Diaghileff and Benois flung the doors wide open. A motley crowd enters pell=mell; even the “decadents” of the Viennese Secession, with Renoir and Carrière. Mistakes are made; there is as yet no scale of values; the obscure Belgian, Léon Frederick, is put upon a pedestal while Cézanne is ignored until 1904. The reason for this is the fact that this group at first has no positive program. But its negative influence is inestimable. Repine, one of the most powerful exponents of this ideologic naturalism which I have mentioned in passing, launched a counter=attack in the name of the survivers of traditional academic style. Diaghileff, by his virulent reply, threw the champion of routine out of the saddle. It is a great period of ringing battles, of hard contests with the adversary who mangled even Ingres’ very name. These struggles were the more heroic since the public remained averse to them. The editorial offices of their magazine were the hot=house in which new ideas were hatched and the staff headquarters where the big offensives were planned. Now, the editorial staff itself was divided into two sections. In the large salon we find Philosophov, handsome and slender as a thoroughbred courser, who meets the contributors to the literary section. There is Merejkovsky, who contributes his best works to the review and who introduces us to the art and the doctrines of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky; Leon Shestov, the apostle of “eradication” with his emaciated face of a Jewish Socrates; Rosanov who pried into the very depths of the sexual problem, a towering spirit who used to bare his inmost thoughts with candor. Of all these men, who were radiant in their young fame, Rosanov alone did not profess a supreme philosophical contempt for the fine arts. The painters, accordingly, would shrink back from the haughtiness and the affected attitude of the literary folk and would seek refuge in the office of the secretary=general, the headquarters of the artistic section.