Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  Nijinsky, who claimed not to get stage-fright, was so nervous before the premiere that he asked Fokine to stay in the wings to prompt him if he went wrong, something he had never done before. He needn’t have worried. Benois – the most critical of audiences – was ‘enchanted’ by his performance. He was particularly impressed by the way Nijinsky, who had hitherto played only jeune premier parts, had bravely embraced the grotesque half-human, half-puppet, resisting any temptation to make himself attractive to the audience. Even Fokine said he never saw a better Petrushka.

  The set was a vivid picture of an entirely Russian world: a jostling crowd of coachmen dancing in the snow to keep warm, of trained bears, troupes of gypsies, wet-nurses in their distinctive headdresses, staggering drunken soldiers, fur-capped muzhiks and organ-grinders; where stalls sold caramels, sunflower seeds and doughnuts, tea from steaming samovars, and vodka; and where the sound of silver bells tied to sleigh reins hung in the cold air. Children rode on the painted horses of a wooden carousel. Over a hundred people were on stage in the crowd scenes, almost all of them in costumes designed for their specific role and each acting an individual part rather than dancing in sync like a traditional corps de ballet, their apparent spontaneity echoing Stravinsky’s complex multiplicity of musical themes. There was even space for in-jokes: Bronia, as one of the street dancers, parodied Kshesinskaya’s acrobatic demonstrations of virtuosity in Le Talisman, a ballet by Marius Petipa loathed by the Diaghilevtsy-Fokinisty.

  Petrushka is one of three puppets who belong to the fair’s showman, the Magician. He loves the empty-headed ballerina (Karsavina), who flirts with him but then abandons him for the vain and brutish Moor. The Moor challenges him to a fight and kills him; the last scene showed Nijinsky as Petrushka’s ghost, blowing a final, futile kiss to the world that had destroyed him.

  Each of them had steps that corresponded to their characters: pretty pizzicato steps for the ballerina; florid gestures and clumsy movements for the Moor, whose body language is en dehors, turned out; and stiff, restricted motion for the tormented Petrushka, who is all turned in, en dedans. When Petrushka danced, his heavy wooden head hung awkwardly from his shoulders, his feet in their blue boots dangled loosely at the end of shabby stuffed legs, his hands in black mittens were as stiff as wooden paddles. ‘Only the swinging, mechanical, soul-less motions jerk the sawdust-filled arms or legs upwards in extravagant motions to indicate transports of joy or despair.’ Given what we know of Nijinsky’s later choreographic style (and Fokine’s own tendency to lyricism), the dislocated, fragmentary quality of Petrushka’s movement is likely to have been Nijinsky’s contribution.

  For all the acclaim Stravinsky’s score and Benois’s set received, Nijinsky was Petrushka’s undisputed star. Somehow he had managed to create the illusion that he was a puppet aping a human being, while even Karsavina and Alexandre Orlov, as the Moor, could do no more than appear as humans pretending to be puppets.

  His clown-like clothes were worn and shabby and his face was ashen, the paint that gave him an expression chipped away. ‘Of the once bright-red cheeks only a faded trace remains … the eyebrows look as though they were hurriedly pencilled in, one eyebrow flies up across the forehead; there are no eyelashes on his blank face.’ ‘A friend pointed out that the only role in which one recognises Nijinsky’s civilian face is that of Petrushka, where he is most heavily made up,’ observed the American dance critic Edwin Denby. ‘He is never showing you himself … He disappears completely, and instead there is an imaginary being in his place. Like a classic artist, he remains detached, unseen, unmoved, disinterested. Looking at him, one is in an imaginary world, entire and very clear.’

  While L’Oiseau de feu was composed as a self-conscious attempt to bring a Russian subject to French audiences, Petrushka was a more sincere artistic creation. Stravinsky had meditated ‘an entire poem in the form of choreographic scenes … of the mysterious double life of Petrushka, his birth, his death, his double existence – which is the key to the enigma, a key not possessed by the one who believes that he has given him life, the Magician.’

  Though there were political connotations too – Nijinsky was said to have ‘amplified the crazy doll into the spirit of the Russian people, oppressed by autocracy, but resurgent and unconquerable after all its abuse and frustration’ – this was the key to the extraordinary resonance of the piece. It is impossible to know whether Stravinsky, the primary author of the ballet, recognised the way his story mirrored the relationship between Diaghilev and Nijinsky, but observers spotted it at once. Cyril Beaumont was amazed at how Vaslav ‘seemed to have probed the very soul of the character with astonishing intuition. Did he, in one of his dark moods of introspection, feel conscious of a strange parallel between Petrushka and himself, and the Showman and Diaghilev?’

  And even though Nijinsky, in the months before Fokine arrived to stage the ballet, had plenty of time to develop his own ideas about how to play Petrushka, one of the remarkable things about Fokine’s choreography is how insightful it was. Again and again he took a stock character and made it into something vitally evocative, distilling something of a dancer’s essence in the roles he created for them. He did it for Pavlova with the Dying Swan, and he did it for Nijinsky with Petrushka, turning a wooden puppet into an existential hero, oppressed by his fate, scrabbling for a vestige of dignity, meditating on the precariousness of freedom and the tragedy of its loss.

  Lydia Lopokova agreed. Petrushka had become, she wrote, the symbol of Nijinsky’s ‘personality, the imprisoned genius in the docile body of the puppet struggling to become human and falling back again’. He was, Richard Buckle quipped, ‘a Hamlet among puppets’.

  If, as Valery Bryusov had proposed in an essay in 1902 in the World of Art magazine, the sole task of the theatre was ‘to help the actor reveal his soul to the audience’, then it had triumphantly succeeded with Petrushka. Nijinsky was acclaimed not just as a great dancer, but as a great actor. On seeing his Petrushka, Sarah Bernhardt declared she had ‘seen the finest actor in the world’. Stravinsky said that as Petrushka Nijinsky was perfection, ‘the most exciting human being I have ever seen on a stage’: ‘his beautiful, but certainly not handsome, face, could become the most powerful actor’s mask I have ever seen’. He was haunted by Nijinsky’s final, futile gesture, asking the critic Nigel Gosling years later which was the real Petrushka, the puppet or his ghost.

  Nijinsky was under no illusions about who Petrushka represented and how closely they were linked. He gave a friend photographs of himself in everyday clothes and in costume as Petrushka, to have side by side, describing Petrushka as ‘the mythical outcast in whom is concentrated the pathos and suffering of life, one who beats his hands against the walls, but is always cheated and despised and left outside alone’. Years later he would repeatedly refer to himself in his diary as a ‘clown of god’.

  In June 1911, Diaghilev took his company to London for the first time, performing at the Opera House in Covent Garden under the aegis of Sir Thomas Beecham. Accustomed to the grandeur of Paris and St Petersburg, they were amazed to find the theatre ‘in the midst of a vegetable market … hemmed in by greengrocers’ warehouses and vast mountains of cabbages, potatoes [and] carrots’.

  Like the French, the English had long given up on ballet. Just five years earlier, in A History of Dancing, Sir Reginald St-Johnston had proclaimed that ‘ballet is now a thing of the past, and … never likely to be resuscitated’. But London society was as overwhelmed by their first glimpse of the Russian ballet as Paris had been. ‘People thought and talked of nothing but ballet’; wide-eyed duchesses left the theatre ‘with their diamond tiaras all awry’; society girls dreamed of dancing in the corps de ballet. A critic timed the applause at their last performance: the cheering, clapping and handerchief-waving went on for twenty minutes. After seeing L’Oiseau de feu, Osbert Sitwell knew he had found the thing that would give his life meaning. ‘Now I knew where I stood. I would be, for so long as I lived, on the side o
f the arts.’

  Here, too, Diaghilev was surrounded by friends and sponsors. After Sir Thomas’s mistress, society hostess Lady Cunard, known as Emerald (who had her house in Cavendish Square redecorated in the Bakst style with huge Chinese incense-burners hanging on the wall, a lapis lazuli dining table and arsenic green lace curtains at the windows), the most important of these was Lady Ripon, patron of Nellie Melba and friend of Oscar Wilde. She had arranged for the Ballets Russes to appear as part of a Coronation programme to mark George V’s ascent to the throne. Tall, elegant – she smoked cigarettes through a long amber holder – excitable and extremely kind-hearted, she was bored by politics and shooting but devoted to the arts, and to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in particular, perhaps because of her Russian grandfather.

  Another friend was Muriel Draper, a young American with an English husband whose bohemian household in Edith Grove was always full of artists, writers, actors and musicians including Henry James, John Singer Sargent (who made drawings of Nijinsky and Karsavina), Artur Rubinstein and Gertrude Stein. The modern, Bakst-inspired styles Draper wore, with turbans or a jewel dangling on her forehead, suited her slender pallor. Once she asked Diaghilev how he achieved his magic on stage. ‘Je ne sais pas, je ne sais pas, ma chère Muriel. Je ne sais pas. Un toooout petit peu de la connaissance peut-être, et beaucoup de l’amour … Je ne sais pas.’

  Nijinsky accompanied Diaghilev to the Drapers’ where ‘he ate and drank with incurious stolidity, moved unnoticeably from room to room, smiled without meaning, and spoke rarely. So he maintained and nourished the living automaton that belonged to him, in order to use it for living during the segment of eternity vouchsafed him on the stage. There he remains alive forever.’

  Barely two years into their relationship, and despite their shared professional triumphs and plans for the future, as well as Vaslav’s total dependency on Diaghilev for all the practicalities of his life, their incompatibility in private was becoming unignorable. Diaghilev was not content merely with running Nijinsky’s career: he wanted to control his entire world. Lifar described him being at once the most rewarding, but also the most exacting, of friends. ‘Always he demanded the whole of a person, and in return would shower back everything it was in his power to give, everything. But on one condition, and one condition only, that all should come from him, be given by him or through him.’ Later he would think nothing of sacking dancers who flirted with Lifar and Léonide Massine and everyone in the company knew that his valet Zuikov, who acted as Vaslav’s dresser, was also Diaghilev’s spy, posted to watch over every movement Vaslav made.

  So devoted was he to his art that Vaslav seems barely to have noticed that Diaghilev kept him in ‘the most rigorous seclusion’, but the relentless pampering and surveillance made him both spoilt and rebellious. Count Harry Kessler, who met Diaghilev and Nijinsky in the summer of 1911 to discuss Nijinsky posing for a sculptural monument to Nietzsche, was fascinated to see how slowly Vaslav made his way along the hotel’s breakfast buffet, pausing before each item to ask Diaghilev in detail if he thought he, Vaslav, would like it or not.

  Jean Cocteau witnessed a scene in the wings in which Vaslav, dressed in the gold harem pants of Zobéïde’s Favourite Slave, was refusing to go on stage unless Diaghilev promised ‘to go to the hockshop tomorrow and get my Kodak’. ‘Certainly not,’ Diaghilev replied, but Cocteau said he knew Nijinsky meant it and knew Diaghilev would give in. Stravinsky, too, began to find Vaslav ‘childishly spoiled and impulsive’ and Bronia thought Diaghilev was deliberately encouraging her brother’s vanity ‘on the pretext that it will make him work harder and develop his talent’.

  Sexually they were already living separate lives, sleeping in separate rooms – rooms to which, when they were in London, Diaghilev invited at least one young male visitor whom Kessler observed him addressing as ‘mon petit’. When he visited St Petersburg briefly in the autumn of 1911, Diaghilev accompanied Kuzmin on the usual boy-chasing tour around the bathhouses, but his mood struck his friend as restless.

  Vaslav meanwhile had spent his time offstage in Paris trying to elude the faithful Zuikov. Diaghilev ‘thought I went out for walks, but I was chasing tarts [cocottes]’, sometimes several times a day. After his bout of gonorrhoea in St Petersburg in early 1908 he was wary of disease, but because the police monitored the prostitutes in Paris he thought he was safe. Still, ‘I knew that what I was doing was horrible’. Once, near the Galleries Lafayette with a girl, he noticed a man in a cab with his two children staring at him, and was certain he had been recognised. ‘I received a moral blow, for I turned away and blushed deeply. But I continued to chase tarts.’

  He did not despise these women. On the contrary, he admired them for their beauty and simplicity and spoke of women in general – even his use in the diary of the word cocotte is as un-derogatory as slang for prostitutes gets – with the greatest respect. He simply had no other way of getting close to them, guarded as he was by Zuikov, shy, immature and impractical. Probably in a way these encounters were as intimate as he had ever been with other people; he even described making love to one woman during her period. But the power of his sexual urges terrified him: ‘A man in the grip of lust is like a beast.’

  As early as 1910 Diaghilev had known things weren’t right. One evening he appeared in Karsavina’s dressing room to apologise – most unusually – for allowing another dancer to play her role in Les Sylphides, a mournful monochrome spectre in her mirror.

  ‘You have slapped one cheek. Here is the other.’ Then he added sadly, ‘Tata, I am desperately in love.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘She [sic] doesn’t care for me any more than for the Emperor of China.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Faune and Jeux

  1911–1913

  NIJINSKY HAD STARTED on L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune with Bronia in St Petersburg in early 1911. They worked at home, after hours and without a pianist because no one – least of all the already disgruntled Fokine – could be allowed to know of Vaslav’s plans.

  As soon as Nijinsky resigned from the Mariinsky, Alexandre Benois had foreseen the future, worrying about the possibility that Fokine, jealous of his preeminence, might leave the Ballets Russes. When he voiced his concerns, Diaghilev replied, ‘That’s not so great a calamity. What is a ballet-master [choreographer]? I could make a ballet-master out of this inkstand if I wanted to!’ This, said Benois, was conviction, not bravado, on Diaghilev’s part, but he thought it showed wilfulness and conceit. His own influence, he wrote (wrongly), ‘was still the decisive one’ but because he had never believed Diaghilev really ‘understood the ballet’ (Benois didn’t tire of remembering that Diaghilev had taken longer than him to discover ballet), he did not trust him not to grasp how valuable Fokine was to what he still considered their project.

  But Diaghilev had decided that Fokine was finished, and that anyway he had been the true source of whatever Fokine had been getting right. Although he later praised him to Serge Lifar for the extraordinary originality of his early works, the freshness, vividness and fire of compositions like the Polovtsian Dances, Le Pavillon d’Armide, Les Sylphides and Schéhérazade, he also said that Fokine and Nijinsky, as choreographer and dancer, did no more than ‘carry out my artistic ideas’ (an odd boast, given than Fokine had created Armide and the early version of Sylphides at least, before he ever met Diaghilev). Both Benois and Bakst always thought they contributed more than Fokine to the ballets they created together. ‘Oh, he was like the rest of them, you know, he had no imagination,’ said Bakst. ‘I had to show him what was wanted scene by scene. He just arranged the steps.’ Besides, so the Diaghilev argument ran, though Fokine may have had genius he lacked taste. All that emotion, that poetry, that lyricism: it was, as Vaslav said dismissively to Bronia, too ‘sweetly sentimental’.

  Lifar (who did not meet Diaghilev until the early 1920s) described a bolt of inspiration striking Diaghilev as he and Nijinsky sat in the Piazza San Marco one afternoon in the
autumn of 1910. ‘Leaping to his feet there and then, between two pillars, he began to depict the dense angular plastic* movements of this ballet, and so enthused Nijinsky that for a time all else was ousted from his mind.’ Leaving aside the visual incongruities of this scene, it seems clear that while they toured Europe between them, Diaghilev and Bakst, with Nijinsky present and eagerly absorbing their ideas, formulated the idea for a new ballet that would be not romantically classical (like the dances of Isadora Duncan – her dances were emphatically not ballets – in her filmy tunic and sandals, as well as those of Fokine) but avant-garde and austere, inspired by Bakst’s visits to the remnants of the muscular ancient cultures of Crete, Knossos and Mycenae.

  Indebted to the radical theories of the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, it was to be a ‘moving bas-relief, all in profile, a ballet with no dancing but only movement and plastic attitude’ – an approach that echoed both the ‘sonorous, monotonous and empty line’ of which Mallarmé’s Faun was dreaming and the archaic Greek vases and sculpture Bakst had studied. Since this was Nijinsky’s first attempt at choreography, Diaghilev and Bakst were hoping to keep as much creative control as possible in their experienced hands; they chose the music and Nijinsky apparently never even read the poem that was its source.

  Even so, Vaslav had absorbed their ideas by the time he spoke to Bronia about his ballet for the first time, although he was determined, as he told her, that Greece would be only ‘the source of my inspiration. I want to render it in my own way.’ Night after night, in front of Bronia’s dressing-table mirror, set on the floor in their mother’s living room, he moulded her body and his own into the shapes of the Faun and his Nymphs, taking the first bold steps towards abstraction in dance.

  His method of almost sculptural choreography – worked out on the artist’s own body and then communicated to the other dancers – is commonplace today, but no one had worked in this way before Nijinsky. The painter Mikhail Larionov described watching him work in subsequent rehearsals, what he described as ‘laboratory experiments in movement, attempts at creation. Sometimes after an hour’s work only a single movement would be fixed. Like a sculptor or a painter with a lay figure, he took hold of the dancer, moving his limbs in different directions, stepping back to judge the effect. “No use, no use. Wait; hold it; not bad like that. That’s right now.” Sometimes nothing at all would please him, then suddenly came a pose that would seem interesting; he would retain it and begin to build around it, always experimenting and groping for something that was not quite articulate.’