces been able to cross the Volga. The Volga is one of many Russian rivers, as is the Dnieper, that have appeared over and over again in name and image in our study of Russia’s culture. There have also been innumerable nameless rivers that are mentioned in the works we have reviewed so far this semester. The Russian visual artistic tradition is as reliably river-featuring as Russian literature. In my review of the paintings for this session, I was struck by the absolute breadth of styles and subjects present even within the Itinerants school of the late 19th century. From Vereshchagin’s paintings of exotic Napoleonic locales, to Makovsky’s epic historical scenes, the 14 Itinerants had as many focuses as there were painters part of the “Society of Traveling Exhibitions”. As a result of this, I focused my analysis on the factors that many of the paintings did have in common. Rivers and bodies of water featured in several paintings, across the Itinerants. Usually in the background, the rivers did not feel like a forced subject, or even prototypical setting. The rivers featured in many of the paintings felt like a well-established character, one that makes sense when familiar with even a small portion of Russian literature. It is this vaguely unconscious quality that gives the rivers their borderline omni-present quality, in most Russian landscape painting and some outdoor portraits.
The Itinerant Isaak Levitan, quite clearly made rivers the absolute focus of many of his paintings. Levitan’s work is reminiscent of some of the river-obsessed literature we have surveyed, placing rivers at the heart of Russian identity, landscape, and cultural. His ideas of bodies of water emphasize their importance and beauty, as shown in “Evening Bells”.
Levitan’s colleague Mikhail Nesterov incorporated rivers into his art in a slightly different fashion. His rivers appear like a subtle reminder within the paintings, evoking the sentiment “We are here. You owe us everything”. Perhaps most indicative of Nesterov’s attitude is the prominent featuring of a river in his self-portrait.
Other artists feature rivers occasionally, and often in an extremely symbolic fashion, recalling the place they occupy in Russian culture, as Yereshenko does in “Blind Musicians”.
Savrosov (Evening Flight), however, hints at bodies of water, often featuring them around the periphery, as a minor character of sorts among the other pillars of the painting.
This is perhaps the most accurate way of depicting flowing water in Russian life: familiar and omnipresent.