The actual topic of a conference at London’s Courtauld Institute 2-3 November, 2012, was Russian Culture in Exile (1921-1953) but we found ourselves talking about poets, painters and critics mostly in their formative years before the Bolshevik Revolution: big names like the painters Malevich and Kandinsky, the poets Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and the less-well known Pavel Filonov and Nikolai Punin. Filonov (Horsemen, 1911, left) was an avant-garde painter who died of starvation in the siege of Leningrad. Death came prematurely to Punin, an outstanding art critic, in the Gulag. Internal exile as a psychological state of mind was juxtaposed with external exile or the actual business of being banished from one’s homeland. Both conditions contrasted with the relative good fortune of men like Stravinsky and Diaghilev who had installed themselves in Paris by choice almost a decade before the Revolution. We heard how Kandinsky who had spent formative years in…