Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  The next morning they sighted land, a long brown smudge on the horizon that was Brazil. But when Nijinsky saw Romola it was as if their conversation the previous evening had never taken place. Apart from a polite bow, he did not speak to her again until one evening a few days later when some passengers from first class went down to steerage to see the Italian and Spanish itinerant workers who helped bring in the Argentine harvests, playing, singing and dancing: boleros, tarantellas, real tango, flamenco. On the way back up to their cabins, using Kovaleska as her translator, Romola boldly asked Vaslav if he remembered having lost a little travelling pillow, or dumka, that his mother had given him, that she had heard he treasured. Would he like it back?

  ‘Nijinsky gave me one long look and, mounting up the stairs, said to Kovaleska, “Tell her please to keep it.” I could have choked him.’ That night, when Anna tore another page off the calendar, she quoted a Hungarian proverb to her mistress: ‘The sixteenth day. Really, Miss Romola. I wouldn’t run after a hay-cart which refuses to give a lift.’

  The following day Romola was sitting in the bar before lunch with the Batons, Kovaleska and a few others when Günzburg came up and asked to speak to her. Romola thought she was about to be sacked – that her dancing, which she knew to be not good enough, had been noticed. He took her out on deck and, very formally, said, ‘Romola Carlovna, as Nijinsky cannot speak to you himself, he has requested me to ask you in marriage.’ Thinking it a joke, a humiliated Romola burst into tears and fled to her cabin.

  After dinner a note arrived from Günzburg, hoping she felt better and asking for a response as he could not keep Nijinsky waiting. Perhaps it was true. Romola got dressed and cautiously went out to find Günzburg. When she came out of her cabin, Nijinsky appeared and, pointing to her ring finger, said, ‘Mademoiselle, voulez-vous, vous et moi?’ All she could reply was, ‘Oui, oui, oui.’ It had been the missing dumka which convinced Vaslav: in his account of their meeting, he wrote that it showed him ‘her affection was not just for my art, but also for me. Then and there I decided to marry her.’ Evidently he never suspected she might have stolen the pillow, as I instantly did on reading this; Romola was as enthusiastic a Nijinsky fetishist as any of the fans who bought a discarded rose petal from Zuikov or crept into his dressing room to filch his underwear.

  As they steamed towards land the next morning, an excited Kovaleska burst into Romola’s cabin and threw her arms around her, kissing her three times in the Russian fashion. Vaslav had asked her to come with them into Rio when they docked there for the day, as chaperone and interpreter, to help buy their rings. ‘This is indeed wonderful news. I congratulate you with all my heart. Unbelievable. But somehow I always knew Vaslav Fomich is not as people say.’ Then she stopped, catching herself. ‘I mean, I am glad for both of you … Oh, to see the faces of the others when they hear.’ After choosing the rings they drove up into the mountains above Rio for lunch, meeting some other passengers from the Avon. It was the first time they had ever sat together at a table.

  Back on board that evening, heading for Buenos Aires, Rambert heard Vaslav’s news. She had to bury her face in her trunk, pretending she was looking for something, to hide her tears. ‘I suddenly realised I was hopelessly in love with him, and had been for a long time.’ She envied Romola so much, she thought she might throw herself overboard. That night after dinner, one of the girls (Romola does not say who) was in hysterics because of Nijinsky’s engagement, and earned Madame Baton’s ire by fainting in her husband’s arms; probably it was Rambert.

  That night Nijinsky and Romola sat together in the Avon’s dining room for the first time, with the Batons, Günzburg and Oblokova. Afterwards Adolph Bolm pulled Romola aside, asking her if the rumours were true. As a friend of her parents, he said, he had to warn her that Nijinsky would ruin her life. He was ‘utterly heartless’ and the friendship between him and Diaghilev was ‘more than merely a friendship’. Romola told him stiffly that she would prefer to ‘be unhappy serving Nijinsky’s genius than be happy without him’. When Nijinsky left her at her cabin door that night, kissing her hand, Romola remembered Bolm’s warning and was ‘not quite sure if I should be flattered or offended’.

  Vaslav refused the captain’s offer to perform the ceremony on board; he wanted a real wedding in a church. They would marry when they landed in Buenos Aires. With Günzburg’s help they sent a telegram to Romola’s mother, formally requesting her permission, but they did not inform Eleonora or Diaghilev. As Romola would later say to Bronia, ‘I am not stupid. To give advance notice of our wedding plans to Diaghilev or to Vaslav’s family and risk you stopping us …’

  One great mystery remains: why Günzburg did not warn Diaghilev. There is no doubt that Diaghilev would have wanted to know about Nijinsky’s blossoming romance long before any announcement was made; and that Günzburg, whose specified role was to keep Diaghilev fully informed about the company as a whole and Nijinsky in particular, had failed in this duty first by obviously encouraging them and second by not letting him know as soon as they were engaged. Perhaps he was simply swept away by the shipboard magic of it all, or perhaps for Nijinsky’s sake he hoped to see him free of Diaghilev’s influence. Benois and Grigoriev speculated afterwards that Günzburg was trying to separate Nijinsky from Diaghilev so that he could set up a rival company with Nijinsky, though since (according to Bronia) Günzburg had apparently already agreed to fund Diaghilev’s new season with Fokine rather than Nijinsky, this is unlikely. Maybe, guessing that Nijinsky might not be dancing with the Ballets Russes the following year, Günzburg thought Romola would serve as a consolation.

  Their first days in Buenos Aires were spent rehearsing frantically while Günzburg, still without contacting Diaghilev, arranged the wedding. When Romola made her confession before the service (as required by the Catholic Church), the priest made her promise that she would try to prevent Nijinsky from ever dancing in Schéhérazade again. Nijinsky’s confession was short: thankfully the priest could speak neither Russian nor Polish. On the morning of Wednesday, 10 September, four days after arriving in Buenos Aires, Vaslav and Romola went through a civil ceremony at the city hall. He was twenty-four, she was twenty-one (though later, romanticising things, she claimed to have been under-age) and they had left Europe as virtual strangers less than a month earlier.

  At the wedding breakfast Karsavina, who had joined them in Argentina, made a graceful speech and Bolm made a tactless one, ‘saying that of all the great leaps Nijinsky had ever made this was the most prodigious one: the jump from his former life into marriage’. Lydia Sokolova thought the reception ‘rather dreary’. Like most of the company, she was ‘so shocked and so worried’ about what Diaghilev would do when he found out. The dancers’ accounts of the wedding, reported back to Bronia when they returned to St Petersburg, all carried a ‘strong undercurrent of doom’. But neither the bride nor the groom noticed. Romola commented that ‘they all seemed happy and Karsavina was constantly smiling at us’.

  Afterwards Romola asked Rambert to take her upstairs to wait for Vaslav, who followed with a piece of wedding cake for his bride. If Romola had guessed Rambert’s feelings, it was the cruellest of digs at her vanquished rival. She sat in bed eating her cake while Vaslav kissed the crumbs off her fingers and poor Mim, as Rambert was known, looked on hopelessly.

  The ceremony took place in the Iglesia San Miguel that evening. Anna refused to allow Romola to marry in pale blue, instead making her buy a heavy ivory dress. At the last minute they couldn’t find orange-blossom anywhere, so Romola wore a white turban. Zuikov, loyal to Diaghilev (though strangely, he had not contacted him), was the only member of the company who did not attend. The Latin and Spanish service was long and almost incomprehensible to them both. From the church they went on to the Teatro Colon for the company’s dress rehearsal where Romola was to dance as part of the company for the first time.

  After the rehearsal the newlyweds met in the drawing room of Romola’s little suite, where a cold supper
had been laid out for them. Romola was desperately frightened. She had wanted Nijinsky so much for so long – and here he was; but she barely knew him and she knew nothing about love or sex. They ate in embarrassed silence and afterwards Vaslav kissed her hand and left. Romola was so relieved she almost cried. In the morning – and every morning thereafter – she received a large bunch of white roses from her husband, ‘handed to Anna by Vassily [Zuikov] with a furious look’.

  Each day they got to know each other better. Mornings were spent practising and in the afternoons they would go out driving or walking. Nijinsky ‘made me notice everything lovely around us. It seemed to me that life began to have a new meaning. Suddenly I realised that so much beauty surrounds us which, before, I had failed to observe.’ Before they left Buenos Aires, where they stayed for a month, Nijinsky asked Romola – formally, through Günzburg – to move down to his suite in the hotel. ‘The charm of his personality, the tenderness of his whole being, radiated so much goodness, such beauty, that the evening he chose to remain [in her room] I felt I was making an offering on the altar of happiness.’

  Bronia was in St Petersburg with Eleonora, weeks away from her baby’s arrival, when they opened the newspapers and saw the headline: ‘NIJINSKY MARRIED’. Although, as Romola had discovered, Vaslav wrote to his mother every night, the last letter she had received from him was postmarked Madeira.

  Eleonora was devastated to think that he could have married without discussing it with her, and to someone she had never met. They struggled to think of who the beautiful Hungarian socialite described in the papers might be. Bronia thought she remembered a girl in a train station sitting on one of the big wicker baskets in which the costumes were transported, smoking a cigarette and chatting to Bolm; at performances in Paris and in London, Eleonora had been shocked to find herself sitting next to a girl who tried to talk to her, and had had to ask Günzburg not to place her next to her again (Romola had evidently asked him to do it): the common thread was the boldness of the girl. Then a telegram signed Vaslav and Romushka arrived, asking for Eleonora’s blessing.

  Meanwhile, after being told by the Imperial War Ministry that Vaslav’s petition to be exempt from military service needed only a signature to be confirmed, the news came that it had been denied, on the grounds that he was very wealthy and had ample means to support his mother without dancing. Someone, Bronia was certain, had given new ‘information’ to the Minister. Although she did not accuse Diaghilev directly, she made it clear in her memoirs that she did not think his return to Russia, having heard the news of Vaslav’s marriage at the same time as the exemption was denied, was a coincidence.

  Diaghilev was in Venice in early September 1913. Misia Sert remembered going up to his room one morning to play something for him on the piano. She was wearing a white muslin dress and he was still in his nightshirt and Turkish slippers when she knocked at the door. In high spirits, he seized her parasol, opening it up and dancing with it across the room, while Misia urged him to close it – both of them were ‘madly superstitious’ and thought opening an umbrella inside would bring bad luck. Just then a telegram arrived. It was from Nijinsky, announcing that he had married.

  Diaghilev fell apart, crying, screaming, swearing and sobbing shamelessly. ‘He had entirely formed and fashioned him [Vaslav], moulded him, led him to his glory. He was his work of art and his beloved child.’ Later a sort of council of war was held, an alternate version of Diaghilev’s committee meetings. Irreverently, Bakst wondered whether Nijinsky had bought new underclothes before leaving, which would be certain proof he had intended to elope. ‘Diaghilev burst out again: To hell with their talk of underpants when he was in the depths of despair!’

  It was in effect a divorce, and a divorce complicated by a shared business interest, a company created and made valuable by both parties separately as well as together. Diaghilev had made Nijinsky a star, but Nijinsky was Diaghilev’s main box-office draw. How lawyers would rub their hands over that prospect today. Then there was no method of arranging a split in a civilised way – because theoretically nothing had existed to be split. Except for the first season in 1909, Nijinsky had never signed a contract with the Ballets Russes. Besides, though Diaghilev had threatened to sack Nijinsky for defying him, he had never expected to be dumped himself. He wanted revenge. He told Bakst, ‘As high as Nijinsky stands now – so low am I going to thrust him.’

  Walter Nouvel told Arnold Haskell, one of Diaghilev’s early biographers, that though Nijinsky’s desire to marry was understandable, it should not be seen as ‘an escape from some ogre’. At the start of their relationship Nijinsky had pursued Diaghilev; there could be ‘no suggestion that Diaghilev seduced him. Nijinsky was not a child’ (though they all treated him as one, and he had been a teenager, half Diaghilev’s age, when they met). Throughout their time together, Nijinsky ‘had an enormous respect and admiration for Diaghilev and [had] profited both materially and as an artist from the friendship’. All this was true, and later Vaslav would tell Romola that he would never regret his friendship with Diaghilev, ‘for I believe that all experience in life, if made with the aim of truth, is uplifting’.

  However Nouvel also told Haskell that Nijinsky, during his years with Diaghilev, was ‘a being never fully sexually awake … someone who poured all his emotions into his work, and to whom the active adventures of love meant absolutely nothing’. I think Nouvel intended this statement to mean that Nijinsky never returned Diaghilev’s love, and was therefore calculating in his relations with him; my interpretation of it would be that he was trapped and immature, utterly in thrall to the older man’s intelligence, worldliness and domineering personality, but not physically attracted to him.

  Nijinsky’s diary corroborates this idea of him being sexually immature during his relationship with Diaghilev – the only times he mentions Diaghilev in connection with sex is with a sense of repulsion at what Diaghilev ‘taught’ him – and makes clear that with Romola he woke up. Though occasionally he continued using prostitutes in secret (because, he says, he had so much semen he ‘had to ejaculate’), their sex life was satisfactory: he writes of screwing her, of licking her, of having sex five times a day, of her liking ‘experiencing a feeling of lust for me’.

  It is possible – I believe likely – that Diaghilev had not minded Nijinsky remaining asleep, an adolescent beau aux bois dormant, channelling all his creative energy into his work and expending whatever was left over on prostitutes (I find it hard to fathom that Diaghilev didn’t know anything about this aspect of Nijinsky’s life, regardless of how well Vaslav thought he was keeping it secret). Even he could not have believed that their constant arguing and sexual incompatibility was domestic bliss, but he had his own distractions, and he was perhaps content to adore Nijinsky from a distance – from the stalls, so to speak – as long as he knew he ‘possessed’ him.

  There was a quality in Nijinsky that permitted this sense of ownership. After all, despite his creative independence, he was used to being looked at and admired. The stage somehow makes performers passive, screens for whatever the audience wants to project onto them; Diaghilev (and Romola too in her own way) was just the audience magnified. And Vaslav recognised that he ‘was not mature enough for life’: he needed a protector so that he could concentrate on his art. It is speculation, but maybe, just as Romola believed his fame and glamour would be more than enough for both of them, Vaslav assumed that she was an heiress – who else, after all, would have been able to pursue him as she did? Benois was just one of their circle who believed she was very rich – and would thus be able to look after him. On a practical level she would be a replacement for Diaghilev, but one who would facilitate his creative endeavours rather than secretly compete with or stifle them.

  Misia Sert’s memoirs provide us with another angle on Diaghilev’s view of the break-up. In her view, Diaghilev had provided Vaslav with ‘the background best fitted to bring out his exceptional gifts’ and without that he was ‘a lost child …
insecure, unsure of himself … profoundly miserable’. His dependence on Diaghilev, what Misia described pointedly as ‘a flaccid will’, made him refuse to condemn to Romola his relationship with Diaghilev and refuse to accept that they could not work together in the future, despite her opposition to it.

  Misia and her lover, José-Maria Sert, took the grieving, angry Diaghilev to Florence and Naples where, beyond consolation, he surrendered to ‘a wild orgy of dissipation’. The plans to replace Nijinsky with Fokine were finalised. On the way back to Russia, Diaghilev stopped in Clarens to see Stravinsky and break the news to him that Sacre – the work he considered his best – would not be performed as a ballet again. Diaghilev blamed it on Nijinsky’s running away with Romola and thus, perhaps inadvertently, leaving the Ballet, but in reality the decision had been taken before Vaslav ever set foot on the Avon.

  One of the Ballets Russes’s dancers, Anna Fyodorova (whose sister Olga had run off with Aleksey Mavrin in 1909), saw Diaghilev by chance in Montreux. ‘He was sitting alone, at a café table on the terrace of the hotel on the shore of the lake. The table in front of him was empty. Diaghilev appeared deep in thought, his chin resting on his hands folded on top of his cane. “When I approached to greet him … he lifted his head and I was frightened to see his face so distorted by grief … he did not say a word, he did not answer me.”’

  In October Diaghilev was back in Russia where, possibly, he interfered with Nijinsky’s application for exemption from military service and instructed Grigoriev to telegram Nijinsky informing him he was fired. He sent him no word directly himself. Grigoriev brooded over the situation, unable to influence Diaghilev but blaming him ‘for treating Nijinsky so harshly. For, after all, Nijinsky had spent years in his company and had perhaps done more than anyone else to win it fame.’ Despite their longstanding friendship, Diaghilev was treating Nijinsky no better than he had treated Fokine eighteen months earlier. Grigoriev decided that the violence of Diaghilev’s attitude must be in part a reaction to the failure of Jeux and Sacre: commercial considerations made the break easier for him.