by Lucy Moore
NIJINSKY
ALSO BY LUCY MOORE
The Thieves’ Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild,
Thief-Taker, and Jack Sheppard, House-Breaker
Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld
Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey
Maharanis: The Lives and Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses
Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties
NIJINSKY
LUCY MOORE
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London EC1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Lucy Moore, 2013
Excerpts from The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition translated by Kyril Fitzlyon, edited with an introduction by Joan Acocella. Copyright © 1995 by Actes Sud. Revised translation copyright 1999 by Kyril Fitzlyon. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and Aitken Alexander Associates.
The moral right of Lucy Moore has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 84668 618 4
eISBN: 978 1 84765 828 9
Typeset in Iowan by MacGuru Ltd
[email protected]
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061
for Otto
‘… yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.’
John Keats, Endymion, Book I
Contents
Author’s note
Prologue
CHAPTER 1 Yaponchik 1889–1905
CHAPTER 2 The Favourite Slave 1906–1909
CHAPTER 3 Dieu de la Danse 1909–1910
CHAPTER 4 Petrushka 1910–1911
CHAPTER 5 Faune and Jeux 1911–1913
CHAPTER 6 Le Sacre du printemps 1910–1913
CHAPTER 7 Roses 1913–1914
CHAPTER 8 Mephisto Valse 1914–1918
CHAPTER 9 Spectre 1918–1950
DIVERTISSEMENT A libretto for a ballet based on Nijinsky’s life
CHAPTER 10 The Chosen One
Notes and references
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index
Author’s note
MY SPELLING OF RUSSIAN PROPER NAMES is – I hope – an acceptable mixture of common usage (for example, Tchaikovsky or Massine) and a standard transliteration. At the turn of the twentieth century, a rouble was worth sixteen pence or seventy-six cents.
I have not included descriptions of every ballet in which Nijinsky appeared because I thought it would interrupt the narrative to have too many long technical passages; I only used those that seemed to me to have been important biographically as well as artistically. However, Nijinsky’s first biographer, Richard Buckle, was scrupulous about this, so any reader who wants to learn about the more minor roles would enjoy his detailed account of Nijinsky’s career.
There are some small controversies (for example, the issue of exactly who was present at the dinner and carriage ride after the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps) into which, again for the sake of the narrative, I have not delved too deeply, preferring instead to present what I think is the most likely version of events. In these cases the sources I used (or did not use) and notes for further reading appear in the footnotes.
Sketch of Nijinsky as the Rose by Valentine Hugo, c.1912.
PROLOGUE
The Premiere of Le Sacre du printemps
29 May 1913, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris
FOR ONCE ON A FIRST NIGHT he was backstage in his practice clothes, rather than in his dressing room trying to ignore the throng of admirers while he put on his costume and made up his face. He wore a full white crêpe de Chine shirt and narrow black trousers, buttoned down the calves. It was the first interval and the audience was restive, shifting and murmuring. Les Sylphides, their opening piece, had received the usual rapturous applause.
The dancers moved loosely around him, some warming up, some pretending nonchalance, a few grouped together, whispering. He avoided eye contact with them, but then he usually preferred not to look directly at people. Their brightly coloured costumes were heavy and unwieldy and the men had complained about their false beards. Some crossed themselves, lips moving silently. Like all experienced performers, he recognised how important the backstage mood would be for the success of his debut. On a first night, doubts in the wings, as his sister would observe, can lead to catastrophe. If only she were dancing the role he had conceived for her.
Most of them, he knew, disliked the ballet he had created, could not understand what he was asking of them or what he wanted to achieve. That was partly his fault: movement was his medium of communication, not words. The dancers resented being ordered brusquely to move exactly as he instructed them, without any opportunity for interpreting their roles at all. The shuffling steps, flat-footed jumps, clenched hands, hunched shoulders and unsynchronised, deliberately primitive choreography seemed to them ugly and painful. He knew they asked themselves what ballet was for, if beauty and grace had been removed. It was a question he asked himself.
At least the theatre was packed, despite the fact that they had charged double the normal ticket price. For the past four years, all Paris had been obsessed by the Ballets Russes and by him, its star, Nijinsky – the young savage. Tonight, an unseasonably warm evening at the end of May, they were to premiere a daring new ballet billed as being created by three poets: Igor Stravinsky, its thoroughly modern composer; Nicholas Roerich, a distinguished student of pre-historical, pagan Russia, its set designer; and Nijinsky, its brilliant twenty-four-year-old choreographer. Although it was rumoured that their charming but ruthless impresario, Sergey Diaghilev, was not above giving away tickets to ensure a full house, the thought of empty seats on such a night was inconceivable.
Through the peephole in the curtain he could see his mother in the front row (her usual seat; her one evening dress), and then all around her the city’s cultural and social elite. The diamonds on the bosoms and the bare, white arms of chic ladies from the grand arrondissements – the sort whose parties dapper little Monsieur Proust (his Du côté de chez Swann would come out in six months’ time) schemed to get invited to – glittered alongside the soft jackets worn by self-proclaimed aesthetes, writers and artists, who scorned formal evening wear as bourgeois trappings of an outdated society, considering themselves guardians of the new wave. Igor in his element, four rows from the front, nervously anticipating the applause; glamorous Misia Sert, fanning herself against the heat, waiting for Diaghilev to join her in the box she had booked for every night of their season. Many of them were friends and acquaintances, here to defend their bold new work. The grandees, he knew, were here to be shocked by it.
Aware that some of the audience might find the new material disturbing, Sergey Pavlovich had constructed the rest of the
programme to pander to potential critics. The show had opened with the moonlit elegance of Chopin and tulle skirts and would progress, after their premiere, to the ethereal romance of Le Spectre de la Rose – his virtuoso role, the one that made audiences gasp, and the only part he would be dancing tonight – before concluding with the wild, warlike Tatar dances from the opera Prince Igor. Only Le Sacre du printemps could possibly be seen as controversial.
This was the Ballets Russes’ third performance at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and he should have been encouraged by the knowledge that it was his image, alongside that of Isadora Duncan, that had inspired the decorative bas-reliefs on the exterior, almost leaping out of the marble into the air. All things considered, the dress rehearsal had gone well (as it ought to have done, after the nearly one hundred expensive practice sessions he had insisted upon) and that morning an early notice in Le Figaro had raved about the ballet’s dazzling modernity. His sister Bronia thought he was calm, waiting to be judged but confident his art would not be found wanting.
But the nerves would not be silenced. Relentlessly they bubbled up into his throat. L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune, his first composition, premiered the previous year, in which he played the faun, had caused such a scandal that the onanistic ending had to be altered for subsequent performances. Only two weeks earlier at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées’ grand opening, Jeux, the second ballet he had choreographed, had been greeted with hisses and derisive laughter. Despite its score by Debussy, the setting by Léon Bakst of a garden at dusk, and Nijinsky himself in the lead role, its slight premise – two girls and a boy in modern tennis clothes flirting with one another – had not impressed. Jeux had been dismissed as immature and ugly. Beneath his arms, the thin silk of his shirt was already wet through.
He knew that, in private, Sergey had begun to lose faith, to doubt the wisdom of entrusting all the Ballets Russes’ choreography to his young protégé. Of late all he could see when he looked at him was dyed hair, false teeth and an oily smile. Their arguments were a measure of the stresses under which their relationship – professionally and personally – was labouring. Over the past few months, Sergey had insisted more and more vehemently that although a painting or a piece of music might be misunderstood at first, even remain unappreciated for many years, and yet still be considered a true work of art, a ballet must be well received by the public or it would be doomed to obscurity: it must sell tickets. This was his first major work. It had to succeed.
But why shouldn’t it? Igor was, perhaps, no stranger to controversy, but he was acclaimed as the greatest young composer of the twentieth century. L’Oiseau de feu and Petrushka were dazzling ballets, even without him dancing them. Roerich – he had nicknamed him the Professor – had created a wild and primitive world in which their sacred mystery would be enacted, a tree-studded hill on a lush, green plain. Most importantly, Sergey had trusted them with this work, placing his faith and experience in their united talents. Between them they were creating a revolutionary, entirely modern form of ballet, stripped of the tinselled artifice of previous generations.
And, as he told himself, he was the greatest dancer of his age – the greatest dancer and, God willing, the greatest choreographer. An artist, as well as a performer. Over and again the public had proclaimed him the god of the dance; Sergey had annointed him the prophet of ballet’s future. One day, perhaps even tonight, with this ballet, the power and beauty of his work would prove all the critics wrong.
The chef de la scène banged his stick hard on the floor three times, a signal for all non-performers to clear the stage. That girl was here again, her blue eyes soaking everything up from behind the Baron de Günzburg’s shoulder, looking – he knew – for him. He would not think about that now. Reluctantly – or was he imagining it? – the dancers moved to their places, their make-up already softening beneath the hot lights.
He saw Diaghilev standing in his usual spot, solemn and magnificent, his expression revealing nothing, scanning the stage to ensure everyone was in the correct position before he gave the sign for the curtain to be raised. He had given orders that whatever happened they must not stop dancing. The white streak in his brilliantined hair echoed the starched white shirt-front standing out against his black tailcoat; the almond-blossom scent of his hair-wax hung in the air, an overpowering waft of stale aftershave.
Outside in the pit, he knew, the conductor would be standing before the orchestra with his still arms upraised. Vaslav Nijinsky, possibly the greatest genius of twentieth-century dance, drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited for the music to begin.
CHAPTER 1
Yaponchik
1889–1905
ONE LOST NIGHT IN PARIS in the mid-1920s, Alabama Knight, the discontented heroine of Zelda Fitzgerald’s autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz, finds herself at the Théâtre du Châtelet where Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes are playing. After the performance, spellbound, she is introduced to ‘a woman with a shaved head and the big ears of a gargoyle … [parading] a Mexican hairless [Chihuahua] through the lobby’. This woman, she is told, had once been a ballerina.
‘How did you get in the ballet?’ Alabama asks breathlessly, her heart suddenly set on becoming a dancer. The woman seems almost confused by the question: the answer is so simple. One has to imagine a gravelly émigré accent and a sense of surprised finality about her reply. ‘But I was born in the ballet.’
This was the case with the majority of Russian dancers at the start of the twentieth century and of no one could it be said with more accuracy than Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky,* acclaimed as the dieu de la danse, whose parents were both gifted professional dancers and whose childhood was largely spent in and around theatres. He may not actually have been born in a dressing room, like his venerable ballet master, Enrico Cecchetti, or during a performance, like his sister (their mother went into labour while dancing a polonaise at the Opera Theatre in Minsk, dashed off to a nearby hospital after arranging for an extra to take her place on stage and gave birth to Bronislava before the final curtain fell), but he might as well have been.
As Bronislava, or Bronia, would write of their early years, ‘We were born artists of the dance. We accepted without question our birthright from our parents – our dancing bodies. The theatre and the dance were a natural way of life for us from birth. It was as if, in the theatre, we were in our natural element, where everything responded in our souls.’
Neither of the Nijinsky parents – Foma (Thomas) and Eleonora, née Bereda – came from theatrical families. Foma was born in Warsaw in 1862. His grandfather, father and brother were activists, devoted to the cause of liberating Poland from Russian rule, but although he was a proud patriot Foma knew from childhood that his fate did not lie in politics. At eight he began attending the Wielki Theatre School at the Warsaw State Theatre.
In 1870, when Foma began his career there, fourteen-year-old Eleonora Bereda had already left the Wielki School. Her father, a Warsaw cabinet-maker, had died when she was seven, after his compulsive gambling bankrupted their family – and her mother had died days later. She and her nine-year-old sister Stephanie began attending classes in secret at the Theatre School and, defying the disapproval of their elder siblings who thought a career on the stage was not respectable, were soon contributing to the household expenses by performing in ballets and operas. At fourteen Eleonora, chaperoned by her two elder sisters, had been working for two years as part of the corps de ballet of a small company touring provincial Russia’s thriving theatres.
Like Eleonora, Foma worked as a migrant dancer after leaving the Wielki School. Higher wages compensated for the insecurity and questionable status of this type of work, for despite his talents as dancer and choreographer, headstrong Foma recognised that he lacked the patience and diplomacy to progress steadily through the corps of the great state-funded theatres of Moscow or St Petersburg, as a civil servant in the Tsar’s employ, to the coveted ranks of premier danseur and, ultimately, ballet-ma
ster.
The two young dancers met and fell in love in Odessa in 1882. Eleonora was five years older than Foma and at first she was reluctant to commit to him. After two years’ passionate courtship she relented and they were married in Baku on the Caspian Sea, the capital of modern Azerbaijan. Two years later their first child, Stanislas, was born on a return trip to the Caucasus; Vaslav followed on 12 March 1889 in Kiev; and Bronia made her dramatic entrance in Minsk in 1891.
Although Eleonora had not planned to have so many children, nor so quickly (a family made a carefree, itinerant life with Foma and, indeed, her own career, increasingly untenable), according to Bronia the first years of her parents’ marriage were happy ones, united by love and a shared devotion to their art. Certainly they were picturesque. In her memoirs, Bronia describes travelling the length and breadth of Russia, galloping through the Caucasus along the Georgian Military Highway from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi as fast as possible to avoid being ambushed by brigands in the narrow passes between the mountains, or steaming down the Volga at dusk, lulled to sleep in violet light by sailors singing along to the music of balalaikas playing on the banks and the gentle splashing of the river against the sides of the boat. Bronia remembered her father one afternoon bringing home Caucasian-style Turkish delight, stuffed with almonds and delicately flower-scented; try though she might, for the rest of her life, nothing else ever tasted as good. For a long time her bed was the family’s travelling trunk filled with blankets, its top wedged open.
Dance and the theatre were at the centre of the Nijinsky family’s life. In 1893, when Vaslav was four, they lived in a dacha beside Kiev’s Summer Theatre, where Foma and Eleonora were engaged for the season, on Trukhanov Island, across the Dnieper from the city. The children’s nanny would sometimes take them out secretly after bedtime, while Foma and Eleonora performed, and they would tiptoe to the theatre through illuminated gardens, where the muffled strains of the orchestra could be heard, and into the stage door. Bronia would always remember being dazzled by the ‘fairytale lights’ and Vaslav told her, years later, ‘of his delight in that mysterious night walk and how he used to run in front of everyone to see the lights of the many coloured paper lanterns, hanging on so many chains in so many directions’.