  In the limit of large number of colors N the nucleon consisting of N quarks
is heavy, and one can treat it semiclassically, like the large-Z Thomas--Fermi
atom. The role of the semiclassical field binding the quarks in the nucleon is
played by the pion or chiral field; its saddle-point distribution inside the
nucleon is called the chiral soliton. The old Skyrme model for this soliton is
an over-simplification. One can do far better by exploiting a realistic and
theoretically-motivated effective chiral lagrangian presented in this paper. As
a result one gets not only the static characteristics of the nucleon in a fair
accordance with the experiment (such as masses, magnetic moments and
formfactors) but also much more detailed dynamic characteristics like numerous
parton distributions. We review the foundations of the Chiral Quark-Soliton
Model of the nucleon as well as its recent applications to parton
distributions, including the recently introduced `skewed' distributions, and to
the nucleon wave function on the light cone.
