In October 1898 St. Petersburg buried the poet Jacob Polonsky. The young artist Anna Ostromova and her sister Sonia also walked in the funeral procession. Her attention was focused on one man walking far ahead of her - she didn't want to catch his eye. She knew that if she saw her, she would begin to persuade her to return to the cone again. This person was her last mentor at the school of Baron Stieglitz - the famous St. Petersburg engraver Vasili Matta. He considered her very talented, but her experience working with him consisted mostly of transferring other people's drawings and photographs onto the board for printing in books and magazines. Minimal creativity with a lot of hard work - Anna has already run away from her mentor twice (the first time he convinced her to come back). He claimed that in his entire life he had only met two people who were really talented at engraving, and one of them was her. And I was looking for a meeting with her. And she had plans of her own: she had just received her foreign passport and was preparing to leave for Paris to study painting but they couldn't hide. At some point, Mayte noticed her sister, Sonya, discerning the relationship with an experienced eye - then, walking behind the cabinet, he made her the last offer: let him show her one engraving, just one, and honestly - he won't bother her anymore. She agreed, and he immediately took her to the Stieglitz school library. There he placed old Italian engravings - and Anna froze. Liszt by Hugo de Carpi: Old Man with a Horse in the Waves. color. Printed from several plates. She saw such an engraving for the first time in her life.
- Do you want to work like this? the master asked her.
- Oh yes! This is how I want to work!
And then he literally swore to her about this engraving that she would not betray the craft of engraving. "Holding this engraving in my hand, I vowed that I would work and cut the engraving. And I kept my word," she writes in her memoirs. He also vowed to let her cut whatever she wanted.