Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  Bronia, who knew her brother’s practice intimately and recognised its intensity, described how he would work through the barre exercises at an accelerated tempo, double the speed of other dancers. Vaslav ‘applied maximum tension to every muscle’, practising each movement that he would make on stage with exaggerated force, ‘building up a reserve of strength so that’ when he performed it would appear entirely effortless. Even Bronia, with her trained eye, could never spot his preparation for spins and jumps.

  His aim was perfection. As Susan Sontag would write in 1986, ‘In no other art can one find a comparable gap between what the world thinks of a star and what the star thinks about himself or herself, between the adulation that pours in from outside and the relentless dissatisfaction that goads one from within … Part of being a dancer is this cruelly self-punishing objectivity about one’s shortcomings, as viewed from the perspective of an ideal observer, one more exacting than any real spectator could ever be: the god Dance.’

  Years afterwards he would try to teach his little daughter, Kyra, what he knew: ‘how perfection lay in the strength of the toe, the perfect “pointe”; that the secret of being light as a feather lay in one’s breathing’. Dancing, he believed, ‘should be as simple as one breath taken after another, and, though every step is a separate action, it must seem to be the natural and harmonious consequence of all previous action’.

  He did not need a mirror to correct his faults because his muscular control was so finely tuned. Someone once said to him that it was a pity ‘he could never watch himself dance. “You are mistaken,” he replied. “I always see myself dancing. I can visualise myself so thoroughly that I know exactly what I look like just as if I sat in the midst of the audience.”’ After class he would spend an hour or two rehearsing with Fokine and the other dancers.

  Lunch was always late, about four in the afternoon, once Diaghilev had roused himself from the hotel room with its curtains drawn and electric lights blazing, where, ‘like an old Marquise afraid of the daylight’, he had been drinking coffee in bed, reading and dispatching telegrams, scanning the papers and conducting conversations on several telephones at the same time. When he appeared at rehearsals, often with a small group of friends, the dancers fell silent and any who were sitting stood up. He radiated an almost regal self-assurance. ‘With Grigoriev following discreetly a yard or two behind, he passed through the crowd … stopping here and there to exchange a greeting. Any male dancer to whom he spoke would click his heels together and bow.’ Nijinsky, of course, was the one exception to this custom, confirmation (if any were needed) of the chasm that existed between him and the other dancers.

  After lunch Vaslav might drive through the Bois de Boulogne with Nouvel or Bakst or go to the Louvre with Diaghilev, who was ‘incapable of loving someone without trying to educate him’, before a massage and a rest. Every day she was with them he had tea with his mother.

  On the nights he was performing, Vaslav would arrive at the Châtelet at about half past six or seven. He would change back into practice clothes – slim black trousers and a loose silk shirt – and go through class alone at the back of the stage, avoiding any conversation. Then he would return to his dressing room, to which only Diaghilev’s valet Vasily Zuikov was admitted – even Diaghilev was barred. Benois described Zuikov as independent-minded but totally devoted to his master, ‘a capacity Diaghilev perceived at once, for he possessed a wonderful gift of detecting all kinds of talent’. He relayed all the company gossip back to Diaghilev and was charged with keeping a close eye on Diaghilev’s ‘pride and joy’ – Nijinsky.

  Vaslav kept his dressing room austerely tidy, with his sticks of Leichner greasepaint and new pairs of shoes laid out in neat rows. Zuikov was in charge of these glove-leather shoes, ordered specially from Milan (and later London), and of his costumes. Vaslav might go through two or three pairs of shoes a night. It was here, while Vaslav dressed and put on his make-up (something he always did himself, part of his creation of the character), that a metamorphosis took place and the awkward young man would enter into a ‘new existence’. Which of these creatures, the tongue-tied boy in one of his two slightly ill-fitting suits or the graceful, composed artist who seemed to breathe different air from his audience, was the real Nijinsky?

  His mother, dressed in a newly bought evening gown, paid for by her son, came backstage to bless him before the curtain rose but Nijinsky – unusually for dancers at this time – didn’t cross himself before a performance. The dancers’ real sacrament was coating their shoes in rosin so they wouldn’t slip on stage, pressing their toes into the box with a distinctive grating sound. One of the dancers in her troupe gave a marvellous description of Pavlova quivering on pointe in the rosin box at the side of the stage, grinding her toes into the rosin as deeply as possible while crossing herself with fluttering, ‘uncanny swiftness’ as if ‘doing a special little divertissement for the pleasure of Jesus’. She would do this once on a normal night or over and again if she was nervous.

  Vaslav preferred to stand still and silent for a moment with his eyes closed before going onstage, calming what Deborah Bull has called the ‘tight, nervous energy’ that takes over as a dancer waits for his cue, ‘like a thousand gyroscopes in one small space’. Bronia would watch him, ‘standing in the wings, immersed in silence and concentrated in himself. He seemed unaware of anything around him, as if in a meditation, gathering within himself an inner soul-force that he could carry onto the stage and offer wide to the audience.’

  Diaghilev usually watched the performance from Misia Sert’s box, sitting behind her with a ‘very small pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses’ to look out over ‘that murmuring ocean of jewels, feathers and heads’. Everyone on stage danced differently – better – if Diaghilev was watching. ‘We always knew as soon as we were on stage or in the theatre if he was in the front of the house. It went round like a grapevine. Diaghilev’s here, everybody knew. Ping, up, you had to be, as he was in the house.’

  While Vaslav was dancing, Zuikov waited in the wings, holding ‘a glass of water, a towel, a mirror, a powder box, or some eau de cologne’. During the intervals, he watched over Vaslav ‘like an anxious nurse, wiping perspiration off his face, handing him the soap, turning on the faucet, throwing his dressing gown over his shoulders’.

  After the curtain fell, Vaslav took his bows humbly, gently, revealing deep appreciation for the reception he received and never giving the impression that he thought it was his due. ‘His bearing was modest and dignified, his features were composed … contrast the quietly bowing figure on stage with the frenzied applause and excited gestures of the enraptured audience.’ It may have been another role or perhaps for this brief instant, on stage but not in character, Vaslav was closest to his truest self: neither the exalted being he became when he danced nor the awkward boy he appeared afterwards but simply himself, what he wanted to be, no more and no less.

  If he felt his performance had not been perfect, Vaslav might stay on in the darkened theatre after everyone else had left, practising his steps again and again. Even when he was satisfied, he continued dancing for a while after taking his bows ‘just as a horse is trotted up and down with decreasing momentum after a race gradually to calm its quivering muscles’.

  Diaghilev presided over dinner after the show. He tended to favour the same restaurants – ‘their’ corner table at Larue’s, because Larue had once been chef to the Tsar, where Astruc remembered them devouring chateaubriand; Prunier; Viel – and the same faces were usually there: Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Walter Nouvel. The dance critic Valerian Svetlov, so vain he refused to smile for fear of wrinkles, had accompanied the committee from St Petersburg. He wielded immense power in this world. Vaslav said that ‘all the ballerinas went to bed with him because they were afraid of him’, the most notable exceptions probably being Karsavina, who, having refused Fokine to please her family, had in 1907 married Vasily Mukhin, a civil servant she did not love, and Bronia.

 
Alone among the other dancers, Karsavina was sometimes invited to dinner – she was always amused by the fact that Eleonora left the theatre every night to take her naive daughter home, kissing Vaslav goodnight and leaving him with Diaghilev – but the most regular of Diaghilev’s female guests was Misia Sert. After the champagne-drenched first-night dinner at Larue’s, Vaslav told his sister what fun the evening had been: during supper Diaghilev had flirted with Misia, kissing her and playfully poking a banana in her cleavage. Misia spoke Polish, and Vaslav told Bronia they had become ‘great friends’.

  Another young man was often there too, the poet Jean Cocteau, known to his friends as l’ange du mensonge. Although they were the same age and Cocteau still looked like a mop-haired schoolboy, he suffered from none of the shyness that plagued Vaslav. From his rouged lips witticisms as dazzling as fireworks burst forth and to Vaslav’s amusement he urged Vaslav to make up too; this was Paris, after all. At the party after the premiere, high on the colours with which he said Diaghilev had splashed Paris (and God knows what else), Cocteau danced on the back of Larue’s velvet banquettes, earning himself the nickname ‘Jeanchik’ from his new hero.

  When dinner ended, Vaslav went back to his hotel with Zuikov dispatched to see he got into bed safely and alone, while Diaghilev and the others would stay out later, sampling – as Romola would knowingly put it – ‘the peculiar specialities of Paris’. There is only evidence of Nijinsky accompanying the others on this type of late-night tour once. Cocteau told a friend that he, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Astruc and Bakst went to Le Chabanais, the most famous and opulent brothel in Paris. ‘Bakst thought the women were superb. The women fought over Nijinsky, screaming, “I want the one that’s never done it!”’ (History does not relate whether one of them got him; if one had, I half suspect Diaghilev might have made her regret it.)

  It was an intoxicating time. Diaghilev appeared one morning while Karsavina was working alone on the Châtelet’s unlit stage, a graceful figure in her long white practice tutu and darned pink tights, and said to her, ‘We are all living in the witchery of Armida’s groves.’ Gradually the bond between him and Vaslav was growing closer. Vaslav had stopped wearing the diamond ring Prince Lvov had given him and replaced it with a huge sapphire ring made by Cartier from Diaghilev that he took off only as he was going on stage.

  Although nothing survives in writing to document how Vaslav felt in these heady months, the extensive evidence of how everyone around him said they all felt suggests that he, too, must have been drunk on success, springtime and possibly love. The one piece of evidence we have is that leap offstage after his first variation in Armide, recalled by Karsavina and other witnesses, which she saw as an outburst of joy. For Vaslav, this must have felt like the beginning of life. Everything he had hoped for lay waiting for him: cheering audiences, critical acclaim, creative fulfilment (probably not in that order). Whatever sacrifice he thought he had made in becoming involved with Diaghilev must surely have seemed more than worthwhile; and, in this heightened state of excited anticipation, perhaps he began to love Diaghilev as well as admire him.

  The neglected Aleksey Mavrin, Diaghilev’s secretary and up to now his acknowledged lover, turned for consolation to a dancer called Olga Fyodorova. Deliberately or not he had selected one of the few women Diaghilev had publicly singled out as attractive, apparently telling Benois the previous year ‘that she was the only woman with whom he could fall in love’. When Mavrin and Fyodorova eloped, Diaghilev sacked them both, but more for form’s sake than anything else: it was his pride rather than his heart which was wounded.

  After their season at the Châtelet closed on 18 June, Vaslav had two more performances – a gala at the Opéra and a performance at a private party given by Maurice Ephrussi (he was the son of Charles, Proust’s Swann, who bought the netsukes described by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes). The Ephrussis were loyal supporters of Diaghilev’s enterprises, though Karsavina was embarrassed by the attention – Gabriel Astruc made it quite clear to her that Madame Ephrussi, née Rothschild, was enamoured by her and when she arrived she found her admiring hostess had covered her dressing table with white roses.

  These salon performances were important parts of the Ballets Russes programme, allowing Diaghilev to display his productions to even more potential sponsors and audience members from this sophisticated group at the apex of French society. Exposure to their rarefied world was also good for his dancers. Karsavina remembered watching Nijinsky marvelling at Emmanuel Bibesco’s collection of Gauguin paintings: ‘Look at that strength!’ Finally, they provided the performers with welcome additional income. Diaghilev had negotiated a thousand francs for Nijinsky’s appearance at the Ephrussis’, almost half his salary for the entire season, and Madame Ephrussi saw to it that Karsavina got a thousand too, double what Diaghilev had agreed to on her behalf.

  Vaslav managed to get through the Opéra gala but was too ill to perform in the Ephrussis’ electrically lit garden in the avenue du Bois. Diaghilev was so distracted by worry that he barely noticed the beauty of Les Sylphides – his favourite piece – being performed in an illuminated garden on a summer evening and could not enjoy the party that followed. Leaving behind the crowds waiting to congratulate him on his triumphant season, he rushed off early to check on Vatsa.

  Parisian water was not clean and Vaslav, used to being able to drink from the tap in St Petersburg, had not known to stick to bottled or boiled water. He developed typhoid and, although they caught it early, he still spent a month at the Daunou convalescing. His mother sat by his bedside every day and by the time Bronia was allowed in to see him, when his temperature had fallen, he was sitting up in bed wearing a white nightshirt, thin and with a shaven head, but very cheerful, looking like a little boy and eating cream of asparagus soup. He was enjoying everyone fussing over him and he told Bronia laughingly that Sergey Pavlovich, who was mortally afraid of illness, had not ventured into his room all the time he was ill but had spoken to him through a crack in the door. Even once he was allowed visitors Diaghilev maintained a cautious distance.

  When he was almost better, Diaghilev finally came into his room and made him an offer – of business and pleasure combined, the two being interlinked as they always were with Diaghilev. He invited Vaslav to live with him and be supported by him. Although he would no longer pay Nijinsky a salary, he would take care of all his expenses and give Eleonora 500 francs a month. It sounds rather bald, all these years later, but I think that for Diaghilev at least, this was a romantic moment: the acknowledgement of a serious commitment, significantly of a personal as well as a professional nature – a kind of public bond that had hitherto not existed between two men. As Proust’s Baron de Charlus would declare of Robert Morel, the protégé over whom he felt a possessive pride not unlike Diaghilev’s for Nijinsky, ‘The mere fact that I take an interest in him and extend my protection over him, gives him a preeminence.’

  ‘I did not want to agree,’ remembered Vaslav. ‘Diaghilev sat on my bed and insisted … [he] realised my value and was therefore afraid that I might leave him, because I wanted to leave even then, when I was twenty years old. I was afraid of life.’ But elsewhere in the Diary he wrote that he ‘loved Diaghilev sincerely, and when he used to tell me that love for women was a terrible thing, I believed him. If I had not believed him, I would not have been able to do what I did.’ In the end he accepted, perhaps more because there didn’t seem to be any alternative than because he was really afraid of Diaghilev or because he loved him and actively wanted to be with him.

  He knew that he couldn’t cope with life in the real world – he had no idea how to book a train ticket or find a hotel room, let alone organise his working life; he had been effectively institutionalised by his time at the Imperial Theatre School – and he also understood that nowhere else, with no one else, could he live the sort of life that he could with Diaghilev. As he said to Bronia, ‘this world of art was where he belonged’.

  And while he may not
have found Diaghilev physically attractive, he admired him profoundly, telling someone years later that Diaghilev meant more to him than anyone else he had known. Léonide Massine, Diaghilev’s next lover, described being unsure of himself when Diaghilev was courting him, if courting is the right word, ‘but exhilarated at the prospect of working with such a man’. Vaslav must have felt this too. (Massine also told a mistress that sex with Diaghilev was ‘like going to bed with a nice fat old lady’: boring but not exactly a trial.)

  Finally, under Diaghilev’s aegis he was becoming a star, far more quickly than he would ever have been allowed to rise at the rigid Mariinsky, and only as a star would he be granted control over his creative life, which meant choreography as well as performing. This, I believe, was the bargain Vaslav struck with himself when he accepted Sergey Pavlovich’s proposal in the summer of 1909.

  Though he no longer queued up with the other dancers every two weeks to collect their salaries from Grigoriev, sitting backstage behind a table piled high with gold and silver coins, his new position in Diaghilev’s life gave Vaslav a new insight into the runnings of Diaghilev’s marvellously haphazard operation. It was probably at this meeting or soon afterwards that Diaghilev told him that, despite every seat at the Châtelet being taken throughout their season, they had made significant losses. None of the other dancers knew because he had managed to pay them all in full before putting them on the train back home.

  Diaghilev’s insistence on the ‘first class’ had cost over 600,000 francs, leaving a gap of 86,000 francs between income and expenditure. In an effort to recoup his losses, Gabriel Astruc, Diaghilev’s sponsor in Paris, pawned the ballet’s entire stock of sets and costumes to Raoul Gunsbourg, Director of the Monte Carlo Opera, for 20,000 francs. If he wanted to present another season in Paris, Diaghilev would have to buy everything back from Gunsbourg as well as repay Astruc. But instead of negotiating with Astruc, Diaghilev incensed him still further by making plans to present the 1910 Saison Russe at the Opéra rather than the Châtelet. Furious, Astruc wrote to Mathilde Kshesinskaya, whom he knew despised Diaghilev, hoping to undermine his reputation in Russia. Eventually that winter Baron Dmitry de Günzburg (not to be confused with Raoul) came to Diaghilev’s rescue as he had the previous year, repaying Astruc and restoring relations between the two men.