Using a wide range of sources, including important newly translated texts, Maddocks’ immensely readable book conjures impressions of this enigmatic figure, his friends and the world he encountered. It explores his life as an emigr? artist and how he clung to an Old Russia which no longer existed. That forging of past and present meets in his ‘Symphonic Dances’ (1940), his last composition, written on Long Island shortly before his death in Beverly Hills, surrounded by a close-knit circle of Russian exiles.