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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 Caucasaus. 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 lie somewhere between this fictional past and the real-life, present day of this fascinating part of  Russia.