“In distancing ourselves from society’s conventions and drawing closer to nature, we unwittingly become children. All we have acquired passes from our soul, which is made over such as it once was and will likely be again some day. Whosoever, like me, has had occasion to wander through the desolate mountains and gaze for a long, long time at their fantastical shapes and greedily swallow the vivifying air poured out in their gorges, will naturally understand my desire to convey, relate, draw these magical pictures… In the hearts of simple men the sense of nature’s beauty and grandeur is stronger, and a hundred time more vital, than in us, ecstatic narrators in speech and on paper.”

Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time