The dependence of the nucleon mass on the mass of the pion is studied in the
framework of the chiral quark-soliton model. A remarkable agreement is observed
with lattice data from recent full dynamical simulations. The possibility and
limitations to use the model results as a guideline for the chiral
extrapolation of lattice data are discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables. v2: References added, new figure
included, discussion improved, typos fixed, matches published versio
