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How intoxicating, how magnificent is a summer day in Little Russia! How luxuriously warm the hours when midday glitters in stillness and sultry heat and the blue fathomless ocean arching like a voluptuous cupola over the plain seems to be slumbering, bathed in langour, clasping the fair earth and holding it close in its ethereal embrace! Upon it, not a cloud; in the plain not a sound. Everything might be dead; only above in the heavenly depths a lark is trilling and from the airy heights the silvery notes drop down upon adoring earth, and from time to time the cry of a gull or the ringing note of a quail sounds in the steppe.
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, 1931-32, Quoted from Landscape Painting of the Nineteenth Century, Marco Valsecchi, New York, 1971, p. 279
PLACE: Little Russia = Ukraine ?
The reaped corn, the high grass, the wart-wort, the wild hemp, all a rusty brown and half dead from the summer heat, now bathed in dew and caressed by the sun, revived, ready to flower again. An Arctic petrel flew across the road with a cheerful cry, the Siberian marmots called to each other in the grass; far away to the left somewhere, a peewit wailed; a covey of partridges, startled by the britchka rose up and with their soft "trrr" flew away to the hills; grasshoppers, crickets, field-mice and mole-rats struck up squeaking monotonous music in the grass.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, The Steppe, 1888, Quoted from Landscape Painting of the Nineteenth Century, Marco Valsecchi, New York, 1971, p. 280
TIME: 1864
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