1906
Paper on canvas, water-colour, gouache, bronze paint, black pencil
161 х 143

The painting reflects an understanding theatre in symbolism as a poetical dream, as a sort of protecting veil of illusion, which conceals the chaotic world of reality. It is not by chance that the image of ancient Elysium (hence Elysian Plains) - the plain of the blessed, of the righteous, the other world - comes into being at an age that "casts oblique rays of a setting sun over aging civilizations", the Silver Age. The antiquity was seen as a "far echo", an enchanted world, the home of the shadows that are dear to the European culture. The Russian symbolists thought themselves "late descendants of royal Epigoni". To project an image of "the other" world, Bakst adopts a point of view from above, with the space sinking, as it were, into the deep. Idyllic shepherds, satyrs and bacchantes, hosts of disembodied souls of philosophers and poets inhabit this shadowy kingdom "where time does not pass". Neither is there harmony: among dark ominous cypresses there flashes a dire vision: a winged sphinx, with shadows, petrified with horror, freezing confronted with inescapable doom.