The Poetics of Home:
Journal: Comparative Literature Studies
Year: 2012

In the late watercolors of the Russian symbolist Maksimilian Voloshin (1877–1932), Crimea is a double-voiced muse. In radiant blues and vigorous greens, his paintings of the Black Sea peninsula celebrate a muscular natural landscape, a sea and sky bound to jagged peaks and sun-bleached shores. Yet in their paucity of human figures, in their barren trees borne from thin, tremulous brushstrokes, these akvareli also lament a troubled human landscape—one that seems afflicted by what Voloshin calls a