How to write a biography of an artist who left many texts that obviously shape his posthumous image? How true is this image? Olga Medvedkova offers to look at the personality and life of Lev Bakst from the perspective of microhistory and for the first time reconstructs his intellectual biography, based on archival sources and ego-documents. The subject of her research is the gap between reality and dreams, facts and stories about them, where the artist’s identity manifests itself in all its complexity. The key to understanding Bakst’s myth about himself is the Jewish theme, inextricably linked with the theme of turning to the ancient Greek archaic and the idea of a new Renaissance. Olga Medvedkova is a historian of art and architecture, Doctor of Science, senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, author of books and articles on the history of European architecture of the modern era and problems of Russian art.