Nijinsky (36 page)

His second funeral was held in Paris at the Russian Church in the rue Daru on 16 June 1953. Three years after Nijinsky's death, Serge Lifar had arranged for his body to be reinterred in the cemetery at Montmartre near Auguste Vestris's grave – and perhaps more significantly, beside Lifar's own plot. Margaret Power accompanied the coffin to Paris because Romola was in America. Bronia was there, and Mathilde Kshesinskaya, and Tamara Nijinsky. She remembered the
‘saintly'
priest in white by the grave, who ‘spoke of the beauty of Vaslav's life, of the talent given to him by God and of the wonderful beauty and pleasure he was able to give to the people who saw him. He said that the joy which Vaslav gave to us was still with us, held in precious memory in our hearts.'

St Petersburg. A window- and mirror-lined
classroom at the Imperial Theatre School.

A teacher (Fokine) is leading a class of six young ballet students in their barre exercises. Gradually, as the class becomes more challenging, it becomes clear that one of the boys (Nijinsky) is far more accomplished than his peers. One by one they fall back, leaving Nijinsky dancing in a competition of leaping and turning virtuosity with his closest rival (Georgy Rozai). Once Rozai has reluctantly admitted defeat, Nijinsky dances alone with Fokine, following but exceeding him. Even Fokine stops dancing to marvel at him and when Nijinsky finally comes to a standstill after a dazzling solo they rush to congratulate him.

As Fokine is shaking Nijinsky's hand, an imposing dark man (Diaghilev) with a silver streak in his hair, wearing a black cape, enters the classroom. (Mitsouko wafts out over the audience.) He is attended by two followers (Bakst, small and fiery, with a dapper ginger moustache; and Benois, dark and heavily bearded). Fokine invites them to watch Nijinsky dance. He performs part of
Le Spectre de la Rose
, with
Diaghilev, whom Fokine has solicitously seated in a wooden classroom chair, inadvertently acting the part of the girl. Diaghilev is cynical at first and then won over. As the curtain falls and the music dies away, he is standing, his clapping the only sound in the theatre.

Paris. A theatre presented side on with the curtain running
perpendicular to the stage, so that the left side of the stage
is backstage and the right faces an invisible audience.

Nijinsky, still in his practice clothes, and Diaghilev in white tie, are backstage as, amid the intermittent flurry of stage-setting onstage, other Nijinskys dance solos from his celebrated roles – Armida's Slave, Zobéïde's Slave and Petrushka. At first they are clearly together, very much a couple, but by the time Petrushka is dancing his tragic piece backstage Nijinsky is isolated, dreamily practising steps alone or sometimes with a girl (Karsavina) in a white practice tutu and pink tights, while Diaghilev is surrounded by a fawning, bickering entourage of Fokine, Benois, Bakst, Stravinsky and Misia Sert, costumed almost as caricatures of themselves (Misia, for example, very buxom, glittering with jewels and with a feather almost as tall as her sprouting from her headband; Igor, bald, bespectacled and fussy).

During Petrushka's solo a young blonde girl (Romola) in street clothes drags a wicker costume basket from backstage closer to where Petrushka is dancing. At first she sits on it smoking and swinging her legs, occasionally examining her nails and making eyes at backstage Nijinsky, who appears not to notice. Sometimes she jumps down and rummages through the basket, holding costumes up to herself; or smiles and waves over-animatedly to one of the other people backstage; increasingly she stares at Petrushka and then the Faun, her chin propped on her hand.

Midway through the Faun's piece, he notices that Diaghilev, Bakst,
Fokine and backstage Nijinsky are arguing backstage. He comes backstage and dances around them, as if trying to distract them, but they do not notice him and he comes to centre-stage to finish his piece. Romola jumps up and watches him from uncomfortably close range, amazed by his performance; the others, storming off after their argument, have not seen it.

Backstage Nijinsky sits alone in a corner at the front left of the stage, his head in his hands, while the Tennis Player from
Jeux
comes out and dances with Romola and Diaghilev centre-stage (an echo of Wayne Eagling's recent version of
Jeux
for the English National Ballet). The curtain falls as Romola triumphantly whirls into the wings with the Tennis Player.

New York. A studio.

Nijinsky is rehearsing a group of dancers for
Till Eulenspiegel
. As he finishes demonstrating his final solo, Diaghilev, Bakst and Stravinsky walk in and begin moving the other dancers around, instructing the pianist how to play, discussing the set among themselves. Every time Nijinsky tries to contribute they wave him away like an annoying child; eventually he just continues practising alone on the side of the stage while the others carry on talking and gesticulating without him.

Romola sweeps in, wearing a fur coat and showing off a sparkling ring. Diaghilev and his friends ignore her. She rushes up to Nijinsky and urges him to challenge Diaghilev for insulting her. They end up fighting over Nijinsky, who is trying to intervene. In a scene reminiscent of the final act of
Petrushka
, Diaghilev accidentally knocks Nijinsky down as he tries to hit Romola and then Romola drags Nijinsky's limp, twitching body away.

The stage empties and darkens. A metal bed is wheeled onto the stage, with a straitjacketed figure lying on it. As the figure rises, we
see that it is Nijinsky. He struggles against his bonds and then falls back exhausted. Then, as if by magic, on his third effort he extracts himself from the constraints and comes to the front of the stage where he dances alone. At first his dancing is strange and fragmented, like the descriptions of the Montenegro or Suvretta House performances; then it becomes something else entirely. Like Petrushka's or Till Eulenspiegel's ghost, Nijinsky seems to be dancing as himself for the first time – perhaps something from Russell Maliphant's
AfterLight
. The curtain falls.

LONG BEFORE HE DIED,
Nijinsky's legend was being written. Even when she no longer needed, as she saw it, to promote her husband's memory in order to raise funds for his care, the indomitable Romola
‘refused to accept
that his name' – and her importance as his wife – ‘might fade into oblivion'. Without her, it is almost possible to imagine that Nijinsky might live on today in nothing more than old press cuttings and photographs and in the memories of a handful of artists who danced with someone who once danced with him.

Until she died in 1978, Romola controlled the myth she had in large part created. Richard Buckle, author of the only major English biography of Nijinsky, published in 1971, was scrupulously careful to satisfy her demands when his book came out, but after her death he issued an addendum saying that she had deliberately sensationalised and in places falsified her account of Nijinsky's life to make money.
‘And who could blame her?
' he asked. ‘She had to look after her sick husband.' Her daughter Tamara described her mother as imperious and self-assured, which was
‘both her strength
and her weakness. Did she know when she crossed the borderline between fact and fiction?'

This is the most generous interpretation of her actions. Others – like the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, whose 1991 account of Nijinsky's
life focused on his mental health – have portrayed her as a villainess. Reviewing Ostwald, Roy Porter described Romola as
‘truly awful
… a hysterical egotist, greedy for fame but talentless', who confined Vaslav to a series of uncaring asylums which she then blamed for his failure to recover and, when she was not looking after him – which was most of the time – swanned around the world living off his name and milking the role of martyr to art and love.

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.