Artist Valentina Mikhaelovna Khodasevich was born in 1894.

A younger contemporary of Leon Bakst and Alexander Golovin and creative companion of Vladimir Tatlin and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Valentina Khodasevich has entered the history of Russian art as one of Leningrad’s best theatre designers.

She came into the theatre by chance, returning to St Petersburg from her studies in Europe and succumbing to the call of Sergei Makovsky, editor-in-chief of Apollo. She swiftly made the transition from studentship to a professional career: productions using her designs at the Theatre of Popular Comedy in Petrograd became masterpieces of slapstick and the grotesque. Khodasevich subsequently admitted that eccentricity and character wer...