by Lucy Moore
Diaghilev rose above the impending financial Armageddon, blithely pressing ahead with preparations for his new season. In July he asked Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy to write pieces for his ballet. Diaghilev urged Debussy to finish the scenario as quickly as possible so that he could take it to Venice to show it to a choreographer there. Fokine was not in Venice: the choreographer to whom Diaghilev was referring could only have been Nijinsky. Bronia Nijinska disagreed with this interpretation of events but, since Nijinsky’s first ballet, L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune, was accompanied by Debussy’s music, it is not inconceivable that this was the first mention of it – perhaps even a promise given by Diaghilev to Nijinsky in their talks about their future in his room at the Hotel Daunou, only weeks before.
Accompanied by Bakst, Diaghilev and Nijinsky stayed first in the spa at Carlsbad and then at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice during what amounted to an unconventional honeymoon. They made a strange pair: an impressive, middle-aged, rather ancien régime gentleman (in his summer uniform, a black jacket with a gardenia in the buttonhole, his tie held in place by a black pearl and ‘an eyeglass dangling against his waistcoat’, a silver-topped malacca cane, narrow white trousers, white shoes and a straw hat, which he kept lifting to sponge his forehead), accompanied by a twenty-year-old boy whom he obviously adored, described variously as looking like a stable lad, a plumber’s apprentice, or a clerk. As Cecil Beaton would observe of Serge Lifar, it didn’t matter how immaculately Diaghilev dressed him (as he also dressed Vaslav), he always looked ‘like a street urchin’.
Michel Calvocoressi took Nijinsky shopping for a bathing suit, translating for him at the tailor. Vaslav was as exacting about the fit ‘as if it had been a stage costume’, while Monsieur Calvo took the opportunity, when they were in the changing room together, to marvel at ‘how powerful and harmonious Nijinsky was in build. Although his muscles were on the big side, his body suggested that of a Greek athlete, reposeful as well as strong, and in sharp contrast with the mobile, monkeyish face. It had none of the almost feminine grace which he so often showed when appearing in stage costume.’ Calvocoressi, like most of Diaghilev’s friends, found Nijinsky quiet and almost childlike – hardly surprising, given that they were all fifteen to twenty years his senior* – but ‘pleasant’.
Venice in August was en fête and full of Diaghilev’s friends and acquaintances. At a party given by the flamboyant Marchesa Casati – ‘to society what Ida Rubinstein was to the stage’ – Isadora Duncan told a surprised and rather disapproving Nijinsky what beautiful children they would have together (but she was prone to say this to anyone she admired). After they danced together, she enthused to a friend that ‘it was more wonderful than making love with a Negro boxer on Mr. Singer’s billiard-table’. Mr Singer was Paris Singer, Winnie de Polignac’s brother, Isadora’s lover at the time and the father of one of her children.†
When they arrived at St Petersburg that autumn, Alexandre Benois was disappointed to find (probably retrospectively, as his memoirs were not published until over thirty years later) that ‘Diaghilev’s attitude towards his own enterprise had ceased to be that of Olympic objectiveness; thanks to his friendship with Nijinsky, he had become personally interested in the success of the ballet.’ I would argue that Diaghilev had always been personally interested in his ballet – and that this may have been his reason for pursuing Nijinsky, rather than the other way around – but Benois was jealous of his influence over Diaghilev and perhaps already sensed it slipping away.
There was a new face at the conference table in Diaghilev’s apartment that winter of 1909: the owlish young composer Igor Stravinsky. He was almost unknown, but Diaghilev with his customary confidence in his own taste had entrusted him (along with Fokine) to write a self-consciously Russian ballet tailored to the French market: L’Oiseau de feu.* Pavlova, he hoped, would take the title role. Despite her late arrival for the 1909 season, she was still the biggest draw in ballet and if she could be tempted to star in his 1910 season Diaghilev had to put her first, even though Nijinsky begged to be allowed to dance the Firebird himself, offering to dance en pointe, something no male dancer had done before. (In the end Pavlova refused Diaghilev’s offer, preferring to set up her own company, and Karsavina became the first Firebird.)
Stravinsky was welcomed by Diaghilev’s collaborators. Benois, predictably, remembered liking him because ‘in those days he was a charming and willing “pupil”’. Stravinsky and Diaghilev developed a deep friendship, though he did not appreciate Diaghilev’s insistence that loving women was morbid and that he would be a better artist if he were homosexual; it was, Stravinsky said later, ‘impossible to describe the perversity of Diaghilev’s entourage – a kind of homosexual Swiss guard’.
But he liked Nijinsky, who was only seven years younger than him, immediately. Vaslav’s ‘extraordinary physical presence’ was the first thing Stravinsky noticed, but his ‘shy manner and soft Polish speech’ were endearing and ‘he was immediately very open and affectionate with me’, though Stravinsky thought he detected ‘curious absences in his personality’, perhaps immaturity, perhaps something deeper.
This may have been down to Nijinsky’s lack of confidence in Diaghilev’s circle. Diaghilev and his friends and colleagues were all highly distinguished in their own right, ‘the elite of the St Petersburg intelligentsia’. Much as he enjoyed being part of this group and eagerly soaked up their ideas, Vaslav froze in their company and could not ‘overcome his timidity. He did not behave like a famous artist. He did not realise that he had achieved fame on his own merit and that he was great in his own art.’ He remembered never being able to speak in their meetings, though he always attended them, ‘because I was considered a silly kid’; and it almost certainly suited Diaghilev to keep him feeling like this.
It worried Bronia. The carefree boy she had known, ‘at ease and unconstrained’ and a special favourite with her girlfriends, had disappeared. She put it down to Vaslav’s pride and sensitivity: he would be so devastated at having ‘made the slightest social blunder’ that he retreated altogether so as not to risk embarrassment.
But on his own ground, Nijinsky suffered from none of these anxieties. When Fokine gave Bronia the role of Papillon in his new ballet, Carnaval, but had no time to do more than show her the basic steps, Vaslav helped her create the butterfly’s fluttering lightness to match Robert Schumann’s prestissimo tempo, working out the placement of the body and the flickering hand movements himself and then helping her to learn them. It was his first piece of choreography for another dancer. As Richard Buckle, Nijinsky’s first biographer, would put it, Nijinsky’s first ‘essay in choreography was embedded in a work of Fokine’s, just as Leonardo’s angel is said to smile from the corner of Verrocchio’s Madonna in the National Gallery’.
Throughout the autumn of 1909 Nijinsky and Pavlova rehearsed Giselle. Being chosen to dance the prestigious role of Albrecht while still so young and untried a dancer was a great honour for Nijinsky. Bronia, who watched their rehearsals, described the creative union between her brother and Pavlova as the most ‘supremely right’ of all the performances she ever saw in her life. ‘The unreal quality and beauty of the dance, so ethereal and weightless, charmed the eye and moved one to heartache.’ Other dancers at their rehearsals were reduced to tears.
But so powerful was Vaslav’s interpretation of Albrecht that in the end Pavlova refused to dance opposite him, insisting that they perform Giselle on different nights. She was straightforward when Bronia asked her why: ‘I do not wish to share with Nijinsky my success before the public. I do not wish to see ovations being given Nijinsky for a performance in which I too dance. Let the public that comes to see Pavlova see only Pavlova! Vassia has enough of his own public to fill the theatre to overflowing …’
That winter, even more than in previous years, the Mariinsky was a hotbed of intrigue and jealousy. Diaghilev’s innovative young dancers were known as the ‘Diaghilevtsy-Fokinisty’, set against the old gu
ard ‘Imperialisty’ led by Kshesinskaya and Nikolay Legat, with their antiquated ideas and close connections to the court. Nijinsky, hailed by the St Petersburg press on his return from Paris that autumn and known to be the particular intimate of Diaghilev, was a special focus of Imperialisty hostility despite the boyish modesty with which he responded to his stardom.
Leaving St Petersburg and the stifling atmosphere of the Mariinsky in May 1910 came as a relief. The company travelled first to Berlin for two weeks of dates there, and from there on to Paris. Despite his sublime performances Vaslav was evidently troubled. Bronia was concerned that his mood was increasingly serious and preoccupied. ‘He was almost always alone now, and seemed to be avoiding people … More and more I felt him to be Nijinsky, “le dieu de la danse,” rather than Vaslav, my own brother and dear friend.’
As Diaghilev’s chosen one he was set apart from the camaraderie of the corps, several of whom he had danced with since schooldays, but he never felt he truly belonged at Larue’s either. Vaslav seldom contributed to Diaghilev’s debates with his friends, having learned ‘that it is better to be silent than to talk nonsense’. Later he said Diaghilev had realised he was ‘stupid and told me not to speak’.
The atmosphere in Paris was different in 1910, too. Diaghilev’s ‘magic lantern for grown-ups’ may have been relit, but rivalries and resentments were also glowing patiently, waiting for the spark that would blow them into life. Fokine went first, even before the season had officially begun. Jealous of his preeminence, throughout the preparations for the summer he had been demanding to play the lead parts in his ballets – which meant that Nijinsky could not dance some of the roles Diaghilev wanted for him. It was agreed after extensive negotiations that for certain performances Fokine could have the Chief Warrior in the Polovtsian Dances and Harlequin in Carnaval as well as Ivan Tsarevich in L’Oiseau de feu. Next an article on the Ballets Russes in Comoedia Illustré listed him merely as a performer, not as premier danseur or choreographer. Furious about this slight, Fokine insisted that for all future publicity material his name be written in larger letters than anyone else’s and above the composers, designers and artists. Astruc, who was in charge of promoting the season, refused these demands.
Benois was next. At the opening night, having left his family in Italy and travelled to Paris especially for the occasion, he was horrified when he opened his programme to find that Schéhérazade was listed as being by Bakst, who had designed the sets but not written the libretto. When he asked Diaghilev about it the next day, Diaghilev replied, ‘Que veuxtu? Bakst had to be given something. You have Le Pavillon d’Armide and he will have Schéhérazade.’ Diaghilev considered that since everyone in his committee contributed to all the ballets, everyone should take their turn to be recognised and rewarded for them. Bakst had worked just as hard as Benois on the 1909 season and received none of the plaudits or royalties. Anyway, he was late paying Bakst again – this would go some way to making up for the delay.
Besides, it was Bakst’s designs rather than Benois’s story or even Fokine’s choreography which made Schéhérazade such a phenomenal success. His set was an Arabian Nights harem in glowing blues, emerald greens, fuschias and crimsons that looked as if they should clash but created instead a fantastical riot of colour. The exquisite watercolour sketches he made for the costumes show Schéhérazade’s attendants in sheer filmy fabrics that reveal delicate traces of rosy nipples, the curve of a buttock and shadowy pubic hair. Their heads are thrown back in abandon, arms ecstatically raised to reveal their armpits, their nails and lips darkened. But Benois was unconvinced by Diaghilev’s view that everyone should share in the Ballets’ rewards and hated to admit a rival’s talent. He wrote from Italy to tell Diaghilev that their friendship was over; not for the first time, and nor would it be the last.
Creatures of perfect grace: Nijinsky as Harlequin and Karsavina as Columbine in Carnaval, by Ernest Oppler, c.1910.
In Schéhérazade Nijinsky was again playing a favourite slave, but this time his role was all about sex. In gold harem trousers, his skin painted a dark grey-blue, ‘not unlike the bloom on black grapes’, he stalked the stage like a creature half animal, half snake, crazed with desire, ravishing Ida Rubinstein as Zobéïde and then dying at her feet. He was ‘inexpressibly wild, a cat caressing, a tiger devouring … His lightness and swiftness were unbelievable, but it was sensuality all the way.’
Here one senses Diaghilev understanding even better than they did what his audiences wanted to see and giving it straight to them. ‘Nobody will believe me of course, but Diaghilev did not know anything about dancing,’ George Balanchine told Robert Craft in 1958. ‘His real interest in ballet was sexual. He could not bear the sight of [Alexandra] Danilova and would say to me, “Her tits make me want to vomit.” Once when I was standing next to him at a rehearsal for Apollo [1928], he said, “How beautiful.” I agreed, thinking that he referred to the music, but he quickly corrected me: “No, no. I mean Lifar’s ass; it is like a rose.”’ But Stravinsky did not believe Nijinsky was ever ‘conscious of his performances from Diaghilev’s point of view’: for him ballet was art and art alone, never commerce or sex.
It was a measure of Nijinsky’s versatility that his other two roles in the 1910 Paris season were so different. In his hands Albrecht, traditionally just an auxiliary part, became a major acting role, ‘the grief of the repentant seducer [made] profoundly pathetic’ while he watched his abandoned beloved go mad. As Harlequin in Carnaval, ‘his dancing was music made visible’. He came on stage with his arm around Columbine’s tiny waist, mischievously taking one big step for every two of hers. That incredible entrechat-dix, which he was the first dancer to achieve on stage, was executed with elegant, negligent wit. Cocteau was delighted: Nijinsky’s Harlequin was ‘an acrobatic cat stuffed full of candid lechery and crafty indifference, a schoolboy wheedling, thieving, swift-footed, utterly freed from the chains of gravity, a creature of perfect mathematical grace’.
CHAPTER 4
Petrushka
1910–1911
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1910 Vaslav and Diaghilev returned to Venice where Vaslav swam every day at the Lido.* Bakst painted him on the beach in red briefs, with a handkerchief covering his head and one arm upraised, suntanned muscles rippling: Calvocoressi’s Greek athlete. A bad case of sunstroke – or rather a disinclination to jump when the Mariinsky told him to, after a second triumphant season abroad – meant that Vaslav missed the opening of the Mariinsky’s season in September, passing up the opportunity to dance Albrecht opposite Pavlova’s Giselle. He did not get back to Russia until the end of November after stopping in Paris with Diaghilev for several weeks en route. When they finally did return, he was regularly – insolently – late for class and, as in the previous year, fined for every tiny infringement of the rules. The critics were quick to spot that in the non-Diaghilev repertoire he did not display ‘his usual brilliance’.
The atmosphere at the Mariinsky had worsened since the previous spring. Supported by the dress-circle audience, Kshesinskaya was still at war with Diaghilev and his dancers, and the younger members of the audience who sat up in the gods, students and admirers of Nijinsky, Pavlova and Karsavina, now refused to applaud her. When word got out that Kshesinskaya had said, ‘I spit on the gods,’ they sent her a collective letter saying, from ‘up here, it is much easier to spit down on you than for you to spit up at us’.
On his return to St Petersburg, Bronia found Vaslav still silent and withdrawn, holding himself aloof. ‘But there was also a new air of happiness about him, a certain inner glow.’ Gradually, he began to confide in her about what he and Diaghilev had been discussing over the months they had been away. The Ballets Russes’ successes had made Diaghilev determined to create a permanent company that would work for ten months of the year, rather than just a touring troupe available to him in their summer vacations. His putative company would consist of well-paid dancers on three-year contracts but, except when the artist was a big eno
ugh name to demand time away from the Imperial Theatres, this would require them to relinquish their positions as Artists at the Mariinsky, losing all the security and status that rank carried with it.
Implicit in these talks was the fact that Nijinsky would, of course, be the star of Diaghilev’s new company – although he would not be free to leave the Tsar’s service altogether until 1912, having performed for him for the obligatory five years. That was a problem Diaghilev would deal with when he had to.
Next were the ballets Diaghilev intended his new company to put on. The first would be Petrushka, to music composed by Stravinsky and with the libretto and design by Benois (Diaghilev was using the promise of the project to lure him back into the fold) and Vaslav was to play the eponymous hero (or anti-hero).
Most thrilling of all, from Vaslav’s point of view, was that secretly, so as not to antagonise the temperamental Fokine, Diaghilev had entrusted him with his first choreographic work. It was to be L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune, from a poem of Stéphane Mallarmé, set to the music of Debussy, and he was already bubbling over with ideas for it. ‘I want to move away from the classical Greece that Fokine likes to use. Instead I want to use the archaic Greece that is less known and, so far, little used in the theatre,’ he told Bronia. ‘Any sweetly sentimental line in the form or in the movement will be excluded. More may even be borrowed from Assyria than Greece. I have already started to work on it in my own mind … I want to show it to you …’