by Lucy Moore
But while the avenues of open protest were closed to the young dissidents at the Mariinsky after the theatre’s governing board regained control in late 1905, a powerful means of expressing their ideas still remained to them: their work. Just as the actors of pre-revolutionary France led by the great François-Joseph Talma strove for a new authenticity on stage to reflect the political debates taking place around them, so too did Fokine and his favourite dancers learn to express their liberal ideology through their performances.
The twenty-something ballets Fokine would go on to choreograph between 1906 and 1909, in the majority of which Nijinsky would dance, rejected the established traditions of the Mariinsky and, by extension, the traditions of the Tsar’s regime. Where once a ballet representing an Egyptian dance would have demonstrated its ‘Egyptian-ness’ merely by adding a row of hieroglyphic motifs to the edging of a traditional short, stiff tutu (the kind Kshesinskaya favoured, because they showed off her sturdy legs to perfection), Fokine put his dancers in tunics (à la Isadora), kohled their eyes and darkened their skin with make-up, and included in his choreography profile positions gleaned from studying Egyptian culture. This ethnographic method, as the historian Lynn Garafola explains, was an implicit criticism of Russia’s stridently jingoistic politics.
‘Complete unity of expression’ was paramount and his method of working was collaborative. He would take the dancers into his confidence and encourage them ‘to participate in the creation’ of their roles. He was less interested in having the corps de ballet dance in perfect, rigid unison than, in crowd scenes, allowing the dancers to express their roles individually, creating an overall atmosphere that evoked the story or era he was describing instead of demonstrating the company’s superlatively disciplined training.
Fokine was particularly opposed to the focus on the individual ballerina at the expense of the ballet as a whole. He saw a prima ballerina as first among equals, rather than a star around whom everything revolved as if by divine decree. The Imperial Theatres, though, were organised to celebrate stars. When Kshesinskaya danced, her make-up, hairstyle and costume were chosen to set her off to her best advantage, rather than to create a character or enhance the narrative, and she was always emblazoned with her own fabulous jewels whether she was playing a swan or a peasant-girl. After every solo, which had been tailored to show off her athleticism and technical virtuosity, Kshesinskaya would come to the front of the stage to receive the audience’s applause, interrupting the company’s performance and the atmosphere they had collectively created on stage. Fokine deplored these traditions.
One artist who instinctively understood Fokine’s desire to stop dancers performing ‘for the audience’s pleasure, exhibiting himself as if saying, “Look how good I am”’ was the young Nijinsky. Fokine never needed to explain to him ‘this new meaning of the dance’. Nijinsky may not have been ‘an articulate conversationalist, but who could so quickly and thoroughly understand what I tried to convey about the dances?’ recalled Fokine of working with him in his early career. ‘Who could catch each detail of the movement to interpret the style of the dance? He grasped quickly and exactly, and retained what he had learned all his dancing career, never forgetting the slightest detail.’
In the spring of 1905 Fokine cast Nijinsky as a Faun in a student-only revival of Acis and Galatea, his first work commissioned by the Mariinsky and the first time that Nijinsky, still two years from graduating, would dance a solo and a pas de deux in public. Acis and Galatea contained many of the Duncanesque traits that would become hallmark Fokine: it was inspired by his study of Pompeian frescos and he urged the dancers to form asymmetrical groups on stage and to relax when they weren’t dancing to create an air of naturalness. He was, however, unable to persuade the authorities to allow his nymphs to dance in sandals rather than pointe shoes.
On the night of the performance, Nijinsky overshadowed everyone else on stage. Eleonora sat proudly in the audience – she later said that watching Vaslav perform at the Mariinsky was like going to church on Sunday – and Bronia, watching from backstage, said she had never seen Vaslav dance so brilliantly. Years later she would remember this image of her brother as if she could still see him. ‘As he extends upwards, a barely perceptible quiver runs through his body; his left hand close to his face, he seems to be listening to sounds, only heard by him, which fill all his being. He radiates an inner force that by its very radiance envelops the theatre, establishing a complete rapport with the audience.’ When Vaslav came to the front of the stage, he acknowledged the applause ‘like a bashful schoolboy’; he was, after all, only sixteen. The next day, the critics – who attended student performances like this precisely because they were looking for the next big thing – singled him out as the most distinguished of the young debutantes.
CHAPTER 2
The Favourite Slave
1906–1909
ALTHOUGH THE IMPERIAL THEATRE SCHOOL suggested to Vaslav that he graduate in the spring of 1906, his mother insisted that he remain at the school until the following year so that he would be eighteen when he officially became an Artist of the Imperial Theatres. Even so, following his 1905 debut at the Mariinsky, he began to behave (as only a younger sister could phrase it, half proud and half teasing) as if he were already an Artist, wearing an immaculate white collar and cuffs, his hair smoothly brushed, and holding his head slightly thrown back. When his mother urged him to pay attention to his lessons, he responded grandly that he was studying ‘not merely to be a premier danseur but to become an Artist of the Dance’.
He began performing regularly at the Mariinsky, partnering Anna Pavlova for the first time in January 1906. Bronia recalled the senior girls as well as her classmates starting to say to her, ‘Bronia, tell Vaslav that I adore him,’ and ‘Nijinsky, what a nice fellow … he is a doushka [darling].’ In his turn, Vaslav developed crushes on friends of Bronia’s and girls he partnered on stage. These romances never turned into anything more than innocent flirtations, with shy smiles exchanged and notes passed in the school’s halls, partly because Vaslav, adoring his mother and sister, was devoutly respectful towards women, but also because Eleonora, mindful of Foma’s thwarted career, insisted that for the sake of his art a young dancer must not fall in love and tie himself down too soon.
Foma reappeared in Vaslav’s life in his final years at the school. He came to St Petersburg to see some of Vaslav’s performances, but his comments were usually critical, forcing Vaslav onto the defensive: if he thought Vaslav was being praised for his elevation, he would remind him that he needed to work to become a dancer, not a jumper; when Vaslav partnered a ballerina well he would derisively call him a porteur. Jealous of Vaslav’s talent and potential, he made a great show of demonstrating his own dances to his children, and though Bronia was impressed – and struck continually by the physical similarities between her, Vaslav and Foma, from the musculature of their legs and feet to the almond shapes of their nails – Vaslav dismissed them as acrobatics. When he left after his first visit, Bronia cried, but Vaslav was glad to see him go. He had not forgiven him.
In 1907, the year he graduated, Foma gave Vaslav a hundred roubles as a graduation present and invited him to visit him in Nizhny Novgorod. The plan was to stay for a week but on the first night his father took Vaslav to a restaurant and told him that now he was a man it was time for him to meet Foma’s mistress and the mother of his ten-year-old daughter: Rumyantseva, the woman for whom he had left Eleonora and the children a decade earlier. In response, Vaslav poured out all the pain he had endured over the years as, powerless, he had watched his mother struggle to bring them up alone, taking in boarders, unable to pay her bills, making sacrifice after sacrifice to give her children a roof over their heads and pay for firewood and even food. As Rumyantseva approached their table, Vaslav got up and left the restaurant, setting off for St Petersburg that night. Foma never contacted Vaslav or Bronia again.
As an Artist of the Imperial Theatres, Vaslav was now distinguished w
ith the rank of coryphé, one step below soloist, with an annual salary of 780 roubles, 180 more than a member of the corps de ballet. This was starting out, as Tamara Karsavina, who had begun her career as a coryphée five years earlier, put it, ‘amongst the chosen’. Vaslav danced at the Tsar’s summer theatre in Krasnoye Selo that summer and returned to St Petersburg – after his disastrous trip to Nizhny Novgorod – in the autumn for his first season as an Artist at the Mariinsky.
Very quickly Mathilde Kshesinskaya singled out Nijinsky, choosing him to partner her first in one of her favourite ballets, La Fille Mal Gardée, in November 1907 and then as a regular partner. She found Vaslav ‘a charming boy, friendly and very modest’; perhaps their shared Polish roots further predisposed her to favour him. His modesty was also crucial, for Kshesinskaya did not care to share the spotlight. She had this trait in common with her rival, Anna Pavlova, though at least Kshesinskaya, from the lofty height of her connections with the Tsar and her years as undisputed prima ballerina assoluta, was willing to help younger dancers – especially if, like Vaslav, they made her look good. Tamara Karsavina remembered her teaching all the younger girls which forks to use at the gala dinners they had to attend, where ten baffling pieces of cutlery might await them. Pavlova also danced with Vaslav, but from the day she heard the audience shout his name louder than hers she was wary of him. Bronia recorded her repeated questions about the ‘secret’ of Vaslav’s jump. Half-jokingly, she would take off Bronia’s shoes to examine her feet after class to see ‘what secrets Nijinsky shares with his sister’.
Tall and slender to the point of frailty, ‘like some exotic and fastidious bird’, Anna Pavlova did not fit the image of an ideal ballerina. Until she became a star, the perfect ballerina’s body was thought to be compact and muscular, like Kshesinskaya’s. In fact it was Pavlova’s attenuated physique which led Kshesinskaya to underestimate her as a rival: she allowed Pavlova, then in her second season at the Mariinsky, to take over her roles while she was pregnant in 1901–2, unable to believe that Pavlova could really compete with her. When Pavlova was at the Imperial Theatre School the governesses had tried unsuccessfully to feed her up with cod liver oil and her classmates teased her by calling her ‘The Broom’, but as a ballerina Pavlova converted what was apparently a flaw into a great and unique asset. Her onstage fragility, the effect she created of floating ethereally across the stage, was the essence of her phenomenal success.
Offstage she was a far more powerful creature, whose glamour was electric and whose relentless focus and ambition were sometimes, in the words of Serge Lifar, ‘unworthy of her genius’. The actress Sarah Bernhardt, who could hardly be described as retiring, told Pavlova that she ‘sought more success’ than there was in the world. Even though she liked Lydia Lopokova, a dancer in her own company, Pavlova would send her flowers on the nights she danced badly. Karsavina, whom she saw as direct competition, recalled the venom with which Pavlova tried to scupper her career, refusing to help Karsavina learn ‘her’ role of Giselle and, pretending concern, falsely telling the Mariinsky’s Director that he shouldn’t burden Karsavina with too much work because she was consumptive. Kshesinskaya was happy to set Director Telyakovsky straight on Karsavina’s behalf.
Pavlova’s creed was simple: great art required the greatest of sacrifices. ‘If a dancer, yielding to temptation, ceases to exercise over herself the strictest control, she will find it impossible to continue dancing,’ she wrote. ‘She must sacrifice herself to her art. Her reward will be the power to help those who come to see her forget awhile the sadnesses and monotony of life.’ Normality was impossible: the discipline and commitment required to produce his or her art meant the premier danseur or ballerina could not seek and should not mourn the consolations of everyday life, contentment with a partner and children, ‘the quiet joys of the fireside,’ as Pavlova put it.
Many years later, Rudolf Nureyev would echo her ideas. Domesticity, he wrote, ‘shows onstage. You watch and you can see, he or she has a family, children, a cottage in the country and goes there every Friday. Dancing can’t be a job, like going to the office. It means everything.’
Vaslav would learn to what lengths ambitious dancers were willing to go for their careers when, at about this time, he fell in love with the beautiful Maria Gorshkova, whom he had met in the summer at Krasnoye Selo. He visited her regularly, bringing her flowers and chocolates, until his mother found out and warned him off her, speculating that she might be using him to further her career. Vaslav turned pale at her words, but later told Eleonora that she had been right. ‘I had my arms around her and was about to kiss her when she coyly whispered, “Vatsa, promise me that you will insist on dancing a pas de deux with me …” Now I am cured of love.’
Love and sex, sex and love. In his diary, Vaslav remembered masturbating furiously at school after lights out – nothing unusual in a teenage boy, except for the overpowering sense of wrong-doing he felt, leading him to believe that when he masturbated a lot his dancing deteriorated, as well as being afraid that his teeth would rot and his hair fall out. At fifteen, for his mother’s sake, he forced himself to give it up. This was when, according to his diary, ‘I started to dance like God’ – a direct association between sexual self-control and success on stage. He may have meant that he literally danced like a god but his phrase is just as likely to mean that this was the time people started to take notice of his talents, because as a famous dancer he was often called the God of the Dance. ‘Everyone started talking about me.’
Although he tried to control his masturbation, Vaslav allowed his so-called friend Anatole Bourman to persuade him to lose his virginity with a prostitute. She gave him a serious case of gonorrhoea which took five months to treat (the doctor applied leeches to his swollen testicles as Vaslav looked on, horrified). Between her and the calculating Maria Gorshkova, Vaslav began to distrust women. Perhaps he, like Pavlova, was learning that artists were exempt from the pleasures of ordinary relationships.
The kind of relationships a dancer could have – though of course Pavlova would never have put it like this – were with rich patrons. By the time she was twenty in 1901, after two years in the Imperial Theatres, Pavlova, whose mother was a laundress (she never knew her father), lived in a flat of her own with a maid and a large private studio where every day Enrico Cecchetti came to give her several hours of private tuition, although she was still a coryphée on the same salary level as Nijinsky. Her lovers are reputed to have included a general, a prince and, usefully, a nephew of the Mariinsky’s Director, Vladimir Telyakovsky, as well as the influential critic Valerian Svetlov. Baron Victor Dandré, who became her manager and with whom she lived for years (and may have married, though she was always ambiguous about this), was a well-connected man of property in St Petersburg.
Subservience on one side and exploitation on the other had traditionally been part of a Russian dancer’s experience. The first dancers and actors in Russia had been serfs, trained by their owners to perform in private theatres on their estates. Although many were talented artists, well educated and cultured, they were still considered chattels – which in practice meant concubines. Prince Nikolay Yusupov, owner of a private theatre and Director of the Imperial Theatres in the 1790s, required his female serfs to undress on stage at the end of their performances. Though the serfs had long been freed by Nijinsky’s time, in most cases artists had simply exchanged one kind of master for another. Attitudes of entitlement and submission endured. It was this aspect of the ballet world that gave it a bad name. When Mikhail Fokine asked a group of friends if they thought ballet needed to be reformed, one replied, ‘Ballet is pornography, plain and simple.’
There are several accounts – not entirely mutually contradictory – of how Vaslav, still smarting over the incident with Gorshkova, met his first serious lover, Prince Pavel Lvov. The basic version has the thirty-five-year-old prince sending a note backstage to Nijinsky, inviting him to dinner in a private room at Cubat, one of St Petersburg’s fash
ionable restaurants. Another account has Lvov using the services of a pander, a well-connected fellow dancer who was the illegitimate son of a nobleman, to introduce him to Nijinsky for a fee of 1,000 roubles. Between them they apparently concocted a story about a mysterious princess who admired Nijinsky from afar and had asked Lvov to act as her go-between. They met for the first time at a restaurant and the next day Nijinsky received a note asking him to go to Fabergé, where he was fitted with a diamond and platinum ring, ostensibly from the princess. Gradually the imaginary princess receded into the background and Lvov and Nijinsky became lovers. ‘He loved me as a man does a boy,’ wrote Vaslav, years later. ‘I loved him because I knew he wished me well.’
Pavel Lvov was a handsome playboy with charming manners, a sports enthusiast and one of the first people in St Petersburg to own a motor car. He was the type of man, according to Bourman, who handed out 100-rouble notes at parties – the same sum Foma Nijinsky had given Vaslav for his graduation: it was a different world. The life to which he introduced the unsophisticated eighteen-year-old was one of fabulous luxury and, in the word of the day, decadence.
A month after meeting Vaslav, Lvov invited him, Bronia and Eleonora to dinner to celebrate Bronia’s birthday. She was overwhelmed by his mansion, with its thick carpets, silk-draped windows and the footmen in yellow-braided tailcoats who waited on them, piling their gold plates high with caviar and sturgeon and making the huge fires blaze merrily. In the centre of the table were arranged branches of hothouse fruit trees, with the fruit still on them, and at each place-setting stood a little vase containing mimosa and violets so that although it was December everything smelt ‘marvellously’ like spring. Vaslav seemed ‘completely relaxed and at ease’ in Lvov’s splendid house, though Bronia wondered whether he had felt as ‘stupefied’as her when he first saw it.