We have followed Bakst through each of the fields with which he was familiar, whatever their nature. Each road in this labyrinth of styles brought us back to the native land of the artist. Throughout, the exotic or “Eurasiatic”—to use a word coined by a group of Russian dreamers in exile—dominated. For the common herd Bakst is over and above all the creator of an oriental fairyland. Even his very name, monosyllabic, quickly pronounced, and cutting like the blade of a Turkish simitar, seems to call up a fleeting but intense vision of Asia.
Bakst was bound forever to disconcert the lovers of convenient formulas. You think you have caught up with his jerky and lightning-like course, when, lo! he has already escaped, to the delight of one of the “four winds of the spirit”. There remains in your hand the sixth skin of the serpent which it divests itself of—only to clothe itself again in the seventh.
Recently, in the spring of 1922, we witnessed a new avatar of the artist. Ten years previously he had left his fatherland for a new fatherland that was more hospitable—for France. Now, under a splendid impulse of piety, of tender homesickness, of filial love he returned of his own accord to his Mother—Russia, bruised, trampled
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“A PEASANT WOMAN” (SKETCH BY POTEMKINE). GOUACHE