beings; and what a soul, good God! Nothing in these puppets reminds one of the smiling indifference of “Petroushka”. We are on the eve of terrible happenings, and we feel it with sadness; a dull ennui weighs upon us heavily, like the low cloud before a storm.
Ah! we are now in the Petrograd of 1916! How can we express all the trickiness in the apathetic inertia of these figures that are scarcely articulate, that are uniformly costumed and that skip about or sink down at the will of their wires that direct them? Before this pliability, this evil passivity of shapeless puppets, this cynical swaying motion of impotent figures, this “dance of death” of inertia, the mimicked action vanishes, and living men disappear. The drama of the passion—death which passes, hideous and sneering,—becomes pallid under the gaze without eyes of hostile faces.
How the inevitable closes about us! Everything in this atmosphere of anguish and of hallucination becomes a latent menace. The day is near at hand—one feels it with one’s whole soul, nervous with fear—when this mass, inert, blind, crushing, will hurl itself upon quivering Russia.
Happy the blond student in green blouse who finds death as he pursues a dream of love; he will not see it. He will not know hunger or exile or disgrace. Who of us Russians would not envy him?
Such were the two faces of Russia which were exhibited by two painters who are more than painters,—Benois who has the power of retrospective divination, Bakst who possesses an understanding of modern life and of its tumultuous forces.
But behold! the curtain which has just fallen on the bristling, rough, malicious scenery of “Lâcheté”, rises once more to unfold before our eyes a third Russia—a Russia debonair and drunken, ignorant and full of spirit.
The vaudeville act “Old Moscow” depicts a rich and opulent city of merchants wearing their kaftans, of free carousals, of a jovial savagery. Two frames, reaching to the knees of the actors, form the stage setting. On them is a miniature reproduction of the orphaned capital with its forty times forty cupolas, encircled by the crenelated walls of the Kremlin. And amidst this delightfully exaggerated parody of a stage full of moujik=bourgeois, we see funny human beings, overbubbling with good health, moving about dressed in wide, stiff skirts that are sky=blue or tri=colored; likewise country women weighing a hundred kilos.
The thing that is of importance above everything else in this caricature composed without any masked thought is that aroma of the land which, even in its funniest moments, makes the tears come to the eyes of Moscow émigrés.
Today Bakst is completely absorbed by this forgotten world which rises about him on a background of a distant past. He is consumed with an appetite for Russian memories, emotions and visions. Each day in his studio a population of Russian figures keeps multiplying—models and groups of which not only their costume but their very attitude has something indefinably national about them, something profoundly popular, in short, something authentic. And to what purpose? The artist as yet does not know. Once the actors are placed upon the stage, he says to himself, the play will start spontaneously. And in pursuing his enormous and unceasing labors he lets things take their course without hastening them.—