Traces of the Exiled: Absence and Cultural Memory in Levitan’s Vladimirka
Author: Alexandra Ross, McGill University
Editor: Rachel Barker
A solitary road stretches across a desolate landscape, its rutted tracks vanishing into an infinite horizon beneath a sky heavy with muted greys. Vladimirka (1892), Isaac Ilyich Levitan’s depiction of the road to Siberian exile, is often regarded as a Realist landscape, capturing the physicality of a solitary road stretching beneath a muted grey sky (Fig. 1). The painting’s stark minimalism and attention to detail evoke the desolate atmosphere of the Russian countryside. However, Vladimirka is no ordinary Russian road; it is embedded with historical trauma, its rutted tracks weathered by the footsteps of countless exiles condemned to Siberia. The road, steeped in suffering and repression, transforms the painting into more than a Realist depiction of a landscape – it becomes a charged space resonating with the spectral presence of the displaced. Levitan’s personal experiences of marginalisation as a Jewish artist further deepen the painting’s engagement with themes of exile and erasure, making the road a corporeal archive of loss.
The Vladimirka Road, a name now synonymous with suffering and repression, was once a vital route connecting Moscow with Siberia. In the nineteenth century, it became notorious as a path to oblivion, used to transport political prisoners and criminals alike to Siberian exile.[1] Thousands of individuals, stripped of their freedom and identities, trudged along this road toward a grim fate in penal colonies, many of them never to return. Their footsteps left physical traces on the earth, transfiguring the road into more than a thoroughfare; it became a corridor of exile where the body itself served as an instrument of punishment through forced displacement.
By overlooking Vladimirka’s role as a repository of cultural memory, we risk reducing it to a static representation of the past, failing to acknowledge its dynamic engagement with historical violence. This diminishes the painting’s ability to provoke acts of remembrance and to challenge viewers to confront the erasure of lives marked by exile. This paper situates Vladimirka within its historical context, arguing that its Realist composition serves as a framework for Levitan to transform the road into a site of cultural memory. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “trace”[2] and comparing the painting to Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead,[3] I analyse how Levitan’s road functions as a corporeal archive, where the absence of visible bodies amplifies their enduring presence, ultimately positioning Vladimirka as a visual elegy for the exiled.
Levitan’s decision to depict the Vladimirka Road was informed by his own experiences of marginalisation and displacement. Born into a Jewish family in the Pale of Settlement, Levitan faced the harsh realities of life in a region established in the late eighteenth century to confine and manage the Russian Empire’s Jewish population.[4] Stretching across parts of modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, it was created following the partitions of Poland, as the Russian Empire sought to manage its newly acquired Jewish population. Within the Pale, Jews faced severe restrictions on their movements, professions and rights, while anti-Semitic policies and periodic violent pogroms reinforced their marginalised status.[5] Though he was celebrated as one of Russia’s greatest landscape painters, his identity as a Jewish artist remained a source of vulnerability. Imperial Russian and Soviet scholars mostly ignored this aspect of his life [6]
In May 1892, a decree by Alexander III forced Levitan, as a person of Jewish origin, to leave Moscow.[7] He relocated with his companion and fellow artist Sofia Kuvshinnikova to the village of Gorodok in the Vladimir region. During a hunt, they encountered the Vladimirka Road which Kuvshinnikova described as having a “wonderful, quiet charm,” with its long white-washed road, weathered icon and ancient golubets[8] evoking a sense of antiquity.[9] By the 1890s, the Vladimirka Road was no longer used to march convicts to Siberia, as they were instead transported by railway, which explains the serenity of the scene.[10] Having recalled the history of this road, Levitan later revisited it to create sketches, which became the foundation for his painting.[11] Uncharacteristically, he inscribed the title Vladimirka directly onto the canvas, highlighting the importance of knowing the road’s name.[12]
Levitan’s depiction of this composition reflects a broader cultural preoccupation with exile in nineteenth-century Russia. From the penal systems described in Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead [13] to the lamentations of exiled Decembrists,[14] the theme of forced removal permeated Russian literature and art. The missing figures commemorated by Vladimirka reflect this shared cultural memory, as Levitan uses the landscape itself to memorialise those erased by the state. In doing so, he transforms the road into a liminal space, where it becomes a symbol of physical displacement and a site of haunting.
Levitan’s Vladimirka draws the viewer into an austere composition where every element of the landscape commemorates the echoes of lived experiences once present. The painting’s most striking feature is its emptiness – an expanse of muted fields bisected by the road that dominates the scene. The rutted tracks, worn into the earth, speak to the repeated passage of human footsteps, a monotonous rhythm that has worn the soil into submission. These tracks, devoid of the visible bodies, function as inscriptions – physical manifestations of lives marked by suffering and erasure. This trace of human presence in Vladimirka aligns with Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “trace.” For Derrida, the trace signifies the simultaneous presence of an absence – a lingering residue that recalls what has been lost while generating new meaning.[15] The road’s marks testify to those absent. Levitan includes the solitary mourning figure, but her presence does not diminish the overwhelming sense of vacancy; instead, it amplifies it. She becomes part of the trace – a living witness to the void left by others erased through systemic violence. The materiality of the tracks, coupled with her presence, transforms the road into an active repository of historical trauma.
The road’s diagonal trajectory pulls the viewer’s gaze into the distance, evoking the unrelenting march of exiles toward an uncertain and often terminal future. The restrained colour palette, dominated by greys, browns and ochres, heightens the desolation of the scene. The overcast sky, heavy with diffused light, blankets the landscape in an oppressive atmosphere, evoking the weight of historical trauma and the absence of hope. Yet subtle tonal shifts – the faint glow on the horizon and the distant white church – introduce a sense of ambiguity. These elements suggest a liminal space where memory and erasure converge, offering neither resolution nor closure. This interplay of light and shadow transforms the painting into a temporal threshold, a realm where past suffering lingers and future redemption remains elusive.
The composition juxtaposes two key elements that disrupt its emptiness: the solitary figure of a woman and the distant white church on the horizon. The woman, clad in black, kneels at a golubets – her posture a poignant embodiment of both physical and spiritual burdens. Her presence ties her to the countless exiles who traversed this path, their suffering memorialised by the road’s scarred surface. Averil King observes that the woman, set against the desolate road and somber landscape, creates a scene imbued with “sadness and foreboding,” reflecting the despair of those condemned to journey eastward through this wilderness.[16] Yet the fact that Levitan depicts a woman rather than a male convict introduces a gendered dimension to this suffering—women were rarely exiled themselves, yet they were expected to bear the pain of displacement from the outside, following their husbands or fathers into Siberia, supporting them, and carrying grief that was not their own. Her kneeling posture, in this sense, does not merely signal personal sorrow but aligns with a broader cultural expectation that women shoulder both emotional and material burdens, rendering them silent witnesses to exile’s devastation.
The golubets offers a fleeting moment of respite, one that Serge Shavirin calls ‘a memento mori,’ but its diminutive size underscores the insignificance of individual suffering against the vastness of systemic punishment.[17] The distant white church serves as a counterpoint to the woman’s black-clad figure. Positioned on the horizon, the church might symbolize spiritual hope or redemption, yet its remoteness complicates its role as a source of comfort. It becomes both an object of longing and a marker of distance. The church’s location within its desolate, exiled territory mirrors a sense of religious alienation, echoing Levitan’s own experiences of persecution for his Jewish faith. His inclusion of the church in such a landscape reflects an unresolved tension with salvation – a tension heightened by the dominant narrative at the time, which dictated that Jewish artists like him had no right to engage with the Russian landscape. This prejudice, as Konstantin Pautovsky notes, haunted Levitan throughout his career, from being denied the title of artist upon graduation from the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture to the broader struggles of carving out a place for himself in Russian art.[18] The road, connecting the woman to the church, symbolizes the arduous journey from despair to an elusive promise of salvation.
Levitan’s focus on absence situates him within a broader tradition of artists who use emptiness and erasure to evoke trauma. Comparisons can be drawn to Caspar David Friedrich’s use of vast, empty spaces to suggest spiritual longing and loss. However, where Friedrich’s works often gesture towards transcendence, Levitan’s remains rooted in the material realities of human suffering. For instance, Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808–1810) (Fig. 2) presents a solitary figure dwarfed by an overwhelming expanse of sky and water, evoking the sublime through the insignificance of man before nature’s vastness. The monk’s isolation suggests not only melancholy but also the possibility of divine revelation – a contrast to Levitan’s treatment of solitude as an inescapable condition of exile. Vladimir Petrov describes the work as polyphonic, suggesting that “melancholy and solitude do not entirely dominate the painting,” pointing to Levitan’s love for the natural landscape.[19] This interpretation, however, risks diluting the painting’s stark confrontation with the brutality of exile. There are no sublime qualities to this work – the muted colour palette and the desolate landscape leave little room for the romanticisation of nature. The painting’s absence is not a metaphysical void but a specific and historical absence, tied to the physical and emotional toll of exile. This distinction highlights Levitan’s unique contribution to the art historical discourse on trauma, as he bridges the personal and the collective through the medium of landscape.
His brushwork, marked by its delicacy and precision, conveys a tactile sense of the landscape’s physicality. The textures of the road, fields and sky invite the viewer to imagine the physical sensations of the space – the uneven ground underfoot, the chill of the air, the oppressive weight of the sky. This attention to material detail reinforces the painting’s role as a repository of memory. The landscape itself becomes an archive of human suffering, its contours standing in for the human presence it has outlived. Just as W. J. T. Mitchell argues that landscapes act as “social hieroglyphs” – obscuring the power dynamics and historical forces that shape them – Vladimirka transforms the physicality of the road into a record of imperial control.[20] The painting reveals how the contours of the landscape bear witness to human suffering, presenting the road as both a site of historical testimony and a silent enforcer of exile’s systemic erasure. By shifting the landscape from passive backdrop to active testimony, Levitan compels his viewer to confront the absence of figures as an act of remembrance, transforming the road into an archive of erased lives and a meditation on the enduring traces of collective historical trauma.
Levitan’s Vladimirka and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead share a preoccupation with exile and its enduring impact on the human condition.[21] Both works transform the landscapes of exile into active participants in the articulation of cultural memory, yet they differ in their approach to the themes of trauma and absence. By focusing on the road in Vladimirka and the prison yard in Dostoevsky’s semi-autobiographical work, we can trace how each artist uses absence to evoke the persistence of erased lives while engaging the audience in acts of remembrance.
In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky describes the Siberian penal colony where exiles endure a loss of individuality and humanity: “Looking through the crevices between the palisade in the hope of seeing something, one sees nothing but a little corner of the sky and a high earthwork, covered with the long grass of the steppe.”[22] The barrenness of the prison yard becomes a symbol of the spiritual and physical desolation experienced by the inmates. The small fragment of visible sky functions equally as a reminder of their limited freedom and a paradoxical embodiment of possibility. While the sky connotes boundlessness, its constriction to a ‘little corner’ reinforces the claustrophobic oppression of exile, emphasizing the prisoners’ disconnection from the world beyond the labour camp. This image echoes Vladimirka, where the open road similarly represents the possibility of movement and the inevitability of suffering for those forced to traverse it. In both works, the landscape blurs the line between freedom (perhaps even the sublime) and confinement through imperial control, embedding the pain of absence within natural and built environments.
Dostoevsky’s narrative is, however, not entirely devoid of hope. He observes moments of reflection among the inmates, where even the oppressive landscape is temporarily transformed by spiritual resilience and redemption. This particular reflection occurs during a rare theatrical performance staged by the convicts, where they improvise roles and create a shared experience of joy and humour amidst their suffering. He writes: “These unhappy men had been permitted to live for some moments in their own way... to escape for a brief hour from their sad position as convicts; and a moral change was effected, at least for a time.”[23] This excerpt highlights how these fleeting moments of reprieve allowed the convicts to reclaim some sense of humanity, even within the constraints of their environment. This instance of human connection and agency stands in contrast to the next passage of the groaning despair of nighttime, punctuated by the rattle of chains, nightmares and the rhythmic prayer of an Old Believer.[24] The labour camp, while oppressive, and the lived experiences of those confined to it, offer glimpses of personal redemption and transformation, making exile both a punishment and a crucible for spiritual renewal.
Vladimirka, by contrast, denies the possibility of redemption. The road in the painting offers no relief or resolution, its infinite trajectory dissolving into an ambiguous horizon. Unlike Dostoevsky’s prison yard, which contains the aforementioned moments of human interaction and introspection, Levitan’s road is empty aside from a ghostly figure praying, amplifying the scar-like silence and emptiness of exile. The road itself, marked by worn tracks, bears the trace of the exiles who walked it, but it offers no indication of their survival or transformation. In this way, Vladimirka suggests a more unrelenting vision of historical trauma, one where absence is total and irreversible. Both works, however, compel the audience to engage with the absent bodies they evoke. In Dostoevsky’s prose, the prisoners’ stories serve as a counterpoint to their erasure, ensuring that their humanity is preserved in the reader’s memory. Similarly, Levitan’s Vladimirka demands that the viewer confront the absence of figures as an act of remembrance. The road becomes a silent witness to exile, its emptiness challenging the viewer to imagine the lives and sufferings of those who once walked it.
The painting’s composition invites the viewer to engage with absence as an active force. By situating us at the threshold of the road, Levitan positions the viewer as a proxy for the countless erased bodies whose presence lingers in the landscape’s scarred surface. The rutted tracks become a testament to the lives uprooted and histories erased, initiating an act of remembrance through the very act of looking. This participatory engagement highlights how Vladimirka transcends the limitations of representation to confront the viewer with the lived realities of historical trauma.
Rather than offering resolution or redemption, Levitan’s landscape creates a liminal space where memory and erasure coexist. The interplay of absence and embodiment transform the road into a bridge between past suffering and present reflection, demanding an ethical reckoning with the traces of imperial violence. As Yan Grunt poignantly observed decades later, the Vladimirka remains a symbol of irretrievable loss and systemic cruelty: “In front is the trampled Vladimirka, in front are shackles and a dressing gown with a diamond ace on the back. Willy-nilly, one has to come to terms with the thought that long years of youth are again being erased from my life. There is hard labor ahead.”[25] Levitan’s work preserves this history within its contours, ensuring the road remains an enduring site of active memory, challenging us to confront the persistent shadows of cultural and human erasure.
Appendix
Figure 1. Isaac Ilyich Levitan, Vladimirka (oil on canvas, 79 cm x 123 cm, 1892; Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
Figure 2. Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea (oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm, 1808-1810; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin)
Footnotes
[1] Pyotr Petrovich Kopyshev, «Владимирка» [Vladimirka], in К истории древних трактов восточного Подмосковья и Замосковья (исторические экскурсы и экстракты) [On the History of Ancient Routes of Eastern Podmoskovye and Beyond Moscow (Historical Excursions and Extracts)], 2nd ed. (Meshchera, 2015), 44.
[2] Jacques Derrida, “The Outside Is the Inside,” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, fortieth-anniversary ed., introduction by Judith Butler (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 44-65.
[3] Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (ImWerden Verlag, 2007).
[4] Sergei Glagol and Igor Grabar, Исаак Ильич Левитан: Жизнь и творчество [Isaac Ilich Levitan: Life and Work] (Moscow: I. Knebel, 1913), 80–82.
[5] Robert Geraci, “Pragmatism and Prejudice: Revisiting the Origin of the Pale of Jewish Settlement and Its Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History 91, no. 4 (2019): 776–814, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26852257.
[6] For more information on writings about Levitan’s Jewish heritage, see Leland Fetzer and Ita Sheres, “The Jewish Predicament of Isaak Levitan,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 11, no. 1 (1981): 53–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/13501678108577351; and Glagol and Grabar, Исаак Ильич Левитан: Жизнь и творчество, 80–82. For a more recent work discussing the historiography, including the decision of scholars to include or omit his Jewish identity, see Cadra Peterson McDaniel, “Isaak Levitan’s Enduring Appeal and Russian National Identity, 1891–Present,” The Historian 83, no. 3 (2021): 323–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/00182370.2021.1999049.
[7] Serge Shavirin, “The Vladimirka. What is Truth?” in Five Noble Truths in Isaac Levitan’s Paintings, March 16, 2021, 5, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14224337.
[8] A traditional roadside shrine, usually involving a roof on a grave or a worship cross.
[9] «Картина была полна удивительной тихой прелести. Длинное полотно дороги белеющей полосой убегало среди перелесков в синюю даль. Вдали на ней виднелись две фигурки богомолок, а старый покосившийся голубец со стёртой дождями иконкой говорил о давно забытой старине. Всё выглядело таким ласковым, уютным». Andrei Mikhailovich Turkov, Исаак Ильич Левитан [Isaak Ilyich Levitan] (Isskustvo, 1974), 74. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.
[10] Vladimir Petrov, «Владимирка. 1892» [Vladimirka. 1892], in Исаак Левитан [Isaac Levitan] (Beliy Gorod, 2000), 58–59.
[11] Turkov, Исаак Ильич Левитан, 74.
[12] Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, Исаак Ильич Левитан. Жизнь и творчество [Isaac Ilyich Levitan. Life and Art] (Iskusstvo, 1966), 163.
[13] Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead.
[14] Glynn Barratt, ed., Voices in Exile: The Decembrist Memoirs (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), https://www.deslibris.ca/ID/448402.
[15] Derrida, “The Outside Is the Inside,” 44-65.
[16] Averil King, “Major Works,” in Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), 69.
[17] Shavirin, “The Vladimirka,” 6.
[18] Konstantin Pautovsky, Исаак Левитан: Повесть о художнике [Isaac Levitan: A Tale of an Artist] (1937; e-published Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing, 2023), 2.
[19] «Но чувство тоски и одиночества не безраздельно господствует в образном строе картины». Petrov, «Владимирка. 1892», 58–59.
[20] W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5.
[21] Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead.
[22] «Случалось, посмотришь сквозь щели забора на свѣтъ Божiй: не увидишь ли хоть чего-нибудь? — и только и увидишь, что краюшекъ неба, да высокiй земляной валъ, поросшiй бурьяномъ…». Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, 7.
[23] « А между-тѣмъ это не мечта моего воображенiя. Это правда, истина. Только немного позволили этимъ бѣднымъ людямъ пожить по-своему, повеселиться полюдски, прожить хоть часъ не по-острожному — и человѣкъ нравственно мѣняется, хотя бы то было на нѣсколько только минутъ...». Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, 166.
[24] Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, 166.
[25] «Впереди протоптанная Владимирка, впереди кандалы и халат с бубновым тузом на спине. Приходится волей-неволей мириться с мыслью, что долгие годы молодости опять вычеркиваются из моей жизни. Впереди каторга». Yan Grunt, «В тюрьме и на каторге» [In Prison and at the Labour Camp], Каторга и ссылка [Penal Servitude and Exile], no. 5 (1923): 101.