In the 20th century literature, the subjective vision of nature often prevails over its objectivity, the emotionally intense perception of nature triumphs over its ‘landscape’ side, the concreteness seems to dissolve in fog and twilight.

Andrei Ilyich Kurnakov portrayed his emotional vision of the summer landscape in the picture. This is not just a canvas with a specific landscape - it is a collective image, a conversation with a fellow countryman, favorite writer, author of ‘A Sportsman’s Sketches’ Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. In this wonderful land, “in his beloved Mtsensk district, ” he spent his childhood and adolescence, his youth began. Everything on this Russian land was infinitely dear to Turgenev”s heart: the pale blue of the endless distances, and the endless sea of waving rye, and islands of birch groves on gentle hills, and cool oak forests, and rivers gleaming in the sun, and wide green valleys, where bonfires are burning at night and the stomping and neighing of horses is heard.

One can describe the artist”s painting in Turgenev’s words: ‘The color of the horizon, a faint pale lilac, does not change all day, and is the same all round… On such days all the colors are softened, bright but not glaring; everything is suffused with a kind of touching tenderness’.

The greenish strip of earth in the foreground is clearly visible ‘through the thin steamy mist evenly diffused in the air’, on which the grass grows with tall inflorescences, with already ripe seeds, brownish wisps trembling in the fog. Behind them, like Turgenev wrote, ‘the river winds for ten miles, dimly blue through the mist; beyond it meadows of watery green; beyond the meadows sloping hills’. Beyond the river, on a gentle floodplain bank with sparse trees, there are stacks of fragrant hay. Silhouettes of grazing horses and spreading trees are visible in the lilac haze.

Very soon everything in nature will change and colors will be different. And now only flying black-and-gray ducks still disturb the peace and silence. ‘The bird that flutters up … vanishes at once in the whitish dark of the hanging fog. But how peaceful, how unutterably peaceful it is everywhere! ” Ivan Turgener wrote. Dawn breaks out, a bright pink disk of the sun floats into the blue-crimson sky with pinkish-lilac clouds. The artist, observing the beauty of the dawn and trying to depict this difficult transitional state of nature, chooses a lilac-pinkish-green color.