Shortly after graduating from art school Boris Zabirokhin made repeated trips to the remote and forgotten villages of northern Russia. His work has since been influenced by a mixture of nostalgia for his childhood holidays with his grandmother in one such village and his sympathy for the very difficult life of the villagers which persisted at least until the date these works were first designed in 1982. Other influences have been religion and Russian literature, particularly the work of the so-called 'country writers' and their empathy with the peasants. His work has a strong illustrative and narrative vein, often themed around children's stories and folklore. These two prints come from a group of four depicting the Seasons and suggest poverty and the daily struggle to survive, but at the same time they have a kind of romantic lyricism which comes through the inclusion of religious iconography, images from nature, such as birds, trees and flowers, and the general disposition and weaving together of individual scenes to make up the whole.