Portrait of poet, prose writer, translator and dramatist Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky with his wife

In 1914 the poet Sergei Gorodetsky and his wife Anna rented a summer house in Kuokkala, a village on the Finnish coast just outside St Petersburg, where Repin lived. They became regulars at the Wednesdays when the painter opened his house, the Penaty, to visitors. Gorodetsky was 30. Three years earlier he had founded the Guild of Poets with Nikolai Gumilyov, the circle from which Acmeism grew, and in 1914 the Guild split. Anna wrote verse under a pen name and acted in amateur theatricals, and their friends simply called her Nymph. Repin put her in front, among the cushions, with her husband leaning in behind. A few days after Russia went to war that summer, the writer Korney Chukovsky, another Kuokkala resident, noted in his diary that Gorodetsky had turned showily patriotic and was writing patriotic poems. Years later, Anna liked to tell people that Repin had been in love with her.