GLR May-June 2023

ESSAY How Diaghilev Reimagined Ballet A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

T HE BRITISH DANCE and opera critic Rupert Christiansen has written a history of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that is not aimed at scholars or specialists. Referring to his morbid addiction to “watching, thinking or dream ing about classical dance and dancers,” Chris tiansen chooses “to [make] connections that can explain the allure of ballet to those uninfected with my mania.” His brisk story starts with the extraordinary hold Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s post-World War II cinema melodrama The Red Shoes had on a populace living in the “drab and derelict” war-scarred cities of Europe. The movie’s “glori ously excessive Technicolor,” he maintains, fed “a primal human need.” A popular surge of interest in ballet had not been seen like this since the early decades of the century, when the Ballets Russes took Europe by storm. Christiansen writes a cultural history with considerable verve. His wit and sharp judgments—of Sergei as a youth eager to be stylishly cosmopolitan, of the Renaissance court culture that lent the ballet early models of elegant gesture and grace, of the “las civious old gents” who ogled young women’s legs at Music Hall performances, and of a select audience of self-appointed arbiters of taste, often homosexual—color his story with the passion of a “home team” devotee cheering on Manchester United. But he also writes a richly human story to encourage readers to appreci ate Diaghilev for his brazen managerial skills and temperamen tal amours, which were all-male, all the time. We learn that when Sergei was leaving his hometown of Perm to study law in St. Pe tersburg, his father arranged for him to lose his virginity to a pros titute. Young Diaghilev caught a venereal disease, which may have accounted for his “irrational repulsion” to the female body. In other contexts, Diaghilev could be warm and respectful toward women, although he often used mature aristocratic women as fi nancial vehicles for the advancement of his cultural projects. Still, achieving his aims required a practiced charm. Christiansen’s portrait of the self-assured and arrogant Di aghilev offers up an admirable if not always appealing picture of a “chancer”—to use an English term for a scheming oppor tunist—who, especially in his early years, sometimes failed spec tacularly. Before taking up the reins of a ballet company essentially Russian in its tendencies and staffing, Diaghilev en joyed success as an organizer of art exhibitions and as founder of an ambitious and lavishly illustrated journal called Mir Iskussva , “The World of Art.” The latter undertaking he shared with a group of four St. Petersburg university students who fashioned them selves the “Nevsky Pickwickians.” According to Christiansen, “they considered themselves a cut above their vulgar contempo raries, whose devotion to sports, drinking and womanizing pro Allen Ellenzweig is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye.

voked them to scorn.” Diaghilev knew them via his “darkly handsome” cousin Dima Filosofov, one of its members, who was intellectual, literary, and capable of cutting remarks. Sergei had arrived from Perm to cos mopolitan St. Petersburg, where he shared a bedroom with Dima, who may have been his first love. Precocious Sergei was eager to ingratiate himself with Dima’s exclusive fraternity. The leader of the group was Alexandre Benois. Descended from French stock of the ancien régime , he was “the most sophisticated ... and eru dite.” Walter Nouvel was a musical connoisseur with demanding standards that he expressed unapologetically. Benois’ friend Lev Rosenberg joined the group late. Bipolar and “secretly cursed with perverse sexual tastes,” he was an art student with a genius for color who would disguise his Jewish origins by changing his name to Léon Bakst. In the years before and after the turn of the 20th century, the Nevsky Pickwickians acted as “an informal editorial committee”

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