Nijinsky (2 page)

He knew that, in private, Sergey had begun to lose faith, to doubt the wisdom of entrusting all the Ballets Russes' choreography to his young protégé. Of late all he could see when he looked at him was dyed hair, false teeth and an oily smile. Their arguments were a measure of
the stresses under which their relationship – professionally and personally – was labouring. Over the past few months, Sergey had insisted more and more vehemently that although a painting or a piece of music might be misunderstood at first, even remain unappreciated for many years, and yet still be considered a true work of art, a ballet must be well received by the public or it would be doomed to obscurity: it must sell tickets. This was his first major work. It had to succeed.

But why shouldn't it? Igor was, perhaps, no stranger to controversy, but he was acclaimed as the greatest young composer of the twentieth century.
L'Oiseau de feu
and
Petrushka
were dazzling ballets, even without him dancing them. Roerich – he had nicknamed him the Professor – had created a wild and primitive world in which their sacred mystery would be enacted, a tree-studded hill on a lush, green plain. Most importantly, Sergey had trusted them with this work, placing his faith and experience in their united talents. Between them they were creating a revolutionary, entirely modern form of ballet, stripped of the tinselled artifice of previous generations.

And, as he told himself, he was the greatest dancer of his age – the greatest dancer and, God willing, the greatest choreographer. An artist, as well as a performer. Over and again the public had proclaimed him the god of the dance; Sergey had annointed him the prophet of ballet's future. One day, perhaps even tonight, with this ballet, the power and beauty of his work would prove all the critics wrong.

The
chef de la scène
banged his stick hard on the floor three times, a signal for all non-performers to clear the stage. That girl was here again, her blue eyes soaking everything up from behind the Baron de Günzburg's shoulder, looking – he knew – for him. He would not think about that now. Reluctantly – or was he imagining it? – the dancers moved to their places, their make-up already softening beneath the hot lights.

He saw Diaghilev standing in his usual spot, solemn and magnificent, his expression revealing nothing, scanning the stage to ensure everyone was in the correct position before he gave the sign for the curtain to be raised. He had given orders that whatever happened they must not stop dancing. The white streak in his brilliantined hair echoed
the starched white shirt-front standing out against his black tailcoat; the almond-blossom scent of his hair-wax hung in the air, an overpowering waft of stale aftershave.

Outside in the pit, he knew, the conductor would be standing before the orchestra with his still arms upraised. Vaslav Nijinsky, possibly the greatest genius of twentieth-century dance, drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited for the music to begin.

ONE LOST NIGHT IN PARIS
in the mid-1920s, Alabama Knight, the discontented heroine of Zelda Fitzgerald's autobiographical novel
Save Me the Waltz
, finds herself at the Théâtre du Châtelet where Diaghilev's Ballets Russes are playing. After the performance, spellbound, she is introduced to
‘a woman with a shaved head
and the big ears of a gargoyle … [parading] a Mexican hairless [Chihuahua] through the lobby'. This woman, she is told, had once been a ballerina.

‘How did you get in the ballet?' Alabama asks breathlessly, her heart suddenly set on becoming a dancer. The woman seems almost confused by the question: the answer is so simple. One has to imagine a gravelly émigré accent and a sense of surprised finality about her reply. ‘But I was born in the ballet.'

This was the case with the majority of Russian dancers at the start of the twentieth century and of no one could it be said with more accuracy than Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky,
*
acclaimed as the
dieu de la danse
, whose parents were both gifted professional dancers and whose childhood
was largely spent in and around theatres. He may not actually have been born in a dressing room, like his venerable ballet master, Enrico Cecchetti, or during a performance, like his sister (their mother went into labour while dancing a polonaise at the Opera Theatre in Minsk, dashed off to a nearby hospital after arranging for an extra to take her place on stage and gave birth to Bronislava before the final curtain fell), but he might as well have been.

As Bronislava, or Bronia, would write of their early years,
‘We were born
artists of the dance. We accepted without question our birthright from our parents – our dancing bodies. The theatre and the dance were a natural way of life for us from birth. It was as if, in the theatre, we were in our natural element, where everything responded in our souls.'

Neither of the Nijinsky parents – Foma (Thomas) and Eleonora, née Bereda – came from theatrical families. Foma was born in Warsaw in 1862. His grandfather, father and brother were activists, devoted to the cause of liberating Poland from Russian rule, but although he was a proud patriot Foma knew from childhood that his fate did not lie in politics. At eight he began attending the Wielki Theatre School at the Warsaw State Theatre.

In 1870, when Foma began his career there, fourteen-year-old Eleonora Bereda had already left the Wielki School. Her father, a Warsaw cabinet-maker, had died when she was seven, after his compulsive gambling bankrupted their family – and her mother had died days later. She and her nine-year-old sister Stephanie began attending classes in secret at the Theatre School and, defying the disapproval of their elder siblings who thought a career on the stage was not respectable, were soon contributing to the household expenses by performing in ballets and operas. At fourteen Eleonora, chaperoned by her two elder sisters, had been working for two years as part of the
corps de ballet
of a small company touring provincial Russia's thriving theatres.

Like Eleonora, Foma worked as a migrant dancer after leaving the Wielki School. Higher wages compensated for the insecurity and questionable status of this type of work, for despite his talents as dancer and choreographer, headstrong Foma recognised that he lacked the patience
and diplomacy to progress steadily through the
corps
of the great state-funded theatres of Moscow or St Petersburg, as a civil servant in the Tsar's employ, to the coveted ranks of
premier danseur
and, ultimately, ballet-master.

The two young dancers met and fell in love in Odessa in 1882. Eleonora was five years older than Foma and at first she was reluctant to commit to him. After two years' passionate courtship she relented and they were married in Baku on the Caspian Sea, the capital of modern Azerbaijan. Two years later their first child, Stanislas, was born on a return trip to the Caucasus; Vaslav followed on 12 March 1889 in Kiev; and Bronia made her dramatic entrance in Minsk in 1891.

Although Eleonora had not planned to have so many children, nor so quickly (a family made a carefree, itinerant life with Foma and, indeed, her own career, increasingly untenable), according to Bronia the first years of her parents' marriage were happy ones, united by love and a shared devotion to their art. Certainly they were picturesque. In her memoirs, Bronia describes travelling the length and breadth of Russia, galloping through the Caucasus along the Georgian Military Highway from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi as fast as possible to avoid being ambushed by brigands in the narrow passes between the mountains, or steaming down the Volga at dusk, lulled to sleep in violet light by sailors singing along to the music of balalaikas playing on the banks and the gentle splashing of the river against the sides of the boat. Bronia remembered her father one afternoon bringing home Caucasian-style Turkish delight, stuffed with almonds and delicately flower-scented; try though she might, for the rest of her life, nothing else ever tasted as good. For a long time her bed was the family's travelling trunk filled with blankets, its top wedged open.

Dance and the theatre were at the centre of the Nijinsky family's life. In 1893, when Vaslav was four, they lived in a
dacha
beside Kiev's Summer Theatre, where Foma and Eleonora were engaged for the season, on Trukhanov Island, across the Dnieper from the city. The children's nanny would sometimes take them out secretly after bedtime, while Foma and Eleonora performed, and they would tiptoe to the theatre
through illuminated gardens, where the muffled strains of the orchestra could be heard, and into the stage door. Bronia would always remember being dazzled by the
‘fairy-tale lights'
and Vaslav told her, years later, ‘of his delight in that mysterious night walk and how he used to run in front of everyone to see the lights of the many coloured paper lanterns, hanging on so many chains in so many directions'.

In an interview given in 1912, Vaslav couldn't recall when his formal dance training began –
‘My parents considered
it as natural to teach me to dance as to walk and talk. Even my mother who, of course, could recall my first tooth, couldn't say just exactly when my first lesson was' – but he and his elder brother Stanislas, or Stassik, joined in the classes both his parents gave society children in ballroom-dancing – waltzes, polkas, quadrilles and Russian country dances – and also in the informal ballet lessons Foma gave the children of other artists.

Other performers, friends of the family, were happy to share their knowledge, too. Three-year-old Bronia and five-year-old Vaslav persuaded Jackson and Johnson, two young African-American music-hall artists who performed to a ragtime soundtrack in top hats and white satin tailcoats with black lapels, to teach them to tap-dance – something absolutely forbidden in the tradition of classical dance because it was thought to weaken the knees and ankles. And there was much to be learned just by watching Foma rehearse his small company or befriending the gypsies in their jangling, colourful costumes, who passed by every now and then leading strings of gleaming ponies, singing and dancing along the way. Years later, Vaslav would thrill his family by imitating these
‘wild, fierce, savage'
gypsy girls, ‘trembling all over from the tips of his fingers to his toes, shaking his shoulders as if they were independent of the rest of his body'.

Vaslav performed in public for the first time in Odessa at Easter 1894, when he was just five. He and Stassik danced the
hopak
, a Cossack dance, with Stassik, wearing blue pantaloons, a loose white blouse and a broad red sash, playing the boy, and Vaslav, in an embroidered Ukrainian dress and a garland of poppies, cornflowers and ribbons on his head, the girl. Both wore knee-high boots of soft red leather and a touch
of rouge, applied by Eleonora with her hare's foot.
‘With his slightly dark skin
, big brown eyes, and long fluffy eyelashes, it was impossible to tell that he was a boy,' recalled Bronia. The audience loved their performance with its jumps, whirling turns, low squats and high leg lifts. ‘To the shouts of “Bravo” and “Bis,” they had to repeat their performance once, and then again.'

By the time Vaslav performed again, at Christmas the same year, Foma had begun regularly teaching the boys the positions and first steps of classical ballet as well as rehearsing them in folk dances like the Cossack
hopak
and the
mazurka
. For this performance Vaslav was elevated to dancing the
hopak
as a solo, wearing Stassik's outfit from six months earlier.
‘How high he
jumped, throwing his legs from side to side and touching the heels of his boots with his hands, striking his heels together, crouching down to dance the
prisyadka
[literally translated as ‘squat', the most famous element in Russian folk dancing], flinging his legs forward faster and faster, and finishing by whirling around in a spinning
prisyatka
close to the ground! Father was so pleased with Vatsa. He said later that not every adult dancer could manage all those difficult stunts of the
hopak
.'

The three young Nijinskys then performed a sailor dance and finally, along with some other children, a Chinese dance (though Bronia commented that it only remotely resembled anything Chinese). Vaslav, as a comical old man, stole the show, taking several curtain calls on his own. It was this that Vaslav would remember with pride as his
‘first appearance
in public'.

Despite Vaslav's early theatrical triumphs, life on the road could be hard and Foma and Eleonora struggled to hold their young family together. Tsar Alexander III's death in October 1894 closed every Russian theatre for a period of official mourning and even private dancing lessons, usually a lucrative source of income, were seen as improper while the nation grieved.
‘Throughout our childhood
this would happen,' wrote Bronia, ‘one day prosperity, the next anxiety.' Increasingly, over the coming years, anxiety would predominate.

Accidents and ill-health – the constant nearness of death – were one
source of this anxiety. Eleonora had been orphaned at seven; she was always afraid for her children and with reason. When Stassik was two and a half, he climbed up onto the window ledge of their rented Moscow apartment to watch a military band pass by and fell three storeys onto the cobbled street below. He was unconscious for three days and, although he recovered physically, gradually it became clear that his mental development had ceased after the accident.

A few years later, Vaslav contracted scarlet fever and diphtheria simultaneously and the doctors feared he would not survive; in 1897 Bronia and Stassik made miraculous recoveries from typhoid. Five years later, sixteen-year-old Stassik, who had never recovered from his fall as a toddler, was placed in a psychiatric hospital because Eleonora could no longer control his rages at home. Nineteenth-century mental institutions were not known for treating their inmates with compassion and the knowledge of where Stassik was and what had happened to him left its scars on Eleonora, Bronia and Vaslav, too.