Nijinsky (56 page)

*
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 off-stage, 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 occasion, 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.