The resourceful artists of Mir iskusstva were of course leading the way. Their paintings, watercolors, drawings, engravings, once again revealing the unparalleled charm and poetry of old Petersburg, became quite popular with the public. An even more important step was taken when Benois created a series of marvelous watercolors depicting Petersburg of the eighteenth century: The Summer Gardens under Peter the Great; The Empress Elizabeth Deigns to Stroll Through the Streets of Petersburg; The Fontanka under Catherine II; The Changing of the Guard in Front of the Winter Palace under Paul I. These watercolors had been commissioned by the publishing house that belonged to the Society of Saint Eugenia, a Petersburg charity that supported retired nurses. The publishing house printed thousands of postcards of the highest quality. The ones with views of old Petersburg by Benois and his Mir iskusstva colleagues became best-sellers and could be seen in every “proper” Petersburg home. At the same time, these popular postcards brought the message of Mir iskusstva to a mass audience.
Carefully reconstructing historic events, costumes, and scenes, Benois’s watercolors do not pretend to be authentic. They illustrate his articles about Petersburg, not the city’s actual history. The artist is always present in them: attentive, loving, with a barely noticeable irony. The composition of Benois’s works is usually rather theatrical; the color stresses the paper’s texture. This is stylization quite typical of early modern European art.
Almost all of his friends recall Benois as a charming person. And of course, they were all enthralled by his enormous erudition and his genius for cultural propaganda. The role of that stooped, bald, and black-bearded man with the attentive brown eyes behind pincenez in the renaissance of Russian artistic taste and the flowering of modern Russian theater and ballet cannot be overestimated. Not many contemporaries considered Benois a truly great artist, and he wasn’t one. But even the most demanding Russian connoisseurs used words like “great,” “astonishing,” and “epochal” when describing two series of Benois’s works—his illustrations for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman and The Queen of Spades. (There’s obviously no escape from Pushkin and his visionary works in dealing with the fate of St. Petersburg.)
Mir iskusstva resurrected the art of the book in Russia. The pioneer here, as in much else, was Benois. He persistently propounded the idea of the book as an artistic concept. Everything in a book, Benois would explain again and again—the paper, typeface, illustrations, design elements, and, of course, jacket—had to be integrated. For Petersburg at the turn of the century this was a revolutionary idea. But it quickly gained acceptance, since the tastes of customers were becoming markedly more sophisticated.
That lofty artistic ideas almost instantly penetrated the mass market was—for Russia, at least—astonishing. The energy of Benois and his friends seemed boundless, as they found time for everything and got involved everywhere, trying to push Petersburg’s cultural life to new limits. And they succeeded. Petersburg’s book design and manufacture, like many other crafts that drew the attention of the Mir iskusstva activists—posters, interior design, porcelain, even toys—underwent a true renaissance, thanks to their pioneering efforts.
Benois’s thirty-three drawings for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman appeared in the first issue of Mir iskusstva for 1904 and immediately caused a sensation. The magazine, alas, ceased publication in the same year, the victim of incompatible ideas. Between the mystic, decadent Merezhkovsky and the much more sober and practical Benois and Diaghilev, a schism developed over the literary, “philosophical” bent represented by Merezhkovsky’s camp and the artists’ desire to be free of unwelcome literary intrusions.
It is telling that many contemporary Russian artists considered the publication of Benois’s illustrations of Pushkin—despite the fact that the impetus for them came from a literary work—to be the most significant artistic event in the five years of the magazine’s existence. On the other hand, Benois’s drawings delighted writers as well, especially those of modernist leanings. One of the major poets of that era, the symbolist Valery Bryusov, proclaimed, “At last we have drawings worthy of a great poet. In them the old Petersburg is alive as it is alive in the poem.”99
