The “burlesque scenes” of Benois seemed like the final blossoming=out of ancient Petrograd, like a nostalgic vision of the imperial city, called forth by an ardent lover of an abandoned past. A mob of people, truculent, jeering, deafeningly noisy, with an exuberant movement of cheerfulness, monopolizes the stage; a forceful, manifold, strikingly lively rhythm constitutes, properly speaking, the action. In the rigid and stiff scenery of the fated city, popular fancy has erected its paradise of outlandish hovels, its blue and red “balagani”, in the open air. Personages from the prints at ten kopecks and from the pictures of Epinal come to life again and bestir themselves; comely “nounous” strut about and try to attract; with noisy clatter of boots bearded coachmen hasten the step of their squatting dance. Russian rural life for one last time spends itself in these Slavic saturnalia. Even the dolls which are the protagonists of the grotesque drama try to shake off their mechanical torpor. They would like to become flesh and blood; they have a hungry desire to live; at times, indeed, they really do live. The action of “Lâcheté”, likewise, is staged at St. Petersburg which, however, has become Petrograd--but not in the clear sunshine of a winter’s day; rather within the concrete walls of the “People’s House” which the last of the Czars erected to the glory of the modern capital. Here the wooden horses are moved by powerful dynamos under the searching light of electric lamps. But what has become of the mob in “Petroushka”,--the motley, varied crowd? The doll, the artificial, mechanical, automatic puppet has dispossessed the human being; it gets the better of the disabled actor. There remains enough soul, however, in this changed world to supply the bodies of five human [Illustration] 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 <g>ennui</g> 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.