Isaak Levitan's lyrical and poetic paintings of Russia's lakes and rivers, her fields, vast forests and seemingly illimitable steppeland have often been compared to works of Russian literature. They recall, it has been said, Turgenev's Hunter's sketches, with their charming descriptions of the countryside around Oryol, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in which the author's engagement with rural life is so apparent, and Chekhov's forlorn, disappearing Cherry Orchard, at whose demise so many theatregoers have felt disconsolate. As the critic Aleksandr Benois wrote in I9O4, Levitan succeeded in conveying 'the ineffable charm of our desolation, the grand sweep of our untrammelled spaces, the mournful celebration of Russian autumn and the enigmatic allure of Russian spring'.