Nigger singers with their faces blacked singing minstrel songs. In the song "", the Mikado sings of the punishment for older women who dye their hair or wear corsets, to be "Blacked like a nigger/With permanent walnut juice." Both lyrics are usually changed for modern performances. The word "nigger" appears in children's literature. "How the Leopard Got His Spots", in the "Just So Stories" (1902) by Rudyard Kipling, tells of an Ethiopian man and a leopard, both originally sand-colored, deciding to camouflage themselves with painted spots, for hunting in tropical forest. The story originally included a scene wherein the leopard (now
The Twelve (poem) half-tone lower, stop telling lies". Such a "criminal" atmosphere pervades the Petrograd of "The Twelve", a frightening city in the snowy winter of 1918. Aleksandr Blok considered this poem to be his best work. During the war, Savoyarov met Aleksandr Blok who attended his concerts in cinemas and café chantant a dozen times in 1914-1918. Sometimes Blok brought actors who recited his poems and plays onstage. Thus in 1918 he persistently showed Savoyarov’s performances to his wife Liubov Mendeleyeva-Blok so that she could "adopt" his eccentric manner (for reading "The Twelve" poem). He wrote in his journals: "Liuba finally saw