How did the Parisian fashion designer become the Great Mademoiselle? Few know that her success was due not only to her own talent and innovation, and not even to wealthy and noble lovers. Chanel entered the elite circle of Paris primarily thanks to prominent Russian émigrés, introduced to her by her close friend Misa Sert. The novel "Russian Friends of Chanel" is based on documentary evidence, particularly on the notes of Coco Chanel's friend Paul Morand, who never received permission to publish them during her lifetime. In it, the author – writer and art historian Elena Celestine vividly conveys the details of Chanel's acquaintance, friendship, and collaboration with Sergey Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Leonid Myasin, Sergey Lifar, Grand Duke Dmitry Romanov, and Princess Maria Pavlovna, Picasso and his Russian wife Olga Khokhlova. The novel immerses the reader in the atmosphere of Paris in the 1920s, a period of the emergence of new art, inspired creativity, but at the same time homelessness, jealousy, and lack of money, – when "at Diaghilev's court" intense work continued, and passions boiled, including the involvement of Gabrielle Chanel. Lively dialogues and rare archival photos of the key figures very accurately illustrate the characters of the heroes, their images, the life of the Russian intelligentsia in emigration, telling for the first time the story of Coco Chanel's emergence in the brilliant circle of geniuses and legends.
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