ウラジーミルカ街道

For more than a hundred years this dirt road east of Moscow carried convicts on foot toward Siberia and hard labour. People called it the Vladimirka, after the town of Vladimir it ran to, and everyone in Russia knew what the name meant. Levitan came upon it by accident in 1892, out hunting near a village where he was staying, and recognised where he was standing. By then the prisoners went by train, so the road he painted is empty. A single small figure, a pilgrim, waits by a wayside shrine, and the track runs off toward a pale, low horizon under a heavy sky. There is no chained column, no guard, no drama at all. The history is carried entirely by the emptiness and by the title. Two years later Levitan gave the canvas to Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow collector whose gallery still holds it, and it hangs there now among the darkest work he ever made.