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which eventually culminated in a canvas some 800 metres in length (about half a mile, al-
though it was advertised as being three miles long). Banvard put his work on display to the
paying public and later took the Mississippi panorama to Europe, where he gave a private
view to Queen Victoria in Windsor Castle, near London, in 1849.
The Volga: soul of Russia
Europe's longest river, the Volga, occupies a special place in the Russian psyche as a be-
loved symbol of national culture. Venerated in folklore, song, poetry, and painting, 'Moth-
er River' or 'Mother Volga' represents the country's vast open spaces and embodies the
lifeblood of Russia's history. The river was portrayed as a symbol of Russia in the senti-
mental poetry of several 19th-century writers, including Nicolai Karamzin, Ivan Dmitriev,
and Nicolai Nekrasov. Prince Pyotr Viazemskii, a leading figure in the so-called Golden
Age of Russian poetry during the first half of the 19th century, celebrated the Volga 'as a
marker of nationality'. The lives of Volga river people were also vividly portrayed in the
novels and stories of Maxim Gorky, one-time dishwasher on a Volga steamship whose early
years were spent in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, at the confluence of the Volga and the
River Oka.
Esteem for the Volga is a familiar focus of Russian folk songs, epitomized by the 'Song
of the Volga Boatmen', a shanty traditionally sung by the river's barge-haulers who, in the
era before steam, used to haul vessels along certain stretches of the river using ropes from
the shore. The song was popularized by the operatic bass singer Feodor Chaliapin, himself
born in the Volga region. It is intimately linked with the famous oil painting of the same
name, by Ilya Repin, a striking depiction of the peasantry's terrible working conditions in
Tsarist Russia, echoed in a Nekrasov poem: 'Along the river there were barge-haulers,/and
their funereal cry was unbearably wild.' Repin's work, completed in 1873, also managed
to capture the dignity and fortitude of the barge-haulers, and represented a key stage in the
development of the national realist school of painting. The latter half of the 19th century
was a time when the river, its towns, villages, and surroundings were increasingly depic-
ted on canvas by such celebrated Russian artists as Isaac Levitan, Ivan Shishkin, and Boris
Kustidiyev. The work of Levitan particularly is known throughout Russia for its propensity
to reflect the soul of Russian nature. He spent several summers on the river, and some of
his best-known paintings capture the changing light, rhythm of life, and the beauty and
serenity of the Volga's scenery.
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