…When I met Bilibin, I can say that it happened a long time ago in Saint Petersburg. Ivan Yakovlevich was a great friend of my father, the writer Evgeny Nikolayevich Chirikov. My father took us to show drawings and books illustrated by Ivan Yakovlevich. Back then I was still a girl with pigtails (Bilibin is 20 years older than me), but I was already interested in art at that time. But we especially became close friends in Batiliman, of course, during the difficult time of the war and the revolution, where our family, like Ivan Yakovlevich, had dachas. Bilibin used to come there with a beautiful young artist Renée O’Connell. And we had often gone together to paint studies and engage in graphics. But at that difficult time, he came to Batiliman alone, a bachelor, and was very busy with work. At the same time, he made pencil portraits of my father, my elder sister and myself in 1919. A lot of people came to the estates, and the times became more and more dark. We needed food and kerosene for lighting, sometimes we went for it on horseback to Sevastopol and Yalta. Fortunately, the fishermen supplied us with fish.