Pushkinian Elements in Isaak Levitan's Painting "by the Mill-Pond" (Notes‪)‬

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).