A truly Russian icon

For far too long, the history of 20th- century Russia has been understood almost exclusively through the prism of politics, as if it were about nothing more than Marxism and Leninism, revolution and totalitarianism, war and famine. But in fact the history of Russia over the past 100 years is not only one of multiple political crises, but of an unprecedented cultural catastrophe. Between 1917 and 1937, the Bolsheviks destroyed not just the Russian political system, but an entire civilisation, everything from its manners and its habits to its stamp-collecting clubs and its fashion designers. A generation of cultural and social leaders died or emigrated. Most of those who stayed were imprisoned, impoverished, or otherwise silenced. As a result, the books people read and wrote before 1917, the pictures they painted and the ideas they thought differed from what Russians read, wrote, painted or thought in the years afterwards.

There were, however, a tiny number of exceptions, a small group of creative people who were neither destroyed by the revolution nor completely transformed by it.