REMEMBRANCE (“ELYSIUM” CYCLE)
and with envy he watched how his chums sketched fine battle scenes upon the margins of their note books. His life’s calling announced itself for the first time when he was almost twelve years old. His school, known as “the sixth gymnasium”, was making preparations to celebrate the
ETERNAL WANDERERS (“ELYSIUM” CYCLE)
centenary of Joukovsky, the celebrated Russian poet. A good portrait was wanted for the ceremony. Accordingly, a prize competition was organized. Bakst decided to enter it. He reverently took home the little engraving which was to serve as model, and four or five days later he brought back his drawing. The prize was awarded him, and his masterpiece put in a glass frame and hung in the gymnastic hall. From then on Bakst was unanimously proclaimed a painter, and he was able to pride himself on winning many a prize.
Leon’s father was not much pleased over this sort of success, especially since bad marks were raining thick in the other studies. He conceived the notion that his son’s predilection for drawing was due to sheer laziness. He therefore positively forbade him this pastime which, he argued, interfered with serious studies. Leon therefore continued drawing in secret, at night=time, by the light of a candle.
On the other hand his accomplishments brought him the friendship of his drawing and penmanship teacher, who became much attached to the youngster. Andrei Andreevitch was a diminutive little man with bowlegs; but this tail=coated freak in blue was fired with a divine enthusiasm. Striding about the class room he would talk incessantly to the pupils, now pondering the volutes of an acanthus leaf, now discussing the lives of great painters, their struggles, their triumphs. So volubly and so well did he speak that he stirred deeply the imaginative soul of little Bakst and awakened all the latent passion in him. Subsequently, the artist’s entire magnificent life was to be animated, as it were, by these rhythmic fits of intellectual fever, from which he was to emerge renewed, transformed, his mind’s eye turned toward unexplored horizons.
The profession of painting, therefore, suddenly appeared to Levoushka to be the highest of all destinies—one bearing the halo of heroism. Filled with this romantic dream, he was anxious to quit school at once. And he insisted with such impetuosity that his parents, routed in the argument, decided by way of setting him right to seek the advice of the sculptor Marc Antokolsky, a friend of the family and a recognized authority on all matters pertaining to art. The late Antokolsky was little known in Paris where he used to live, nor do people care much about him in Russia today, although his works, which are quite numerous, fill the museums of Moscow and especially of Petrograd. So deceptive is artistic glory!
For indeed, he had his day of glory. In Russia he was the sculptor of the century—of that nineteenth century which had lost the plastic
