"Firebird": Russian Beauty in Berlin Exile.

The literary and artistic magazine "Firebird" was published by the Russian emigration from 1921 to 1926 in Berlin and Paris. It emerged at a time when a wave of refugees from Bolshevik Russia flooded Europe - and along with their suitcases and memories, the emigrants brought with them a culture they sought to preserve at any cost.

The publication was financed by Alexander Kogan, the owner of the Berlin publishing house "Russian Art." The art department was edited by art historian Georgy Lukomski, while the literary department was headed by poet Sasha Chorny. The union of commercial acumen, scholarly rigor, and poetic lightness yielded unexpectedly powerful results.

The artistic design of the magazine amazed with its exceptional quality: multicolored lithographed covers and colored inserts reproduced works by Bakst, Benois, Bilibin, Grigoriev, Kuznetsov, Roerich, Somov, and Chagall - the entire palette of the "World of Art" and related movements.

A total of 14 issues were published: the first 13 in Berlin, and the last one in Paris. The circulation was about 300 copies. This is insignificantly small by the standards of mass media - but each issue was a work of art.

The fairy-tale image of the Firebird was identified with the lost Motherland - unattainable, yet alive in memory. The name was chosen deliberately: the emigrants did not consider themselves people without a future; they believed they were preserving the flame of Russian culture for better times.

"Firebird" honorably continued the tradition established by "World of Art" and "Golden Fleece" - the best magazines of the Silver Age. This was its main mission: to keep the thread between old Russia and the scattered Russian people around the world from breaking.