It was in a dull and mediocre home of the well=to=do middle class that our artist who, as the originator of expensive pageants and the dispenser of unheard=of splendor, was destined some day to modify profoundly the whole conception of the western stage, spent his early childhood. Leon Bakst’s family lived at Petrograd, on Sadovaia street. Now, there is nothing more incongruous than the different sections of the Russian capital--“the most phantastic in the world,” to use a phrase of Dostoievski. The Sadovaia is a rather narrow but very lively street, which cuts across the market=place and is flanked by the arches of three huge galleries where countless small tradesmen carry on their business. Here, in the adjacent streets, in the gutters of the sidewalks which, depending upon the time of the year, were muddy or dusty, Roskolnikov lived his life of superhuman anguish; a few steps from here, in a gloomy red house, during all of a terrible night Rogojin and Prince Mishkin watched over their murdered love; here, too, one day Nicholas I, the giant=like autocrat with the countenance of an Apollo, standing at the entrance to the temple which overhangs Sennaia Square, by a single imperious word brought the revolting mob, which was exasperated by the plague and the shedding of blood, to their knees. Thus to a dreamer who is haunted by memories the very stones of this district, which has been the silent witness of tragic fates, whether imaginary or real, seemed to be harbingers of bad luck. And yet, notwithstanding, there is nothing more noisily commonplace than the daily routine in broad daylight of this same Sadovaia: large public houses, but devoid of rustic cheerfulness; mechanics’ shops in which the songs had died. Dull boredom of an industrious popular life, but how discolored, deadened, and enervated by the peculiar atmosphere of this artificial town--this city of officials, of soldiers and of ghosts! Nevertheless the little soul of the well=behaved child, blocked up though it was by realities that afforded no way out, possessed its wondrous sesame, its secret garden. Every Saturday Levoushka would walk toward the Nevsky Prospect where, but a few steps from General Army Headquarters with its imposing semi=circular façade of red, from Winter Palace Square, and from the Admiralty--a veritable fairy=land of lofty architecture--, his grandfather lived, a noble and vaguely mysterious being who, without in the least being conscious of it, awakened in the future artist a reverence for Beauty, a holy fear of the Unknown. The child thus came into unusual surroundings which constituted the artificial paradise of his early life. Whatever it was--precocious influence or atavism--this fascination dominated the life of Bakst and at least decided his calling. At any rate the master himself, who one day told me at length about his earliest recollections, seems to think so.