Nijinsky (55 page)

*
‘Vaslav' is pronounced ‘Vatslav', hence his family nickname Vatsa; Fomich is his patronymic, indicating that he is the son of Foma, or Thomas. The Polish spelling of his name is Wacław Nizynski.

*
Marie Petipa's father, Marius, wrote in his diary that Legat ‘went mad, biting Marie, then, he killed himself' (L. Garafola,
Legacies of Twentieth Century Dance
, 2005, p. 26).

*
The Jockey Club was founded in 1833 by a group of these gentlemen in a site next to the Opéra. It was ‘purportedly devoted to Anglophile equestrian affairs, although the activities of its members tended more towards gossip and the “protection” of ballerinas' (J. Homans,
Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
, 2010, p. 145).

*
Years later, in his memoirs, Fokine would insist that the three most acclaimed pieces of the 1909 season were Bolm in the Polovtsian Dances, the Jesters from
Armide
and the Bacchanal (danced by his wife) from
Cléopâtra
– none of which were danced by Nijinsky. The accounts of Karsavina, Grigoriev and Benois, as well as the press reports, contradict his claims.

*
The only person of Vaslav's age in Diaghilev's circle was Jean Cocteau, who, though he never saw Nijinsky after 1914, returned to him as a subject again and again throughout his life. His biographer Francis Steegmuller speculates (in
Cocteau: A Biography
, 1970, pp. 72–3) that Cocteau's initial efforts to get closer to Nijinsky when they first met (he had a habit of visiting Nijinsky at the time he knew he was being massaged) were firmly squashed by Diaghilev.

†
Duncan was another enthusiastic hostess. On a rainy summer's night in 1910 she threw a party in the gardens of the Palace Hotel, Versailles. Guests drank champagne and ate caviar in tents in the illuminated gardens while gypsy music and an orchestra from Vienna played. Duncan presided over everything in flaming Fortuny silk and gold sandals. In the
New Yorker
, Janet Flanner recalled her once giving ‘a house party that started in Paris, gathered force in Venice, and culminated weeks later on a houseboat in the Nile. She was a nomad
de luxe
'. (Flanner,
Paris was Yesterday
, 2003, p. 36.)

*
Prince Lieven said of the folklore pastiche that was
L'Oiseau de feu
that it was ‘as if Alice of
Alice in Wonderland
was partnered with Falstaff in a Scotch jig'. (Quoted in L. Garafola and N. V. N. Baer (eds),
The Ballets Russes and its World
, 1999, p. 120.)

*
Diaghilev never did. Lifar reported that Diaghilev would not have appeared naked for anything in the world, quite apart from hating water with a superstitious passion.

*
When Karsavina tried to protest that she might need some time off, Diaghilev raged at her, telling her she had all eternity to rest in. ‘Why could you not have married Fokine? [Then] You would both have belonged to me.' (T. Karsavina,
Theatre Street
, 1948, p. 284.) Fokine and Karsavina had in fact hoped to marry in the early 1900s, until, at her parents' behest, she turned him down.

*
This is the same premise as the opening scene of one of the classic nineteenth-century ballets, but with the masculine and feminine roles inverted: at the start of
La Sylphide
, the hero, James, is asleep in an armchair, dreaming of the otherwordly sylph. (A. Macaulay,
Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Dance
, 2000, p. 192.)

*
Three years later, in London, Nijinsky's dancing provoked an indignant letter to
The Times
, which concluded: ‘Against Nijinsky personally, of course, nothing can be said. He is a conscientious artiste devoted to his work. But is not the influence of his dance a degenerate one? It is luscious and enervating. The type of young man who likes it and the type it will breed is precisely that which loves the languor of a rose-lit apartment with the curtains drawn all day, with the smoke of opium curling, and the heavy breath of strange perfumes in the air. And that means rottenness!' From John Julius Norwich's 2011
Christmas Cracker
(my thanks to Peter Carson for passing on this quotation).

*
Plastique
was the standard Russian term for the acting, as opposed to the dancing, elements of ballet: free dance, or free movement, rather than choreographed ballet steps; the form and line the body makes in space.

*
Peter Ostwald, whose biography of Nijinsky focuses on his mental health, speculated that on the first night this ‘final gesture' may have been unsimulated. ‘Fear can and does lead to sexual arousal.' (Ostwald,
Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into
Madness, 1991, p. 61.)

*
Diaghilev wasn't much good at English either. His only English words were said to be, ‘More chocolate pudding!' (O. Sitwell,
Great Morning
, 1948, p. 247.)

*
Because Nijinsky was on the verge of insanity when he wrote his diary, and because he often contradicts himself in it, it is on the surface an unreliable document. For example, he writes of hating Diaghilev and loving him, of despising his artificiality and respecting his genius and knowing that Diaghilev was jealous of his talent. But he was always honest, and all of these impulses seem absolutely consistent with the multiplicity of fractured and refracted emotions Diaghilev stimulated in him. The same is true of the way he describes his feelings for Karsavina and, later, for Romola de Pulszky.

*
Monteux was asked in the 1950s what he had thought of
Sacre
when he first heard it. ‘I detested it.' And now? ‘I still detest it.' (T. F. Kelly,
First Nights
, 2000, p. 274.)

*
When things got too much for them, Grigoriev gave the
corps
old Fokine ballets to rehearse ‘to maintain morale'. (S. Grigoriev,
The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929
, p. 90.)

*
Le Sacre du printemps
was far from being the only one of Diaghilev's ballets which required the dancers to perform in unwieldy and uncomfortable costumes. In
Les Femmes de bonne humeur
(1917), Lopokova said she and the other artists ‘felt like rugby football players dressed as Eskimos pretending to be the most elegant and dainty females of the eighteenth century'. (J. Mackrell,
Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs Maynard Keynes
, 2008, p. 118.)

*
There is no precedent in the myths of any ancient cultures (except Aztec, which Roerich did not mention in his notes) for female sacrifice. This was a modern construct, ‘cousin to the invented myths of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Sigmund Freud' (see L. Garafola,
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
, 1989, p. 72) – except for one arena in which young virgins had willingly and regularly sacrificed themselves for some higher ideal: classical ballet, both on stage and off. (T. Scholl,
From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernisation of Ballet
, 1993, p. 72.)