Gregory, Serge Vladimir Antosha and Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 729 hermetic symbolism are called upon to explain his name, the choice of a barrack (lodge) for the meeting with him, his love for singing and his almost feminine features, even his smell of sweat. Other important recurring elements of War and Peace, such as numerology (p. 315), the contraposition of light and darkness, the oak (as tree of life), the comet, the book, the sky, the door, are connected to the same tradition(s). Of particular interest are the idea of death as a form of rebirth to a higher degree of perfection (pp. 350, 355), which explains Prince Andrei’s fate, and the figure of Natasha as personification of Tolstoi’s particular philosophic-religious syncretism. When she speaks of Pierre as ‘dark blue with red’ and ‘rectangular’ she is combining, Faggionato maintains, the traditional colours of Christ’s robe with the hermetic symbolism of divine humanity. Meanwhile, Nikolen´ka’s dream in the epilogue is viewed as an allusion to victory over death and time via connections across generations, ‘in an original interpretation of the alchemic opus as permanent physical and spiritual resurrections of the fathers in the sons’ (p. 368). As we know this solution for Tolstoi was only temporary, and by 1873 he had lost all interest in the hermetic sciences (p. 317). Nevertheless, Faggionato argues that the titles of such late works as Path of Life, Circle of Reading, Resurrection, The Living Corpse demonstrate that Tolstoi had not dismissed a particular way of imagining things, of using words in all their evocative power (p. 369). It is impossible here to do justice to the complexity of this important scholarly study, which should be made available to a wider audience in translation as soon as possible. University of Milan Laura Rossi Gregory, Serge Vladimir. Antosha and Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2015. ix + 248 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.00 (paperback). In his Introduction Serge Gregory comments that, despite the equal billing of the two figures of his title, his focus is principally on Levitan (p. 5). His achievement is to have supplemented the meagre materials on Levitan available outside Russia. He has plumbed sources in archives and libraries in Russia, mainly letters and memoirs relating to the period. Many of the letters were written by Chekhov and Levitan’s mutual acquaintances, mostly women, who loved one or other of the grouping, and sometimes caused painful disagreements or catastrophic fallings in and out of love. SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 730 Chekhov and Levitan were both born in 1860. Both overcame hardship in their early lives, and both experienced a maturation of their artistic prowess in the 1880s and ’90s, accompanied by a substantial and rising popularity. They died within a few years of each other at the height of their creative powers, latterly so undermined by illness: Chekhov of TB in 1904, and Levitan of a weak heart in 1900, possibly brought on by syphilis, contracted much earlier (a topic of particular attention in this study). The counterpointing of these two creative artists draws attention to their small circle of mutual friends, already well known from the extensive materials available on Chekhov’s life. However, it is now clear from Gregory’s work that the love triangles involving Levitan among these friends were especially intense. At the same time, the letters and memoirs provide a fascinating window on the life of artists on private country estates of the period. It was the practice to escape the pressure and climate of the capital cities in the summer months. The luckier ones accepted invitations from wealthy patrons (Levitan occasionally) or, as in the case of both Antosha and Levitasha, they would rent a room or a cottage on the estates of the more impoverished gentry to have time and space to practise their crafts. The correspondence and memoirs not only give information on working practices of the creative artist, but also the leisure times and personal interactions of these summer communities. The reader can trace the sources of Levitan’s Russian landscapes from the various locales he visited and is shown similar...