The poet and cultural critic, Rainer Maria Rilke, was profoundly affected upon seeing Kramskoi's painting of Christ in the Wilderness. "The painting portrayed a lonely Jesus sitting on a stone in a desert, lost in melancholy meditation. "Russian art does not become more narrow with its growing nationalism," Rilke concluded. On the contrary, "it may be in a better position to express the higher human universals if it completely abandons everything foreign, accidental, and un-Russian." Rilke's advocacy of Russian nationalism has often been misinterpreted by his critics. He was not proposing a return to the confines of a cult or mindless ritual, but he believed in art as a channel or a a system of canals for focusing generally unformed national feelings and intuitions. To be authentic, Russian artistic images had to be intimately linked with millions of individual Russian souls." [from: Rilke's Russia: A Cultural Encounter, Anna A. Tavis. Northwestern University Press, 1997. p. 77. ]