ABSTRACT
For the artists of the Diaghilev circle, deriving from the aestheticism of the nineties, set themselves against the revolutionary currents that finally overtook the Russian state in 1917. They constituted an avant-garde completely at odds with enlightened social causes. A. Benois was, with L. Bakst, M. Larionov, and N. Gontcharova, the most important of the Russian painters who joined with Diaghilev in his fateful artistic adventure, which began with the founding of an art journal, Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art) in St. Petersburg in 1898. The sparks were all struck in this small circle of St. Petersburg aesthetes who conducted the editorial affairs of The World of Art, but it required a larger, freer world than that of St. Petersburg before these sparks could burst into full flame. Only in Paris, where Diaghilev eventually enlisted many of the greatest talents of the century, could this very special Russian dream fulfill itself.
