“The eighties should have had their spokesman in landscape, just as they had him in literature in the person of Chekhov. The shattered hopes of the advanced intelligentsia were drowned in the melancholy of timelessness. Russian nature and wretched villages seemed to personify the mood of society. Sad plains with groves of white-trunked birches and quivering aspen trees, roundabout roads with well-trodden winding footpaths leading to the boundless blue of the distance, rustic gray huts and sheds scattered over the hills, the golden outfit of sad autumn days asked for the soul of the poet-painter and found their exponent in Levitan's face..."