by Lucy Moore
Though this dichotomy between his imposing and almost respectable exterior and his debauched private life was what made him so fascinatingly ‘wicked’ in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, his friends learned to accept him as he was. After several years’ acquaintance with Diaghilev, Tamara Karsavina remembered walking through the gardens at Versailles, discussing him with Sergey Botkin, a mutual friend and Bakst’s brother-in-law. Hitherto, she confessed to him, she had shied away from certain aspects of Sergey Pavlovich’s character, but Dr Botkin ‘made me see that it was the quality of love that makes it beautiful, no matter who the object’.
The great love of Diaghilev’s early life was his cousin Dima Filosofov. As young men they had travelled extensively together and as literary editor to Sergey’s editor-in-chief Dima had worked by his side on Mir iskusstva. By 1905, after a decade together, their relationship had broken down, with Filosofov leaving Diaghilev to live in an even more unconventional arrangement, a ménage à trois with Zinaida Gippius, a woman who wore men’s clothes and described herself as a male intellect in a female body, and her asexual husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky, a philosopher and mystic.
Their separation was devastating to Diaghilev but he consoled himself by cruising the parks and bathhouses of St Petersburg with friends of similar tastes, Walter Nouvel and Mikhail Kuzmin. Kuzmin’s explicit diaries and 1905 autobiographical novel, Wings, give a detailed picture of the confident and promiscuous homosexual subculture Diaghilev and his friends inhabited, comparing notes on boys they picked up and sharing and swapping lovers. Over the next year Diaghilev’s secretary, Aleksey Mavrin, would become his regular lover and travelling companion.
After the triumphant exhibition of Russian portraiture, Diaghilev had turned his attention to Europe, organising a series of five concerts of Russian music in Paris in the summer of 1907. Following its success, he returned to St Petersburg where he was planning a 1908 Parisian season of Russian opera, possibly using Russian dancers in some of the acts. This was the moment when he met Nijinsky.
The miriskusniki had long been interested in ballet. As early as 1897 Walter Nouvel had speculated that ballet would one day realise ‘the clamorous demands of the modern spirit’, but only when it moved away from the ideals of thirty years earlier and came into line with the ‘decadent aesthetic and sensual demands’of the day. Soon afterwards, in The World of Art, Benois deplored the ruination of ballet: fairies (he did not mean homosexuals).
Diaghilev had made his own attempt to bring ballet into line with his artistic vision when in 1899 he was appointed special assistant to the then-Director of the Imperial Theatres, Prince Sergey Volkonsky. It was a disaster. Volkonsky and Diaghilev came up against Mathilde Kshesinskaya and lost; the one ballet Diaghilev tried to commission – Sylvia – was never made; and both he and Volkonsky resigned in 1901 feeling deeply aggrieved by the entire experience. This period at the Imperial Theatres, Volkonsky wrote, was difficult and unpleasant, marked by envy, plots, ill-will and no support from above, and Diaghilev’s hopes for a career in the state theatres were dashed by a specific injunction against him ever again holding a position in the civil service.
It is more than likely that their sexuality was an unspoken element in the ‘unpleasantness’ of this period. Neither Volkonsky nor his protégé, Diaghilev, made a secret of their preferences; indeed, gossip about Diaghilev had reached such a pitch in the 1890s that someone had anonymously sent him a powder puff. Kshesinskaya would not have been above using her certain knowledge of their private lives to influence the Tsar when she was seeking to exert her backstage control of the Theatres. This may have been an element in Diaghilev’s decision in the mid-1900s to turn away from Russia, where he could not hope to be restored to favour, towards Europe, and Paris in particular – partly because it was known to be a city receptive to new creative endeavours but also because homosexuality was not illegal there.
While rumours about his sexuality may have been affecting Diaghilev’s career, Nijinsky was plagued by different troubles. His successes – his brilliant interpretation of the Blue Bird in the coda from La Belle au bois dormant, a role more senior dancers considered their own; his increasingly regular pairings with Pavlova and Kshesinskaya; and his selection by Fokine for the only male part in Chopiniana (what would become Les Sylphides) – were provoking jealousy among the artists of the Imperial Theatres. Gossip about his relationship with Lvov was also circulating. Sensing disapproval and hostility, never that easy in company, Nijinsky withdrew from the camaraderie of his peers, mostly former schoolmates, and earned himself a reputation among them as a snob.
Instead he spent his time with Lvov and his friends, though they seem to have warmed to him little more than his contemporaries. He and Lvov dined with Diaghilev and Walter Nouvel several times over the winter of 1907 and Nouvel visited them at Lvov’s dacha in 1908. Nouvel thought Vaslav a dull-witted oaf; his view is corroborated by Benois who found him ‘uninteresting … [he] seldom spoke, blushed furiously and got muddled when he did, and usually understood that it would be better for him to return to silence’.
But on stage this awkward creature became something else entirely. Even though Nouvel and Benois were scathing about Nijinsky’s hesitant efforts to contribute to their sparkling discussions, they had to admit that he was an extraordinary artist. One of his most important roles in his first year as an Artist of the Imperial Theatres was as the Blue Bird. Cecchetti had created the part in 1890 and Nijinsky’s former teachers Oboukhov and Nikolay Legat had also danced it to great acclaim but instead of learning from them Vaslav chose to work alone on his interpretation of the role. Though he didn’t change Petipa’s steps, there was enough space in the original choreography for him to mark out his own creative path, including persuading the usually rigid Mariinsky to change the costume so it was actually bird-like and to allow him to do his own make-up. It was a triumph: as the Blue Bird Vaslav’s whole body seemed ‘to lose its human contours and design a bird’s flight in the air’.
For his part, Nijinsky was ‘greatly impressed’ by Diaghilev, telling Bronia what an exceptional person he was and how much he learned whenever he was with him and his friends. When Sergey went to Paris in the spring of 1908, as a token of their friendship he gave Vaslav a full set of Mir iskusstva and the catalogues from his exhibitions, and when he returned that autumn Vaslav began spending most evenings with him and his circle, ardently listening ‘to their conversations, discussions and arguments about the theatre, about art and music’. Diaghilev’s commitment to art was in line with Nijinsky’s own; meeting him made him feel he had discovered the place he belonged. Nouvel confirms this. From their meeting in late 1907 and throughout 1908, he wrote, Nijinsky did all he could ‘to please Diaghilev and attract his attention’. At first Diaghilev was unsure about him – evidently sharing his friends’ assessment of the young dancer – but as early as December 1907 he was interested enough to ask Kuzmin for advice about the situation.
From the start Lvov was determined to push Nijinsky into Diaghilev’s path, urging his young friend to be unfaithful to him with Diaghilev. Swapping or handing lovers from one man to another was quite usual among this group of grand homosexuals – Diaghilev, Nouvel and Kuzmin did it all the time – and given the social inequalities between the parties there was very little the junior partner could do about it except acquiesce. Lvov had already introduced Vaslav to one friend, Count Tishkevich. Although Bronia, who also met this Polish patron of the arts, insisted that he spent his time with her and Vaslav lecturing them as if they were children, Vaslav’s diaries record preferring Prince Pavel to the ‘Count’ – which suggests that the count was a lover, or made an attempt to be. In Diaghilev’s case, Lvov recognised how much he could ‘help cultivate [Nijinsky’s] culture and talent’, impressing on Nijinsky how useful Diaghilev could be to his career, and he told Nouvel that it was ‘his most fervent wish’ to bring them together.
Throughout the autumn and into the winter of 1908, Nijin
sky and Diaghilev’s lives became more closely entwined as Diaghilev’s plans for a second season of Russian opera in Paris became plans for a season of ballet and opera. The ballet Diaghilev most wanted to mount there was Le Pavillon d’Armide, in which Nijinsky shone and which was probably the first role Diaghilev saw him dance. Taking it to Paris would guarantee that Nijinsky would accompany him there.
Isadora Duncan had returned to St Petersburg in the spring of 1908, and Vaslav and Bronia watched her at the Mariinsky from Prince Lvov’s box with Tamara Karsavina and her husband. On this second viewing, the Russians were more critical of Duncan’s lack of technique. With her usual thoughtfulness Karsavina admired her ideas and thought they would enrich ballet, while still considering her ‘a child who knows the alphabet but cannot yet read the book’. Vaslav was more strident. To him, Duncan’s ‘barefoot childish hoppings and skippings should not be called an art’. He also noticed an overwhelming void at the heart of her performance: although she was occasionally accompanied by female dancers and had founded a dance school for girls, male dancers did not feature in her work.
Since the early nineteenth century, ballet had been an art that predominantly showcased women. Male dancers were on stage to enhance their partners’ loveliness, rather than to be acclaimed as artists in their own right: according to the nineteenth-century critic Jules Janin, they were merely ‘the green box trees surrounding the garden flowers’. It was this that made Foma Nijinsky’s use of the word porteur to his son so derisive, although ironically it was Vaslav who had already begun to change the audience’s perception of male dancers. For the first time, audiences were calling Nijinsky’s name as loudly as they cried out any ballerina’s – if not more loudly. Fokine was as responsive to this trend as he was to the powerful influences of Duncanism. He choreographed for men, and for Nijinsky in particular, as well as he choreographed for women.
The combination of Fokine’s innovative choreography, Nijinsky and Pavlova’s dancing, and Benois’s exquisite set designs gave Diaghilev something fresh and magical to export while the constrained atmosphere of the Imperial Theatres under Telyakovsky and their frustrated desires for greater creative control of their careers gave the dancers a reason to leave, at least for part of the year. Adolph Bolm described feeling helpless to criticise or even make suggestions to the Theatres’ reactionary administration. Even before Diaghilev planned his ballet season, some artists had been looking to the West in the months of their holidays from the Mariinsky: Pavlova and Bolm had toured Germany and Scandinavia in 1907–8 and Kshesinskaya had danced in Paris in 1908 (Vaslav had been unable to accompany her because of an illness).
Vaslav signed his contract to dance in Diaghilev’s Saison Russe in Paris in the summer of 1909 on 10 October 1908, not once but an emphatic five times. He was to be paid 2,500 francs for the two-month season and given his second-class train ticket; any other expenses would be met by Diaghilev. As a comparison, although Nijinsky was among the highest paid dancers, the celebrated bass Fyodor Chaliapin, who was to be the star of Diaghilev’s opera programme, received 55,000 francs for the season.
It is more than likely that Nijinsky and Diaghilev had become lovers by the time this contract was signed. In his diary Nijinsky remembered Lvov ‘introducing’ him to Diaghilev by telephone. Although he makes it sound as though he had not met Diaghilev before this telephone call, his writing in the diary is impressionistic and I think it occurred after they already knew each other a little (and by the time Vaslav knew Lvov well), perhaps as late as the early autumn of 1908. Vaslav did not meet Lvov until the autumn of 1907 and by the winter of that year they had dined with Diaghilev several times.
Over the telephone Diaghilev summoned Vaslav to come and see him at the Hotel de l’Europe where he was staying. Nijinsky describes their meeting in an often-quoted passage from his diary: ‘I hated him for his voice, which was too self-assured, but I went in search of luck. I found luck there because I immediately made love to him. I trembled like an aspen leaf. I hated him, but I put up a pretence, for I knew that my mother and I would starve to death. I understood Diaghilev from the first moment and pretended therefore that I agreed with all his views. I realised one had to live, and therefore it did not matter to me what sacrifice I made … but Diaghilev liked boys and therefore found it difficult to understand me.’
These words were written more than ten years after the event, at a time when Nijinsky was deeply troubled by sexual and moral issues, but they do carry a weight of authenticity. He was being over-dramatic about starving, since it must have been clear even to someone as inexperienced and impractical as him that a rich lover like Lvov would keep him better than a hopeful Maecenas, but the sense that this was a sacrifice is clear: a sacrifice he was willing to make for many reasons but a sacrifice nonetheless. Elsewhere in the diary he remembers at this time, aged nineteen, having to limit his masturbating again (to what he considered an acceptable level, once every ten days), because he was seeing ‘many beautiful women who flirted’ and made him nervous – women, not men. There is no record of him fantasising about men and because of this he and Diaghilev would never be entirely compatible.
Still, having lived happily with Lvov and admiring Diaghilev as he did, Nijinsky knew that he could give Diaghilev what he wanted and what he would receive in return, and he was used to acting a part. In the same way, when the young Anton Dolin was engaged as a dancer by Diaghilev in the 1920s, his bags were moved out of his single, second-class compartment and into Diaghilev’s first-class double for the train journey down to Monaco. ‘I knew perfectly well what was expected of me,’ wrote Dolin.
For Nijinsky and Diaghilev it was not a case of instantly moving in together, though. Diaghilev’s relationship with his secretary Mavrin continued throughout this period and, though Nijinsky’s affair with Lvov had become less intense over the second half of 1908, they were still seeing each other irregularly until, in late April 1909, Nijinsky left for Paris with Diaghilev, Aleksey Mavrin and Walter Nouvel: a cosy little quartet for the two-day journey.
The incident Vaslav would remember about this first trip abroad demonstrated his anxiety in the presence of his sophisticated and often unwelcoming new friends, the social gulf that yawned between them. Eleonora, afraid her darling boy would be hungry on the journey, had cooked Vaslav a chicken and wrapped it in waxed paper along with bread rolls, butter and oranges: a feast she would not have been able to afford until very recently. Neither she nor Vaslav knew that there was a dining car for the wagon-lit passengers. Vaslav wanted to ask the others to share his meal but he was too shy; and Eleonora had only packed him one plate, one fork and one knife.
When Diaghilev stood up and said that he was going to the restaurant car, Vaslav – embarrassed by his ignorance of the ways of the world and fearing the others would make fun of him – waited until he was alone to throw the lovingly wrapped packet out of the window, raging inwardly against his innocent mother. Later, he would laugh about it; at the time he burned with humiliation.
Just after their departure, Prince Pavel came to see Eleonora and stayed with her for some time, telling her that Diaghilev had asked him to give Vaslav up. Diaghilev had said that if he sincerely wished Vaslav success he would not accompany him to Paris. With great sadness, Lvov had agreed and had given Diaghilev money for his season there. Bronia found Lvov standing alone in Vaslav’s study, the room he had decorated for him.
‘I came to say goodbye to you. I am leaving.’
‘But when will we see you again?’
‘I do not know. Probably we will not see each other for a very long time.’ His eyes were filled with tears as he kissed her hand and left.
CHAPTER 3
Dieu de la Danse
1909–1910
THE FIRST EXPERIENCE OF PARIS was overwhelming. The following year, 1910, Lydia Lopokova had barely arrived there before fainting at ‘the lovely sight of the Gare du Nord’ and having to be revived by Léon Bakst with whom she was travelling. It w
as a beautiful, bustling, modern city: the Métro had been running nearly a decade and, on the crowded boulevards, motor-cars sped between ‘the tangled mass of cabs whose drivers wore shiny top hats of waxed cloth, and the horse-drawn double decker buses’. The smell of gasoline mingled in the air with the traditional scent of horse manure. It had felt like winter in St Petersburg when they left, still cold and damp, but in Paris the sun was warm, the trees were all coming into leaf and Karsavina said that she couldn’t remember a cloud in the sky the whole time they were there.
Diaghilev made his headquarters in the Hotel de Hollande near the Opéra. Nijinsky stayed in the cosier Hotel Daunou around the corner and, when they arrived in early May, the other dancers – including Bronia and Eleonora, as her chaperone – lived in smaller hotels around the Boulevard St Michel. Amid all the excitement of being in Paris, Bronia had barely enough time to buy a hat at Galeries Lafayette before rehearsals began.
The company had spent March and April rehearsing in St Petersburg. Once again Diaghilev had managed to offend his old adversary Mathilde Kshesinskaya, this time by offering Pavlova better roles in Paris than her. In a huff she withdrew from his programme altogether and demanded that the Tsar refuse to allow Diaghilev’s company to rehearse in the Hermitage Theatre, or to take the Mariinsky’s sets and costumes to Paris, or to receive generous state funding for the season. Diaghilev’s patron, Nicholas’s uncle Grand Duke Vladimir, had just died and Diaghilev had no other friends at court to argue his case. Hastily he arranged for his small company to rehearse in a hall on Yekaterinsky Canal and raced to Paris to find donors to ensure that the Saison Russe could go ahead as planned.