Байдарская долина

March 1916

Elected chairman of the World of Art

Bilibin was elected chairman of the World of Art group.

September 1917

Renée O'Connell leaves him over his drinking

The relationship foundered on Bilibin's drinking: before a witness, the musician Stepan Mitusov, the couple agreed that Renée would stay if he did not drink for a year. Bilibin did not keep his word, and in September 1917 she left him; Mitusov wrote a comic poem about their break-up.

22 September 1917

A month before the October Revolution, leaves for Batiliman

Shortly before the October Revolution Bilibin left Petrograd alone for Crimea, for his house at Batiliman, where he lived and worked until September 1919.

1918

Death of his mother, the pianist Varvara Bubnova

The artist's mother, Varvara Alexandrovna (née Bubnova, 1847–1918), a pianist and pupil of Anton Rubinstein and the daughter of a Baltic Fleet naval engineer, died.

21 February 1920

Evacuated from Novorossiysk aboard the Saratov

Bilibin was evacuated from Novorossiysk aboard the steamer Saratov; because of sick passengers the refugees were landed neither at Constantinople nor at Famagusta in Cyprus, and the ship sailed on to Egypt.

1920

Settles in Cairo: the Byzantine style for the Greeks

Having arrived in Alexandria on 13 March and passed through quarantine and the British refugee camp at Tell el-Kebir, in May Bilibin settled in Cairo and worked for the Greek colony on icons, frescoes and panels in the Byzantine style. He painted Egyptian landscapes and studied Egyptian, Coptic and Arab art, enraptured by the 'head-spinning ornamentation' of the mosques.