One afternoon as Bakst, back from Paris, was lording it over a tea table surrounded by beautiful ladies, and was basking in the sunshine of his reputation, with flattering chatter all about him, he noticed a young man enter whose manners at first offended him. With a monocle in his eye, with haughty pride writ across his dark=complected face, round=shouldered, attired in the student’s green blouse with blue collar, he carried on the conversation with an ease that bordered upon disdain and insult. Yet in the very arrogance of the young upstart there was something that fascinated. Bakst took him aside and, when he pressed him for an expression of opinion as to what he thought of his painting, the young man replied candidly that, while he had the profoundest respect for the technical mastery of his questioner, the painting itself absolutely displeased him, and for good cause. This young man’s name was Alexander Benois. As for Bakst, little did he imagine that he had arrived that afternoon at a turning point in his artistic career. [Illustration] THE CLUB For a number of years a group of students from May College a private institution, had been in the habit of meeting at the home of their comrade, Alexander Benois. Among them was Constantine Somoff, a son of the venerable director of the Hermitage, and the future originator of “Echoes of Days Past”; Philosophov who later, when he was associated with Dimitri Merejkovsky, was destined to become one of the revivers of religious sentiment in Russia; and others besides who afterward constituted the nucleus of the society named “The Artistic World” and who still later supplied the staff of the Russian Ballet. Unique, indeed, was the atmosphere of this house. I have already had occasion to speak of the Benois family. They were the descendants of one of those numerous immigrants who for more than a century, from the accession of Peter the Great till the Moscow Fire, were called upon to help in the transformation of Russia. All of these newcomers went through a similar experience: the tremendous opportunities for initiative, the vast geographical extent and the artistic impulses of the young empire called forth the highest development of their abilities. Many a mediocre artist--or at least one assumed to be mediocre--who had become half suffocated amid the rabble of the western world, became transfigured in these favorable surroundings. The originality of the Russian character, the breadth of view of the <g>grands=seigneurs</g> of Catherine II’s time, the primitive simplicity of the life of the people--all this stirred their imagination. And so these men, who transplanted into Russia the artistic methods of the West, the conceptions of style and the traditions of art that had matured in Europe, became Russians themselves in heart and spirit. More than that: it is to these “Russianized” fellow=countrymen of ours that, in a large measure, we owe the birth of a modern Russian art.