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I felt all the luxury of convalescence creeping into my bones. All that I need do was to lie there and let people feed me and read a little if it did not make my head ache. I had a water-colour painted by Alexander Benois on the wall opposite me, a night in the Caucasus, with a heavy sweep of black hill, a deep blue steady sky, and a thin grey road running into endless distance.
Artists Somoff and Benois and Dobujinsky; novelists like Sologub and Merejkowsky; dancers like Karsavina actors from all over Petrograd they were there, I expect, to add criticism and argument to the adulation of friends and of the carelessly observant rich Jews and merchants who had come simply to display their jewellery.
On that occasion the splendid animal devoured the town, and in Pushkin's poem you feel the devastating power of the beast, and in Benois' pictures you can see it licking its lips as it swallowed down pillars and bridges and streets and squares with poor little fragments of humanity clutching and crying and fruitlessly appealing.
I did not know very much about him except that he was a very wealthy merchant, who had made his money by selling cheap sweets to the peasant. He lived, I knew, an immoral and self-indulgent life, and his hobby was the quite indiscriminate collection of modern Russian paintings, his walls being plastered with innumerable works by Benois, Somoff, Dobeijinsky, Yakofflyeff, and Lançeray.
There is an old poem of Pushkin's that Alexandre Benois has most marvellously illustrated, which has for its theme the rising of the river Neva in November 1824.
I say Lermontov, but heaven knows that that great Russian poet was not supposed to be going to have much to say in the affair. This performance had been in preparation for at least ten years, and when such delights as Gordon Craig's setting of "Hamlet," or Benois' dresses for "La Locandiera" were discussed, the Wise Ones said: "Ah, all very well just wait until you see 'Masquerade."
"You shouldn't have gone out walking," she said crossly. "That man's been here again?" referring to the Rat, whom she hated. "If it hadn't been for him," I said, "I would have died." But she made the flat as cheerful as she could, lighting the stove, putting some yellow flowers into a glass, dusting the Benois water-colour, putting my favourite books beside my bed.
He went to the Hermitage and the Alexander Galleries, and purchased coloured post-cards of the works of Somov, Benois, Douboginsky, Lançeray, and Ostroymova all the quite obvious people.
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