[1] Polunin was born in Moscow and studied art in Munich and Paris.
[2] In 1908 he emigrated to London to work as a designer for the Ballets russes.
[4] In London, he met one of the artists Sergei Diaghilev was trying hard to get work for, the sculptor and costume designer Elizabeth Violet Hart.
She was an English introduced in the Parisian Bohemia by Henri-Pierre Roché and heroine of the novel Deux Anglaises et le continent [fr].
At that time he was a teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art.