"We're going to burn down our barns and our crops, we'll tear out the trees, clog the wells, and kill our livestock. All living things must disappear. We'll leave a huge desert where our villages were, so that Napoleon will never take our land. He'll sink deeper into ever greater distances. We'll retreat and after our relentless retreat, the land will soak up French blood, and with it we'll grow our future crops. Russia is eternal and the land is our mother."

Boris Pasternak paid tribute to the millions of dead who made the sacred land of Russia live again and blossom: "The price Russia paid in blood, in sorrow, in tears increases Russians' love for their land. Writers, musicians and artists have all nourished their talent with the fruits of passion that lie deep at the root of the Russian soul."

This book is designed to help the reader share in the discovery of the beloved Russian land. It includes paintings showing country gentlemen and sometimes serfs, toiling like slaves, until their liberation in the late 19th century. At which time, they were able to, finally, own property and harvest their crops.

This richly illustrated book reproduces paintings from the 18th through the 20th century. Pastoral moments, rural scenes and peasants' strained expressions reveal in vivid detail what life was like on the Russian land.

This book brings to life stories about more than 30 painters, including such well known artists as Isaac Levitan, Ivan Shishkin, Vasily Kandinsky, as well as lesserknown artists such as Vasily Polenov and Constantin Yuon. The paradoxical mixture of brutality and tenderness inherent in the Russian land made many creative people fall in love with the theme.

Russia's four seasons is an exceptional book on an ambitious subject that is also treated in the monographs on Levitan, Repin, Shishkin and The Itinerants.