GLR May-June 2025

sorship. But these artistic strategies were not only the work of individual artists: Diaghilev and Filosofov actively encour aged them, shaping the editorial and cu ratorial direction of the movement. Their influence was especially strong in the early 1900s, when Filosofov had become involved with the Symbolist writers Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) and Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), whose æs thetic and philosophical ideas strongly shaped the content of Mir Iskusstva .

clothing to suggest transformations of gender and sexuality. These ideas were discussed within a small group of intel lectuals, poets, writers, and artists known as the “Friends of Hafez,” who named themselves after the 14th-century Persian poet. Hafez’ poetry, renowned for its mystical devotion, sensual imagery, and homoerotic undertones, aligned with the group’s artistic and philosophical ambi tions. Meeting in the Saint Petersburg salon of Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) and Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal (1866– 1907), they reimagined themselves in pseudo-Greek and pseudo-Persian cos tumes, turning their salons into living tableaux that blurred the boundaries be tween art, fashion, theater, and poetry. Their experiments with costume and movement laid the groundwork for a new approach to dance—one that re jected the rigid corsetry of classical bal let in favor of a fluid, liberated body. Without this radical rethinking of move ment and dress, Diaghilev’s ballet enter

The most provocative works in this period were the illustrations of Léon Bakst (1866–1924), which featured an drogynous figures paired with poetic ref erences to ancient Greece. These draw ings resonated with the idea of Greece as a utopia of sexual freedom—an idealized past contrasted with the legal persecution of homosexuality in the Russian Empire. Although Russian law imposed prison sentences for sex between men, this leg islation was rarely enforced among the privileged elite, allowing artists to ex plore queerness obliquely through historical allegory. Bakst’s fascination with Greece was not only æsthetic but also practical. Alongside Somov, he experimented with the ex pressive potential of costume, developing new ways of using

Pavel Tchelitchew. Still Life, Clown , 1930.

prise would not have been possible. Diaghilev himself was deeply invested in this vision of Greece, not only as an æsthetic but also as an erotic ideal. His passion for antiquity found its most famous expression in the bal

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