Mir iskusstva
He was harsher still with the modernist art magazine "Mir iskusstva" and its founders, Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Sergei Diaghilev when the magazine appeared in 1898. He called Diaghilev "a decadent cheerleader" in print and "Mir iskusstva" "the courtyard of the lepers" (an image borrowed from Victor Hugo's novel "Notre-Dame de Paris").