Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  In the last decades of her life, Romola lived between Switzerland, Japan and the States, jealously guarding the manuscript of Nijinsky’s diaries (it was sold to a private collector the year after her death for £45,000 and is now in the New York Public Library), bickering with Serge Lifar over which of them would lie next to Nijinsky’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetary (Lifar had not mentioned to her when he moved Nijinsky’s body that he planned to lie beside it) and following the spectacular racehorse named after her husband wherever he was running.

  Both Karsavina and Rambert tried desperately to avoid her on her flying visits to London. The producer John Drummond encountered her in an office at the BBC in the 1960s. Her hair was dyed a brassy red and she wore a moth-eaten fur coat. She was saying, ‘You know, they all got it wrong; I was the only woman Diaghilev liked …’ – rather a bold statement, even for her.

  Romola had become alienated from both her children and they barely spoke to one another (she told Kyra’s son that Tamara was not Nijinsky’s daughter). In 1960, at the age of forty-seven, Kyra entered a Franciscan order as a lay sister. She believed her father had not been mentally ill but broken by the brutality of his surroundings and she found consolation – as he had tried to – in an intense spirituality. In 1991 Tamara wrote a brave and compassionate book about her parents’ relationship which she dedicated to her grandson – the child of a daughter from whom she in turn was estranged – so that he could ‘feel pride in the past’.

  Kyra, who danced several of his roles for Marie Rambert, among others, in the 1930s, was astonishingly like her father physically, with the same powerful, compact body and the same compelling expression of feline grace in her slanted eyes. In the late 1940s Igor Markevitch, by then separated from Kyra, was in Venice with their teenage son Vaslav. An elderly man approached them. ‘Very strange. There was a Russian dancer who used to come here before the First War. He was very famous. The boy reminds me of him.’ The boy would grow up to be a painter, Vaslav Markevitch.

  The other great moulder of Nijinsky’s legend was Diaghilev, Svengali to his Trilby and, in the mythology of the Ballets Russes, somehow almost his rival. In the early, first-hand literature about the Ballets Russes – the accounts of Benois and Nouvel (through Arnold Haskell), of Lifar and Massine, Stravinsky and Cocteau, Fokine and Monteux, and of Romola herself – there is an unseemly rush to denigrate each other’s contributions and beneath it all the sense of an underlying, unspoken (and spurious) question: who was greater, the Showman or Petrushka?

  The first and perhaps the greatest thing Diaghilev did for his friend was to provide him with an arena in which art was exalted into the noblest of pursuits. Lynn Garafola phrases it best. His ‘generosity [to his protégés, Nijinsky being the first among equals] was boundless: he gave them all the accumulated wisdom of his years and all the fruits of his broad experience, in addition to a knowledge of the arts, an appreciation of aesthetics, and an introduction to anyone who was anyone in the circles of high bohemia. Money was no object: he paid for months of experiments in the studio and hundreds of rehearsal hours with dancers, for music by the greatest composers and sets by the finest artists. No Pygmalion ever served his Galatea as devotedly as Diaghilev served his lover-choreographers.’

  However, the very intensity of this generosity – and what was expected in return – was untenable. The sacrifices Art and Beauty demanded were great: no home, no rest, no friends except those with whom Diaghilev surrounded himself, nothing permitted except the one overriding aim – immortality. Champagne was allowed, but Vaslav seldom drank. Diaghilev may have made his favourites into gods (as Marie Rambert put it) but none of them could ‘sustain it [without him] … Not at the height at which they were with him, because it was too high for anyone.’

  Diaghilev created, in the Ballets Russes, something that was immeasurably greater than the sum of its parts. He ‘was the permeating genius who was behind it, through it, around it and before it; responsible in undefinable ways (as well as those that are definably within the province of a director) for every gesture, light and shade, and measure of tempo. Of all the great artists he has trained, which one ever achieved without him that which was possible with him?’ Nijinsky was not the only one of Diaghilev’s spurned or disgruntled colleagues who could never replicate the creative atmosphere they had experienced alongside him.

  Perhaps this is where the problem lies. Ultimately Diaghilev fell out with most of the people with whom he worked and on whom he depended, whether they were friends or lovers. He tried to bind his collaborators to him by creating an almost claustrophobic sense of family within his company and, in Vaslav’s case, by relying too quickly on him to be his only choreographer, without allowing him a period of apprenticeship (Fokine by contrast had several years, between 1900 when he began composing and 1907 when Pavlova danced his Dying Swan, to hone his ideas away from the public eye) or enough time off; and, when they chafed against his dominion, he turned almost vengefully against them.

  But the great achievement of this volatile group of artists, apart from their work, was their propagation of ballet, as we know it today, across the world. The diaspora of the Ballets Russes would promote or found national or municipal companies in six continents in the decades after Diaghilev’s death and this is perhaps the greatest legacy of Diaghilev’s genius for attracting, recognising and nurturing talent.

  Many of these artists had known and worked with Nijinsky and they preserved a quite different memory of him than that disseminated by Romola or Diaghilev. Marie Rambert, for example, had danced the role of a Nymph in Nijinsky’s 1913 production of Faune. Later she would go on to mount the ballet herself for the company that would become the Ballet Rambert, her own memorial to the man she had loved.

  Diaghilev’s later lovers form an interesting subsection of this group because apart from Massine none of them met Nijinsky until after his breakdown, but their collective obsession with him – I do not think that is too strong a word – would colour their subsequent careers. ‘Any outstanding work of merit in my career with the Russian Ballet was inspired by a man I had never known, and then by the haunting memory of someone I had seen more as a vision than as a living person,’ Anton Dolin would write.

  In his books Serge Lifar claimed that Nijinsky had been merely Diaghilev’s cypher as a choreographer, parroting back what a bitter Diaghilev had almost certainly told him – that he had been responsible for everything good about Nijinsky’s ballets and dismissing the rest – and yet he moved heaven and earth (nearly), braving Romola’s wrath, to get Nijinsky’s body to Paris so that they could lie beside one another for all eternity – leaving Diaghilev, the man he had called his soulmate, alone in a Venetian cemetery.

  This issue – of who was responsible for what – dogs all Diaghilev’s collaborators, but Nijinsky in particular. It was Fokine to whom Diaghilev was referring when he declared he could make a choreographer out of an inkstand, but he damned them all by implication; only Balanchine, whose later career eclipsed the work he did for Diaghilev, escaped this taint. In Spain in 1916 Diaghilev blithely told Nijinsky that he had explained to Massine all the steps and gestures for Les Femmes de bonne humeur, which Massine then showed the other dancers – just what he would later say to Lifar about Nijinsky and Faune.

  I find it interesting that Diaghilev (or his promoters) could in one breath claim Nijinsky’s work as his own and in the next dismiss it as uncommercial, intellectually inadequate and immature. Surely if he really had created Sacre, for instance, as he claimed to Lifar, he would not have dropped it from the Ballet’s repertoire so quickly. It is no accident that when, in the late 1920s, interest in Sacre had been rekindled but Jeux was still considered Nijinsky’s weakest ballet, Diaghilev told Lifar that Sacre was wholly his but the part he had played in Jeux was ‘much more limited’. Vaslav knew he did it: in his diaries he wrote, ‘I know that Diaghilev likes saying they [the ballets] are his, because he likes praise’. ‘Diaghilev did not like me, because I com
posed ballets by myself. He did not want me to do things by myself that went against his grain.’

  Almost everyone involved with the Ballets Russes at one time or another sought to trumpet their own achievements at the expense of their collaborators. Lifar quotes Benois saying that, ‘It was we, the painters – not the professional stage painters, but the real painters – who, profoundly attracted by the stage, took up stage design and so helped mould the art of dancing along new lines.’ Massine also attempted to play down Diaghilev’s role. ‘We were all of us caught up in the violence of the artistic creation in Paris of the period. No escape was possible, and the ballet expressed what the poets, painters and musicians had to say … Diaghilev followed.’

  Many of them tried to do this at Nijinsky’s expense; Nijinsky, who could not answer back. As Lincoln Kirstein, to whom Nijinsky owes in great part the rehabilitation of his reputation from the 1970s onwards, observed, it was ‘convenient for many reasons for Cocteau (who knows perhaps more than anyone), even for Fokine, for his other colleagues, dancers and musicians, to keep either a deprecatory silence about his creative expression (apart from his dancing) or to flatly run it down’. In short, making Nijinsky look bad often made his collaborators or successors look good, and regardless of her motivations the only person who cared about this, to begin with, was Romola.

  The battle between Diaghilev and Romola is another epic element of the Nijinsky myth. It is true that, as Arnold Haskell wrote, Diaghilev was uninterested in personal gain and had always lived precariously for the sake of Art: every penny he had ‘went into his dreams’. His pursuit by Romola through the law courts for the salary Nijinsky had been neither paid nor, it has to be said, promised, was a body blow. It is possible that, as Nijinsky imagined when he married, he might have been able to return to Diaghilev’s artistic bosom (if not his physical one), as Benois and Fokine had, if it hadn’t been for Romola’s refusal to compromise with the man she knew her husband would always consider his mentor.

  It is also clear in her biography of Nijinsky that Romola thrilled to her duel with Diaghilev, pitting her wits and determination against this magnificent rival. With undisguised glee she recounted her first interview with Diaghilev, during which she convinced him that she was in love with Bolm and had barely noticed Nijinsky, and procured his permission to follow the Ballet by playing on his desire to impress her friend, an influential critic. On the surface, she wrote, a debonair impresario was granting a request to a young society girl; ‘in reality, two powerful enemies had crossed swords for the first time …[a] fine, covert duel … was being fought between and behind words’. When she left the room with permission to take lessons with Cecchetti, ‘I could scarcely believe I had succeeded in fooling such an inconceivably clever man’. She presented herself as having saved Nijinsky, a captive genius, from the evil Showman: a knight in a fairytale, with Vaslav cast as princess.

  But Romola’s depiction of her battle with the dragon is ‘all the more misleading through being nearly accurate on so many points, and always highly plausible’. Diaghilev was an arch-manipulator; he was furious with Nijinsky for leaving him and he did undoubtedly want to diminish him in the most wounding way he knew how – as an artist – as punishment for that humiliation and heartbreak; but the thought that he was engaged with Romola in some kind of Miltonian struggle for possession of Nijinsky is laughable, and evidence only of her capacity for grandiose self-deception.

  Romola’s unpopularity, and the image she propagated of her husband as half-victim, half-saint, both kept his name on people’s lips and turned many others in the field of dance against him. Quite deliberately, and for her own purposes, she had contravened Anna Pavlova’s tenet that a great ‘artist should show himself to the public only on stage, never in private life’ and the fact that she insisted so vehemently on his genius made many determined to reject it.

  While today the mere mention of Nijinsky’s name can cause shivers of delight among his devotees, with one modern writer, the poet, Wayne Koestonbaum, riffing djinn, jinx, sky in an effort to quantify its enchantment, by the 1930s it had become ‘a sign of connoisseurship not to like Nijinsky’. His role in Schéhérazade had become an object of parody – by none other than Balanchine. The 1949 Dance Encyclopedia (published the year after the film The Red Shoes, partly based on Diaghilev and Nijinsky’s relationship, came out) even claimed that a ‘Nijinsky conspiracy’ was keeping his feeble flame alight. ‘So few people, comparatively speaking, ever saw Nijinsky dance, that if his fame were based on his actual appearances before the public, he would now have been completely forgotten … his role in the history of ballet and his influence on the art of ballet are extremely modest.’

  The second great gift Diaghilev gave Nijinsky was making him the star of his ballets, the central figure on stage rather than an accessory to a ballerina. For the first time since the early nineteenth century, audiences came to see a male dancer – not a porteur but a supreme artist – and for him not just solos but entire ballets were composed around a male central figure. Diaghilev did this because he was erotically in thrall to Nijinsky. He saw him as beautiful and desirable and he presented him on stage as beautiful and desirable.

  Diaghilev’s private passion for Nijinsky was a defining aspect of his public success as a dancer. Whatever really happened between them, physically or emotionally, for me this is their love story, the truest expression of their partnership – why, if for no other reason, they were in some romantic sense meant to be together and why they will always be remembered as inextricably linked: Diaghilev catching his breath in a darkened theatre watching Nijinsky dance; audience and performer united by the intensity of their desire, in their different ways, to capture the same perfection.

  Nijinsky came to prominence at a time of deep-seated confusion about sex and gender and at the start of a century of change that would transform how Western society viewed dissenters from the norm. Freud published his first articles on sexuality and the unconscious in the 1890s. Despite flourishing ‘gay scenes’ in Paris, Berlin and St Petersburg, homosexual scandals were still rocking the established order all over Europe: Oscar Wilde’s case was the most notorious, but even political trials like those of Alfred Dreyfus in France and Roger Casement in Ireland had homosexual subtexts. At the same time, gay men with public profiles like Wilde and Diaghilev were increasingly unwilling to disguise or deny their preferences.

  Women were also subverting traditional roles on a broader level, with the suffragettes demanding a say in government but also privately refusing to accept nineteenth-century stereotypes of how they should behave. Ida Rubinstein commissioned a ballet in which she played St Sebastian; other prominent but unfeminine women of the time, many of whom Nijinsky knew, included Virginia Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Sitwell, Zinaida Gippius and even his sister Bronia.

  Diaghilev laboured under no illusions about himself. He knew he was gay and what was more he believed being gay was better than being straight – all the proof he thought he needed was that throughout history the great creators from Socrates to Christ to Leonardo had been homosexual (evidently it never occurred to him that women have not had the same opportunities to be creative). One of the things he and Stravinsky always disagreed about was his prosyletising insistence that Stravinsky would be a greater artist if he could detach himself from women.

  With regard to the ballet in general, ‘although he was showman enough to emphasise the beauty of the female body’ on stage, Diaghilev’s preference for boyish slenderness (he used to say, ‘there is nothing uglier than a woman’s thighs’) made him ban short classical tutus for all his dancers except those with the longest, thinnest legs and shaped the attenuated physique that prevailed for female dancers throughout the twentieth century. Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of Vladimir and a composer who worked with Diaghilev in the 1920s, believed that Diaghilev deliberately embraced the ‘scandal’ of his homosexuality in promoting the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky. ‘The risk, and the sense of otherness, was
a powerful source of Diaghilev’s mystique, and he used it knowingly.’

  Thus, according to Richard Buckle, did Nijinsky’s entrance on stage in his pearl choker as Armida’s Slave in Paris in 1909 speed ‘this most homosexual of centuries on its vertiginous course’. Throughout the century an interest in dance in general and the Ballets Russes and Diaghilev and Nijinsky in particular was a signal of unmasculine interests and intentions: in A Queer History of the Ballet (2007), Peter Stoneley lists as examples of this the young Harold Acton dancing instead of playing football at Eton and Edmund White as a boy imitating the Favourite Slave in his mother’s turban. Almost unwittingly Nijinsky became a gay icon, for want of a better phrase: a beacon for homosexual men and women charting a new course, moving away from needing to keep their true selves hidden from the world.

  One of these people, strangely enough, may have been Romola Nijinsky herself. Although it was not until Buckle’s biography of Nijinsky that his relationship with Diaghilev was discussed openly – coinciding with the advent of the gay liberation movement – Romola played her own part in this aspect of Nijinsky’s legend. After his breakdown, her great loves were women, and the books she wrote about Nijinsky make absolutely clear both what the relationship between her husband and Diaghilev was and that she understood the nature of it. ‘To make Sergey Pavlovich happy was no sacrifice to Vaslav,’ she wrote. ‘And Diaghilev crushed any idea of resistance, which might have come up in the young man’s mind, by the familiar tales of the Greeks, of Michelangelo and Leonardo, whose creative lives depended on the same intimacy as their own. The relationship between them was so real that it was therefore universally taken for granted. Diaghilev and Nijinsky were one in private life …’