At last in late 1898, Diaghilev brought his and Benois’s longstanding, heretofore Utopian dream to life: they started an art magazine. Modeled on foreign publications of the modern style like the British Studio, the German Pan and Die Jugend, and the French La Plume, Benois and Diaghilev’s brainchild was called Mir iskusstva (World of Art), which represented quite a revolutionary concept for Russia. It was the first artistic publication by a group of like-minded young people who wanted to use it as a beacon for broad cultural change in the country. It was also the first magazine in Russia’s history prepared and designed as a complete artistic concept.
Mir iskusstva immediately caught the attention of the Petersburg elite with its attractive appearance: large format, excellent paper, well-designed headings, and endpapers. Each issue had wonderful reproductions, specially made in Europe, of works by modern Russian and Western painters. Diaghilev dug its delicate typeface out of the printing house of the Academy of Sciences, where it had lain since Empress Elizabeth’s reign. The magazine’s logo, by Bakst, was a solitary eagle on a mountaintop.
For Diaghilev and his friends this logo was a symbol of independent and free art, proudly presiding high above the mundane. But in fact Mir iskusstva was closely tied to the economic and cultural transformations at large in Russian society. It was no accident that the magazine was financed by Princess Maria Tenisheva, whose husband, a Russian self-made man, built the first car factory in Petersburg, or by the Moscow merchant Savva Morozov, who had grown rich by building railroads. At first Diaghilev himself felt that one of the main goals of the magazine should be the promotion of Russian art industries: the growing textile, fabric, ceramic, china, and glass enterprises. Benois earnestly insisted that “in essence so-called industrial art and so-called pure art are sisters, twins of the same mother—beauty—and resemble each other so much that sometimes it is very hard to tell them apart.”92
In an interview in Peterburgskaya gazeta, Leon Bakst happily promised that each issue of the new magazine would present model designs for craftsmen and workers; special attention would be paid to designs for fabric, furniture, and pottery, ceramics, majolica, mosaics, and wrought iron. Stasov, defender of the Wanderers and realistic art, worriedly wrote to a friend about Diaghilev’s feverish activity, “that shameless and brazen piglet is trying to get all kinds of merchants, traders, industrialists and so on to subscribe to his publication.”93
Stasov, who called Diaghilev a “decadent cheerleader” in print and Mir iskusstva “the courtyard of the lepers” (an image borrowed from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris) had ample reason for sounding the alarm. Even though eventually the young modernists’ magazine did not become a catalogue and handbook for the rapidly developing Russian arts industry, and the number of its subscribers never exceeded one thousand, the influence of Mir iskusstva—both the magazine and the artistic circle it represented and later the whole movement that took its name—had a revolutionary effect on all spheres of Russian cultural life, including the applied arts.
Just as in the early 1860s young artists in Petersburg had passed around every issue of the radical journal Sovremennik with the latest article by the nihilistic guru Chernyshevsky, now they heatedly debated the innovative ideas of Mir iskusstva. Passions boiled. The penny press slung mud at Diaghilev, Benois, and company, and just as had happened with the Wanderers, rich buyers attracted by the scandal came to the studios of the Mir iskusstva artists: stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers, and big bureaucrats who wanted to be au courant and fashionable.
On the pages of his magazine, Benois tirelessly touted promising new names and exciting artistic and cultural concepts. He propagandized the artists of Art Nouveau like Beardsley, the Viennese secessionists, and later the French postimpressionists. Benois called on Russian art to free itself from the conventions of genre, from the slavish dependence on literature displayed by the Wanderers, and also from the shallow salon academism that was still influential both in Russia and the West. But he didn’t proclaim the concept of art for art’s sake, either. According to Benois, a broader concept of art that included music and theater should develop. This Western idea, assimilated through the writings of Wagner and Nietzsche, was taken to heart by the Petersburg modernists and was destined to play an enormous role in their future undertakings.
