ABSTRACT
Blissful childhoods are the stuff of literary memoirs of the pre-Revolutionary period. Sergey Aksakov, Lev Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov are the most familiar writers to leave idyllic accounts of Edenic nests of gentry before the Fall. KS's recollections in My Life in Art convey a similar nostalgia for a vanished way of life. By all accounts they are not inaccurate. Cosseted by wealth and encouraged in his artistic predilections, he comes across as a privileged but unspoiled participant in a world of moneyed leisure and informed dilettantism. Unlike Aksakov and Tolstoy, scions of landowning gentry and nobility, and unlike Nabokov, son of a highly-placed statesman, KS belonged to the highest circle of Russian industrialists who united patriarchal manners with commercial integrity and a love of art and culture. By blood and sympathies, the Alekseevs were related to the art collectors the Tretyakov brothers and Sergey Mamontov, the creator of a private Russian Opera.
