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Monthly Archives: May 2013
Levitan’s Women
With my departure for Moscow less than two weeks away, I’m finishing up translating all of Levitan’s published letters to ensure that I don’t overlook anything that should be followed up from sources in the Russian State Library or archives. … Continue reading
Levitan Proposes
With a household full of Chekhov siblings and their guests, all spirited, intelligent men and women in their 20s, the atmosphere at Babkino in the summer of 1886 was both lively and emotionally charged. One day Maria Chekhova was walking … Continue reading
The Ridiculous Jew
When Levitan arrived at Babkino at the end of May 1886, the Chekhov clan (Anton, sister Maria, brothers Nikolai and Mikhail, and their mother) was already comfortably settled into their summer routines at the estate. For a month Chekhov had … Continue reading
Levitan and Russian Impressionism
Konstantin Korovin, Levitan’s classmate at the Moscow School of Painting, recalled that their teacher the Itinerant painter Vasily Polenov introduced them to French Impressionism in their landscape class. But Impressionism didn’t make much of an impact on Russian painters in … Continue reading
Was Chekhov an Impressionist?
This is not a question to be answered in a few paragraphs. It is a thread that runs throughout Antosha and Levitasha, especially since Levitan is usually thought of as a Russian Impressionist painter. Associating Chekhov with Impressionism has always … Continue reading
Levitan’s Lost Letters
After Chekhov died in 1904, his sister Maria set about methodically to retrieve his voluminous correspondence. The 1974-83 Soviet Academy of Sciences Complete Collected Works and Letters of Chekhov contain 4,468 letters, although some were cut by the prudish Maria … Continue reading
Crocodile! Крокодил!
The very first morning at Babkino, the country estate where he spent the summer of 1885, Chekhov set out to place one of the fish traps he brought from Moscow carefully tied to the back of a cart. As he … Continue reading
Antosha and Levitasha 