Levitan spent the final year of his life working on The Lake. Rus, which was painted over a number of canvases never to be completed. Feodorov-Davydov interpreted this piece to be symbolic of Russia as “she ought to and deserves to be.” King thought it a “celebration of beauty of the Russian countryside.” The interpretation of works of art is an exhaustive task, but it can be said that Levitan did not simply celebrate nature. He dove into nature and struggled over how to understand the existence of humankind in relation to nature. His incompletion of this painting reveals that struggle. On the whole, the canvas supplies a delightful expanse of color and light with a sense of movement. The quality of reflection by the lake expands on his earlier works, Evening on the Volga and Above Eternal Rest. Here there is not a confrontation of darkness and light or a complex variety of weather overpowering the vast... [http://museumstudiesabroad.org/polyphony-in-isaac-levitans-landscapes/]