And as is almost inevitable in Russia, this cultural transformation could not have been achieved without the help of Pushkin’s omnipresent spirit. But while Pushkin’s
Chronicling the creation of
And in fact, many did shed tears when
The leader of the group, who dubbed themselves the Nevsky Pickwickians, was twenty-year-old Alexander Benois, the son of a wealthy and influential Petersburg architect. The Benois family had Italian, French, and German roots. Alexander’s maternal great-grandfather, who came to Russia from Venice in the late eighteenth century, was named “director of music” of Petersburg by Nicholas I in 1832; his grandfather was the architect of the Maryinsky Theater. A curious detail: entering upon marriage, Benois’s Catholic grandfather and Lutheran grandmother agreed, to avoid religious friction in the family, that their male descendants would be Catholic and the females Lutheran. Alexander Benois felt that this decision contributed to his family’s tradition of broad-mindedness and tolerance, both religious and aesthetic.
Interested in both painting and music, Benois was sent to Karl May’s private school, one of the best in Petersburg. There he befriended Dmitri Filosofov, Konstantin Somov, and Walter Nouvel, and in the best Petersburg tradition founded a circle they called the Society for Self-Education. The club members were only sixteen and seventeen years old. They usually met at the Benois apartment and took turns giving diligently prepared lectures on music, art, and philosophy, followed by lively discussions.
Soon the Pickwickians were joined by the young artist Leo Rozenberg, who later became famous under his pseudonym, Leon Bakst; elected “speaker” of the club, he moderated the debates. That they sometimes grew heated is evidenced by the fact that the bronze bell Bakst used for calling his friends to order eventually cracked.
The Nevsky Pickwickians considered themselves Petersburg cosmopolites. As Benois recalled, they “valued the idea of some sort of united humanity.” In their intense dreams the young club members imagined no less a feat than bringing Russian art out of isolation and into Europe. But those dreams would have been nothing more than that if their group had not been joined by Filosofov’s cousin from the provinces—a young, energetic, and self-confident charmer named Sergei Diaghilev.
The country cousin was the startling opposite of the thin, pale, and restrained Petersburger Filosofov. Benois recalled that Diaghilev astounded them with his un-Petersburgian appearance. “He had round rosy cheeks and sparkling white teeth, which showed as two even rows between his bright red lips.”78 Diaghilev, who had a resounding baritone, dreamed of becoming a singer; he also took lessons in composition at the Petersburg conservatory. But he was almost completely ignorant about art, and his literary tastes were equally embarrassing to his new friends.
Benois took up the education of Diaghilev, acting for many years as his mentor and, as Benois called himself, his “intellectual protector.” Diaghilev amazed Benois with his uncommon abilities: “with wild leaps he went from total ignorance and indifference to a demanding and even passionate study”79 of European and Russian culture. Benois observed in astonishment as his “beloved and most colorful student” became a specialist, almost instantly, in—say—the little-studied, arcane realm of eighteenth-century Russian art. But Benois always considered Diaghilev’s main talent to be his willpower—to which he added energy, stubbornness, and a considerable understanding of human psychology: “He, who was too lazy to read a novel and who yawned while listening even to a most interesting lecture, was capable of spending a long time to study carefully the novel’s author or the lecturer himself. The ensuing verdict was always acutely accurate and insightful.”80
