Russian Tourism & Painting
While Russian academic artists were travelling through Italy and creating classical landscapes, others were actually taking an interest in drawing and painting their own land. This neglect of Russia’s geography by its own painters is highlighted by Dostoevsky’s aggrieved question: “Does there exist a Russian…who doesn’t know Europe twice as well as Russia.”?[1] In other words tourism did not exist in Russia; it was unattractive as a place of vacation or retreat for artists and the intelligentsia. Russia missed out on the aesthetic picturesque movement of the nineteenth-century, largely because of the European focus; but also because most of the descriptions of Russia were in writing: travel journals, diaries of educated tourists, and novels such as Gogol’s Dead Souls. Another factor was the vast geographical distances in Russia compared to Western Europe, not to mention the primitive accommodation available to the Russian tourist-artist. The landscape seemed unwelcoming too; this external hostility of the Russian countryside was thought to contain some inner, mystical quality that would reveal itself to the seeker only gradually.[2] The emergence of Russian tourism also coincided with renewed interest in the religious architecture, especially provincial churches and far-flung monasteries. The picturesque was rejected; history was embraced as monasteries and similar buildings on the outskirts of centres like Moscow and Novgorod. Levitin’s Evening Bells (above) is a good example of how the “holy and the picturesque” could melt together in a spiritual/artistic epiphany. This spiritual picturesque relied heavily on mood and atmospheric effects in nature; hence later nineteenth-century works like Vasily Polenov’s, Moscow Courtyard or the brooding landscapes of Levitin, one of the founder-members of the Moscow Group.
[1] Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, cited in Christopher Ely, “The Picturesque and the Holy: Visions of Touristic Space in Russia, 1820-1850” in Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present, eds James Cracraft, Daniel Rowland, (Cornell University Press, 2003), 80-89, 81.
[2] Ibid, 82.
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