Nijinsky (6 page)

Tall and slender to the point of frailty,
‘like some exotic and fastidious bird'
, Anna Pavlova did not fit the image of an ideal ballerina. Until she became a star, the perfect ballerina's body was thought to be compact and muscular, like Kshesinskaya's. In fact it was Pavlova's attenuated physique which led Kshesinskaya to underestimate her as a rival: she allowed Pavlova, then in her second season at the Mariinsky, to take over her roles while she was pregnant in 1901–2, unable to believe that Pavlova could really compete with her. When Pavlova was at the Imperial Theatre School the governesses had tried unsuccessfully to feed her up with cod liver oil and her classmates teased her by calling her ‘The Broom', but as a ballerina Pavlova converted what was apparently a flaw into a great and unique asset. Her on-stage fragility, the effect she
created of floating ethereally across the stage, was the essence of her phenomenal success.

Off-stage she was a far more powerful creature, whose glamour was electric and whose relentless focus and ambition were sometimes, in the words of Serge Lifar,
‘unworthy of her genius'
. The actress Sarah Bernhardt, who could hardly be described as retiring, told Pavlova that she
‘sought more success'
than there was in the world. Even though she liked Lydia Lopokova, a dancer in her own company, Pavlova would send her flowers on the nights she danced badly. Karsavina, whom she saw as direct competition, recalled the venom with which Pavlova tried to scupper her career, refusing to help Karsavina learn ‘her' role of Giselle and, pretending concern, falsely telling the Mariinsky's Director that he shouldn't burden Karsavina with too much work because she was consumptive. Kshesinskaya was happy to set Director Telyakovsky straight on Karsavina's behalf.

Pavlova's creed was simple: great art required the greatest of sacrifices.
‘If a dancer
, yielding to temptation, ceases to exercise over herself the strictest control, she will find it impossible to continue dancing,' she wrote. ‘She must sacrifice herself to her art. Her reward will be the power to help those who come to see her forget awhile the sadnesses and monotony of life.' Normality was impossible: the discipline and commitment required to produce his or her art meant the
premier danseur
or ballerina could not seek and should not mourn the consolations of everyday life, contentment with a partner and children,
‘the quiet joys of the fireside,'
as Pavlova put it.

Many years later, Rudolf Nureyev would echo her ideas. Domesticity, he wrote,
‘shows onstage. You watch
and you can see, he or she has a family, children, a cottage in the country and goes there every Friday. Dancing can't be a job, like going to the office. It means everything.'

Vaslav would learn to what lengths ambitious dancers were willing to go for their careers when, at about this time, he fell in love with the beautiful Maria Gorshkova, whom he had met in the summer at Krasnoye Selo. He visited her regularly, bringing her flowers and chocolates, until his mother found out and warned him off her, speculating that she might be using him to further her career. Vaslav turned pale at her
words, but later told Eleonora that she had been right.
‘I had my arms
around her and was about to kiss her when she coyly whispered, “Vatsa, promise me that you will insist on dancing a
pas de deux
with me …” Now I am cured of love.'

Love and sex, sex and love. In his diary, Vaslav remembered masturbating furiously at school after lights out – nothing unusual in a teenage boy, except for the overpowering sense of wrong-doing he felt, leading him to believe that when he masturbated a lot his dancing deteriorated, as well as being afraid that his teeth would rot and his hair fall out. At fifteen, for his mother's sake, he forced himself to give it up. This was when, according to his diary,
‘I started to dance like God'
– a direct association between sexual self-control and success on stage. He may have meant that he literally danced like a god but his phrase is just as likely to mean that this was the time people started to take notice of his talents, because as a famous dancer he was often called the God of the Dance. ‘Everyone started talking about me.'

Although he tried to control his masturbation, Vaslav allowed his so-called friend Anatole Bourman to persuade him to lose his virginity with a prostitute. She gave him a serious case of gonorrhoea which took five months to treat (the doctor applied leeches to his swollen testicles as Vaslav looked on, horrified). Between her and the calculating Maria Gorshkova, Vaslav began to distrust women. Perhaps he, like Pavlova, was learning that artists were exempt from the pleasures of ordinary relationships.

The kind of relationships a dancer could have – though of course Pavlova would never have put it like this – were with rich patrons. By the time she was twenty in 1901, after two years in the Imperial Theatres, Pavlova, whose mother was a laundress (she never knew her father), lived in a flat of her own with a maid and a large private studio where every day Enrico Cecchetti came to give her several hours of private tuition, although she was still a
coryphée
on the same salary level as Nijinsky. Her lovers are reputed to have included a general, a prince and, usefully, a nephew of the Mariinsky's Director, Vladimir Telyakovsky, as well as the influential critic Valerian Svetlov. Baron Victor Dandré, who
became her manager and with whom she lived for years (and may have married, though she was always ambiguous about this), was a well-connected man of property in St Petersburg.

Subservience on one side and exploitation on the other had traditionally been part of a Russian dancer's experience. The first dancers and actors in Russia had been serfs, trained by their owners to perform in private theatres on their estates. Although many were talented artists, well educated and cultured, they were still considered chattels – which in practice meant concubines.
Prince Nikolay Yusupov
, owner of a private theatre and Director of the Imperial Theatres in the 1790s, required his female serfs to undress on stage at the end of their performances. Though the serfs had long been freed by Nijinsky's time, in most cases artists had simply exchanged one kind of master for another. Attitudes of entitlement and submission endured. It was this aspect of the ballet world that gave it a bad name. When Mikhail Fokine asked a group of friends if they thought ballet needed to be reformed, one replied,
‘Ballet is pornography, plain and simple.'

There are several accounts – not entirely mutually contradictory – of how Vaslav, still smarting over the incident with Gorshkova, met his first serious lover, Prince Pavel Lvov. The basic version has the thirty-five-year-old prince sending a note backstage to Nijinsky, inviting him to dinner in a private room at Cubat, one of St Petersburg's fashionable restaurants. Another account has Lvov using the services of a pander, a well-connected fellow dancer who was the illegitimate son of a nobleman, to introduce him to Nijinsky for a fee of
1,000 roubles
. Between them they apparently concocted a story about a mysterious princess who admired Nijinsky from afar and had asked Lvov to act as her go-between. They met for the first time at a restaurant and the next day Nijinsky received a note asking him to go to Fabergé, where he was fitted with a diamond and platinum ring, ostensibly from the princess. Gradually the imaginary princess receded into the background and Lvov and Nijinsky became lovers.
‘He loved me as a man does a boy,'
wrote Vaslav, years later. ‘I loved him because I knew he wished me well.'

Pavel Lvov was a handsome playboy with charming manners, a sports enthusiast and one of the first people in St Petersburg to own a motor car. He was the type of man, according to Bourman, who handed out 100-rouble notes at parties – the same sum Foma Nijinsky had given Vaslav for his graduation: it was a different world. The life to which he introduced the unsophisticated eighteen-year-old was one of fabulous luxury and, in the word of the day, decadence.

A month after meeting Vaslav, Lvov invited him, Bronia and Eleonora to dinner to celebrate Bronia's birthday. She was overwhelmed by his mansion, with its thick carpets, silk-draped windows and the footmen in yellow-braided tailcoats who waited on them, piling their gold plates high with caviar and sturgeon and making the huge fires blaze merrily. In the centre of the table were arranged branches of hothouse fruit trees, with the fruit still on them, and at each place-setting stood a little vase containing mimosa and violets so that although it was December everything smelt
‘marvellously'
like spring. Vaslav seemed ‘completely relaxed and at ease' in Lvov's splendid house, though Bronia wondered whether he had felt as ‘stupefied'as her when he first saw it.

One day Vaslav and the Prince arrived to visit Eleonora, and found her crying over a court summons for unpaid rent from years earlier. Straight away Lvov handed the writ to his lawyers who dealt with the creditors and settled the debt. When Eleonora tried to offer to repay him, he said that Nijinsky could pay him back when he was making more money and he regularly sent her and Bronia lavish gifts: French wine, hampers of foie gras, caviar and cheese, boxes of chocolates and huge baskets of fresh fruit.

With Vaslav too Lvov was magnificently generous. Assuring him that he could repay him later, when he was a star and could demand whatever he wanted for performing – a powerful vote of confidence in itself – he persuaded Vaslav to stop giving society children dance classes. For the past few years Vaslav had been teaching so that he, Bronia and Eleonora could afford an apartment in which he had his own room, a mark of maturity he longed for. Lvov furnished two rooms for him in the Nijinskys' large new apartment on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa:
a study papered in dark raspberry with bottle green velvet curtains; a mahogany desk with secret drawers that glided open at the touch of a finger, upon which stood a bronze Narcissus; leather armchairs, a full bookcase and an enamelled stove. A brass bed and a marble washstand stood in his bedroom, along with a wardrobe full of new clothes and rows of pairs of custom-made shoes.

In St Petersburg they went most Saturday evenings to concerts together, attended various sporting events – Bronia thought perhaps Lvov and Vaslav had met through Mikhail Fokine, whose brother was a champion cyclist – and went to the theatre. The Prince took Vaslav and Bronia to see the first aeroplane to come to St Petersburg. In the summer of 1908, instead of taking an engagement at a summer theatre Vaslav spent a few months at Lvov's dacha on the islands outside St Petersburg where Lvov taught Vaslav to play tennis. Here he was described by one visitor as being bad-tempered and sulky, with a penchant for making scenes – still a teenager, even though he was now living in an adult world.

Saying that it was a privilege to help his young friend realise his potential, Lvov also insisted on paying for private lessons with the great Enrico Cecchetti, Anna Pavlova's mentor. Cecchetti was a legendary dancer who, in his late fifties, had become an equally legendary master of ballet. An intelligent, charming and whimsical man, he was adored by his pupils over whom he ruled with absolute authority. He was quite capable of reducing any of them to tears in class but, as Lydia Lopokova said,
‘it was a bad sign
not to be abused, for that would show that one had no gifts, no possibilities' and this was the start of an immensely productive working relationship. Cecchetti saw his role as helping his students reach
‘perfection in the
mechanics of dance technique, yet the ultimate artistic perfection – the feel for the movement and the interpretation of the dance – that, the artist must achieve and create for himself'.

Bronia's memoirs record that she saw nothing more in Lvov than the kindest of friends, a man whose devotion to Vaslav and the arts inspired him to great acts of generosity, and whose thoughtfulness to Eleonora and Bronia only demonstrated his disinterested affection for
Vaslav. When a schoolfriend whispered to her the rumours circulating about Lvov and her brother, she was so innocent that at first she did not understand what the friend was trying to tell her.

Eleonora could scarcely have pleaded such naiveté but everything in Vaslav and Bronia's lifelong devotion to their art suggests that they believed (as she had taught them) that people who loved art and admired artists would happily bestow gifts on them and would assist them financially to help them achieve their creative ambitions, expecting nothing in return except the pleasure of knowing they had been involved. Indeed, this was the principle by which Sergey Diaghilev would later run the Ballets Russes. Not many people had been kind to Eleonora or her children and she was evidently deeply touched by Lvov's generosity. Besides, she knew her son was a genius; surely it had only been a matter of time before someone appeared who would count himself proud, as Lvov put it,
‘for the rest of my life
to know that I had contributed to the development of this great talent'.

Yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Eleonora did understand what Lvov wanted from Vaslav in return for his patronage. Of course he liked the glamour and cachet of being associated with the arts; quite probably (although there is no evidence to corroborate this) he was also in thrall to the emotions that art and beauty stimulate in us all. But alongside these impulses often come more carnal compulsions and Lvov was clearly subject to these too. The benefits to Vaslav, to his career and to his material security – as well as to his mother and sister – evidently outweighed any unspoken worries Eleonora might have had about sanctioning her young son's intense new friendship.

She would not have been alone in tolerating a homosexual relationship like that of Lvov and Vaslav. Homosexuality in imperial Russia was illegal after 1835, but before that serfs had been used to call sex with their masters ‘gentleman's mischief' and it was commonly accepted that lower-class men like coachmen, waiters, cadets and apprentices would, for a small sum and out of a certain deference, have sex with men of higher social standing and that young men of all classes might experiment before marriage without it meaning much to anyone.