Fate and Migration: A Migrant, Returning to His Homeland, Bids Farewell to the Graves of those Dear to Him Who He Had Lost in the Adopted Land, 1904. Boris Vasilievich Smirnov (1881-1954) was a Russian artist who in 1904 traveled by prisoner transport from western Russia across Siberia. Along the way he created a series of drawings and watercolors of the people and places he encountered. Novosibirsk State Museum of Regional History and Folklife