The Salon album of Vera Sudeikin-Stravinsky

Before meeting Igor Stravinsky in 1921 in Paris, Vera Sudeikin-Stravinsky (1888-1982) was already know as the "Muse of the Muses" in what had been the bohemian, intellectual life of St. Petersburg-Petrograd. Hers was the "Silver Age" of Russian culture, when symbolism reigned in the cabarets and the artistic process itself was a form of spontaneous celebration. As the habitues of this world fled the Bolsheviks, Vera, an artist and writer in her own right, managed to preserve their heritage in an extraordinary literary production: an album containing poems, sketches, fragments of music, and other dedications by some of the most influential Russian cultural figures of the day. The Album, which is reproduced here for the first time, is both a record of a cultural diaspora and a monument, in its very content and composition, to Russian culture during the Revolution.