Nijinsky in evening clothes by Valentin Sverov, head back and eyes half-closed, wearing the distant expression that fascinated Romola de Pulszky.
FAUNE AND JEUX were not the only ballets with which Diaghilev was preparing to entrust his young friend. In Vienna in 1912 they met Hugo von Hofmannsthal to discuss a ballet Richard Strauss might write for them (which became La Légende de Joseph) and Hofmannsthal was ‘entranced’ by their all-night conversations, writing to his friend Harry Kessler that ‘since the evening of this Saturday I have actually only existed with no one else but Diaghilev and Nijinsky’. A few months later, in Paris (about the time of Faune’s premiere), they sat up together again, this time accompanied by Kessler, Reynaldo Hahn and Marcel Proust, debating which biblical story should accompany Strauss’s composition and Bakst’s Veronese-inspired setting. The backdrop of Larue’s was almost exotic enough to inspire a ballet of its own, to read Kessler’s description: ‘Bowls of monstrous strawberries stood on the table, glasses of champagne and liquors glittered in all colours; the Aga Khan, the richest Muslim prince of India, sat, arriving from a masked ball, at the corner in an oriental costume completely covered with fabulous genuine pearls, and even larger rubies and emeralds … A belated pair danced the tango.’
As early as 1910, Nicholas Roerich and Igor Stravinsky had been talking about a ballet that would show the ancient spring rites of pre-historic Russia, a great sacrifice as enacted by a Slavonic tribe. Both claimed to have been the originator of the initial concept for Le Sacre du printemps, and quite possibly they came up with similar ideas simultaneously; Stravinsky said a vision of Sacre came to him in a dream. What is clear is that during the spring of 1910, when both were in Paris, they had discussed their shared passions for Russia and for the primitive and embarked on the development of a ballet that at this early stage they called the ‘Great Sacrifice’.
Diaghilev was irritated that they had come up with the idea without his involvement and though he insisted that he was interested in it, he pressed for Petrushka to be produced first, partly because he wanted to tempt Benois back to work with him again and partly because prioritising a ballet of his choice would bind Stravinsky closer to him. Roerich could wait. For the time being, the Great Sacrifice was put aside and it was not until the following September that Stravinsky settled down in a pensione in Clarens to begin composing it in earnest.
In the meantime he, Roerich and Diaghilev corresponded about their aims for the piece. Nicholas Roerich, whom Nijinsky called the Professor and whom Karsavina described as a prophet, was one of the most interesting of Diaghilev’s collaborators. Diaghilev had known him since their college days in the early 1890s and he had been one of the miriskusniki. A distinguished painter and occasional set designer (he had staged the opera Prince Igor for Diaghilev), he was also a respected scholar, a writer, philosopher, mystic and anthropologist whose earliest passion had been excavating shamanic burial mounds. His paintings were almost exclusively concerned with ancient landscapes and their primitive inhabitants, hunting, fishing and participating in rituals.
In 1910 Roerich had written an essay setting out his thoughts on ancient Slavonic fertility festivities, when the people would go into the woods and array themselves in fresh greenery before dancing and singing to celebrate the coming of spring. He believed that enduring folk customs such as ritualistic dancing when the crops were sown, or in some places stripping a girl naked and leading her on horseback through the newly planted fields before burning her effigy, were literal remnants of Russia’s original pagan culture. What he wanted, writes the historian Nicoletta Misler, was ‘to present the power of images as the survival of memory’.
The following year he painted a study for a mosaic for the church at Princess Tenisheva’s Talashkino estate called The Forefathers, which showed a man sitting on a sacred hill playing a wood or bone pipe to a group of bears hypnotised by his music – a reflection of the Slavonic tradition that men were descended from bears. Stravinsky came to work with Roerich at Talashkino where he met the singer and gusli player S. P. Golosov, who was also studying there. While Stravinsky composed, Roerich studied the Princess’s large collection of folk art, embroidery and clothing for inspiration for the costumes for the tribal dancers who would enact their ancient mysteries. Although Stravinsky would later claim he had tapped into ‘some unconscious folk memory’ for the traditional melodies that he abstracted for use in Sacre, it is likely that Roerich and Golosov pointed Stravinsky in the direction of folk songs that were ethnologically appropriate for the piece, right for the season and the ceremony they planned to portray.
Though the overall impression the piece would create was more important to both composer and designer than strict academic ‘correctness’ – they did not want Sacre to be dry or museum-like – each relied heavily on what was then seen as authentic source material. Roerich studied a three-volume history of Russian dress and the folk way of life and the folklorist Alexander Afanasyev’s monumental The Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature, as well as a twelfth-century chronicle of pagan customs and Herodotus’s description of the Scythians during the Persian Wars. Stravinsky used Rimsky-Korsakov’s collection of 100 Russian Folk Songs and an extensive anthology of Lithuanian folk tunes.
Both men were inspired by the poetry of Sergey Gorodetsky. A few years earlier Stravinsky had composed music to accompany some of his poems. The 1907 poem ‘Yarila’ described an ancient wise man attended by two young girls, one of whom he kills with a flint axe by a pale lime tree in the spring as a sacrifice to the sun god, Yarilo: ‘a white bride’ who springs out of her bloodstains to become ‘a new god’. This imagery is repeated in a letter from Roerich to Diaghilev describing a tribe gathered at ‘the foot of a sacred hill, in a lush plain … to celebrate the spring rites … there is an old witch … a marriage by capture, round dances … the wisest ancient [imprints] his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth’. Then the young virgins dance before choosing one of their number to be ‘the victim they intend to honour’.
The titles of the sections Stravinsky used as he began composing echoed these visions: ‘Divination with Twigs’ (he told Roerich that ‘the picture of an old woman in a squirrel fur … is constantly before my eyes as I compose’); ‘Khorovod – Round Dance’; ‘The Kiss of the Earth; ‘Game of Abduction’; ‘Round Dances’; ‘Secret Night-games’ (which would become ‘Mystic Circles of the Young Girls’); and ‘Holy Dance’. By January 1912 he had finished Part One, and on 17 March he wrote to tell his mother that when he had played the completed sections to Diaghilev and Nijinsky in Monte Carlo, ‘they were wild about it’.
Two days later he told Roerich triumphantly that he thought he had ‘penetrated the secret of the rhythm of spring’. The mood and sounds of the Russian spring were vitally important to the piece, as essential to its émigré creators as Roerich’s shamanic studies or Stravinsky’s complex modernism. Serge Lifar described spring in Kiev, where he grew up, being marked by the ‘dull, rumbling explosions’ of the dislodged floes of the thawing Dnieper crashing against one another in a torrent of melt-water. Later, an exiled Stravinsky would speak of ‘the violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.’
Diaghilev raved so enthusiastically to Pierre Monteux about Stravinsky’s ‘extraordinary new work’ that he was desperate to hear it when Stravinsky played it to them in Monte Carlo in the spring of 1912, but he was totally unprepared for the sadistic novelty of what he heard. As Stravinsky, drenched in sweat, pounded away on a quivering, shaking upright piano, the sound dwarfed everything. Monteux listened ‘in utter amazement’, worried his friend might burst. ‘I must admit I did not understand one note of Le Sacre du printemps. My one desire was to find a quiet corner in which to rest my aching head.* Then my director turned to me with a smile and said, “This is a masterpiece, Monteux, which will completely revolutionise music and make you famous, because you are going to conduct it.”’
In June, Stravinsky and Debussy played Stravinsky’s four-hand arrangement of Sacre at the Paris home of Louis Laloy, editor of La Grande Revue. ‘When they finished, there was no question of embracing, nor even of compliments,’ wrote Laloy. ‘We were dumbfounded, overwhelmed by this hurricane which had come from the depths of the ages, and which had taken life at the roots.’ Five months later, Debussy was still in thrall to what he had heard, writing to Stravinsky that he was haunted as if ‘by a beautiful nightmare’, trying ‘in vain to recall the terrifying impression that it made. That’s why I wait for the performance like a greedy child who’s been promised some jam.’
When they first began discussing Sacre, Roerich and Stravinsky had assumed that they would use Fokine as choreographer. In 1910–11 he was still the Ballets Russes’s directeur choreographique and although Nijinsky had begun work on Faune, no one apart from Diaghilev, Bakst and Bronia knew about it. But by early 1912, as he was finishing Sacre, Stravinsky was having doubts, writing to his mother from Monte Carlo in March to complain that Fokine was not up to the job. Each of his successive works was immeasurably weaker than the one before, Stravinsky said, and for Sacre ‘new forms must be created and the evil, the greedy and the gifted Fokine has not even dreamed of them … Genius is needed, not habileté.’ It could only be Nijinsky.
Diaghilev agreed, though neither he nor Stravinsky was motivated solely by artistic concerns. At this time Diaghilev and Fokine were locked in conflict over Faune and Daphnis et Chloé and he had no intention of retaining Fokine for another ballet. Using Nijinsky as choreographer – he thought – would also reassert his authority over Sacre, about which he was still smarting because it had been conceived without him. He assumed Nijinsky, whom he still saw as his creature, would act as his cypher. For his part Stravinsky, who had resented being a junior partner in earlier collaborations with Diaghilev, thought he would have more creative control with the inexperienced Nijinsky staging Sacre.
Both men sought to assert their influence over Vaslav with (according to which source you choose to believe) varying success. Grigoriev thought that while composing Sacre, Nijinsky ‘was as helpless as a child and relied entirely on suggestions from Diaghilev and Stravinsky’. Because Nijinsky’s method relied upon working out movements on his own body and then demonstrating them to his dancers – ‘something he brought with him and showed you and you could either do it or you couldn’t do it’ – rather than working spontaneously with them as Fokine had used to, many of the dancers assumed Diaghilev worked out the steps and showed them to Nijinsky, who was then expected to teach them to the company. However Diaghilev’s faith in his taciturn friend’s capacity for communication was so limited that he had brought in Marie Rambert to help him explain what he wanted from the dancers. That Diaghilev was the ultimate source of the ballet and only used Nijinsky as his interpreter is as unlikely as the image of the portly impresario stomping around a hotel suite demonstrating to Nijinsky the Chosen Maiden’s solo, though this is what Serge Lifar would later claim on Diaghilev’s behalf.
Throughout the choreographic process, Stravinsky worked closely with Nijinsky, attending rehearsals whenever he could – and once furiously pushing aside the fat German accompanist, whom Diaghilev had nicknamed Kolossal, to play the music the way he intended it: ‘twice as fast as we had been doing it, and twice as fast as we could possibly dance,’ remembered Marie Rambert. ‘He stamped his feet on the floor and banged his fist on the piano and sang and shouted, all to give us an impression of the rhythms of the music and the colour of the orchestra.’
He annoyed Nijinsky, though, by his time-wasting assumption that he was the only one who knew anything about music. ‘He explains the value of the black notes, the white notes, of quavers and semi-quavers, as though I had never studied music at all,’ Vaslav complained to Bronia, who replied that since Stravinsky did that with everybody Vaslav shouldn’t take it personally. While Stravinsky may not have believed that anyone other than himself understood music, he expected Nijinsky to listen to his ideas about dance. Luckily his ideas for Sacre were closely in line with Nijinsky’s. Throughout the collaborative process Stravinsky declared repeatedly that he and Nijinsky were wholly in tune. His conviction that the movement should be all dancing with no mime was perhaps a response to Petrushka, in which emotions and drama had been conveyed as much through facial expression as by using the body, a style Nijinsky had already moved away from in Faune and Jeux.
Like Diaghilev and Nijinsky, Stravinsky was in contact with Jaques-Dalcroze, who wrote to him in January 1913 to argue that only when the musician understood the human body as fully as the dancer’s body was impregnated by the music would the regeneration of ballet that Stravinsky had initiated be complete. All three of them were influenced by Dalcroze’s idea that in dance each musical note should be expressed by a corresponding movement; this would become one of the defining, and controversial, ideas behind Sacre’s choreography. Using Dalcrozian theory as a starting point, Nijinsky would originate the important ‘idea of the ballet as an organism broken up into interacting members, dancing in relation to itself and to each other, keeping the time of its unit in relation to the great pulse of the whole’.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1912, when he had time, Vaslav was planning Sacre, writing out his ideas swathed in a hotel dressing gown, the hood pulled down over his face like a prize-fighter’s. The solidity, strength and simplicity of modern art – especially that of Gauguin – fascinated him, reflecting as it did his own preoccupations with rejecting illusion and artifice. Like Stravinsky he wanted to challenge preconceptions, violate rules and redefine expectations to bring audiences to a new reality. Ottoline Morrell observed him ‘incessantly thinking out new ballets, new steps … absorbed by the ideas of the old Russian myths and religions’.
In November, as they toured Germany, Nijinsky began work on the second part of Sacre with Bronia as the Chosen Maiden. Immediately she understood what he wanted from her. ‘As I danced I imagined above me the dark clouds in the stormy sky, remembered from the painting by Roerich. Around me I pictured the calm of nature before the onslaught of a hurricane. As I envisaged the primitiveness of the tribal rites, where the Chosen Maiden must die to save the earth, I felt that my body must draw into itself, must absorb the fury of the hurricane. Strong, brusque, spontaneous movements seemed to fight the elements as the Chosen Maiden protected the earth against the menacing heavens. The Chosen Maiden danced as if possessed, as she must until her frenzied dance in the primitive sacrificial ritual kills her.’ In two sessions Vaslav had created the role for her; by the third, Bronia was dancing it alone while her brother watched, delighted.
When the Ballets Russes were in London in December 1912 Vaslav began working on Sacre with the whole company for the first time. An approving Stravinsky told a reporter that, ‘Nijinsky works with passionate zeal, forgetting himself’. The dancers were less enthusiastic, however. The music was so difficult and unpredictable that even the orchestra had trouble with the rhythms – they needed seventeen orchestral rehearsals as opposed to nine for L’Oiseau de feu – and, on first seeing the score, some demanded to know if the music was correctly printed: they could not believe how complicated it was. Occasionally during rehearsals, when the music began an awkward crescendo, nervous giggles could be heard, infuriating Stravinsky who would rush to the piano, shouting, ‘Gentlemen, you do not have to laugh, I know what I wrote!’
Because there was no melody, the dancers had to follow the rhythm, calling out the time as they danced – they loathed what they called these ‘arithmetic classes’ in which all they did was count.* To make it even more difficult, the polysyllabic Russian numbers they all used took so long to say that they couldn’t keep pace with the music. The girls ran around ‘with little bits of paper in their hands, in a panic, quarrelling with each other about whose count was right’. This was why Diaghilev had employed Marie Rambert, whom the company quickly nicknamed Rhythmichka. Her role was to explain to them what Nijinsky wanted, helping to link the movements directly to Stravinsky’s complex score; but although she was popular with the dancers, hardly any of them, including Bronia, approved of her Dalcrozian ideas or understood her strange position within the Ballets Russes – neither really one of them nor part of Diaghilev’s inner circle of tacticians.
The lack of melody was one problem for the corps; Nijinsky’s steps were another. The flat-footed, straight-legged jumps, the pounding stamping that made up a percussion section of its own (so interconnected were the choreography and the composition that Stravinsky noted the rhythm of their steps on his piano score), the bent-over stance, turned-in feet and shuffling steps contradicted in every gesture the nobility and grace of classical ballet. Movement was disconnected, jagged, frenzied, apparently chaotic. The dancers found the steps physically painful and resented being asked to perform them.
Because they spent much of the time turned away from the audience, absorbed in their mystery, and there was only one short solo – most of the ballet was danced by the corps en masse – there was no chance for the dancers to shine individually. As Nijinsky would tell a journalist in February 1913, Sacre ‘is the life of the stones and the trees. There are no human beings in it. It is only the incarnation of Nature … and of human nature. It will be danced only by the corps de ballet, for it is a thing of concrete masses, not of individual effects.’
This depersonalisation, this denial of individual virtuosity and beauty for its own sake, was an implicit repudiation of the dancers’ ideals and their years of training and discipline. Many saw Nijinsky’s challenging choreographic style as an insult to the traditions their work celebrated. Karsavina was one of these. Though she did not dance in Sacre, she said that in it (and Faune) Nijinsky ‘declared his feud against Romanticism and bid adieu to the “beautiful”’ – which was about as disapproving as the diplomatic Karsavina could force herself to be.
But while his critics complained that his work was a rejection of beauty, Nijinsky knew they were wrong. He was, he wrote, ‘the artist who loves all shapes and all kinds of beauty. Beauty is not a relative thing. Beauty is god. God is beauty with feeling … Beauty cannot be discussed. Beauty cannot be criticised.’ Instead he wanted to re-examine beauty: ‘La grace, le charme, le joli sont rangés tout autour du point central qu’est le beau. C’est pour le beau que je travaille,’ he explained to a journalist. Grace, charm, prettiness – Karsavina’s ‘Romanticism’ – could obscure what he considered the essence of the art to which he was devoted, and it was this to which he wanted to return, not unlike Cézanne painting and repainting the same view of Mont Sainte-Victoire in an effort to uncover its spirit, or Gertrude Stein re-examining the use and function of language by subverting what people expected to hear or read. As Stein would write of Picasso, ‘Another vision than that of all the world is very rare … to see the things in a new way that is really difficult, everything prevents one: habits, schools, daily life, reason, necessities of daily life, indolence, everything prevents one.’
As the rehearsals went on, Nijinsky became increasingly defensive, all too aware how inadequately the dancers grasped his concept for Sacre. Even with Rambert’s help he was ‘unable to reach them [the corps de ballet] personally and obtain their cooperation, so they might believe in him and be supportive of his work and ideas, so essential during the process of creation’. If they could not perfectly copy a movement he demonstrated, he would accuse them of deliberately working against him and Diaghilev would have to come and make peace. When he saw how unpopular Sacre was proving in rehearsal, Diaghilev remarked sanguinely, ‘that it was an excellent sign. It proved the composition to be strikingly original.’
What he was seeking to convey, as Vaslav told Lady Ottoline, was the sense of ‘pagan worship, the religious instinct in primitive nature, fear [and] ecstasy, developing into frenzy and utter self-oblation’. His inspirations were Stravinsky’s extraordinary score and the spiritual and anthropological discussions he had with Roerich, whom he respected enormously. He was also indebted to the folk dances he had performed as a boy – the Ukrainian hopak, with side kicks, big jumps and powerful arm movements; the Caucasian lezghinka, in which men wearing soft leather boots dance almost on pointe, with fisted hands and turned-in legs; the khorovod, a circular dance used in ritual ceremonies, with flat palms and turned-in feet – and even to the costumes Roerich was designing. Roerich used folk motifs from the libretto like the firewheel and bundles of dry twigs used for setting fire to effigies, as well as rhythmical repetition, perhaps the main decorative element of Russian folk art. So important were his ideas that Nijinsky apparently waited to begin composing the ensemble sequences until he had seen Roerich’s sketches so that he could incorporate their arcs and broken and concentric circles into his choreography.
Another element in the fractured, disconnected quality of Nijinsky’s choreography for Sacre must have been his own increasingly fragile emotional state. Through the spring of 1913 the psychological pressures he was under, which had been building since he began composing Faune in 1910–11, were approaching a crisis point. It was ‘as if he felt that a net was being woven around him and was about to envelop him’.
His schedule of performing, composing and rehearsing, never in the same place for longer than a few weeks, was ever more relentless. There had never before been a ballet-master as young as him. Although he was convinced of the importance of what he was doing, he was not always sure he was doing it right and he had no real support. Bronia was newly married; his mother could not begin to comprehend the complexities of his life with Diaghilev (he wrote in his diary that he avoided speaking to her and Bronia about Diaghilev because he knew how worried they were about him); and Diaghilev himself, it was becoming increasingly obvious – the man who was meant to be his patron and protector – had a private agenda that clashed with his own.
Lydia Sokolova, a young British dancer born Hilda Munnings (until Diaghilev transformed her into a Russian ballerina when she joined the Ballets Russes in early 1913), described Nijinsky as being like ‘a wild creature who had been trapped by society and was always ill at ease’. He barely spoke to anyone and, if addressed, looked ‘as if he might suddenly butt you in the stomach’; he was always nervous, fiddling with his hands and nails, ‘and seemed to exist on a different plane. Before dancing he was even more withdrawn, like a bewitched soul. I used to watch him practising his wonderful jumps in the first position, flickering his hands; I had never seen anyone like him before.’
What kept Vaslav going was the knowledge that he was creating something totally original. In late January 1913 he wrote to tell Stravinsky how pleased he was with Sacre’s progress. ‘If the work continues like this, Igor, the result will be something great. I know what Le Sacre du printemps will be when everything is as we both want it: new, and for an ordinary viewer, a jolting impression and emotional experience. For some it will open new horizons flooded with different rays of sun. People will see new and different colours and different lines. All different, new and beautiful … So, goodbye until we see each other. A bow to your wife. I kiss your hand. Vaslav.’
The first blow to Vaslav’s hopes came a few weeks later, when Bronia told him that she could not dance the role of the Chosen Maiden. She had been feeling nauseous and faint for some weeks and the doctor had informed her she was expecting a baby. Nijinsky lost control, screaming violently at her, ‘You are the only one who can perform this dance, only you, Bronia, and no one else! … You are deliberately trying to destroy my work, just like all the others.’ When Bronia’s husband Sasha Kochetovsky came into the room, Vaslav turned on him as if he were about to hit him, calling him an ‘uncouth muzhik [peasant]’ despite all Eleonora’s protests that it was perfectly normal for a married woman to have children. Later he told Rambert that ‘“a blackguard, a brigand … has prevented Bronia from dancing Jeux and Sacre”. “But who is he?” “Kochetovsky!”’
Marriage – the first time Bronia had deviated from the path of art to which she and Vaslav had jointly been devoted from childhood – had shaken the bond between brother and sister; this betrayal, as he saw it, hardened the rift, leaving him even more isolated. In her memoirs, Bronia also described arguing with him during this period about the Dalcroze system, which she thought had nothing to teach classical dancers. After his furious response to her pregnancy she avoided him altogether, even though she longed to tell him how much she admired Sacre’s choreography and realised ‘how exhausting and fatiguing it was for him to be surrounded by uncooperative artists and try to create a ballet in such a hostile atmosphere … what an effort it cost him to obtain from the artists such exactness in the execution of a choreography they did not understand’.
Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the ballet travelled to Paris for their final rehearsals before the season began, but the news that Isadora Duncan’s two children had been drowned in the Seine on 19 April cast a dark shadow over their arrival. Their driver had left the car in gear when he got out to crank the engine and, when it started, it shot off the road, plunging into the river. It was impossible to reach the two children and their governess who were trapped inside. Vaslav, who had known the children, was very distressed by this tragedy.
Just as in 1909, the theatre they were using was under construction, so they were having to rehearse alongside all the dusty commotion of builders. But the atmosphere was very different from the holiday feel of four years earlier. With Jeux still unfinished and so much riding on Sacre, the overwrought Nijinsky was furious at any distraction from his work and the entire company was picking up its mood from him and Diaghilev.
The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was Gabriel Astruc’s baby, a vast new building intended to be a temple to modern dance and music. The sculptor Antoine Bourdelle had even used Nijinsky, alongside Isadora Duncan, as his inspiration for the bas-reliefs that adorned the monumental exterior, showing Vaslav tearing ‘himself away with a wild leap from the marble still holding him fast’. He called Nijinsky ‘more than human … [with] something of the sacred animal’ about him.
Astruc was so determined to have the Ballets Russes as his opening programme that he promised Diaghilev an astronomical fee for the season: 25,000 francs a night for twenty nights (when in earlier years he had received less than half that for a night’s performance), as well as extra money for supplementary expenses – electricians, coiffeurs, costumiers, stage hands and so on. Diaghilev couldn’t have accepted less. His existing debts and the number of rehearsals Nijinsky and Monteux needed for Sacre were crippling him. Even though the front row of seats had already been installed – and the tickets for them sold – when Stravinsky, ‘in that sad delightful Slav voice of his’, insisted that they be ripped out to make space for the extra musicians he needed for Sacre (‘You know, old friend, it’s done with the utmost ease nowadays by that powerful machine they have for cutting steel and reinforced concrete. And the upholsterers will patch up the damage very quickly’), Astruc had agreed.
It is to this period of their time together that Vaslav’s most eviscerating memories in his diary about Diaghilev belong: his false smiles, the black hair-dye that stained his pillowcase, his two false front teeth which moved when he touched them nervously with his tongue, and which reminded Vaslav of a wicked old woman. ‘I realised that Diaghilev was deceiving me. I trusted him in nothing and began to develop by myself, pretending that I was his pupil … I began to hate him quite openly, and once I pushed him on a street in Paris … because I wanted to show him that I was not afraid of him. Diaghilev hit me with his cane because I wanted to leave him.’
Misia Sert’s letters to Stravinsky in the late spring of 1913 confirm the misery and unpleasantness between them. Diaghilev was ‘going through a dreadful period’ in which creditors were threatening to sue him and an insufferably rude Nijinsky was chafing against their relationship, recalling the deliberately provocative way the young Vaslav had behaved towards his father before he left Eleonora.
Bronia hoped a romance might blossom between Vaslav and Maria Piltz, whom they had known since schooldays and who was replacing her as the Chosen Maiden; she thought Piltz was ‘a little in love with him’. Piltz told an interviewer in 1968 that Vaslav had asked her to come with him for a ride through Paris fifty-five years earlier, but as she got into the carriage someone pulled her from behind. It was Diaghilev: ‘Get out. You’re not going anywhere with him.’ She remembered Vatsa fondly. ‘He was so nice! But he was strange … He used to joke around with me. Once I asked him, “What do you love best in the world?” He laughed and replied, “Insects and parrots.”’
Vasily Zuikov was still shadowing Nijinsky on Diaghilev’s instructions. When he and Rambert were working together, Zuikov would interrupt every few minutes to open or close the window, although Rambert recorded that ‘Nijinsky didn’t take the slightest interest in me as a woman. It never occurred to him, it never occurred to me. We were only discussing the work in hand.’ Afterwards they would go to Pasquier’s and drink hot chocolate and eat cakes. Rambert didn’t realise then that she was falling in love with Vaslav, but Eleonora noticed. Ever watchful for women trying to ensnare her son, she warned Vaslav that Rambert admired him; he assured her there was ‘no danger’. Something else would be needed to help him break free of Diaghilev’s hold.
Whatever his feelings for her, Rambert was enthralled by Nijinsky, as a man as well as an artist. He possessed a great feeling for literature and she found him observant, with a gift for summing people up with a choice phrase, and was drily funny. One of the most fundamental things Nijinsky’s life seems to me to have lacked was humour. Everyone around him took themselves so painfully seriously – unless the sources just conceal it (which is of course very possible) – perhaps easy laughter was yet another of the sacrifices they offered up on the altar of artistic immortality.
Many years later, Rambert remembered watching Vaslav’s ecstatic performances when he taught the Chosen Maiden’s solo to Piltz as ‘the greatest tragic dance I have ever seen’. ‘His movements were epic. They had an incredible power and force, and Piltz’s repetition of them – which seemed to satisfy Nijinsky – seemed to me only a pale reflection of Nijinsky’s intensity.’ For Rambert, Piltz could be no more than a ‘picture-postcard of a great painting’.
Others were less convinced. At one of the last rehearsals, Diaghilev asked Enrico Cecchetti, venerable maître de ballet and guardian of the old style of dance, what he thought of Sacre. ‘I think the whole thing has been done by four idiots,’ Cecchetti replied. ‘First, Monsieur Stravinsky, who wrote the music. Second, Monsieur Roerich, who designed the scenery and costumes. Third, Monsieur Nijinsky, who composed the dances. Fourth, Monsieur Diaghilev, who wasted money on it.’ Diaghilev just laughed.
The people who crowded into the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on the unseasonably warm evening of 29 May 1913 (the anniversary of Faune’s premiere) were a mixture of types – as Cocteau would put it, ‘the thousand varieties of snobbism, super-snobbism, anti-snobbism’. Many were bejewelled ladies from the highest ranks of society, accompanied by men in white tie, the grand music-lovers who had been Diaghilev’s earliest supporters in Paris. Others were younger, intellectual and rebellious – refusing to wear stiff collars and tailcoats (which anyway they could not afford) as a mark of their rejection of the traditional and outdated. Although the seats had all been sold, at double the normal price, Diaghilev, seeking support for his radical programme, had given these artists, critics and poets free standing passes, so that inside the theatre they were mingling on foot amidst the boxes occupied by the gratin.
Stravinsky had given an interview (which he later disowned) which came out that morning, explaining the inspirations behind Sacre and what he, Nijinsky and Roerich hoped to achieve with it. He concluded, ‘I am happy to have found in Monsieur Nijinsky the ideal collaborator, and in Monsieur Roerich, the creator of the decorative atmosphere for this work of faith.’ This public show of confidence does not tally with descriptions of the final orchestral rehearsals (during which Nijinsky tried to throw a chair at a workman who interrupted them) and the dress rehearsal the previous day, which Rambert described as pandemonium, and during which the dancers heard the orchestra play the score for the first time.
‘Whatever happens,’ Diaghilev told Pierre Monteux and the dancers, ‘the ballet must be performed to the end.’ To calm everyone’s nerves, the first piece was Les Sylphides: graceful, poised and beautiful. Then, after an interval, Monteux gave the signal for the orchestra to begin playing Le Sacre du printemps. Stravinsky said later that his conductor had been ‘impervious and nerveless as a crocodile’ but Monteux remembered keeping his eyes glued to the score in front of him, not daring even to glance at the stage. ‘You may think this strange, cherie,’ he told his wife, ‘but I have never seen the ballet.’
Like Monteux, the dancers waiting on stage were nervous, sweating heavily in their thick costumes.* This is the Sotheby’s description, from a 1968 sale, of a costume for one of the Maidens: ‘Exceptionally long-sleeved robe [of cream-coloured flannel] stencilled all over in barbaric patterns of oxblood, scarlet, lemon-yellow, turquoise-blue, peacock-blue, ochre and bottle-green, the predominant effect being tawny; and an attached vermillion petticoat stencilled with an oxblood and white stripe and dashes of white and yellow.’ The glowing, gem-like colours Roerich used recalled traditional Russian ikons. On their legs both men and women wore loose white leggings over which the ribbons of their soft shoes criss-crossed. The men wore false beards and strange, pointed, fur-trimmed caps, the women headbands and long false plaits. Behind them the set portrayed a lush green landscape dotted with the mystical symbols or ‘memory signs’ so important to Roerich: animal skulls, sacred rivers, hills and trees, magical stones and ominously gathering storm clouds.
The first strains of Sacre, a technically intimidating bassoon solo in an unusually high register, are hauntingly delicate, but the body of the score is wild, violent, powerful and provocative: complex rhythms layered over one another, pounding away in a remorseless, dissonant frenzy of primitive abandon. For an audience of 1913, even an audience as sophisticated as this one, hearing this kind of noise for the first time was overwhelmingly disconcerting, ‘as irritating to the nervous system,’ said one early listener, ‘as the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom’. Hisses, whistles, boos and disbelieving laughter broke out: was this some kind of joke? The composer Camille Saint-Saëns leapt out of his seat to leave, hissing to his neighbour, ‘If that’s a bassoon, I’m a baboon!’ Debussy, who had so longed to hear an orchestra playing Sacre, was sitting in Misia Sert’s box. After a few moments he turned to her ‘with a sad, anxious face’ and whispered, ‘It’s terrifying – I don’t understand it’.
Onstage, as the audience reaction grew less inhibited, the frightened dancers struggled to hear the music over the noise of the crowd and forced themselves to keep moving. Trembling with fury, dripping with sweat beneath the stage lights, his face ashen, Nijinsky stood on a chair in the wings, frantically shouting out the time for them. Stravinsky, who had rushed backstage when the tumult began, was by his side. Astruc leant forward out of his box, his fist clenched, and screamed, ‘First listen! Then hiss!’ Desperately Diaghilev switched the house lights on and off several times, appealing for calm.
Nijinsky’s willingness ‘to exclude the audience’, partly by denying them the lightness and sensuality they had come to expect from the Ballets Russes, partly by having his dancers apparently more absorbed in the ritual of their dance than the performance, caused fury. When the maidens held their cheeks as if in pain, hecklers shouted out, ‘Un docteur! Un dentiste!’ One countess took their heavily rouged cheeks as a deliberate dig at her own make-up, and stood up, cheeks flaming, tiara askew, to shout indignantly, ‘I am sixty years old, but this is the first time anyone has dared to make a fool of me!’
Defenders of the piece were equally vehement, believing like Harry Kessler that they were witnessing ‘an utterly new vision, something never before seen … art and anti-art at once’. They recognised that what they were seeing and hearing was as revolutionary as the writings of Nietszche, Proust and Freud, the scientific discoveries of Einstein or the art of Cezanne, Picasso and Brancusi. Fisticuffs broke out between opposing factions: one man hit another over the head with his cane; Monteux saw a man pull someone else’s hat down over his face. Some witnessed gendarmes arriving to quell the riot. The music critic Florent Schmitt cried, ‘Down with the whores of the Seizième!’ Finding herself in the midst of a battleground, Eleonora fainted.
At times, reading the accounts of the rowdy, roiling mob, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they had all come spoiling for a fight. The succès de scandale was an established part of cultural life, particularly in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century – the first Impressionist painters made a virtue of being rejected by the establishment with the Salons des refusés, while both Oscar Wilde’s 1894 Salomé and Richard Strauss’s 1906 opera of Wilde’s play caused their audiences to return again and again in delighted horror. Premieres of pieces by Wagner and Schoenberg had provoked riots. Diaghilev himself was hardly a stranger to courting commercial success by leading his audiences to the outer bounds of what they considered acceptable.
The audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was apparently restless from the start, whispering and giggling even before Sacre began. Roerich later observed that the real savages that night were not the dancers portraying on stage ‘the refined primitivism of our ancestors, for whom rhythm, the sacred symbol, and subtlety of movement were great and sacred concepts’, but the brawling mass watching them. ‘What an idiot the public is,’ Rambert heard Nijinsky muttering. ‘Dura publika, dura publika.’
The theatre did not quieten until Maria Piltz calmly faced the hooting, bellowing audience for her solo.* ‘She seemed to dream, her knees turned inwards, the heels pointing out – inert. A sudden spasm shook her body out of its corpse-like rigour. At the fierce onward thrust of the rhythm, she trembled in ecstatic, irregular jerks.’ Finally the Maiden collapsed, having danced herself to death, and six of the men lifted her limp body to the skies and bore it off with ‘no cathartic outpouring of despair, sadness, or anger, only a chilling resignation’.
The pitiless quality of Sacre, the impossibility of catharsis, is perhaps the main reason no one there that night quite knew what to make of it. As Prince Volkonsky, Diaghilev’s friend and former colleague at the Imperial Theatres, said, ‘Nothing could be less appropriate to prepare one for this spectacle than the word “ballet” and all the associations it carries with it.’ Not only was there no demonstrable grace, virtuosity or eroticism, but there was also no narrative and none of the conventional devices that steered an audience towards a sense of unity and completion. ‘This is not the usual spring sung by poets, with its breezes, its birdsong, its pale skies and tender greens. Here there is nothing but the harsh struggle of growth, the panic terror from the rising of the sap, the fearful regrouping of the cells,’ wrote Jacques Rivière, hailing Sacre a masterpiece. ‘Spring seen from inside, with its violence, its spasms and its fissions. We seem to be watching a drama through a microscope.’
The music and the choreography combined to create something simply breathtakingly new. If Le Sacre du printemps was for Roerich an attempt at reconstruction of an ancient ceremonial rite, for Stravinsky and Nijinsky the distant past was a metaphor for the tragedy of modern existence. Their Sacre – the music and the movement – was ‘a bleak and intense celebration of the collective will’ and its triumph over the individual. If audiences found it frightening, remorseless, inhuman, at times absurd – well, that was the point.
Grigoriev kept the curtain down for longer than usual before the next piece, Le Spectre de la Rose, in an attempt to restore order. Think of Vaslav in the crowded changing room while the wardrobe mistress stitched him into his pink body stocking, preparing himself after that tumult to dance a role which merely irritated him – one that he saw as cloyingly sentimental and outdated and by which he resented being defined.
After the final curtain, said Stravinsky, they were ‘excited, angry, disgusted, and … happy’. He, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Bakst, Cocteau and Kessler went off to dine. Diaghilev’s only comment on the evening was, ‘Exactly what I wanted.’ After dinner, during which they agreed that it might take people years to understand what they had just shown them, they drove through the dark and empty city in a cab, Cocteau and Kessler perched on the roof, Bakst waving a handkerchief tied to his cane like a flag. Diaghilev was muffled up against the night air in his opossum coat; Vaslav sat in his ‘dress coat and top hat, quietly contented, smiling to himself’.
Cocteau remembered their midnight ride taking them on to the Bois de Boulogne – where by coincidence Rambert and the rest of the company were also having a late supper, too excited to think of going to bed. The scent of acacia blossom hung in the air. When the coachman lit his lantern, Cocteau saw tears glistening on Diaghilev’s face. He was reciting Pushkin under his breath, with Stravinsky and Nijinsky listening intently. Whatever happened later, Cocteau wrote, ‘You cannot imagine the sweetness and nostalgia of those men.’
In June Nijinsky went on to London with Diaghilev and Walter Nouvel, his usual travelling companions. Also on their train was Romola de Pulszky, who had in Vienna some months earlier managed to persuade Diaghilev to allow her to follow the Ballet with the plan that if she carried on her training with Cecchetti she might one day dance with them. Nijinsky had been against the idea – what else could she be but a dilettante? – but Diaghilev, always aware of who people were, was happy to be able to please her mother, the great Emilia Márkus. Romola had managed to convince Diaghilev that it was Bolm, not Nijinsky, with whom she was in love; and so she had been accepted.
Since then, Romola had been tailing le petit (as she and her maid had codenamed Vaslav) with all the focus and guile of an international spy. The dresser at the Viennese Opera House, Mr Schweiner, fed her titbits of information; once a girlfriend entered Nijinsky’s room at the Hotel Bristol while he was dressing ‘as if she was making a mistake’; in Monaco Romola lay on a bench under a blossoming magnolia tree as Nijinsky, Diaghilev and their party had dinner on the terrace at the Hotel de Paris, ‘and watched them for hours and hours’. Having exhausted Bolm and Cecchetti, she had moved on to Baron de Günzburg, one of Diaghilev’s most important backers, and by his side had complete access to the Ballets. It was with Günzburg that she had watched the first night of Sacre, squashed in among the mob of dancers and friends watching from the wings, looking out for Nijinsky’s pale, tense face in the crowd.
Nijinsky in evening clothes by Valentin Sverov, head back and eyes half-closed, wearing the distant expression that fascinated Romola de Pulszky.
She was delighted to find herself on the same train as Vaslav – she always instructed her maid Anna to find out when he and Diaghilev were travelling, but this was the first time Anna’s information had been accurate – and, hanging out smoking (at this time a very racy activity for a woman, especially an unmarried woman) in the corridor near his compartment, was overjoyed when he asked her in his broken French if she was looking forward to being in London. It was their first conversation. On the sea crossing to Dover they spoke again and Romola triumphantly told Anna, who took a dim view of her crush on Nijinsky, that flirting was a great cure for sea-sickness.
In London she tried as much as she could to be where Nijinsky and Diaghilev were, badgering her English relations to take her to dine at the Savoy, where they were staying. Nijinsky ‘seemed now almost to take it for granted that I was here, there, and everywhere he appeared in public. He must have wondered how I managed it. I was really glad now that I had spent so much on my clothes in Paris,’ Romola wrote. ‘As I always went with some friends, it must have seemed natural to Diaghilev that I was present. He realised that I moved in the same society as he himself.’ Nijinsky was unfazed by this pursuit; indeed, sometimes when he looked at her she noticed the shadow of a smile on his face.
One morning Nijinsky and Karsavina arrived early for their class with Cecchetti, before Romola’s class had been dismissed. She took a long time to change so that she could watch them. Every day Cecchetti began with a little speech: ‘Tamara Platonova, Vaslav Fomich. You may be celebrated, great artists, but here in my class you are my pupils. Please forget here all your crazy modern movements, all that Fokine, Nijinsky nonsense. Please, ras, dva, tri, chetyre …’ They obeyed without question, helping sprinkle water on the floor, executing whatever he asked of them with the precision of clocks, listening to his criticism of the performances of the night before and his inexhaustible complaints about the terrible modern music they had to dance to. A few days earlier, for his birthday, Nijinsky had given Cecchetti a cane with a heavy gold top; Romola said she and the girls in her class wished there was less gold in it, because Cecchetti rapped them with it when they made mistakes.
The Opera House in Covent Garden was full every night for their season and again London surrendered for two weeks to the Ballets Russes’s spell. Muriel Draper and her husband went to the first night of Sacre with the pianist Artur Rubinstein and marvelled at the sound Monteux extracted from the orchestra, ‘a sound that is still sinking down through me with every blood-beat’. Nijinsky’s geometrical, ‘beyond-human’ choreography, thought Draper, intensified the music’s power. When the curtain fell, ‘the house broke loose’. As they filed off to find their drinks at the bar, the audience was stunned, shaken, paralysed.
‘You call that art, do you?’
‘You call it music?’
‘My God!’
Rubinstein saw it differently. He found the audience merely polite (this was also Monteux’s view, though the fact that the English applauded wearing kid gloves made even enthusiasm sound no more than polite) and he left the theatre ‘defeated and unhappy’ on account of the difficulty of the music and the incomprehensibility of the action on stage. ‘It took me weeks of study to understand the greatness of this work.’
Despite her loyalty to Vaslav, Lady Ottoline Morrell thought Sacre ‘really terrible and intense. Too much of Idea in it to please the public. Too little grace.’ Lytton Strachey, on the other hand (who had ordered a new suit for his first meeting with Nijinsky, deep purple, with an orange stock, and who had found him ‘much more attractive than I’d expected’ despite their lack of a common language) loathed it. He had not imagined, he told a friend, ‘that boredom and sheer anguish could have been combined together at such a pitch’.
While the French critics had wittily dismissed Sacre as the massacre du printemps, the English were more measured. One journalist acknowledged that while many felt Sacre ridiculed the ideals of beauty, perhaps ‘in a few years we shall have learned that there are other things in music and ballet than sweetness and sensuous beauty, just as there are other things in painting than domestic subjects’.
This was the way Nijinsky saw his work. In an interview published in the Daily Mail the day after Sacre’s premiere, he protested against forever being associated with Armide, Spectre and Sylphides. ‘The fact is, I detest “nightingale and rose” poetry; my own inclinations are “primitive”,’ he told the interviewer. ‘I eat my meat without sauce Béarnaise.’ In painting and sculpture, once-great traditions became banal through repetition, familiarity and the inevitable debasement of being copied by inferior artists, he observed. ‘Then there has always come a revolt. Perhaps something like this has happened in dancing.’
Meanwhile the shock of the new, the first experience of seeing and hearing Sacre, was easing and Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s peers were beginning to form their judgement on the piece. Once Debussy had had time to digest its extraordinary wildness, he was less afraid, telling composer André Caplet dismissively that it was ‘primitive music with all modern conveniences’. The influential editor Louis Laloy, who had been blown away by hearing Stravinsky and Debussy play the four-hand piano version of Sacre, described the score as being something people would not be ready for until 1940 and the dancing as epileptic and absurd. (In his diary Vaslav would write, ‘An artist sacrifices his whole life for art. The critic inveighs against him because he does not like his picture.’)
But Cocteau felt ‘uprooted’ by it: ‘Beauty speaks to the guts. Genius cannot be analysed any better than electricity … One has it, or one does not … The Russian troupe has taught me that one must burn oneself up alive in order to be reborn.’ The painter Sigismond Jeanès wrote to tell Stravinsky that Sacre had been ‘one of the great emotional experiences of my life’.
Even though they had performed in front of full houses in Paris and London – the box office had taken 38,000 francs on the night of Sacre’s premiere – Diaghilev was still heavily in debt and Astruc was bankrupt. His beautiful new theatre would be closed down three months later. The contract he had signed, promising Diaghilev 25,000 francs a performance had been his ‘death warrant … But I do not regret my madness.’
Stravinsky had developed typhoid after Sacre’s Paris opening and he had remained there to convalesce while the others went to London. He and Diaghilev were arguing by telegram about cuts Diaghilev wanted to make to the score in an attempt to make it more palatable to audiences. Diaghilev told Misia Sert that Stravinsky was ungrateful, that their success had gone to his head. ‘Where would he be without us, without Bakst and myself?’ Relations between them were so strained that Sert had to intervene. She wrote to Stravinsky telling him of Diaghilev’s troubles: Bakst, who thought Sacre dreadful, was about to quit because he thought Diaghilev should drop it from the programme; lawsuits over Diaghilev’s debts loomed; and the rebellious orchestra did not even want to play Sacre. Worst of all was Nijinsky, ‘intolerable and mal elevé… [speaking] to Serge as if he were a dog’.
Occasionally Vaslav managed to give the ever-present Zuikov the slip. It was probably around this time that a curious incident occurred, recounted many years afterwards by the porter at the Friends of St Stephen’s, a poorhouse on the Fulham Road. He remembered a young man being brought in late at night, unconscious. The man was given a bed in which to sleep off his excesses – nothing unusual in that – but when he awoke the following morning he astonished everyone by doing the splits over his own bed and then leaping over each of the twenty beds on either side of the ward. He spoke no English but somehow he must have managed to get out word of where he was, for a little while later Diaghilev appeared with some other people in a couple of cabs, thanked everyone profusely for looking after his young friend, tipped them lavishly in gold sovereigns, and bore him off.
During the summer of 1913, while he remained alone in Paris, Stravinsky continued to declare himself delighted with Sacre and its choreography. A few days after the premiere he gave an interview in which he called Nijinsky ‘capable of giving life to the whole art of ballet. Not for a moment have we ceased to think upon the same lines.’ On 20 June he wrote to his friend Max Steinberg (Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law), calling Nijinsky’s work superb: ‘I am confident in what we have done’. Two weeks later, nearly recovered and about to leave Paris for the summer, he wrote again. ‘Nijinsky’s choreography is incomparable and, with a few exceptions, everything was as I wanted it. But we must wait a long time before the public becomes accustomed to our language.’
Diaghilev, though, was quick to dissociate himself from Sacre, which had not been as successful with the public as he had needed it to be. At the end of July he summoned Bronia to the Savoy to discuss her brother – since he had become impossible to deal with directly. ‘I had to tell Nijinsky that his ballet Jeux was a complete failure, and since it has not had any success it will not be performed any more. The same also applies to Sacre. All the friends of the Ballets Russes – from Paris, or London, or St Petersburg – all agree that Sacre is not a ballet and it would be a mistake to follow this path of Nijinsky’s. They say I am destroying my ballet company!’
Bronia tried to explain to Diaghilev how devoted Vaslav was to his art, and how well it had been received by the people they respected, but Diaghilev was unmovable: in other genres, like painting or literature, immediate commercial success was immaterial, but a ballet had to be loved by the public from the start to have any life at all. The theatres that wanted to present the Ballets Russes’s programme did not want to sponsor Nijinsky’s researches into the future of dance. Sir Thomas Beecham had already made Diaghilev promise that Fokine would create two new ballets if they were to play the Opera House in 1914, one of which would be Strauss’s La Légende de Joseph – on which Nijinsky was already working. Baron de Günzburg, on whose financial support Diaghilev depended, had also made Fokine’s return a condition of his continued investment in the company.
Nijinsky received the message with such fury that Bronia understood why Diaghilev had preferred to let her break the news to him. ‘Let Diaghilev give it [Joseph] to whomever he wishes … I do not care … But it does matter to me that Diaghilev has become a servile follower, a theatrical lackey, and is destroying everything that is the heart of the Ballets Russes.’
When Bronia went back to see Diaghilev again, he urged her to sign her 1914 contract as soon as possible, obviously anticipating that a break with her brother would shake her commitment to him. He was honest with her when she asked him about the latest rumour flying around the company: that Fokine’s price for returning to the Ballets Russes was dancing the lead roles – Nijinsky’s roles – in all his ballets.
‘But Nijinsky would have more to dance in the Imperial Theatres.’
‘Well, something has to be arranged. Nijinsky cannot return to Russia. Perhaps he should simply leave the Ballets Russes and not dance for a year.’
If he would not accept his conditions, Diaghilev told Bronia, ‘I shall have to part with Nijinsky’. This was when Bronia realised that their friendship was over, though despite all their differences she knew that her brother still saw himself very much as one of Diaghilev’s artists.
Underlying the arguments about the creative direction of the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky’s role within it was a longstanding and bitter debate over money. Vaslav had never received a regular salary and had never signed a contract. But as he became more important to the company he demanded to be paid like everyone else – if only as a mark of his independence. According to Bronia, he wanted several years’ back salary, amounting to 200,000 francs per year for 1911, 1912 and 1913, minus expenses (four times what the opera superstar Fyodor Chaliapin had been paid for the month-long season of 1909). But Diaghilev, deeply in debt, didn’t have the money – even if he had thought he owed it. After all, the old agreement had been that Diaghilev would look after Vaslav while Nijinsky danced. Both of them felt resentful and aggrieved.
When the London season ended in early August, the company was due to sail to South America for their first non-European tour, but although he had booked a stateroom Diaghilev had decided not to go with them; Günzburg would go in his place. He hated sea travel (whenever they went on a boat he made Zuikov pray for them both while he lay sick and groaning on his bunk, which was why Nijinsky had been free to flirt with Romola between Calais and Dover a few weeks earlier) and believed what a fortune-teller had once told him, that he would die on water. Instead he would have a holiday in Venice, pull himself together and plan for the future.
For the first time in his adult life, Vaslav was going to do something on his own. Before he left, Bronia, whose baby was expected in October and who was therefore remaining behind, urged Vaslav to remember that he was an artist and above such spats with Diaghilev. Instead, she said, he should look on the journey as a holiday: relax, enjoy himself, not work too hard and try to make friends.