Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  Benois, who had been through his own ruptures with Diaghilev, wrote to Stravinsky with almost audible glee: ‘Be kind and tell me one thing: was it a complete surprise for Serge, or was he prepared for it? How deep was his shock? Their romance was coming to an end, and I doubt that he was really heartbroken, but if he did suffer I hope it was not too terrible for him. However I imagine he must be completely bewildered in his position as head of the company. But why can’t Nijinsky be both a ballet-master and a Hungarian millionaire?’ Later he would write that Diaghilev, evidently needing someone to blame, told him Günzburg had pushed Vaslav and Romola together, hoping to steal Nijinsky away from him, and that he was more angry because he had been deceived than because he had been abandoned.

  Stravinsky’s response to Benois was more considered, though typically more concerned with the impact of events on him than on anyone else. ‘Of course, this turns everything upside down – literally everything we’ve been doing – and you yourself can foresee all the consequences: for him [Nijinsky] it’s all over, I too may long be deprived of the possibility of doing something valuable in choreography, and, even more important, of seeing my creation which had been made flesh, choreographically speaking, with such incredible efforts. Ah, my friend, this creation gives me not a minute’s rest. It’s surrounded by a dreadful din, like devils gnashing their teeth.’ He went on to complain that Diaghilev had surrendered to commercial concerns, just as Nijinsky had railed against Diaghilev to Bronia in London earlier in the year. ‘Very simply I fear he has come under bad influences, ones that I think are strong in a material rather than a moral sense.’

  For Stravinsky, Nijinsky’s leaving the Ballets Russes meant the end of a hugely productive and exciting working relationship. It could not be replicated. Spoilt and stubborn though he may sometimes have been, difficult though he found it to articulate his ideas – there simply was no one else around who combined Nijinsky’s classical technique and iconoclastic creativity. After four years of seeing each other almost daily, once Diaghilev broke with Nijinsky he and Stravinsky would scarcely meet again.

  Diaghilev’s first priority was to find – or make – a new premier danseur, the star of his upcoming season. He saw what he wanted when a handsome eighteen-year-old boy, dark-haired and dark-eyed, carried a ham on a platter on stage in a feast scene at the Bolshoy in Moscow. This was the young Léonide Massine, who had just given up ballet to concentrate on acting. Diaghilev took him to St Petersburg to audition for Fokine, then to the Hermitage, and then (presumably; this would become Diaghilev’s standard seduction routine) to bed. Grigoriev said those winter months of 1913–14 were similar to the spring of 1909, with an infatuated Diaghilev infecting the entire company with his energy and high spirits. Nijinsky had been replaced.

  The Ballets Russes tour of South America progressed after their month in Buenos Aires to Montevideo, briefly, and on to Rio de Janeiro. Marie Rambert suffered her broken heart in silence. She was one of the swans in the corps de ballet of Swan Lake. At one point Nijinsky had to go down the line, scrutinising each face as he searched for Odette. ‘There was a heavenly moment of waiting for him to approach, and then for one second he looked into my face before passing on.’

  At one performance in Rio, apparently trying to compel Günzburg to pay him some of the back salary he was claiming, and urged on by Romola, Nijinsky refused to perform. He was presumably hoping to prove that without him the Ballets Russes was nothing – an attempt to force Günzburg’s hand. The plan backfired spectacularly. Not appearing for a scheduled performance, without a doctor’s note, was a sackable offence. Günzburg – so remiss in this duty just a few weeks earlier – telegraphed Diaghilev immediately and it was this incident that Diaghilev later used when he ordered Grigoriev to inform Nijinsky that he had been dismissed from the Ballet.

  Until they returned to Europe, Vaslav hoped that Diaghilev would accept his marriage. One cannot read Romola’s version of any event without bearing in mind her carefree relationship with the truth, but she insisted that he believed Diaghilev would be happy for them, writing from Buenos Aires to ask for his blessing, and that he assumed – at this stage he had not been told otherwise – that despite their arguments the previous spring he would be dancing for the Ballets Russes in the 1914 season.

  Day by day they were able to communicate better, speaking in pidgin French and Russian, but the insights they revealed were not always welcome. Romola found that there was a total separation between Nijinsky the artist and Vaslav the man. The first time she tried to go into his dressing room – as a child she had always loved watching her mother while she made up for a role – he gently asked her to leave. At rehearsals he helped her with her steps but the expression on his face was impersonal, that of a master to his pupil; and he was marvellously patient and polite, but unsparing. When he told her that she could never be a top-flight ballerina because she hadn’t trained as a child, she decided to stop dancing. But she misunderstood him; he wanted to share his art with her. Although he said nothing, he was disappointed. ‘I asked her to learn dancing because for me dancing was the highest thing in the world after her. I wanted to teach her … I wept bitterly.’

  Romola ‘began to rave about all the Callot dresses, Reboux hats and Cartier jewels, and all of the mondaine life I was going to lead’. This was what she had been brought up to believe marriage meant, especially marriage to a great and successful artist. All her life, as her daughter would confirm, she thirsted ‘for material things that were the most luxurious, the most exquisite’: some kind of physical validation of her worth. Vaslav smiled and said that of course he would try and give her those things but, ‘I am only an artist, not a prince’. Later, he would write that it was then that he knew he had made a mistake: ‘she loved me for my success and the beauty of my body’; she wanted ‘a young, good-looking and rich husband’. The side of her he distrusted – what he called ‘the intelligent Romola’ – was this aspect of her character. Her concern with the material world, with practicalities like social success and smart hotels, would, he feared, ‘prevent her from understanding me’.

  In Rio, Romola learned that she was pregnant and she spent the entire voyage back to Europe in her cabin, morning sickness compounded by the movement of the sea. Jealous of her happiness with Vaslav, eager to enjoy to the full her glamorous new life, she did not want the baby. They landed in Cadiz in late November and took the train to Paris where Vaslav hoped to meet Diaghilev, who was not there. From Paris they travelled to Budapest so Vaslav could pay his respects to Emilia Márkus. In both places they were greeted by banks of reporters and cameramen waiting to capture for the papers the dieu de la danse and his pretty bride. Pleading delicate health, Romola had planned to have an abortion in Budapest. On the night she was due to enter the sanatorium, to Vaslav’s delight and relief, she changed her mind.

  Two days before they were due to leave Budapest for St Petersburg, Grigoriev’s telegram arrived, informing Nijinsky that his services were no longer required by the Ballets Russes. ‘I was petrified … This was Diaghilev’s revenge,’ wrote Romola. ‘Now, for the first time, it dawned on me that perhaps I had made a mistake; I had destroyed, where I wanted to be helpful.’ With a wife to provide for and a baby on the way, and nowhere to work or even live, Nijinsky’s ‘whole world had collapsed around him’.

  I keep thinking of what Nijinsky would have owned, what the few trunks and suitcases he had taken to South America (and which followed him back to Paris and thence to Budapest) might have contained as he embarked on his new life: practice clothes and shoes; suits for day and evening, but not many – Romola said he only had two when they met and he had travelled to Europe with two in 1909, one brown and one blue; shirts, underwear – though probably not the new underwear Bakst had speculated about; and his new gold watch. Even in the Lvov days he had had well-made shoes; after all, his feet were essential to his work. He kept everything immaculately clean and perfectly in order.

  Reynaldo Hahn ha
d given him a letter signed by the great eighteenth-century dancer Auguste Vestris. Several times Diaghilev had given him sapphire rings and Cocteau had presented him with a gold pencil studded with a sapphire. The emerald girdle Ottoline Morrell had heard about must have been an exaggeration, but anyway it would soon have been pawned. Perhaps there was the camera Cocteau remembered them bickering about, if it had been saved from the hockshop this long. As a perpetual traveller – he often referred to himself as a gypsy or a wanderer – he might have had things he used to make his hotel rooms feel like home: books, a photograph or two. He liked reading (Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were favourites) and when he was creating Sacre he showed Bronia books containing Gauguin reproductions. But his possessions were few, especially compared to the weight of belongings we consider normal today.

  One thing he did not possess was a passport. After three years’ absence, Russia – war-torn and on the edge of revolution – was closed to him. The only thing he could be was an exile. The dancer Li Cunxin has written about the heartbreaking homesickness he suffered after his defection from China to the United States in 1981, the grief he stored inside himself while he concentrated on ballet to fill the hole being away from his home and family left in him; and the way the wealth and luxury with which he was surrounded in his new life never compensated for his feelings of loss, isolation and guilt.

  Despite having no papers, immediately – predictably – the offers began flooding in. The incredible success of the Ballets Russes had made all dancers, let alone one of Nijinsky’s status, into hot commodities. For the past few years, according to one Parisian theatrical agent, dancers had been offered ‘engagements on golden trays’. Nijinsky had been rejecting lucrative offers for years. Now Jacques Rouché, newly appointed director of the Paris Opéra, wanted him for a four-month season of thirty performances from May 1914, for 90,000 francs. A rich German was offering him ‘something like a million francs’ to set up a new company to rival the Ballets Russes.

  But Vaslav still hoped he could repair things with Diaghilev, writing affectionately to Stravinsky within days of receiving Grigoriev’s telegram to try and find out what had gone so wrong. Naively he asked Stravinsky to tell him if it was true that Diaghilev really meant to dismiss him. ‘I can’t believe that Seryozha would behave so badly to me. Seryozha owes me a lot of money. For two years I wasn’t paid anything at all for my dancing or for the new productions of Faune and Jeux and Sacre. I was working without a contract. If it’s true that Seryozha doesn’t want to work with me any more, I have lost everything … I can’t understand why Seryozha’s behaved like this. Ask him what the matter is, and write to me.’ As Stravinsky would later comment, the letter was so unworldly that if Vaslav hadn’t written it, only a character from Dostoyevsky could have: ‘It seems incredible to me … that he was so unaware of the politics and sexual jealousies and motives within the Ballet.’ But Diaghilev was unmoved and Vaslav’s initial disbelief crystallised into resentment.

  Both Bronia and her husband had already signed contracts with Diaghilev for the 1914 season. Understanding her position, Diaghilev invited her and Kochetovsky to dinner in St Petersburg in December to persuade them to stay with the Ballets Russes. Never, before or afterwards, did she see him display ‘his legendary irresistible charm’ as on that snowy night. They ate lobster and strawberries and drank champagne while Diaghilev told Bronia that he loved her as a daughter and respected her as an artist. He told her how hurt he had been, how insulted he had felt by the break with Vaslav; and together they discussed Günzburg’s role in Vaslav’s marriage with bitterness. She saw something new in his attitude to her, as if losing her brother had made her dearer to him.

  Then Diaghilev turned to business, promising Bronia that all her earlier roles would still be hers if she stayed. Bronia knew that Fokine had tried to demand her dismissal as well as Vaslav’s as a condition of his return (as well as being an unwelcome reminder of her brother, Vera Fokina liked dancing Bronia’s parts), but Diaghilev had refused. Again and again he asked her to promise she would join the company in Prague for the start of the season, but he never reminded her that she had signed a contract to be there.

  ‘When we parted he embraced me several times, and as he helped me on with my fur coat he looked deep in my eyes. Suddenly he took my valenki [felt overboots] from the hall porter, and as gallantly as a youth he bent on one knee to help me put them on. That was too much for me. I took my valenki from him and gave them to Sasha. I hugged Sergey Pavlovich and said, “All right, I shall come to Prague!” And so we parted that evening, but were not to meet again for many years.’

  When Bronia and Kochetovsky got to Prague, Diaghilev was in Paris, having left Günzburg behind as acting director. The other dancers were unfriendly to them and Grigoriev informed Bronia that Fokina would be dancing her roles. Then a telegram from Vaslav arrived saying that he had agreed to put on a season in London: would Bronia and Sasha come and dance for him? Günzburg asked them to speak to Diaghilev, who would be returning later that day, before deciding, but their minds were made up. As their train waited on the platform in Berlin, Bronia caught sight of Diaghilev staring at her out of his window on another train heading east as their carriages pulled away in opposite directions.

  Vaslav had turned down Jacques Rouché’s offer because it did not offer him creative control. Instead he signed a contract with Alfred Butt, a successful vaudeville impresario and director of the Palace Theatre, a music hall on Cambridge Circus in London, for an eight-week season for which he would receive a thousand pounds a week.

  Bronia was astonished to discover that Vaslav had agreed to dance at the Palace. For several years Pavlova had performed there, preferring her own name in lights than Diaghilev’s (and the money that went with it), and she and Vaslav had argued passionately about it. At dinner at the Savoy in 1911, while Diaghilev tried to persuade Pavlova to come back to the Ballets Russes, Vaslav insisted that it was beneath her dignity as an artist to perform ‘sandwiched between performing dogs and acrobats’. An artist’s one goal was ‘to perfect himself’, he said and at the Palace Theatre Pavlova’s art would be destroyed. Pavlova had not spoken to him since.

  Bronia was also surprised to find that Vaslav would be dancing some roles choreographed by Fokine, most of which were still in the Ballets Russes repertoire; but Butt had specified that he had to dance at least some of the roles which had made him famous. Vaslav insisted they would be his own versions of Le Spectre de la Rose, of Harlequin in Carnaval, of the poet in Les Sylphides, which, as he said to Bronia, were his creations, and the creations of Bakst or Benois, as much as Fokine’s. They would reorchestrate them and create new scenery and costumes and Faune and Jeux would also be performed.

  The season was to begin on 2 March 1914 after only a month of preparation. Bronia and Sasha went to Russia to recruit dancers while Vaslav went to Paris to ask Bakst, whom he still believed to be his friend, to design the new scenery. Romola waited in the carriage when Vaslav went into his studio. He came down some time later with tears in his eyes. Bakst had told him that Diaghilev had made him promise that he would not work for Nijinsky. ‘He also felt it was his duty to tell Vaslav the truth, that his dismissal from the ballet was not the end, it was the beginning, of a state of war which Diaghilev had declared against Nijinsky.’

  Rehearsals began in Paris, with both Vaslav and Bronia working so hard they barely slept or ate. Under these strains there was no time for pleasantries. Bronia did not bother to hide her dislike of Romola, blaming her for what had befallen her brother. ‘I was the intruder in the Russian ballet, in the family. She isolated herself behind a screen of ice which I could never penetrate. At Laroux’s [sic], or at Viel’s, I used to await them for lunch sometimes until four or five o’clock in the afternoon. But they worked and danced all the time.’ Despite following the ballet for all those months, Romola had not grasped the fact that this was what they had always done. The work of art came first: lunch, even with her, was just a d
istraction. Now, with a wife and expecting a baby, there was more pressure than ever on Vaslav; and no Diaghilev to wave his magic wand and make sure that the show would go on in the end.

  As the opening night approached, it was evident that Vaslav had taken on too much. The administrative demands of running a company and managing the dancers were overwhelming, despite all the help Bronia could give him. On the day of the dress rehearsal, probably not coincidentally, Bronia received a summons to appear in court to answer charges of breaking her contract with Diaghilev. She missed the rehearsal, but the next day, by explaining that by allowing Fokina to dance her roles Diaghilev in fact had broken his contract with her, she won her case and was released. When she got to the theatre to dress for their first performance, Bronia found Vaslav dreadfully upset, having received an unexpected telegram: ‘CONGRATULATIONS BEST WISHES TO MUSIC HALL ARTIST. ANNA PAVLOVA.’

  Their programme began after the comic singer, Wilkie Bard, whose most popular piece was performed in drag. Bronia and Vaslav stood on the darkened stage waiting for the music to begin; Maurice Ravel had reorchestrated Chopin’s music for Vaslav’s version of Les Sylphides. Bronia looked out over the audience and saw Diaghilev sprawled nonchalantly immediately to the left of the conductor. It was a deliberately conspicuous seat, intended to be noticed from stage. While they were dancing, Bronia’s eyes kept flickering back to Diaghilev, whose gaze never left Vaslav. Les Sylphides had always been his favourite ballet. The sardonic smile he had been wearing before they started had disappeared and he seemed ‘to shrink in his seat and his arms were tightly crossed’ over his body, pudgy fingers tucked into his fists. ‘I do not believe that he applauded once, not during Les Sylphides and not at the end.’ Their act was followed by the Bioscope, an early cinema.