by Lucy Moore
Tishkevich, Count 47
Tolstoy, Leo 170, 186, 190, 205
Toscanini, Arturo 90
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 54, 250
Train Bleu, Le 195, 217f
Tricorne, Le 213
U
Utrillo, Maurice 215f
V
Valentino, Rudolph 189
Van Vechten, Carl 257–8
Venice 72–3, 80, 100, 117, 153
Verlaine, Paul 54, 89
Vestris, Auguste 17, 59, 170, 234
Vienna 145, 178, 179, 218, 232
Vladimir, Grand Duke 53
Volkonsky, Prince Sergey 38, 45, 144
Volny, Maurice 176
Vuillard, Édouard 54
W
Wagner, Richard 143
Walser, Robert 218, 258
Way of a Pilgrim, The 206
Weber, Carl Maria von 85
Wedding, The 182, 216, 220
White, Edmund 248
Wielki Theatre School 7
Wilde, Oscar 95, 143, 247
Wilson, Colin 211
Wilson, Edmund 189
Wings (Kuzmin) 44
Woolf, Virginia 209, 217f, 247, 258
Y
Young, Stark 258
Yusupov, Prince Nikolay 34
Z
Zucchi, Virginia 11
Zuikov, Vasily 63, 66, 67, 96, 97, 98, 120, 150, 152
and Rambert 139
Le Spectre de las rose 87, 89
on SS Avon 154
Vaslav’s marriage 161
Zverev, Nicholas 186, 190, 193
1. Nijinsky in the dress uniform of the Imperial Theatre School, c.1900. This was taken at the time that Nijinsky, aged eleven, entered the senior schoool as one of six male students in his year and won the coveted scholarship that would fund his education. The silver lyres, the school’s insignia, are embroidered on his collar.
2. Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova in the first version of La Pavillion d’Armide, 1907. It was as Armida’s Favourite Slave, a role written especially for him the year he graduated, that the eighteen year-old Nijinsky in his pearl choker bewitched Prince Lvov and Sergey Diaghilev.
3. Nijinsky in Paris in 1909. Along with the rest of the Ballets Russes, the awkward boy found himself inhabiting ‘an unreal and enchanted world’.
4. Nijinsky in playful mood, posing for publicity stills for the ‘Danse Siamoise’ for the photographer Druet in his garden in Paris, 1910.
5. The composer Igor Stravinsky and Nijinsky as Petrushka by Bert, 1911. Even posing off stage Nijinsky is in character, arms handing woodenly by his sides, his feet turned in, en dedans, and his expression as blankly quizzical as a puppet’s.
6. Bronia Nijinska as the Street Dancer and Ludmilla Schollar as a Gypsy flank Kobelev, the Organ Grinder, in their costumes for Petrushka, 1911. Bronia’s dance was a parody of Mathilde Kshesinskaya’s style, an in-joke only devotees of the Ballets Russes would have understood.
7. Nijinsky as the Rose (1911) with his face made up to resemble ‘a celestial insect, his eyebrows suggesting some beautiful beetle … his mouth was like rose petals’.
8. Plus nu que nu: Nijinsky as the Faun by Bert, 1912, wearing a short tail, horns, pointed, elongated ears and the dappled body stocking which, before every performance, Léon Bakst painted directly onto him. He looked, as one observer said, even more than naked. ‘One could not define where the human ended and the animal began’.
9. Playing Daphnis et Chloë, a ballet choreographed by Nijinsky’s in-house rival, Mikhail Fokine, with its composer Maurice Ravel in Paris, 1912. Note Nijinsky’s look of utter concentration.
10. Dancing the turkey trot with Tamara Karsavina while Ludmilla Schollar waits in Jeux, 1913, the first ballet set in the contemporary world. Karsavina and Schollar wear white tennis dresses designed by Paquin and Nijinsky is in a white version of his usual practise clothes.
11. A formal portrait taken in New York in 1916 when Nijinsky was twenty-seven and about to lead the Ballets Russes in Diaghilev’s place on a catastrophic fifty-two city tour of the United States which would lose its sponsor, the Metropolitan Opera House, quarter of a million dollars.
12. Posing as himself in New York, 1916, in the pale crepe-de-chine shirt, slim black trousers and woven sandals in which he practised every day.
13. Supervising every detail of his work: Nijinsky applying makeup to one of the dancers in Till Eulenspiegel, New York, 1916.
14. ‘I am a father. I am a married man.’ Vaslav with two-year-old Kyra and Romola in New York, 1916.
15. When Romola and Serge Lifar visited Nijinsky in 1939 (attended by press photographers) he astonished everyone by joining in when Lifar danced for him. While Lifar was warming up a watchful Nijinsky warned, ‘You might fall into the air.’
16. With Romola in a hotel in Egham, Surrey, 5 December 1947, just after their arrival in England. His eyes are so expressive that he seems almost to be looking out from behind the mask of his face.
* ‘Vaslav’ is pronounced ‘Vatslav’, hence his family nickname Vatsa; Fomich is his patronymic, indicating that he is the son of Foma, or Thomas. The Polish spelling of his name is Wacław Nizynski.
* Marie Petipa’s father, Marius, wrote in his diary that Legat ‘went mad, biting Marie, then, he killed himself’ (L. Garafola, Legacies of Twentieth Century Dance, 2005, p. 26).
* The Jockey Club was founded in 1833 by a group of these gentlemen in a site next to the Opéra. It was ‘purportedly devoted to Anglophile equestrian affairs, although the activities of its members tended more towards gossip and the “protection” of ballerinas’ (J. Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, 2010, p. 145).
* Years later, in his memoirs, Fokine would insist that the three most acclaimed pieces of the 1909 season were Bolm in the Polovtsian Dances, the Jesters from Armide and the Bacchanal (danced by his wife) from Cléopâtra – none of which were danced by Nijinsky. The accounts of Karsavina, Grigoriev and Benois, as well as the press reports, contradict his claims.
* The only person of Vaslav’s age in Diaghilev’s circle was Jean Cocteau, who, though he never saw Nijinsky after 1914, returned to him as a subject again and again throughout his life. His biographer Francis Steegmuller speculates (in Cocteau: A Biography, 1970, pp. 72–3) that Cocteau’s initial efforts to get closer to Nijinsky when they first met (he had a habit of visiting Nijinsky at the time he knew he was being massaged) were firmly squashed by Diaghilev.
† Duncan was another enthusiastic hostess. On a rainy summer’s night in 1910 she threw a party in the gardens of the Palace Hotel, Versailles. Guests drank champagne and ate caviar in tents in the illuminated gardens while gypsy music and an orchestra from Vienna played. Duncan presided over everything in flaming Fortuny silk and gold sandals. In the New Yorker, Janet Flanner recalled her once giving ‘a house party that started in Paris, gathered force in Venice, and culminated weeks later on a houseboat in the Nile. She was a nomad de luxe’. (Flanner, Paris was Yesterday, 2003, p. 36.)
* Prince Lieven said of the folklore pastiche that was L’Oiseau de feu that it was ‘as if Alice of Alice in Wonderland was partnered with Falstaff in a Scotch jig’. (Quoted in L. Garafola and N. V. N. Baer (eds), The Ballets Russes and its World, 1999, p. 120.)
* Diaghilev never did. Lifar reported that Diaghilev would not have appeared naked for anything in the world, quite apart from hating water with a superstitious passion.
* When Karsavina tried to protest that she might need some time off, Diaghilev raged at her, telling her she had all eternity to rest in. ‘Why could you not have married Fokine? [Then] You would both have belonged to me.’ (T. Karsavina, Theatre Street, 1948, p. 284.) Fokine and Karsavina had in fact hoped to marry in the early 1900s, until, at her parents’ behest, she turned him down.
* This is the same premise as the opening scene of one of the classic nineteenth-century ballets, but with the masculine and feminine roles inverted: at the start of La Sylphide, the hero, Jame
s, is asleep in an armchair, dreaming of the otherwordly sylph. (A. Macaulay, Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Dance, 2000, p. 192.)
* Three years later, in London, Nijinsky’s dancing provoked an indignant letter to The Times, which concluded: ‘Against Nijinsky personally, of course, nothing can be said. He is a conscientious artiste devoted to his work. But is not the influence of his dance a degenerate one? It is luscious and enervating. The type of young man who likes it and the type it will breed is precisely that which loves the languor of a rose-lit apartment with the curtains drawn all day, with the smoke of opium curling, and the heavy breath of strange perfumes in the air. And that means rottenness!’ From John Julius Norwich’s 2011 Christmas Cracker (my thanks to Peter Carson for passing on this quotation).
* Plastique was the standard Russian term for the acting, as opposed to the dancing, elements of ballet: free dance, or free movement, rather than choreographed ballet steps; the form and line the body makes in space.
* Peter Ostwald, whose biography of Nijinsky focuses on his mental health, speculated that on the first night this ‘final gesture’ may have been unsimulated. ‘Fear can and does lead to sexual arousal.’ (Ostwald, Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness, 1991, p. 61.)
* Diaghilev wasn’t much good at English either. His only English words were said to be, ‘More chocolate pudding!’ (O. Sitwell, Great Morning, 1948, p. 247.)
* Because Nijinsky was on the verge of insanity when he wrote his diary, and because he often contradicts himself in it, it is on the surface an unreliable document. For example, he writes of hating Diaghilev and loving him, of despising his artificiality and respecting his genius and knowing that Diaghilev was jealous of his talent. But he was always honest, and all of these impulses seem absolutely consistent with the multiplicity of fractured and refracted emotions Diaghilev stimulated in him. The same is true of the way he describes his feelings for Karsavina and, later, for Romola de Pulszky.
* Monteux was asked in the 1950s what he had thought of Sacre when he first heard it. ‘I detested it.’ And now? ‘I still detest it.’ (T. F. Kelly, First Nights, 2000, p. 274.)
* When things got too much for them, Grigoriev gave the corps old Fokine ballets to rehearse ‘to maintain morale’. (S. Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929, p. 90.)
* Le Sacre du printemps was far from being the only one of Diaghilev’s ballets which required the dancers to perform in unwieldy and uncomfortable costumes. In Les Femmes de bonne humeur (1917), Lopokova said she and the other artists ‘felt like rugby football players dressed as Eskimos pretending to be the most elegant and dainty females of the eighteenth century’. (J. Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs Maynard Keynes, 2008, p. 118.)
* There is no precedent in the myths of any ancient cultures (except Aztec, which Roerich did not mention in his notes) for female sacrifice. This was a modern construct, ‘cousin to the invented myths of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Sigmund Freud’ (see L. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 1989, p. 72) – except for one arena in which young virgins had willingly and regularly sacrificed themselves for some higher ideal: classical ballet, both on stage and off. (T. Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernisation of Ballet, 1993, p. 72.)
* Rudolf Nureyev also venerated Bach. ‘When you listen to Bach you hear a part of God …When you watch me dance you see a part of God.’ (J. Kavanagh, Rudolf Nureyev, 2008, p. 187.)
* Grigoriev told Walter Nouvel that Romola had entirely made up the rehearsal; Nijinsky had gone to London on the hope, rather than a promise, of reconciliation. (A. L. D. Haskell, Ballet Russes: The Age of Diaghilev, 1968, p. 259.)
* Zverev was known to his fellow dancers as Percy Greensocks because he always wore green practice clothes, and he was painted several times by Picasso in late 1922.
* He teased Diaghilev. ‘You don’t direct, you don’t dance, you don’t play the piano, what is it you do?’ Diaghilev replied, ‘Your Majesty, I am like you: I don’t do anything, but I am indispensable.’ (R. Davenport-Hine, A Night at the Majestic, 2006, pp. 17–18.)
* Olga Spessivtzeva, one of Diaghilev’s five Auroras in the ill-fated 1921 production of The Sleeping Princess, was the last of the original Ballets Russes dancers to succumb to mental illness, in the United States in the 1950s. See Anton Dolin’s 1966 biography, The Sleeping Ballerina.
* The roll call of artists and composers with whom he worked during this period is astonishing and included (apart from those mentioned in the text) Poulenc, Auric, Milhaud, Berners, Laurencin, Braque, Gris, de Chirico and Utrillo.
* After the preview at Winnie de Polignac’s, in an evening that exemplified Paris in the 1920s for a certain set, the glamorous American exiles Gerald and Sara Murphy – who, through their friendship with Goncharova, and along with the unlikely figure of their shy and bespectacled friend John Dos Passos, had helped paint the sets for Les Noces – threw a party for the company and its friends on a barge in the Seine. Sara Murphy had decorated the boat with piles of cheap children’s toys from a Montparnasse bazaar, which delighted Picasso; Goncharova read the guests’ palms; Cocteau stole the captain’s dress uniform from his cabin and kept putting his head through the porthole to announce they were sinking; as the sun rose, Stravinsky jétéd down the centre of the cabin.
* All through the writing of this book, I have been conscious of the presence of Bronia Nijinska at my shoulder, like the sister of Shakespeare whom Virginia Woolf imagined for her 1929 essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. (Irina Nijinska, Bronia’s daughter, told Millicent Hodson that her mother always loved Woolf’s books – perhaps because, as Hodson speculated, the role Nijinsky had conceived for Nijinska in Jeux was based on Woolf.)
In her wonderful memoir of their early life, Bronia focused on her brother, seeking to understand the marvels of his art and how he so captured the imaginations of those who saw him dance, but occasionally she could not help making a point about her own achievements, almost as if to say, I know you are reading this book about him – and that is of course why I have written it – but you must understand that I have my own story, and I possessed greatness too. At school Vaslav was always top of the dancing classes, but lagged behind in academic subjects; Bronia was top in every subject. When she remembers the circuses of their childhood, she cannot resist adding proudly how much they influenced her own choreographic work, too: Le Renard (1922), Le Train Bleu (1924), Impressions de Music Hall (1927) …
The theme of gender recurs throughout Nijinsky’s story, a subtext running in silent parallel to the more obvious discussions of sexuality. For the most part, ballerinas were exalted and adored on stage, but were seldom given control over their careers offstage or admitted to the creative process, though three notable exceptions in their different ways were the trail-blazers Kshesinskaya (post-feminist before her time), Pavlova and Duncan. Karsavina described longing to penetrate Diaghilev’s ‘mysterious forge where creative minds worked a new armour of art’ and wondered if it would ‘ever be open’ (Karsavina, Theatre Street, 1948, p. 192) to her. When Romola saw her husband with Stravinsky for the first time after their marriage she had to acknowledge to herself that along with Diaghilev they inhabited a world to which she could never hope to be admitted. ‘I felt so crushed. What did I have to do among those men – those gifted initiates of God?’ (Romola Nijinsky, Nijinsky; and, The last years of Nijinsky, London, 1980).
Despite her evident talent, Bronia struggled against Diaghilev’s misogyny. Her unconventional looks were given as the reason she would never be a star in her own right; when he told her to dye her hair and dress more like a ballerina offstage, she was appalled. Besides, he had chosen Nijinsky, not her. ‘I cannot have two geniuses of the dance from one family!’ (Nijinska, Early Memoirs, p. 326.) When she married, Vaslav was her best man but Diaghilev gave her away, and he gave her her wedding ring, set with sapphires and brilliants, which he declared, in a tone rather contrary to the spirit of the o
ccasion, was ‘to wed her to her art’ (Buckle, Nijinsky, p. 263). (cont.)
Bronia would become one of Diaghilev’s most important collaborators of the 1920s – significantly, unlike her brother, one who could provide him with a steady stream of successes – though in the same breath as admiring her he could not stop himself belittling her. ‘The choreography [of Les Biches, 1924] has delighted and astonished me,’ he told Boris Kochno. ‘But then, this good woman, intemperate and anti-social as she is, does belong to the Nijinsky family’ (Burt, The Male Dancer, p. 95).
* Professor Josh Miller, who read this in draft, suggested to me that Nijinsky may also have been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum today.