GLR May-June 2023

and unpaid staff for Mir Iskusstva. The magazine was initially supported by Princess Tenisheva and a Russian businessman. When they eventually withdrew their funding of the financially fraught enterprise, the Tsar himself provided support with a three year grant. The Pickwickians’ interest in the magazine by then had faded. However, despite their sometimes testy relations with Diaghilev—Benois was “infuriated” by the “brash pretentions” of the pushy social climber Diaghilev—they frequently participated in his later efforts to upend the dainty conventions of traditional courtly ballets. When Diaghilev brought his ballet to France, Marius Petipa, the French-born ballet master choreographer, who had settled in Russia for three decades to dominate the Tsarist imperial ballet, was becoming old hat. His greatest successes were in the past— first, the procession of ghostly girls in white tulle from La Bayadere , and later, the lavish Sleeping Beauty with a cast of over two hundred and an intoxicating score by Tchaikovsky set in a royal milieu from a 17th-century French fairy tale. The produc tion was an enchantment in 1890, one whose music “bewitched” Alexandre Benois, who claimed late in life that had he not “in fected” his fellow Pickwickians by his enthusiasm “there would have been no Ballets Russes and all the balletomania to which they gave birth.” By the first decade of the 20th century, impresario Diaghilev was importing leading Russian composers and singers to Paris. But his ambitions led him to introduce a new sense of the inte grated ballet to the West, in which music, story, costume, décor, and choreography met in a unified gestalt. By then, a younger generation had been making its presence felt, such as Mikhail Fokine, “a handsome and conceited young man” with classical training from the imperial school who was “impatient with Petipa’s academicism.” Fokine had been influenced by the auda cious American Isadora Duncan, who danced in Russia barefoot, bare-legged, and without corset in a Grecian-style tunic. While he did not share her disdain for ballet’s conventions, he recognized her distinctive personal response to the music. In successive productions in Paris and London, the Ballets Russes began presenting the latest in musical composition, with décor and costumes by contemporary artists like Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, Cocteau, and Picasso. Choreography and narratives might be drawn from contemporary life, starring one or more from a trio of Fokine’s dancers. Anna Pavlova, “a crea ture more of the air than the earth,” is said to have performed Fokine’s famous “Dying Swan” solo more than 4,000 times worldwide over a long, commercially-minded career. The dark beauty Tamara Karsavina could “communicate emotional reali ties as well as elusive fantasies.” A pupil of her father’s at the im perial school, she became a friend of Fokine but was a thorn in the side of the older Pavlova. Finally, there was Vaslav Nijinsky, of Catholic Polish ancestry and suspected Tartar blood. A son of professional touring dancers, he acquired a gymnastic athleticism in traditional folk dances, which matured when he whizzed through ballet school in St. Petersburg and, by age eighteen, was partnering “all the star ballerinas.” Unusual in his physical dimensions—at five foot, four inches tall, Nijinsky was short, with sloping shoulders but “rock-solid thighs and bulbous calves”—the more eccentric aspect of his man ner was in his personal comportment. Christiansen proposes that in our time Nijinsky might be “diagnosed on the autistic spec

trum” given his inability to mingle socially or directly engage in conversation, unless it was with a dance partner. But he would then beat a hasty retreat. Composer Igor Stravinsky, one of Bal lets Russes’s mainstays, noted “curious absences in [Nijinsky’s] personality,” which may hint at his later descent into mental ill ness. Not “obviously handsome,” Christiansen writes, “his erotic allure exuded a disturbing perfume of the Uranian ‘third sex.’” However, while not himself homosexual, Nijinsky was taken under the wings of successive older suitors as a male favorite in a manner accepted in upper-class Russian circles, where “mature men of rank amusing themselves on the side with pretty serf boys or bathhouse attendants was ... laughingly accepted as ‘gentle men’s mischief.’” By the time Diaghilev “inherited” young Ni jinsky, during the 1910 Paris season, the dancer had previously been the boy toy of a wealthy “thirty-something” prince and “man about town” who set him up in a luxurious apartment, paid for extra ballet lessons, and lavished “his impoverished mother and sister with hampers of food.” Christiansen suggests that Ni jinsky was “perhaps only politely compliant in the bedroom” and was eventually passed from the prince “to a Polish count and thence to Diaghilev.” While their relationship may have been transactional, Di aghilev did by 1912 see an element of genius in his 23-year-old lover and imagined that the curiously self-contained youth might push the ballet “out of the realms of fairy story and lurid romance into uncharted aesthetic territory.” Diaghilev set him the task of devising a dance to a “voluptuous” ten-minute long tone poem by Debussy of 1894, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune . If Nijinsky had a hard time verbalizing his vision during rehearsals, he still

-<. :9=* 34< +*( 31/% #&!*. (<636<,1>7 +034=9 =: #'* ,1).* &4 -'* 2*/)"*04 $*0

,"21)%"1 '<36 &+3/# -%" ('"- !04"5$ *1."2-12 2% 3426 "<.2743:1. %<( ;1<9 :-%3-6&)

)$)%!)&!( '"#

' *% <%$4-%32%7 3-.< #: 52%#$42# 2% 34< <%" 32'<6 * #CDB;$@ :! >2B" =B:=>? 24#$@?;"D >:%#B* 6;$"$D?* 4#8D 2$"* %#?= ;%!#B=2$=* >#!D)& ? )@ #5"/% $/&'2

' 8%< $-%+3 4<.! ,13 :-. 2% .#0< (234 3426 ,#/) & ? ;@ /@ !8$!8

5A9-A 07)+A.(510/3,<

May–June 2023

13