Abstract: A model of the emergence of constituent quark mass in the nucleon is presented, which is based on the polaron mechanism in the theory of electron motion in ionic crystals. It is shown that identifying the energy of ionic lattice polarization, which is caused by the presence of an electron, and the quark energy in the vacuum of strong interactions leads to the observed nucleon mass value, provided that the strong coupling limit in the theory of the longitudinal optical polaron is used. A possible way to construct the nucleon wave function within the polaron approach is discussed.