In Valentin Rasputin’s short essay on Lake Baikal, he describes human’s relationship with nature and how that relationship affects their reality. There is of course a great chasm between modern society and the natural world, but as much as humans have attempted to distance themselves from the natural world, there is still a force pulling them to their most natural state. Rasputin writes about this intense urge to reject aspects of human society: “Oh the spirit of Baikal! This is something special, something living, something that makes you believe in the old legends and ponder with mystical apprehension the extent to which people in some places feel free to do anything they please.”

The theme of being able to do anything that one pleases is explored through the text: “Baikal, it would seem, ought to overwhelm a person with its grandeur and its dimensions—everything in it is big, everything is large-scale, enigmatic, and free—yet on the contrary, it is uplifting.” In this quote, Rasputin argues that nature allows humans to be free and live lives closer to how they were meant to be. This begs the question of whether humans are realest when they are freest. Is the most accurate reality for a human to live in a reality in which they are governed only by their own wants and desires? I think that Rasputin is arguing that freedom brings us closer to our natural state, and thus brings us into a true reality,

Towards the end of the text, Rasputin quotes Tolstoy: “How, in the midst of nature’s charms, can feelings of malice and vengeance or the passion to destroy others like himself possibly remain entrenched in man? It seems that all evil in a person’s heart should vanish when it comes into contact with nature, this spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.” This quote illustrates perhaps the most important part of Rasputin’s thesis, the description of humans falling from goodness and moving towards the corruption of society. Ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, human’s have lost the sense of innocence omnipresent in the natural world. They have needlessly complicated a world that has literally evolved over millions of years to work well and rationally, and be filled with spontaneous perfection.