STRANGE was the fate of this composer who went to his
grave unnoticed, after a humdrum life, against the darkly
ominous and turbulent background of unfolding revolu-
tionary events. He was forgotten even in his native land,
and many musicians there were who went out of their way
to humiliate and belittle a composer who, in the light of
historical criticism, had played a prominent rôle in the last
period of Russian music.

Ryebikoff did not escape that strong coating of artistic
dilettantism which, in one or another degree, is peculiar to
the mightiest geniuses of Russian art, Musorgski, Borodin,
even Skryabin. Perhaps he was born too early or out of
place. An early impressionist, the first "decadent" in Rus-
sia, which at the time had not grown up to impressionism,
one of the early pioneers of that school of "destruction of
traditions" which subsequently swept over the whole world
in huge waves, Ryebikoff's only fault was perhaps that his
too advanced ideas about musical theory and esthetics proved
unsupported by an equal intensity of the creative art itself.
His talent, which can in nowise be called feeble or poor,
is below his ideas as an innovator. He elicited ridicule on
the part of some and ardent love on the part of others,
who alas, were at that time too youthful and too weak in
art themselves to create epochs and influence them with
their personal opinions.

Occasionally it happens that persons endowed with cre-
ative gifts in a moderate degree, but not with the gorgeous
super-abundance of genius, loom up importantly in histori-

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