The last great modernist journal in Russia was Apollon (1909–17), the first number of which came out on 15 October, 1909. It is a measure of the success of the ‘new art’ in all its forms that it was not founded specifically by the Symbolists for the Symbolists.

The original impulse for a new journal came from Sergei Makovsky, the son of the Populist artist Konstantin Makovsky, a man of considerable experience in art-journalism who had been co-editor of the journal Starye Gody (Bygone Years) since 1907, and was also the organiser of exhibitions in Russia and abroad and himself an amateur artist and a competent poet.

At Makovsky's ‘Salon of 1909’, an exhibition held in Petersburg in the January of that year, he met the young, as yet little-known poet Nikolai Gumilev, not long returned from Paris – the Sorbonne – and travels which had taken him to the wilds of Africa. The conversation turned to the desirability of starting up a new periodical which would replace Zolotoe Runo and Vesy but avoid the factionalism which had marred these journals, modelling itself rather on the eclectic urbanity of Mir Iskusstva. The journal, from the outset, was conceived as giving equal importance to the visual arts and literature.