Nijinsky (7 page)

Bath-houses were St Petersburg's most common pick-up spots, though a covered gallery off Nevsky Prospekt and the Tauride and Zoological Gardens were also well-known cruising areas. There was even a special name for the well-heeled, usually older gentlemen out looking for a young friend:
tyotki
, or aunties. In 1902 the penalty for sodomy between consenting adults (cases of which, for obvious reasons, very rarely came to court) was reduced to only three months in prison and, in the early 1900s, several grand dukes including one of the Tsar's uncles and Prince Volkonsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres between 1899 and 1902, barely bothered to disguise their homosexual preferences.

Although, according to his later diary and to Bronia's account of his adolescent crushes, Vaslav's real sexual urges were towards women, he adapted easily to his new life.
‘Before, he had only known school
. Now [he thought], this must be the way the rest of the world chose to behave.' Only one anecdote suggests that he may have felt uneasy about his initiation into Lvov's decadent world, perhaps suspecting too late that, unwittingly, he was being used for something he didn't quite understand. During Carnival in the spring of 1908, the Mariinsky held a masked ball and, telling him it was a prank, Lvov and his friends persuaded Vaslav to wear the costume of an eighteenth-century lady, powdered, laced and jewelled. ‘With great ability he mimed a lady of the Rococo. He looked as if he had walked out of a Watteau, assuming the very air of the eighteenth century. Nobody could have told that this charming masquerader was not really a girl. For Vaslav this was all only a part to play, but not to the others, and only later was he shocked into regretting his … innocence.'

One of Vaslav's early stage successes during this period was as Armida's favourite slave in the baroque fantasy
Le Pavillon d'Armide
; this is said to have been the performance that so dazzled Lvov, prompting him to pursue Vaslav in late November 1907. Mikhail Fokine – who had written the part of the slave especially for Nijinsky – brought the painter and set designer, Alexandre Benois, along to a rehearsal. Watching what he thought of as his ballet come to life, Benois experienced
‘that very rare feeling
– not
unmixed, somehow, with pain – that occurs only when something long wished for has at last been accomplished'. But when Fokine introduced him to his young protégé, Benois was surprised at Nijinsky's ordinariness: ‘He was more like a shop assistant than a fairytale hero.'

Another visitor to the rehearsals for
Le Pavillon d'Armide
was Sergey Diaghilev, who had told his friend Benois that he was
‘dying of curiosity'
to see how his first ballet as set designer was coming together. Members of the public did not usually attend rehearsals, though, and, perhaps because six years earlier he had been ignominiously dismissed from the Tsar's service, on the day Diaghilev appeared the police also turned up and asked him to leave. Despite this inauspicious introduction, it seems likely that this was the first time that Nijinsky met Diaghilev in person. It is possible that Diaghilev may have wanted to come to the rehearsal to catch a glimpse of the young dancer all St Petersburg was waiting to see; it is impossible to imagine that Nijinsky would not have known exactly who Diaghilev was when he walked into the rehearsal room, only to be ushered out unceremoniously by a police officer.

At thirty-five, Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev cut an imposing and idiosyncratic figure. Though the streak of white in his black hair led the young artists of the Imperial Theatres to call him (behind his back) ‘Chinchilla', he resembled
‘a magnificent bear'
. In fact he invited comparisons with animals: Jean Cocteau would describe his smile as that of a very young crocodile,
‘one tooth on the edge'
; Karsavina said he reminded her of a sea lion; and Bronia thought he looked like a bulldog with black eyes that smiled but were always sad. Those eyes, said one lover,
‘looked one through
and through … saw everything, and yet, at times, gave the impression that they were not even looking at you'. When I try to imagine Diaghilev I am assailed by smells: the almond-blossom brilliantine he wore in his hair, a faint powdery whiff of the violet bonbons he habitually chewed, the smoke of his gold-tipped ‘Black Russian' Sobranie cigarettes, a waft of Mitsouko.

Diaghilev was born in 1872 in the province of Novgorod, in a village near where his father, then a soldier, was stationed. His mother
died soon after his birth and so her nanny took sole charge of the little boy until Pavel Diaghilev married again two years later, giving Sergey a stepmother he adored and two younger brothers. For some years Pavel and his family lived in St Petersburg, funded by the Diaghilevs' vodka-distilling business, but when bankruptcy loomed they returned to Pavel's father's house in Perm, several days' travel east by rail and then by river from St Petersburg.

Despite the loss of his mother and the family's hopelessness with money, Sergey remembered his childhood, surrounded by music and loving relations, as a happy one, an idyll of genteel rural Russianness, of wooden
dachas
encircled by wide verandas, of driving through snowy forests on sledges in winter, of sudden, longed-for spring thaws and golden autumns spent collecting mushrooms. This almost mythical Russia, so dear to his heart throughout his life, was the place he described in an article about the landscape artist Isaac Levitan:
‘his bluelit nights
, his avenues of sleeping, century-old birches, which slowly lead one to that old house in the country, which all of us know so well, where Tatyana [the heroine of Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
] waits and dreams …'

Even as a boy Sergey was supremely self-confident, with what Karsavina called a
‘peculiar lazy grace'
. At school his classmates
‘looked up to him as a distinctly superior person'
and, although when he returned to St Petersburg as a law student in 1890, his new friends considered him by turns provincial, a dandy, a dilettante and even a boor, he soon carved out a role for himself as leader of their group. At times they might rail against his tyrannical tendencies but they could not fail to respect his astonishing ability to accomplish exactly what he set out to do regardless of the obstacles in his path.
‘It is the Seryozhas
[an affectionate diminutive of Sergey] in life that make the world go round; all glory and honour be unto him,' wrote Alexandre Benois in 1897 after admitting defeat in an argument, though only months later he would again be wondering if Sergey was his friend or his enemy, and the same year he called him,
‘the only one
of us capable of furthering his aims by making really wicked decisions'.

From his childhood music, literature and painting were everything
to Diaghilev.
‘The dream and
purpose of my life is to work in the field of art,' he wrote on his twenty-first birthday. A year earlier, in Bayreuth, he had seen Wagner performed for the first time.
‘Everything is here
: pettiness, intrigues, grief, anger, love, jealousy, tenderness, cries, groans – all of this goes on until eventually the whole of it mingles to present life as it flows on for each of us, and above it all triumphs the truth of beauty,' he wrote to his stepmother.

According to Benois, it was during one of these art-immersed trips to Europe in the mid-1890s that Diaghilev gave up his dream of becoming a composer and decided that his vocation in life was as a promoter of the arts – not an impresario, heaven forbid, that sounded like a thief – but as a Maecenas. He wanted to be
‘part of history'
and he possessed, as he famously put it, almost every quality required to succeed in this ambition. The one thing he lacked was money (or rather, enough to create his dreams) but he was certain that would come.

In 1898 Diaghilev secured the backing of two important patrons of Russian art, the fabulously rich railway tycoon Savva Mamontov and Princess Maria Tenisheva, for a new journal,
Mir iskusstva
, or
The World of Art
. He laid out his individualistic, art-for-art's-sake manifesto in an article in the first issue:
‘We are a generation
that thirsts for beauty. And we find it everywhere, both in good and evil … We must be free as gods in order to become worthy of tasting this fruit of the tree of life. We must seek in beauty a great justification for our humanity, and in personality the highest manifestation of beauty.'

While Diaghilev was the founder and presiding genius of
Mir iskusstva
, it was always a collaborative achievement, the work of a group of passionately idealistic friends known to posterity as the
miriskusniki
. They included the artist Léon Bakst, with his ginger moustache,
‘sly dandified primness
[and] imperturbable good nature', constantly sketching something on the back of a menu or a paper napkin; clever, opinionated Walter Nouvel, who could have been a professional musician, and whose wit made
‘one think of champagne'
; the refined and rather superior Benois, ever-watchful for a slight; and Dmitry or Dima Filosofov, Diaghilev's high-minded cousin and closest companion.

They met in Diaghilev's large apartment, which was furnished in the lush, aesthetic fashion Prince Lvov had echoed in the rooms he decorated for Vaslav, with grey and beige striped wallpaper, a piano, velvet-covered armchairs, bronze statues and a huge black sixteenth-century Italian table covered with papers, pens and pots of glue which Diaghilev used as a desk. Diaghilev's ancient nanny in her black lace cap presided over a steaming samovar while Diaghilev, resplendent in a flowered dressing gown, drifted in and out dispensing opinions and infusing everyone with his energy and vision.

He possessed, said Benois,
‘an individual gift
of creating a romantic working climate and with him all work had the charm of a risky escapade'. One element of this was Diaghilev's inability to distinguish between his professional and private lives. For him
‘there could be
no bourgeois distinction between work and leisure, between the business of breadwinning and the life of the mind and soul'. He lived a life devoted to art and he expected everyone around him to do so too.

By the mid-1900s,
Mir iskusstva
had run its course and Diaghilev had embarked on another stage in his career as a Maecenas, as curator and exhibition organiser, personally amassing over 4,000 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits from more than 550 lenders all over Russia for an exhibition to be held in St Petersburg's Tauride Palace. His vigour, knowledge and organisational skills were extraordinary. As an artist who assisted him in setting up the show commented, the remarkable thing about him was that
‘for all his
“commander's” ways, Diaghilev had an eye for detail; nothing was trivial for him, everything was important, and he wanted to do everything himself'.

Diaghilev's exhibition opened in January 1905, the month of Bloody Sunday. Although he did not make a speech at the opening, he did speak at a dinner afterwards, summing up the
fin de siècle
feel of his times and his own attitude to it. ‘I think many of you will agree that the idea of a reckoning, of things coming to an end, is one that increasingly comes to mind,' he began. As he journeyed across Russia in search of these lost and unappreciated masterpieces, he had found that,
‘The end
was here in front of me. Remote, boarded-up family estates, palaces frightening
in their dead grandeur, weirdly inhabited by dear, mediocre people no longer able to bear the weight of past splendours.'

His conclusion was as surprising as it was characteristic, no lament for the lost world he still cherished but a call to arms for the new: ‘Without fear or doubt, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of those beautiful palaces, and in equal measure to the new commandments of the new aesthetic. And the only wish that I as an irredeemable sensualist can make is that the coming struggle will not insult the aesthetics of life, and that death may be as beautiful and as radiant as the Resurrection!' The idea of himself as an ‘irredeemable sensualist' was at the core of the mature Diaghilev's understanding of himself. As a young man he had struggled with his homosexuality, just like his tormented heroes Nikolay Gogol and Tchaikovsky, who had bemoaned his ‘damned buggeromania' in letters to his brother and lamented the predilections which were
‘my greatest
, my most insurmountable obstacle to happiness'. Through his stepmother, Diaghilev had had some childhood contact with the great composer, whom he proudly called Uncle Petya, and would have understood the causes of his lifelong depression and possible suicide.

Diaghilev was lucky to live in slightly more tolerant times. In 1902 he visited the German clinic of the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and arrived at some kind of acceptance of what Dr Krafft-Ebing would have called his ‘deviant' sexual nature. Perhaps he came to believe, as his friend the writer Vasily Rozanov would argue, that homosexuality was not unnatural, just another facet of human nature. Whatever decision he came to, from this point forward he would make no effort to disguise his true self. Though he was never camp or effeminate, he made a point of appearing to be exactly what he was – a grand, rather old-fashioned bachelor, as Léonide Massine would later put it,
‘elegant but unremarkable'
.

Though this dichotomy between his imposing and almost respectable exterior and his debauched private life was what made him so fascinatingly
‘wicked'
in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, his friends learned to accept him as he was. After several years' acquaintance with
Diaghilev, Tamara Karsavina remembered walking through the gardens at Versailles, discussing him with Sergey Botkin, a mutual friend and Bakst's brother-in-law. Hitherto, she confessed to him, she had shied away from certain aspects of Sergey Pavlovich's character, but Dr Botkin
‘made me see
that it was the quality of love that makes it beautiful, no matter who the object'.