Isaac Levitan met Nikolay Mescherin in 1898. And the same year he went to Paris to the world-famous exhibition where his attention turned to paintings by artists of the Barbizon school - Jean Battista Camille Corot, Jean Francois Millet, Theodore Rousseau and some impressionists. Their paintings could not but influence the Russian master of a landscape. Moreover, exactly at this time, he became interested in the transmission of rapidly changing, barely perceptible states in nature. These are twilight and night landscapes, images of sleeping villages, and quiet nights. In the work "Moonlight Night" in 1899 the artist managed to achieve maximum conciseness and generalization of the image. But this simplification of forms is based on the highly accurate identification of the main thing in living nature. Depicting the rounded shapes of birch trees melting in the lilac twilight, ghostly whitening in the night mist and as if emitting a quiet light, the artist - with the apparent simplicity of the motive - saturated the basic color surfaces with a variety of vibrating shades. And thus, universal poetic emotions were realized in a realistic landscape.