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 fantastic in the manner in which Somov evokes the very flavour of the dim past.

Somov reproduces bygone ages without any scientific pedantry; his themes are taken from commonplace, everyday life. Somov's personages are not human beings that love and suffer, they are rather marionettes, but such marionettes as had partaken of life's enticements and "would not taste of death." Somov's art is steeped in quiet sadness and scepticism. He loves his world infinitely, and at the same time he mocks at its vanity. In Somov's presentation life is a brilliant and delicate game with a very strange beginning and a disconsolate, gloomy end. Somov's talent is all impregnated with the mysterious power of inspiration and divination, but at the same time there is a note of despair in it; to his mind the riddle of life conceals no lofty meaning.

Somov is a décadent not only in the philosophic import of his art, but also in his very technique and painting. But in applying to Somov the term "décadence" has the same meaning as it bore when characterising Vrubel's art. Somov is at one and the same time an ineffective painter and a virtuoso. At times we find in him something in the nature of intentional puerility, which is due to his proneness to satire, to