Nijinsky (13 page)

In
Schéhérazade
Nijinsky was again playing a favourite slave, but this time his role was all about sex. In gold harem trousers, his skin painted a dark grey-blue,
‘not unlike the bloom
on black grapes', he stalked the stage like a creature half animal, half snake, crazed with desire, ravishing Ida Rubinstein as Zobéïde and then dying at her feet. He was
‘inexpressibly wild
, a cat caressing, a tiger devouring … His lightness and swiftness were unbelievable, but it was sensuality all the way.'

Here one senses Diaghilev understanding even better than they did what his audiences wanted to see and giving it straight to them.
‘Nobody will believe me
of course, but Diaghilev did not know anything about dancing,' George Balanchine told Robert Craft in 1958. ‘His real interest in ballet was sexual. He could not bear the sight of [Alexandra] Danilova and would say to me, “Her tits make me want to vomit.” Once when I was standing next to him at a rehearsal for
Apollo
[1928], he said, “How beautiful.” I agreed, thinking that he referred to the music, but he quickly corrected me: “No, no. I mean Lifar's ass; it is like a rose.”' But Stravinsky did not believe Nijinsky was ever
‘conscious of his performances
from Diaghilev's point of view': for him ballet was art and art alone, never commerce or sex.

It was a measure of Nijinsky's versatility that his other two roles in the 1910 Paris season were so different. In his hands Albrecht, traditionally just an auxiliary part, became a major acting role,
‘the grief of the repentant seducer
[made] profoundly pathetic' while he watched his abandoned beloved go mad. As Harlequin in
Carnaval
,
‘his dancing was
music made visible'. He came on stage with his arm around Columbine's tiny waist, mischievously taking one big step for every two of hers. That incredible
entrechat-dix
, which he was the first dancer
to achieve on stage, was executed with elegant, negligent wit. Cocteau was delighted: Nijinsky's Harlequin was
‘an acrobatic cat
stuffed full of candid lechery and crafty indifference, a schoolboy wheedling, thieving, swift-footed, utterly freed from the chains of gravity, a creature of perfect mathematical grace'.

DURING THE SUMMER OF 1910
Vaslav and Diaghilev returned to Venice where Vaslav swam every day at the Lido.
*
Bakst painted him on the beach in red briefs, with a handkerchief covering his head and one arm upraised, suntanned muscles rippling: Calvocoressi's Greek athlete. A bad case of sunstroke – or rather a disinclination to jump when the Mariinsky told him to, after a second triumphant season abroad – meant that Vaslav missed the opening of the Mariinsky's season in September, passing up the opportunity to dance Albrecht opposite Pavlova's Giselle. He did not get back to Russia until the end of November after stopping in Paris with Diaghilev for several weeks en route. When they finally did return, he was regularly – insolently – late for class and, as in the previous year, fined for every tiny infringement of the rules. The critics were quick to spot that in the non-Diaghilev repertoire he did not display
‘his usual brilliance'
.

The atmosphere at the Mariinsky had worsened since the previous spring. Supported by the dress-circle audience, Kshesinskaya was still at war with Diaghilev and his dancers, and the younger members of the
audience who sat up in the gods, students and admirers of Nijinsky, Pavlova and Karsavina, now refused to applaud her. When word got out that Kshesinskaya had said,
‘I spit on the gods,'
they sent her a collective letter saying, from ‘up here, it is much easier to spit down on you than for you to spit up at us'.

On his return to St Petersburg, Bronia found Vaslav still silent and withdrawn, holding himself aloof.
‘But there was
also a new air of happiness about him, a certain inner glow.' Gradually, he began to confide in her about what he and Diaghilev had been discussing over the months they had been away. The Ballets Russes' successes had made Diaghilev determined to create a permanent company that would work for ten months of the year, rather than just a touring troupe available to him in their summer vacations. His putative company would consist of well-paid dancers on three-year contracts but, except when the artist was a big enough name to demand time away from the Imperial Theatres, this would require them to relinquish their positions as Artists at the Mariinsky, losing all the security and status that rank carried with it.

Implicit in these talks was the fact that Nijinsky would, of course, be the star of Diaghilev's new company – although he would not be free to leave the Tsar's service altogether until 1912, having performed for him for the obligatory five years. That was a problem Diaghilev would deal with when he had to.

Next were the ballets Diaghilev intended his new company to put on. The first would be
Petrushka
, to music composed by Stravinsky and with the libretto and design by Benois (Diaghilev was using the promise of the project to lure him back into the fold) and Vaslav was to play the eponymous hero (or anti-hero).

Most thrilling of all, from Vaslav's point of view, was that secretly, so as not to antagonise the temperamental Fokine, Diaghilev had entrusted him with his first choreographic work. It was to be
L'Après-midi d'un faune
, from a poem of Stéphane Mallarmé, set to the music of Debussy, and he was already bubbling over with ideas for it.
‘I want to move away
from the classical Greece that Fokine likes to use. Instead I want
to use the archaic Greece that is less known and, so far, little used in the theatre,' he told Bronia. ‘Any sweetly sentimental line in the form or in the movement will be excluded. More may even be borrowed from Assyria than Greece. I have already started to work on it in my own mind … I want to show it to you …'

Bakst was encouraging him in other creative endeavours, too. Vaslav attended his painting classes where his easel was next to that of the young Marc Chagall. He smiled at Chagall,
‘as if to encourage
me in my boldness, of which I was not yet aware', but his own drawings, wrote Chagall, were childlike in their simplicity.

Nijinsky danced
Giselle
for the first time at the Mariinsky in January 1911 to thundering applause and rave reviews. He performed opposite Karsavina, his partner in the Ballets Russes's Paris version of the ballet, and he wore the costume Benois had designed for him earlier that year. The next morning, according to Bronia's account, he was awakened by a telephone call summoning him to the offices of the Imperial Theatres. Bronia and Eleonora waited for him at home, hoping that he would return promoted to the coveted rank of
premier danseur
; Karsavina had told them she had just been made
prima ballerina
with a corresponding rise in salary to 6,000 roubles.

Instead he reappeared pale but with an excited determination in his eyes and told them that he had been dismissed for wearing
‘an indecent and improper costume'
in the presence of her Imperial Majesty Maria Fyodorovna, the Tsar's mother. When Vaslav did not respond, he was told that if he issued an apology to the Minister of the Imperial Court and requested a reinstatement he would be taken on again. As Vaslav turned to leave, still without saying anything, the official panicked and offered him a contract for 9,000 roubles for twenty performances a year, leaving him ample time to perform abroad. Still Vaslav said nothing. The offer was raised to 12,000 roubles. Finally he bowed and said haughtily that he did not wish to remain at ‘the Imperial Ballet from which I was thrown out as if I was useless'. If they wanted him to return, he said,
he
would expect an apology and a petition requesting his return. ‘I am no longer an Artist of the Imperial Theatres. I am now only an artist of the
Diaghilev Ballet,' he told Eleonora and Bronia when he got home. ‘I will telephone Seryozha and tell him … I can imagine how happy he will be.'

The Mariinsky's official costume for Albrecht was a long tunic worn over a pair of tights, with short trunks worn over the tights so that nothing untoward could be glimpsed beneath the tunic. Benois's costume, intended to be a more accurate approximation of medieval clothing (
Giselle
is set in Germany in the Middle Ages), had a shorter, belted tunic and no trunks. In Paris, Diaghilev had ordered Benois to shorten the tunic a further two inches from his original design to show off Nijinsky's bottom. But, as Telyakovsky, the Director of the Imperial Theatres, would observe in his diary,
‘Paris is tolerant
of things that would be out of the question in St Petersburg, especially on the Imperial stage.'

Nijinsky, though, would have seen the Mariinsky's costume as out of date. He and the other dancers of the Diaghilevtsy-Fokinisty set were passionately attached to the idea of ballet being authentic, rather than pandering to the audience's tastes or prejudices: he simply would not have worn a costume he considered wrong. When Grand Duke Sergey, one of Mathilde Kshesinskaya's lovers, had come backstage between the first and second acts to demand that Nijinsky change the offending outfit, Nijinsky, furious at this interference in his artistic domain, had rudely refused. Benois had a different perspective. Even though he had designed the disputed costume, he called Nijinsky that
‘conceited artist'
for taking offence over the issue and resigning.

There has been much speculation since about whether Diaghilev persuaded Nijinsky to appear in an improper costume in order to provoke a crisis between the dancer he considered his property and the theatre which still effectively owned him. Diaghilev may well have encouraged Vaslav to wear the costume they both considered appropriate for Albrecht; it is hard to imagine they hadn't discussed it, given the importance of this Russian debut of what was effectively their production of
Giselle
. Probably, too, without the knowledge that Diaghilev was waiting to offer him a position in his new company, Nijinsky would not have dared to reject the Imperial Theatres' offer to take him back. In reality, though, all this incident did was clarify the fact that Nijinsky's
fate was inextricably tied to Diaghilev's: from the moment in the Hotel Daunou two summers earlier this confrontation had been inevitable, in one form or another.
‘Vaslav,' said Benois, ‘was now entirely at his [Diaghilev's] disposal and under his control.'

Whether or not he had a hand in Nijinsky's dismissal from the Imperial Theatres, Diaghilev was quick to capitalise on it. He telegraphed Gabriel Astruc in Paris days later, detailing the intrigue:
‘Appalling scandal
. Use publicity.' When Telyakovsky called repeatedly to try and persuade Vaslav to change his mind, Diaghilev reminded him how he had been insulted and urged him to leave behind the petty jealousies and tedious administrative demands of the Imperial Theatres, to live instead with him in a world of art
‘where ballets
would be created by great musicians and great painters under [his] personal guidance and direction', and where Vaslav would be a central figure in all their works.

In a matter of weeks Bronia had tendered her resignation on the grounds that she no longer had confidence in the artistic direction of the Imperial Theatres. Adolph Bolm followed and others, including Karsavina, promised to dance for Diaghilev when they were not required to be at the Mariinsky.
*
Enrico Cecchetti was engaged as
maître de ballet
– though his tastes were more traditional than Diaghilev's he would become the company's ‘dance-conscience' – and the volatile Benois and Fokine were given grandiloquent titles,
directeur artistique
and
directeur choreographique
respectively. Diaghilev had headed writing paper printed with the words ‘Les Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilew'.
‘A completely new path
was opening in front of us … the future uncertain but so exciting.'

There was one unhappy footnote to this episode, a kiss from Carabosse. Vaslav was due to be called up for military service, but no one close to him foresaw that outside the influence of the Imperial
Theatres, and bearing in mind Diaghilev's unpopularity at court and the manner of Vaslav's dismissal from the Theatres, it would be almost impossible for him to procure an exemption. Once he left Russia he would not be permitted to return without performing this service. From 1910 onwards he was effectively stateless, belonging nowhere but the stage.

Nijinsky and Diaghilev left St Petersburg in March for Paris and then Monte Carlo, where the new company would be based for the spring. Having left behind the tensions surrounding their departure from Russia – Vaslav's proud refusal to compromise and his mother's anguish over his decision – this was, like their first season in Paris, a time of excited hopefulness.

It was decided while they were in Monte Carlo that
Petrushka
would be put on hold while they prepared for the premiere of the new season,
Le Spectre de la rose
, which was first performed in late April at the Monte Carlo Opera, a last flourish of art nouveau style. Its premise, based on two lines from a poem of Théophile Gautier's, was wonderfully simple: a young girl, returning home from her first ball, falls asleep on a chair in her bedroom, dreaming of the boy who has given her the rose she still holds.
*
The spirit of the Rose comes through her window and dances with her as she sleeps; the music is Carl Maria von Weber's swirlingly romantic 1819 ‘Invitation to the Waltz'. The Rose flies out of the window when the girl wakes, wondering whether it had all been a dream.

Léon Bakst designed the set, a pretty blue and white bedroom in the style of the 1830s, and Tamara Karsavina as the girl wore a ruffled ivory satin gown trimmed with lace. On the first night Bakst was rushing around trying to find a spot for a canary in a cage that he
was determined would provide the final touch to the scenery, but he couldn't hang it in the window through which Nijinsky would jump and there was nowhere else for it to go. It recalled the exquisite yellow drawing room in the house belonging to his glamorous but irascible French grandfather, which had canaries in four gilded cages – one of those Proustian details at which the designers of the Ballets Russes so excelled. Impatiently Diaghilev told him to do without it:
‘You don't understand
, Seryozha; we must create the atmosphere.' The cage was lost in transit before they reached Paris.