Nijinsky (4 page)

Most galling for his tormentors was his quite evidently exceptional talent. Throughout their schooling, his rivals bubbled with
‘anger and jealousy
' about Vaslav and in their first year as boarders engineered a trick that very nearly killed him. Three boys challenged Vaslav, who could jump further than any of them – over seven benches – to prove how high he could leap, and they set up a tall, solid music stand in the centre of the room for him to jump over. While Vaslav wasn't looking they raised it even higher and then rubbed soap on the floor in front of it, where he would take off. Going full pelt, he slipped and crashed into the stand and collapsed onto the floor; the boys who had been egging him on fled the room, leaving him lying there alone and unconscious. He lay in a coma for five days – later he remembered seeing death while he was in hospital – and even when he came to, the great fear of internal bleeding, remained. Without X-rays there was nothing to be done but wait. Gradually he recovered his strength and rejoined his class after recuperating over the long summer break.

After this his classmates, chastened by what they had done, seem to have begun treating him better. Vaslav learned that their admiration could be gained through naughtiness
(‘I played a
lot of pranks, and the boys liked me for it'), and because he was strong, a good fighter and had perfect aim he was always getting himself into trouble – for example, being the only one blamed when all the boys went through a craze of lashing each other with leather belts after lights out.

Although Vaslav excelled in Dance, Music and Drawing he couldn't be bothered with academic subjects. None of his classmates thought French would ever be any use to them – according to a student a few years ahead of Nijinsky, they all considered it an
‘unnecessary torment'
– and Vaslav only managed to pass because the other boys would whisper the answers to him and the teacher preferred to let him scrape through rather than expose his own shortcomings as an instructor. In vain did the school provide him with private elocution lessons to soften his Polish accent.

One of the responsibilities and privileges of being a student at the Imperial Theatre School was playing small parts in productions at the
Mariinsky (ballet and opera) and Alexandrinsky (drama) Theatres. The young artists were taken to the theatre in a coach and paid 60 kopeks for an evening's work but, although Vaslav was saving up for a mandolin from the wages he received for playing a mouse in
The Nutcracker
and a page in
Swan Lake
, the real importance of these appearances was far greater than the excitement of staying up late and receiving a salary. The school's daily training sessions were physically gruelling and often relentlessly boring, involving hours of repetitions; they were something to be endured rather than enjoyed. These performances kept the students inspired, giving them the chance to see at close hand what they were working so hard to achieve. When he was barely in his teens, Vaslav found himself on stage beside the most celebrated artists of his day: the great bass, Fyodor Chaliapin; the
prima ballerina assoluta
, Mathilde Kshesinskaya; and gracefully etiolated Anna Pavlova, the Imperial Ballet's unconventional rising star.

The theatre exerts its own special magic – the ‘red and gold disease' to which Jean Cocteau famously described himself succumbing. All his life Alexandre Benois, whose maternal grandfather had designed the Mariinsky, would remember the intoxicating smell of the gas-lamps as he entered its foyer. Prince Peter Lieven described driving up to the theatre as a child with the carriage wheels crunching over the snow, seeing the attendant in gold braid and white stockings waiting to help him out of the coach, and then the special ‘hot-house' smell inside. The three main state-funded theatres in St Petersburg blazed white and gold, with blue brocade on the Mariinsky walls, egg-yolk yellow on the Alexandrinsky's and crimson in the Mikhailovsky.

But while audiences experience the public face of a theatre – the crystal and gilt opulence of the vast public spaces, the luxury of the red velvet seats and the buzzing, glittering crowd all around them – performers are in thrall to quite a different spell. When the young Rudolf Nureyev's sister was studying theatre, she sometimes used to bring home costumes for him to look at.
‘That to me
was heaven,' Nureyev remembered. ‘I would spread them out on the bed and gaze at them – gaze at them so intensely that I could feel myself actually inside them.
I would fondle them for hours, smooth them and smell them. There is no other word for it – I was like a dope addict.'

As a student Tamara Karsavina, who entered the Girls' School four years before Vaslav, learned to love rehearsing out of hours, when the theatre was dark and empty, the chandeliers shrouded in dust sheets and brown holland covers over the seats.
‘The theatre in
its unguarded moments, curtain up, stage abandoned, and lights lowered, has a strange poignancy,' she wrote. ‘The faint ghostliness of it touches a vulnerable spot of incurable sentimentality, a professional disease of those bred in the artificial emotions of the footlights.'

Karsavina was one of several of Vaslav's contemporaries who came from a similarly theatrical background. Her grandfather had been a provincial actor and playwright and her father, Platon Karsavin, had been a great dancer and a teacher at the Imperial Theatre School; Pavel Gerdt, a legendary character dancer and one of the teachers at the school, was her godfather. Kshesinskaya's father and brother were dancers in the Imperial Theatre. Léonide Massine, six years Nijinsky's junior, was the son of a French horn-player in Moscow's Bolshoy Orchestra. Lydia Lopokova's father was a lowly usher at the Alexandrinsky – perhaps the very man the young Prince Lieven remembered waiting to assist him up the stairs – but he got four of his five children into the Imperial Theatre School and Fyodor, Lydia's brother, went on to become
maître de ballet
at the Mariinsky. The theatre was in their blood.

In 1903 Vaslav narrowly avoided being expelled from the school. Since his accident three years earlier he had learned to get along with the boys in his class but they still encouraged him to perform wildly dangerous pranks. One day he and some others were on their way to the theatre for a matinee performance, covertly hitting lampposts and trees with their slingshots out of the carriage window. As they turned into St Isaac's Square, one of their darts hit (but did not knock off) a top hat on a passing gentleman's head. It was unfortunate for Vaslav that this gentleman was a government official. He went to the school's Director and demanded that the guilty boy be expelled.

It was hard to determine who the guilty boy was – there had been
two carriages filled with boys, most of them carrying slingshots – but his classmates encouraged Vaslav to confess on the grounds that he was such a good dancer they would never expel him. Questioning revealed that Vaslav was considered the best shot at school and his past years of poor academic work, bad conduct, regular disciplining and warnings sent home to Eleonora sealed his fate. Initially he was expelled but, after hearing arguments from Eleonora, Vaslav's tutors and the offended official, whom Eleonora had persuaded to relent, the school's Director agreed to suspend him for two weeks and then allow him back as a nonresident, returning all the clothes and books with which the school had supplied him – a terrible humiliation and a heavy burden on Eleonora, who would have to pay to outfit Vaslav herself. This was granted only on condition that while he was at home Eleonora would birch him, which she forced herself to do. It was a turning point. From the moment he was reinstated as a boarder a month later, having
‘felt a great
pain in my soul' to have caused his mother such distress and jeopardised his future, Vaslav devoted himself to achieving his potential.

After the annual examinations that took place the following spring, Bronia, by then a student at the school herself, first heard her fifteen-year-old brother being talked about as a future star. Mikhail Fokine, one of the instructors at the Girls' School, rushed into class late, coming straight up to Bronia where she stood at the bar in her blue serge practice dress.
‘You have
such a brother that I must congratulate you!' It was almost unheard of for a teacher to talk about a student in front of other students, but Fokine could not control his raptures. ‘For Nijinsky today we should have come up with a new grade. If anybody had suggested it, I would have given a 20 or even a 30 [the highest mark was 12]. He surpassed anything we have seen.' Fokine said that Vaslav had danced as part of a group and was then asked to dance his role alone. When he had finished, the examining board (comprising the Director, Vladimir Telyakovsky, and all the instructors) had burst into spontaneous applause. ‘I'm late because we could not leave right away; we were all talking about Nijinsky. A great future awaits your brother.'

Nikolay Legat, another teacher present that day, agreed with Fokine's
assessment. Vaslav possessed a rare otherworldly quality. While remaining totally natural, he was somehow transformed when he danced:
‘exalted, vibrant, free and so ecstatic'
. Far more than mere technical brilliance – that marvellous jump, during which he appeared to be suspended in the air – even at school Nijinsky seemed to belong
‘to a plane above ours'
which he could only make his audience understand through dance. This elusive quality, possessed so abundantly by Nijinsky, lies at the core of what makes dance, and ballet in particular, so powerful. In their desire to fly,
‘above all to ascend'
, dancers become, like angels, a ‘link binding man and god, heaven and earth'. Even as a boy it was these celestial heights that Nijinsky strove to inhabit.

Although the Imperial Ballet School was a place of
‘convent-like seclusion'
, very occasionally events from the outside world intruded into its rarified atmosphere. One such moment occurred in the winter of 1904–1905 and continued on through 1905, when Russia was shaken by the first powerful stirrings against the Tsar and the old regime.

The Imperial Theatres – with their rigid traditions and hierarchy, political in-fighting and insistence upon the strictest obedience to their decisions – replicated in miniature the Tsar's entire unwieldy and unpopular administration. As a reminder of the extent of their dependence on the monarch, every year the season opened on the first Sunday in September with a performance of Glinka's
A Life for the Tsar
. Debentures were handed down from generation to generation. Balletomanes, as they were known, followed the objects of their adoration from performance to performance, if necessary from city to city. When Kshesinskaya went to perform at the Bolshoy in Moscow, the front row of stalls at the Mariinsky would be empty: her fans were all in Moscow. As the favourite of the Tsar and his cousins, she had her pick of roles, even though in 1905 she was several years over the age of thirty; younger dancers, with arguably more talent, found their careers at a standstill because she still reigned absolute.

As if to underline the younger dancers' artistic grievances, Isadora Duncan came to St Petersburg in December 1904. The Russian ballet
world turned out to greet her: she dined with an assortment of creative grandees-in-training, including the then artists Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst and the then curator and editor, Sergey Diaghilev, watched Anna Pavlova's daily practice with Marius Petipa (reflecting with relief, when she saw the sparse lunch Pavlova permitted herself after three hours' training, that she was not a classical ballet dancer), and observed the classes at the Imperial Ballet School which she thought seemed a
‘torture chamber'
. Even Kshesinskaya invited her to come and see her perform.

Her own performances at the Mariinsky had an immediate impact. Duncan's style could not have been further from the traditions the Imperial Theatres held so dear; it was, in fact, an explicit reproach to them. She danced alone, barefoot, wearing what she described as a
‘tunic of cobweb'
(and almost nothing in the way of underwear, at a time when Russian ballerinas still danced in boned corsets), in front of a plain blue velvet curtain, to music that was not considered ‘ballet music'. She was self-taught and relied on not technical virtuosity but feeling and emotion, often improvised, to communicate with her audience.
‘Like eager springtime'
, this pink-cheeked girl ‘distilled joy and vividness'.

Despite her lack of training, she was by all accounts an extraordinarily powerful performer. As Mikhail Fokine, a Mariinsky dancer who was just beginning his choreographic career when he saw Duncan perform, would write, she
‘reminded us
:
Do not forget that beauty and expressiveness are of the greatest importance
.' Although he went on to qualify his praise – ‘the new Russian ballet answered:
Do not forget that a rich technique will create natural grace and expressiveness, through the really great art form
' – everything he would compose in the future would be touched by Isadora's influence.

Radical politics were an important and, given that ballet had always been associated with royal courts, highly unusual element of Duncan's work. She was a socialist (despite her fondness for champagne) and she was appalled by the misery she saw on St Petersburg's streets in contrast to the wealth in which the audiences at the Mariinsky luxuriated. Her sense of drama blurred her memory; she claimed in her memoirs
to have arrived in Russia later than she actually did, in January 1905, ‘remembering' driving to her hotel through a deserted city past a procession of coffins – the coffins of the protestors shot on Bloody Sunday at the Winter Palace by the Tsar's troops. When she danced in St Petersburg (and this may well have been true, though she would already have been there for a few weeks by the time Bloody Sunday happened) her
‘soul wept with
righteous anger, thinking of the martyrs of that funeral procession of the dawn'.