Nijinsky (9 page)

The incident Vaslav would remember about this first trip abroad demonstrated his anxiety in the presence of his sophisticated and often unwelcoming new friends, the social gulf that yawned between them. Eleonora, afraid her darling boy would be hungry on the journey, had cooked Vaslav a chicken and wrapped it in waxed paper along with bread rolls, butter and oranges: a feast she would not have been able to afford until very recently. Neither she nor Vaslav knew that there was a dining car for the wagon-lit passengers. Vaslav wanted to ask the others to share his meal but he was too shy; and Eleonora had only packed him one plate, one fork and one knife.

When Diaghilev stood up and said that he was going to the restaurant car, Vaslav – embarrassed by his ignorance of the ways of the world and fearing the others would make fun of him – waited until he was alone to throw the lovingly wrapped packet out of the window, raging
inwardly against his innocent mother. Later, he would laugh about it; at the time he burned with humiliation.

Just after their departure, Prince Pavel came to see Eleonora and stayed with her for some time, telling her that Diaghilev had asked him to give Vaslav up. Diaghilev had said that if he sincerely wished Vaslav success he would not accompany him to Paris. With great sadness, Lvov had agreed and had given Diaghilev money for his season there. Bronia found Lvov standing alone in Vaslav's study, the room he had decorated for him.

‘I came
to say goodbye to you. I am leaving.'

‘But when will we see you again?'

‘I do not know. Probably we will not see each other for a very long time.' His eyes were filled with tears as he kissed her hand and left.

THE FIRST EXPERIENCE OF PARIS
was overwhelming. The following year, 1910, Lydia Lopokova had barely arrived there before fainting at
‘the lovely sight of the Gare du Nord'
and having to be revived by Léon Bakst with whom she was travelling. It was a beautiful, bustling, modern city: the Métro had been running nearly a decade and, on the crowded boulevards, motor-cars sped between
‘the tangled mass
of cabs whose drivers wore shiny top hats of waxed cloth, and the horse-drawn double decker buses'. The smell of gasoline mingled in the air with the traditional scent of horse manure. It had felt like winter in St Petersburg when they left, still cold and damp, but in Paris the sun was warm, the trees were all coming into leaf and Karsavina said that she couldn't remember a cloud in the sky the whole time they were there.

Diaghilev made his headquarters in the Hotel de Hollande near the Opéra. Nijinsky stayed in the cosier Hotel Daunou around the corner and, when they arrived in early May, the other dancers – including Bronia and Eleonora, as her chaperone – lived in smaller hotels around the Boulevard St Michel. Amid all the excitement of being in Paris, Bronia had barely enough time to buy a hat at Galeries Lafayette before rehearsals began.

The company had spent March and April rehearsing in St Petersburg.
Once again Diaghilev had managed to offend his old adversary Mathilde Kshesinskaya, this time by offering Pavlova better roles in Paris than her. In a huff she withdrew from his programme altogether and demanded that the Tsar refuse to allow Diaghilev's company to rehearse in the Hermitage Theatre, or to take the Mariinsky's sets and costumes to Paris, or to receive generous state funding for the season. Diaghilev's patron, Nicholas's uncle Grand Duke Vladimir, had just died and Diaghilev had no other friends at court to argue his case. Hastily he arranged for his small company to rehearse in a hall on Yekaterinsky Canal and raced to Paris to find donors to ensure that the Saison Russe could go ahead as planned.

In Russia, Diaghilev had raised money by introducing rich merchants who wanted titles to grand dukes, like Vladimir, with access to patents of nobility; his friends sniggered about his enterprises being sponsored by rubber barons (
galoshisty
, or rubber-makers, with the word ‘rubber' having the same connotation in Russian as in English). In Paris, initially through Grand Duke Vladimir and his wife, he had become friends with a small group of rich lovers of music, particularly of opera, who would become the
Ballets Russes'
sponsors. These included Misia Edwards, the Comtesses de Chevigné and Greffulhe, models for Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes (he began writing
À la recherche du temps perdu
in 1909), and Winnaretta Singer, the American sewing-machine heiress and devoted Wagnerian, who was married to the Prince de Polignac.

These women were fabulously rich but they were also unconventional. The formidable Princesse de Polignac may have been married to one of the pillars of French society but it was a
mariage blanc
; she was known to her friends as Tante Winnie –
tante
in the same way as the St Petersburg
tyotki
were aunties. Madame Greffulhe, descended from the Thermidorian beauty Thérésia Tallien, was a trained classical musician and the President of the Société des grandes auditions musicales de France. When her husband took to frequenting the company of what she called
‘little ladies
who enjoy jumping on mattresses' she simply raised a graceful eyebrow, and she told a friend she considered it of no
importance whatever whether someone slept with ‘a man, a woman or a canary-bird'. She took Diaghilev at first for an adventurer, but he won her over with his knowledge of art and his wonderful piano-playing.

Voluptuous, flame-haired Misia Edwards (later and best known as Misia Sert) was the most important of the women Diaghilev befriended in the mid-1900s, the most steadfast champion of the Ballets Russes and for the rest of his life his closest woman friend – in many ways the replacement for his beloved stepmother. As the muse for a roll-call of artists including Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, friend of the poets Verlaine and Mallarmé, student of Liszt and patron of Fauré and Ravel, her artistic credentials were impeccable and must have impressed even Diaghilev.

Her disregard for convention was a match for Diaghilev's – married twice (the second time to the immensely rich newspaper magnate, Alfred Edwards) and divorced once by 1909, she was living adulterously with the man who would become her third husband, the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert – and, also like Diaghilev, her friends loved and despaired of her in equal measure. She was
‘a fairy godmother
one moment and a witch the next, frightfully malicious, adorably generous', inspiring nicknames like Tante Brutus and Tante Tue-Tout, as well as Proust's dreadful Madame Verdurin – though her best qualities were also revealed in Princess Yourbeletieff, Proust's exquisite patron of the Russian ballet. She and Diaghilev plotted together on the telephone every morning – the drawing room of her rue de Rivoli apartment, with its vast Bonnard mural, would become Diaghilev's unofficial headquarters whenever he was in Paris.

Two men were also essential to the business side of Diaghilev's enterprise in 1909: Baron Dmitry de Günzburg, introduced by Walter Nouvel, who stepped in with generous funds after the Tsar withdrew his backing from the Saison Russe; and Gabriel Astruc, the French impresario who brought Artur Rubinstein and Mata Hari to Paris and who had secured 100,000 francs from each what he called a
‘
tournée des mécènes
'
for Diaghilev's 1908 opera season. Astruc knew everyone, ‘
mes chers snobs
', without whom no venture could prosper in Paris, and had done
the deal for Diaghilev's 1909 Saison Russe with the shabby and rather unfashionable Théâtre du Châtelet, known principally as a home for operetta.

In St Petersburg, Diaghilev's committee had been drinking weak tea since the previous autumn while they planned their season. Diaghilev, his exercise book in front of him, was omnipresent. Other regulars were the
miriskutnik
artists Alexandre Benois, Nicholas Roerich and Léon Bakst; Walter Nouvel, a gifted amateur musician; and Mikhail Fokine, who was choreographing every new piece they would present. Fokine had suggested his friend Sergey Grigoriev as company
regisseur
or manager. A
‘benevolent giant'
, Grigoriev saw everything that went on in the company, noting it down (along with the relevant fine) in the little notebook he always carried.

‘A conference was like a council of war,'
wrote one observer of these meetings. ‘Each would pour out his ideas into a common pool, but Diaghilev – have no doubt of it – was the supreme commander, he imposed a unity of form and aesthetic conception, he turned a mass of brilliant projects into an ordered and coherent work of art,' inspiring each of his collaborators to produce for him their best work.
‘It was impossible
to know where the work of one began and another ended.'

When Karsavina signed her contract with Diaghilev the following year, he took her into his bedroom so they could discuss it in private, and she was fascinated to find the room
‘bare of adornment
… I could not realise then that the glamour of his personality spent itself in creations of fancy'. Diaghilev was uninterested in ownership. His friend, the critic Michel Calvocoressi, asked him why he hadn't bought some
objets d'art
that he had admired and he replied that he
‘did not want
to own them. I have no possessions and wish for none. To own things is cumbersome and tedious. A couple of trunkfuls of personal effects is all I have in the world.' Even then he knew that what he created would be more important than anything he might own: his vocation was the ephemeral.

Benois remembered the company's rehearsals in St Petersburg's
Catherine Hall in the spring of 1909 being infused by a picnic spirit, an atmosphere of adventure and excitement, of joy and hope at watching something mature
‘that would amaze the world'
. Fokine, composing the Polovtsian Dances for the opera
Prince Igor
in a matter of hours, was at the top of his form, inspiring everyone around him. He
‘shouted himself hoarse
, tore his hair, and produced marvels'. Benois, who, despite seeing Diaghilev almost daily for the past year, had never seen him with Nijinsky before, noticed at these rehearsals an intimacy between the two which surprised him.

In Paris the almost celebratory mood continued during two weeks of frenetic rehearsals at the Châtelet before their first night. It was so hot in the theatre that Karsavina said you could have bred salamanders and they danced through the dust and drying paint while the builders made trap doors, extended the orchestra pit, removed seats, added boxes, resurfaced the stage with fresh pine boards and laid thick new carpet in the lobbies. Rather than breaking for meals, Diaghilev would order roast chickens, paté and salad from Larue's and the company would eat on packing boxes amidst the scenery, as if they were picnicking in the porcelain colours – apple green, rose pink and duck-egg blue – of Armida's enchanted garden.

Diaghilev was tireless. He could spot a single bulb that had burned out among the stage lights or hear when the orchestra's second trumpet was playing flat. Shadowed by the spectral Grigoriev, he supervised costumes, hair, make-up, musicians, backdrops, press briefings and photography sessions, complimentary tickets to potential sponsors – and everything else that had to be done. Karsavina said that she
‘had seen a Japanese
performer once, exhibiting feats of quadruple concentration. I failed to be impressed by him: I had seen Diaghilev at work.'

A few days before the dress rehearsal, Anna Pavlova, who featured in a graceful arabesque on Saison Russe posters all over Paris, informed Diaghilev that she would arrive in Paris two weeks later than planned, missing the opening night, perhaps because she wanted to see how the company would be received before joining it. If so, it was a tactical misjudgement, allowing Karsavina to step into her roles and providing
Diaghilev with the perfect excuse to present Vaslav Nijinsky to the already fascinated newspapermen as his company's star.

Every seat at the Châtelet was taken on the night of 19 May 1909. Astruc had even arranged for the prettiest actresses in Paris to be seated around the front row of the balcony, alternating blonde and brunette. (The next day the press called them Astruc's
corbeille
, or flower basket, and since then the dress circles of French theatres have been known as
corbeilles
.) Bronia watched her brother waiting on stage for his role in
Le Pavillon d'Armide
– the first performance of the first night – to begin.
‘His whole body
is alive with an inner movement, his whole being radiant with inner joy.' At the end of his
pas de trois
, Nijinsky, in what looked to Karsavina like an explosion of delight, leapt instead of walking off stage, landing out of sight and giving the impression that he had flown off the stage. The audience gasped audibly:
‘a storm of applause
broke; the orchestra had to stop'.

For the second piece, the Polovtsian Dances, Nicholas Roerich's depiction of a nomadic camp on the steppes of southern Russia, with long, low, dark tents from which a few thin columns of smoke rose into a vast, sulphurous sky, transported the audience from the refined rococo loveliness of Armida's palace to a place of barbaric wilderness. The warlike dances of the Tatar warriors and their maidens, led by Adolph Bolm, provoked such an enthusiastic response from the audience that in the interval that followed admirers flooded backstage. The stage became so crowded that Nijinsky and Karsavina could not practise their lifts from the
pas de deux
they were about to perform as part of
Le Festin
, adapted from the Blue Bird variation which Nijinsky had danced with Pavlova in St Petersburg the previous season.

When the curtain fell for the last time, pandemonium broke out.
‘The familiar barriers
between the stage and the audience were broken.' Karsavina had been so swept away by the moment that she had not noticed cutting herself on Nijinsky's jewelled costume while they danced and backstage afterwards she remembered someone ‘exquisitely dressed' using his ‘cobwebby handkerchief' to staunch the blood trickling down her arm. ‘Somebody was asking Nijinsky if it was
difficult to stay in the air as he did while he was jumping; he did not understand at first [if only he had paid better attention to his French lessons at school], and then, very obligingly: “No! No! Not difficult. You have just to go up and then pause a little up there.”' From that night on, Karsavina said, a proud Diaghilev called her and Nijinsky his children.