1. Read the text and translate it into Ukrainian.
2. Answer the following questions:
1. Who was in the first of Russian’s major landscape painters?
2. How can Ivan Aivazovsky be described?
3. What picture did Ivan Aivazovsky achieve his big popular success with?
4. What is depicted in Aivazovsky’s picture “The Maiia in a Gale”?
5. What is the principal actor in Russian’s theatre of nature?
6. What tree played an important role in Russian art?
7. What was Arkhip Kuindzhi famous for?
8. How was Ivan Shishkin called?
9. What are the most famous pictures by Shishkin?
10. What is the last picture by Shishkin special for?
3. Give Ukrainian equivalents of the following words and phrases:
to grasp the possibilities
to bring up
marine painter
immense output
precipitous and fear generating drama
unfathomable rage
distinct and embittered protagonist
to produce a fresh set of dramatic circumstances
to cope with overwhelming presence
to create light-effects
to get twilight or dawn effect
to get the same effect
semidarkness and stillness
4. Give English equivalents of the following words and phrases:
великомасштабна робота
висота
примха природи
повільні струмки
зображення шторму
відчуття спокою
межа можливого
всюдисущий
біло-срібна кора берези
гасити світло
світлотінь
ретельні малюнки рослин
отримати ефект сутінок та світанку
дивовижне та віртуозне виконання
глибока вогкість
передавати клаустрофобію
гігантські полотна
5. Make up sentences of your own with the given words and phrases.
6. Match a line in A with a line in B.
A |
B |
to grasp |
to go or cause to go into solution |
altitude |
having or seeming to have no end |
to dissolve |
to reject the authority or validity of |
to repudiate |
to gather or become gathered together in an increased quantity |
credibility |
water or other liquid diffused as vapour or condensed on or in objects |
endless |
having no limits or boundaries in time, space, extent, or magnitude |
to accumulate |
to walk or move in an steady manner, as from old age |
moisture |
the vertical height of an object above some chosen level |
to totter |
to grip something firmly with or as if with the hands |
infinite |
the quality of being believed or trusted |
7. Summarize the text in English. Unit 55 text
The Belated Arrival and Sombre Glories of Russian Art
Part III
The only Russian painter to compare with Shishkin in depicting the forest was a Jew from Lithuania, Isaak Levitan (1860-1900), whom many, perhaps with justice, consider Russia's finest artist. He came from great poverty, was a lifelong depressive and suffered privation and internal exile during the worst pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s. In view of this, and his short working life, his record of achievement is noble. So is his versatility. Indeed, it is hard to think of any painter of nature, in any country or in any epoch, who grappled with such a wide range of subject matter, so confidently and well. In his forest scenes, Levitan moved in closer than Shishkin: his Footbridge, Savvino Village (1884) is almost a miniature of a village on the forest edge, and his Birch Grove (1885; both Tretyakov) is almost an orchard. He loved the autumn specially—it suited his sombre mood—and his September scenes, such as Golden Autumn (1895, Russian Museum), the Vladimirka Road (1892) and Autumn (1896; both Tretyakov), take us closer to the actual feel of a Russian village landscape near the end of the century than all the rest of the Russian school put together. He did some superb watercolours too, of which Autumn Mist (1899) and Storks in Sky, Spring (1884), are outstanding examples. Indeed the more one examines his work, the more one wonders at it, combining as it does all kinds of subject matter, all districts, all seasons, with impeccable virtuosity and genuine emotion—indeed love.
Levitan had no reason to love Russia or the Russians, but he did. And he celebrated his love in some magnificent canvases which used the beauty and grandeur of the Russian scene to express spiritual values hovering just beneath its surface. In the Russian Museum, St Petersburg, there is a superb, smallish canvas, Golden Autumn in the Village, showing a garden, manor house and farm
37 Golden Autumn, 1895