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North Caucasus

 

A series that came about through a love for the 19th century Russian novels set in the North Caucasus Region and a subsequent trip I made to the Russian republics of Dagestan and Chechnya in December 2017. Writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy set their fiction in a highly romanticised, mountainous land that has become known as the Literary Caucasus. I wanted to see the North Caucasus Mountains for myself, beyond the romantic and somewhat stereotyped lands and cultures that the novels portray. These paintings mold the real-life, present day around the fictionalised, literary past of this fascinating part of  Russia.