It was not critics or poets but painters, musicians and men enamoured of the performing arts who finally found the confidence to break out from the art of the cell and to launch the first Russian modernist journal: Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art, 1898–1904). Nor was it, primarily, the new middle class of Moscow of which Briusov was so striking a representative, but a cosmopolitan group of Petersburg amateurs of the fine arts, closely linked by blood and patronage to the dvorianstvo and the court, who undertook to bring ‘Russian art to the notice of the West, to make it big and known’, and who were bold enough to put the question: ‘Are we capable of saying something new in European art or is it our lot to trail along behind?’ Before the century was out, however, the three forces – the lonely poets and thinkers, the Petersburg aesthetes and the new Moscow bourgeoisie – were allied. Their subsequent disintegration, which began after 1905 and which culminated in the 1910 crisis of Symbolism, was in new directions.

The prehistory of Mir Iskusstva began in Petersburg, where a group calling themselves the ‘Nevsky Pickwickians’ originated within a nucleus of friends at a private school run by the Hoffmannesque German pedagogue, Karl Ivanovich May.