LONG BEFORE HE DIED, Nijinsky’s legend was being written. Even when she no longer needed, as she saw it, to promote her husband’s memory in order to raise funds for his care, the indomitable Romola ‘refused to accept that his name’ – and her importance as his wife – ‘might fade into oblivion’. Without her, it is almost possible to imagine that Nijinsky might live on today in nothing more than old press cuttings and photographs and in the memories of a handful of artists who danced with someone who once danced with him.
Until she died in 1978, Romola controlled the myth she had in large part created. Richard Buckle, author of the only major English biography of Nijinsky, published in 1971, was scrupulously careful to satisfy her demands when his book came out, but after her death he issued an addendum saying that she had deliberately sensationalised and in places falsified her account of Nijinsky’s life to make money. ‘And who could blame her?’ he asked. ‘She had to look after her sick husband.’ Her daughter Tamara described her mother as imperious and self-assured, which was ‘both her strength and her weakness. Did she know when she crossed the borderline between fact and fiction?’
This is the most generous interpretation of her actions. Others – like the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, whose 1991 account of Nijinsky’s life focused on his mental health – have portrayed her as a villainess. Reviewing Ostwald, Roy Porter described Romola as ‘truly awful … a hysterical egotist, greedy for fame but talentless’, who confined Vaslav to a series of uncaring asylums which she then blamed for his failure to recover and, when she was not looking after him – which was most of the time – swanned around the world living off his name and milking the role of martyr to art and love.
In the last decades of her life, Romola lived between Switzerland, Japan and the States, jealously guarding the manuscript of Nijinsky’s diaries (it was sold to a private collector the year after her death for £45,000 and is now in the New York Public Library), bickering with Serge Lifar over which of them would lie next to Nijinsky’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetary (Lifar had not mentioned to her when he moved Nijinsky’s body that he planned to lie beside it) and following the spectacular racehorse named after her husband wherever he was running.
Both Karsavina and Rambert tried desperately to avoid her on her flying visits to London. The producer John Drummond encountered her in an office at the BBC in the 1960s. Her hair was dyed a brassy red and she wore a moth-eaten fur coat. She was saying, ‘You know, they all got it wrong; I was the only woman Diaghilev liked …’ – rather a bold statement, even for her.
Romola had become alienated from both her children and they barely spoke to one another (she told Kyra’s son that Tamara was not Nijinsky’s daughter). In 1960, at the age of forty-seven, Kyra entered a Franciscan order as a lay sister. She believed her father had not been mentally ill but broken by the brutality of his surroundings and she found consolation – as he had tried to – in an intense spirituality. In 1991 Tamara wrote a brave and compassionate book about her parents’ relationship which she dedicated to her grandson – the child of a daughter from whom she in turn was estranged – so that he could ‘feel pride in the past’.
Kyra, who danced several of his roles for Marie Rambert, among others, in the 1930s, was astonishingly like her father physically, with the same powerful, compact body and the same compelling expression of feline grace in her slanted eyes. In the late 1940s Igor Markevitch, by then separated from Kyra, was in Venice with their teenage son Vaslav. An elderly man approached them. ‘Very strange. There was a Russian dancer who used to come here before the First War. He was very famous. The boy reminds me of him.’ The boy would grow up to be a painter, Vaslav Markevitch.
The other great moulder of Nijinsky’s legend was Diaghilev, Svengali to his Trilby and, in the mythology of the Ballets Russes, somehow almost his rival. In the early, first-hand literature about the Ballets Russes – the accounts of Benois and Nouvel (through Arnold Haskell), of Lifar and Massine, Stravinsky and Cocteau, Fokine and Monteux, and of Romola herself – there is an unseemly rush to denigrate each other’s contributions and beneath it all the sense of an underlying, unspoken (and spurious) question: who was greater, the Showman or Petrushka?
The first and perhaps the greatest thing Diaghilev did for his friend was to provide him with an arena in which art was exalted into the noblest of pursuits. Lynn Garafola phrases it best. His ‘generosity [to his protégés, Nijinsky being the first among equals] was boundless: he gave them all the accumulated wisdom of his years and all the fruits of his broad experience, in addition to a knowledge of the arts, an appreciation of aesthetics, and an introduction to anyone who was anyone in the circles of high bohemia. Money was no object: he paid for months of experiments in the studio and hundreds of rehearsal hours with dancers, for music by the greatest composers and sets by the finest artists. No Pygmalion ever served his Galatea as devotedly as Diaghilev served his lover-choreographers.’
However, the very intensity of this generosity – and what was expected in return – was untenable. The sacrifices Art and Beauty demanded were great: no home, no rest, no friends except those with whom Diaghilev surrounded himself, nothing permitted except the one overriding aim – immortality. Champagne was allowed, but Vaslav seldom drank. Diaghilev may have made his favourites into gods (as Marie Rambert put it) but none of them could ‘sustain it [without him] … Not at the height at which they were with him, because it was too high for anyone.’
Diaghilev created, in the Ballets Russes, something that was immeasurably greater than the sum of its parts. He ‘was the permeating genius who was behind it, through it, around it and before it; responsible in undefinable ways (as well as those that are definably within the province of a director) for every gesture, light and shade, and measure of tempo. Of all the great artists he has trained, which one ever achieved without him that which was possible with him?’ Nijinsky was not the only one of Diaghilev’s spurned or disgruntled colleagues who could never replicate the creative atmosphere they had experienced alongside him.
Perhaps this is where the problem lies. Ultimately Diaghilev fell out with most of the people with whom he worked and on whom he depended, whether they were friends or lovers. He tried to bind his collaborators to him by creating an almost claustrophobic sense of family within his company and, in Vaslav’s case, by relying too quickly on him to be his only choreographer, without allowing him a period of apprenticeship (Fokine by contrast had several years, between 1900 when he began composing and 1907 when Pavlova danced his Dying Swan, to hone his ideas away from the public eye) or enough time off; and, when they chafed against his dominion, he turned almost vengefully against them.
But the great achievement of this volatile group of artists, apart from their work, was their propagation of ballet, as we know it today, across the world. The diaspora of the Ballets Russes would promote or found national or municipal companies in six continents in the decades after Diaghilev’s death and this is perhaps the greatest legacy of Diaghilev’s genius for attracting, recognising and nurturing talent.
Many of these artists had known and worked with Nijinsky and they preserved a quite different memory of him than that disseminated by Romola or Diaghilev. Marie Rambert, for example, had danced the role of a Nymph in Nijinsky’s 1913 production of Faune. Later she would go on to mount the ballet herself for the company that would become the Ballet Rambert, her own memorial to the man she had loved.
Diaghilev’s later lovers form an interesting subsection of this group because apart from Massine none of them met Nijinsky until after his breakdown, but their collective obsession with him – I do not think that is too strong a word – would colour their subsequent careers. ‘Any outstanding work of merit in my career with the Russian Ballet was inspired by a man I had never known, and then by the haunting memory of someone I had seen more as a vision than as a living person,’ Anton Dolin would write.
In his books Serge Lifar claimed that Nijinsky had been merely Diaghilev’s cypher as a choreographer, parroting back what a bitter Diaghilev had almost certainly told him – that he had been responsible for everything good about Nijinsky’s ballets and dismissing the rest – and yet he moved heaven and earth (nearly), braving Romola’s wrath, to get Nijinsky’s body to Paris so that they could lie beside one another for all eternity – leaving Diaghilev, the man he had called his soulmate, alone in a Venetian cemetery.
This issue – of who was responsible for what – dogs all Diaghilev’s collaborators, but Nijinsky in particular. It was Fokine to whom Diaghilev was referring when he declared he could make a choreographer out of an inkstand, but he damned them all by implication; only Balanchine, whose later career eclipsed the work he did for Diaghilev, escaped this taint. In Spain in 1916 Diaghilev blithely told Nijinsky that he had explained to Massine all the steps and gestures for Les Femmes de bonne humeur, which Massine then showed the other dancers – just what he would later say to Lifar about Nijinsky and Faune.
I find it interesting that Diaghilev (or his promoters) could in one breath claim Nijinsky’s work as his own and in the next dismiss it as uncommercial, intellectually inadequate and immature. Surely if he really had created Sacre, for instance, as he claimed to Lifar, he would not have dropped it from the Ballet’s repertoire so quickly. It is no accident that when, in the late 1920s, interest in Sacre had been rekindled but Jeux was still considered Nijinsky’s weakest ballet, Diaghilev told Lifar that Sacre was wholly his but the part he had played in Jeux was ‘much more limited’. Vaslav knew he did it: in his diaries he wrote, ‘I know that Diaghilev likes saying they [the ballets] are his, because he likes praise’. ‘Diaghilev did not like me, because I composed ballets by myself. He did not want me to do things by myself that went against his grain.’
Almost everyone involved with the Ballets Russes at one time or another sought to trumpet their own achievements at the expense of their collaborators. Lifar quotes Benois saying that, ‘It was we, the painters – not the professional stage painters, but the real painters – who, profoundly attracted by the stage, took up stage design and so helped mould the art of dancing along new lines.’ Massine also attempted to play down Diaghilev’s role. ‘We were all of us caught up in the violence of the artistic creation in Paris of the period. No escape was possible, and the ballet expressed what the poets, painters and musicians had to say … Diaghilev followed.’
Many of them tried to do this at Nijinsky’s expense; Nijinsky, who could not answer back. As Lincoln Kirstein, to whom Nijinsky owes in great part the rehabilitation of his reputation from the 1970s onwards, observed, it was ‘convenient for many reasons for Cocteau (who knows perhaps more than anyone), even for Fokine, for his other colleagues, dancers and musicians, to keep either a deprecatory silence about his creative expression (apart from his dancing) or to flatly run it down’. In short, making Nijinsky look bad often made his collaborators or successors look good, and regardless of her motivations the only person who cared about this, to begin with, was Romola.
The battle between Diaghilev and Romola is another epic element of the Nijinsky myth. It is true that, as Arnold Haskell wrote, Diaghilev was uninterested in personal gain and had always lived precariously for the sake of Art: every penny he had ‘went into his dreams’. His pursuit by Romola through the law courts for the salary Nijinsky had been neither paid nor, it has to be said, promised, was a body blow. It is possible that, as Nijinsky imagined when he married, he might have been able to return to Diaghilev’s artistic bosom (if not his physical one), as Benois and Fokine had, if it hadn’t been for Romola’s refusal to compromise with the man she knew her husband would always consider his mentor.
It is also clear in her biography of Nijinsky that Romola thrilled to her duel with Diaghilev, pitting her wits and determination against this magnificent rival. With undisguised glee she recounted her first interview with Diaghilev, during which she convinced him that she was in love with Bolm and had barely noticed Nijinsky, and procured his permission to follow the Ballet by playing on his desire to impress her friend, an influential critic. On the surface, she wrote, a debonair impresario was granting a request to a young society girl; ‘in reality, two powerful enemies had crossed swords for the first time …[a] fine, covert duel … was being fought between and behind words’. When she left the room with permission to take lessons with Cecchetti, ‘I could scarcely believe I had succeeded in fooling such an inconceivably clever man’. She presented herself as having saved Nijinsky, a captive genius, from the evil Showman: a knight in a fairytale, with Vaslav cast as princess.
But Romola’s depiction of her battle with the dragon is ‘all the more misleading through being nearly accurate on so many points, and always highly plausible’. Diaghilev was an arch-manipulator; he was furious with Nijinsky for leaving him and he did undoubtedly want to diminish him in the most wounding way he knew how – as an artist – as punishment for that humiliation and heartbreak; but the thought that he was engaged with Romola in some kind of Miltonian struggle for possession of Nijinsky is laughable, and evidence only of her capacity for grandiose self-deception.
Romola’s unpopularity, and the image she propagated of her husband as half-victim, half-saint, both kept his name on people’s lips and turned many others in the field of dance against him. Quite deliberately, and for her own purposes, she had contravened Anna Pavlova’s tenet that a great ‘artist should show himself to the public only on stage, never in private life’ and the fact that she insisted so vehemently on his genius made many determined to reject it.
While today the mere mention of Nijinsky’s name can cause shivers of delight among his devotees, with one modern writer, the poet, Wayne Koestonbaum, riffing djinn, jinx, sky in an effort to quantify its enchantment, by the 1930s it had become ‘a sign of connoisseurship not to like Nijinsky’. His role in Schéhérazade had become an object of parody – by none other than Balanchine. The 1949 Dance Encyclopedia (published the year after the film The Red Shoes, partly based on Diaghilev and Nijinsky’s relationship, came out) even claimed that a ‘Nijinsky conspiracy’ was keeping his feeble flame alight. ‘So few people, comparatively speaking, ever saw Nijinsky dance, that if his fame were based on his actual appearances before the public, he would now have been completely forgotten … his role in the history of ballet and his influence on the art of ballet are extremely modest.’
The second great gift Diaghilev gave Nijinsky was making him the star of his ballets, the central figure on stage rather than an accessory to a ballerina. For the first time since the early nineteenth century, audiences came to see a male dancer – not a porteur but a supreme artist – and for him not just solos but entire ballets were composed around a male central figure. Diaghilev did this because he was erotically in thrall to Nijinsky. He saw him as beautiful and desirable and he presented him on stage as beautiful and desirable.
Diaghilev’s private passion for Nijinsky was a defining aspect of his public success as a dancer. Whatever really happened between them, physically or emotionally, for me this is their love story, the truest expression of their partnership – why, if for no other reason, they were in some romantic sense meant to be together and why they will always be remembered as inextricably linked: Diaghilev catching his breath in a darkened theatre watching Nijinsky dance; audience and performer united by the intensity of their desire, in their different ways, to capture the same perfection.
Nijinsky came to prominence at a time of deep-seated confusion about sex and gender and at the start of a century of change that would transform how Western society viewed dissenters from the norm. Freud published his first articles on sexuality and the unconscious in the 1890s. Despite flourishing ‘gay scenes’ in Paris, Berlin and St Petersburg, homosexual scandals were still rocking the established order all over Europe: Oscar Wilde’s case was the most notorious, but even political trials like those of Alfred Dreyfus in France and Roger Casement in Ireland had homosexual subtexts. At the same time, gay men with public profiles like Wilde and Diaghilev were increasingly unwilling to disguise or deny their preferences.
Women were also subverting traditional roles on a broader level, with the suffragettes demanding a say in government but also privately refusing to accept nineteenth-century stereotypes of how they should behave. Ida Rubinstein commissioned a ballet in which she played St Sebastian; other prominent but unfeminine women of the time, many of whom Nijinsky knew, included Virginia Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Sitwell, Zinaida Gippius and even his sister Bronia.
Diaghilev laboured under no illusions about himself. He knew he was gay and what was more he believed being gay was better than being straight – all the proof he thought he needed was that throughout history the great creators from Socrates to Christ to Leonardo had been homosexual (evidently it never occurred to him that women have not had the same opportunities to be creative). One of the things he and Stravinsky always disagreed about was his prosyletising insistence that Stravinsky would be a greater artist if he could detach himself from women.
With regard to the ballet in general, ‘although he was showman enough to emphasise the beauty of the female body’ on stage, Diaghilev’s preference for boyish slenderness (he used to say, ‘there is nothing uglier than a woman’s thighs’) made him ban short classical tutus for all his dancers except those with the longest, thinnest legs and shaped the attenuated physique that prevailed for female dancers throughout the twentieth century. Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of Vladimir and a composer who worked with Diaghilev in the 1920s, believed that Diaghilev deliberately embraced the ‘scandal’ of his homosexuality in promoting the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky. ‘The risk, and the sense of otherness, was a powerful source of Diaghilev’s mystique, and he used it knowingly.’
Thus, according to Richard Buckle, did Nijinsky’s entrance on stage in his pearl choker as Armida’s Slave in Paris in 1909 speed ‘this most homosexual of centuries on its vertiginous course’. Throughout the century an interest in dance in general and the Ballets Russes and Diaghilev and Nijinsky in particular was a signal of unmasculine interests and intentions: in A Queer History of the Ballet (2007), Peter Stoneley lists as examples of this the young Harold Acton dancing instead of playing football at Eton and Edmund White as a boy imitating the Favourite Slave in his mother’s turban. Almost unwittingly Nijinsky became a gay icon, for want of a better phrase: a beacon for homosexual men and women charting a new course, moving away from needing to keep their true selves hidden from the world.
One of these people, strangely enough, may have been Romola Nijinsky herself. Although it was not until Buckle’s biography of Nijinsky that his relationship with Diaghilev was discussed openly – coinciding with the advent of the gay liberation movement – Romola played her own part in this aspect of Nijinsky’s legend. After his breakdown, her great loves were women, and the books she wrote about Nijinsky make absolutely clear both what the relationship between her husband and Diaghilev was and that she understood the nature of it. ‘To make Sergey Pavlovich happy was no sacrifice to Vaslav,’ she wrote. ‘And Diaghilev crushed any idea of resistance, which might have come up in the young man’s mind, by the familiar tales of the Greeks, of Michelangelo and Leonardo, whose creative lives depended on the same intimacy as their own. The relationship between them was so real that it was therefore universally taken for granted. Diaghilev and Nijinsky were one in private life …’
Despite all her fame being attached to her role as a devoted wife, Buckle called Romola ‘predominantly homosexual’; certainly her sexuality was complex. Repeatedly in writing about her husband she marvelled at his ability to assume a woman’s form, imitating the peasant dances and gypsy girls he had seen in his youth and dancing for her the women’s roles in the ballets he was creating in the mid-1910s, and the way it stimulated her. ‘Never, never, have I seen among all the great prima ballerinas anybody so tender, so maidenly, so light, so harmonious, so perfect in their attitudes, and so matchlessly equal on their toes.’ Apparently he even planned a ballet for her, based on Pierre Louÿs’s Les Chansons de Bilitis, arranged by Debussy, the story of a young Greek girl of antiquity who, in the first act, has as her lover a shepherd and, in the second, another young girl – a fable Romola evidently saw as a mirror for her own life.
Just as much as Diaghilev, Romola was attracted by Vaslav’s androgynous quality on stage and acclaimed it as an element of his genius. Sometimes, she wrote, she felt like the women of mythology must have felt when a god made love to them, because despite the intensity of his passion there was always something unattainable about Nijinsky. Her bias was echoed by Nijinsky’s first biographer Buckle, who was too young to have seen him dance. He described an awkwardness for Vaslav ‘in the normal man–woman relationship in ballet’, implying that he needed to wear a mask to convincingly partner a woman.
But Haskell commented rightly that it was absurd to call Nijinsky effeminate just because he was beautiful on stage; indeed, in Schéhérazade and Faune it was his overwhelming virility that shocked audiences. Most observers who did see him have made clear that Nijinsky was not feminine, on stage or off. Cyril Beaumont said that rather than seeming to be either overtly masculine or overtly feminine, he appeared instead ‘of a race apart, of another essence than ourselves, an impression heightened by his partiality for unusual roles, which were either animal-like, mythological or unreal. On the stage he seemed surrounded by some invisible yet susceptible halo.’
While it is impossible and irrelevant now to try to assess whether Nijinsky was a masculine presence on stage or not – by yesterday or today’s standards – what is evident is that for audiences he ‘made the relation between the dancer’s sexuality and the dancer’s art absolute’, whatever vocabulary the critics used. His work expressed ‘Freud’s chart of man’s developing psyche,’ according to Lincoln Kirstein in 1970: ‘in Faune, adolescent self-discovery and gratification; in Jeux, homosexual discovery of another self or selves; in Le Sacre du printemps, fertility and renewal of the race.’ ‘If the trilogy of Faune, Jeux and Sacre has any biographical meaning at all,’ dance critic Arlene Croce wrote in 1982, ‘it is a biography of the orgasm: at first self-induced, later consciously manipulated through the piquancy and perversity of intimate relations, and finally a vast and sweated communal seizure, with death and life occurring together in a shattering rhythm.’
Freud explicitly associated sex with creativity, suggesting that sublimated desires might bubble up and be rechannelled as art. Rudolf Nureyev agreed. He saw creativity as ‘very much akin to sex, sexual drive or sexual appetite if you wish’ and he, like Nijinsky, projected incredible sexual energy on stage. Since his breakdown, Nijinsky’s creativity – Stravinsky said that his ‘creative imagination [was] … almost too rich’ – and his sexuality have been inextricably linked to his madness.
Dance has a long association with insanity, most famously in the 1841 ballet Giselle which tells the story of a girl who goes mad after having had her heart broken and who then, after dying, protects her faithless lover from the Wilis, beautiful but evil spirits from Slavonic folklore who dance young men to their deaths. The elegant, elongated redhead Jane Avril, ‘sylphide étrange’ and model for many of Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of fin de siècle Montmartre nightlife, was hospitalised as a girl with the nervous condition then known as StVitus’ Dance before taking her place on the stage of the Moulin Rouge. She was still dancing in the same decade Nijinsky arrived in Paris.
Even before his breakdown – though most of these accounts were written with the benefit of hindsight – people around him sensed something about Nijinsky that was unsettling. Cecchetti told Romola not to get close to him, Stravinsky detected worrying gaps in his personality, Charlie Chaplin found his presence unnerving, and set designer Robert Edmond Jones said he carried around with him an atmosphere almost of oppression. In old age Lydia Lopokova told author Henrietta Garnett that Nijinsky was always ‘potty. His soul had holes in it, but when he danced then his holes were healed, then he became alive and he was not unhappy any more.’
I find it hard to believe that the struggles faced by Nijinsky as a child and the tragedies he saw enacted all around him throughout his life did not heighten his vulnerability, making dance his sole means of escape from a brutal world: his father leaving them and the struggles borne by his mother to raise her children alone; his brother’s illness and incarceration; the excruciating intensity of the working atmosphere of the Imperial Theatres and then the Ballets Russes; the pressures of his celebrity; the strains of his relationship with Diaghilev and its devastating end; his haphazard marriage to a self-absorbed woman who worshipped but made no effort to understand him; and the waste and wreckage of the Great War and the revolution tearing his homeland apart – a place to which he knew he could never return. Illness and death were always near. Of his six classmates at the Imperial Theatre School alone, four died tragically in their twenties. He was the fifth and Anatole Bourman the sixth.
When Nijinsky was diagnosed and throughout the remainder of his life, quite different factors were thought to have contributed to his illness. Freud speculated that schizophrenia was caused by repressed homosexual urges; later psychoanalysts would suggest that overprotective mothering might stimulate it; in the 1930s Anton Boisen (founder of the clinical pastoral education movement and sufferer from mental illness, who believed some types of schizophrenia could be understood as crises of the soul, rather than the mind) thought it sprang from an intolerable loss of self-respect. Alfred Adler believed Nijinsky suffered from an inferiority complex stemming from the social disjunct between his deprived childhood and the sophisticated world in which he moved as an adult, what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb have called ‘the hidden injuries of class’. Nijinsky may have been subject to all of these conditions, but probably no doctor today would say they had caused his illness. Perhaps Nureyev, who could imagine what it felt like to be Nijinsky better than most, got it right. At first, he said, he had assumed that the end of his relationship with Diaghilev had made Nijinsky go mad; later he came to believe that Nijinsky’s ‘mind broke because he could no longer dance’.
At times during the last thirty years of his life Nijinsky was brutally restrained and heavily drugged; at others he was cruelly neglected or thrust back into the public eye to satisfy other people’s ambitions. The contrast between Nijinsky before and after 1919 – the weightless figure glowing in the spotlights and the stodgy, blank face of the mental patient – is the most tragic image from the story of his life.
‘Balanchine always said that his ballets are like butterflies: they live for a season.’ Ballet is a notoriously hard art to communicate. Like wordless poetry it seeks to express mysteries just out of reach. If you weren’t at a particular performance you wouldn’t be able to recreate what it was like – even if you watched the same piece being performed again the next night. ‘At the moment of its creation it is gone.’
The art of an individual artist is even more ephemeral. When Pavlova died in 1931, Lopokova observed that ‘a dancer can leave nothing behind her. Music will not help us to see her again and to feel what she gave us, nor the best words.’ But though the best words cannot make dance come alive again, they can help us understand the power of an artist and what he or she communicated to their audience; and the creative memory of other artists, their training and technique, their will to be artists and to carry on the traditions they represent, preserve the achievements of their predecessors in indefinable but fundamental ways. Though it may be impossible to ‘know how the great Taglioni [Marie Taglioni, 1804–1884] danced … her art is not dead. Some little girl in London, Paris or Milan dances differently today because Taglioni once existed. She will carry part of Taglioni with her onto the stage.’
Every great artist is the product of his training and surroundings and Nijinsky was no exception. His parents’ experience and passion, the tuition of the Legat brothers and Cecchetti, working as part of the Mariinsky at the end of fifty years of Marius Petipa’s supremacy, Fokine creating ballets for him and Diaghilev working to give him everything he needed off stage and on combined to create a background and environment in which he could shine.
Beyond that it was up to Nijinsky. Technique, craft, experience and practice will only take the artist so far; the next level is a kind of transfiguration, a spiritual awareness, a surrender. This is what creates the sense of exaltation in the audience – the knowledge that they are witnessing something on a higher plane, the ‘spiritual activity in physical form’, as Merce Cunningham and Lincoln Kirstein have defined dance. With Nijinsky, as Rambert wrote after his death, ‘his technique was completely subordinate to his expression’.
All the dancers from the Imperial Theatre School had incredible elevation, but what was unique about Nijinsky, according to Karsavina, was his ‘incorporeal lightness’, the way he appeared to float over the stage as if he had left the ground behind. Despite his muscularity, the effortlessness of his style could make him seem almost indolent and his port de bras, though classical in line, according to his training, was unconventionally supple and expressive.
‘Never has any other dancer been able to seize upon one’s imagination and sweep one into forgetfulness of the mechanics of dancing as Vaslav Nijinsky,’ wrote his schoolmate Anatole Bourman. Throughout her life Bronia was captivated by her brother’s art, which for her depended not upon his virtuosity or elevation, extraordinary though those were, but on ‘the nature of the Dance, living in him, body and soul’. For Massine, his work was simply ‘the highest form of artistic perfection’.
Nadine Legat, wife of Vaslav’s teacher Nikolai and herself a prima ballerina of the Imperial Theatres, told Tamara Nijinsky that for her there would always be ‘two Nijinskys – Nijinsky “the dancer”, whom the world enjoyed watching, loved and even idolised, and Nijinsky the “superman” – barred from us through his detachment from the material world which he had outgrown, and to which he did not wish to belong … To me Nijinsky was never mad. It was the world that was blind (if not mad) because it could not see, understand, or reach his height … therefore he lived in his own world.’
The gulf between what Nijinsky seemed to be onstage and what he really was offstage fascinated his contemporaries, both before and after his breakdown. ‘Where the essential Nijinsky existed was a constant mystery,’ admitted his wife. Tamara Nijinsky has offered this assessment of her father’s character, after years of trying to find out what he had been like: unimpressed by status, uninterested in money, ‘wrapped up in his art for which he lived and breathed; he only felt rapport for people on the same wavelength’. In manner reserved, in speech succinct, he sought ‘escape from people fawning upon him; only when he danced did the incredible metamorphosis take place’. It makes me wonder whether it would have been somehow always impossible for his offstage self to match up to his ineffable onstage experiences.
Even his friends often thought the dancer was his true self. ‘Nijinsky alone could use his body as a symbol of imponderable ideas while it moved in fluid physical intensity. The world of canvas scenery, costumed bodies, and painted faces, was his reality. It was Nijinsky himself who leapt out into space in red rose-petalled grace in Spectre de la Rose; it was an uninhabited hulk of heavily breathing man that rose from the thick mattress held outside the window by six pairs of strong hands, to cushion his fall,’ wrote Muriel Draper. ‘Atop the flimsy impermanence of a tottering show-booth in a country fair, the soul of Nijinsky questioned God with little useless folded hands, while unanswering crowds of spectators revolved in dead merriment below.’
‘You could never believe that this little monkey, with sparse hair, dressed in a wide overcoat, a hat balanced on top of his skull, was the public idol. Yet he was the idol,’ wrote Jean Cocteau. ‘On stage, his over-developed muscular system appeared supple. He grew taller (his heels never touched the ground), his hands became the foliage of his gestures, and his face radiated light.’
The power of his stage presence came to be an ambiguous burden. ‘Too familiar with the triumph of grace, he rejects it,’ Cocteau wrote elsewhere. Nijinsky ‘carries in him that fluid which stirs crowds, and he despises the public (whom he does not refuse to gratify)’. It was this feeling, surely – the impulse that made him tell newspapers that playing the Rose made him feel sea-sick – that made him so determined to create ballets over which he maintained total control rather than merely dance other people’s ideas of what he did best.
Fokine had been the inheritor of and challenger to Petipa’s formal traditions of virtuosity and splendour designed to reflect the pageantry and flatter the vanity of an imperial court. Wonderfully convincingly he conjured up past worlds and far-off places, using flowing movement rather than mime to create drama, and he did this by taking the dancers into his confidence to elicit from them the emotions he wanted expressed on stage. Along with Pavlova, no one embodied this style better than Nijinsky, yet when he embarked upon his own choreographic work it was an implicit denial of Fokine’s work.
Although it is wrong to think of Nijinsky as having rejected the classical canon – on the contrary, until his break with Diaghilev, he remained immersed in it, sprinkling water on the floor in Cecchetti’s class as humbly and enthusiastically in 1913 as in 1908 – he recognised its limitations. He was determined to speak for his own, modern world rather than to create exotic historical fantasies. ‘I do not like past centuries, because I am alive.’
Having taken what he could from Fokine, he discarded his sinuous, curving lines and unbridled sensuality and violence in favour of almost Byzantine angles, austerity and rigour: no sentiment, no emotion, just ideas expressed as pure movement. ‘What kind of beauty is hidden in this spare, restricted dancing?’ asked Jacques Rivière, comparing Nijinsky’s style to Fokine’s in his review of Sacre. ‘All one can read in it [Fokine’s dancing] is a vague, entirely physical and faceless joy … By breaking up movement, by returning to the simplicity of gesture, Nijinsky has restored expressiveness to dancing. All the angularities and awkwardness of this choreography keep the feeling in … The body is no longer an escape-route for the soul: on the contrary, it gathers itself together to contain the soul.’
Nijinsky even came to see Diaghilev as outdated. ‘I could not agree with him in his taste in art,’ he would write. ‘I want to prove that all Diaghilev’s art is sheer nonsense. I know all his tricks and habits. I was Diaghilev. I know Diaghilev better than he does himself.’ Creating was the only place where he could both be himself without being desired from the stalls and where he could rebel – against his training, against the traditions of which he knew himself to be a part and against Diaghilev’s control over him. ‘Now that I am a creator myself, I don’t any longer need you in the way that I did,’ the character of Nijinsky says to Diaghilev in Nicholas Wright’s 2011 play, Rattigan’s Nijinsky. ‘I must belong to myself and no one else.’
‘Absolutely everything he invented from the beginning, and everything that he invented was contrary to everything he had learned,’ said Marie Rambert. ‘I would not hesistate to affirm that it was he, more than anyone else, who revolutionised the classical ballet and was fifty years ahead of his time.’ Ninette de Valois agreed; for her Nijinsky was an even greater choreographer than dancer.
He also transformed the way choreographers were viewed, the respect accorded to the role as distinct from the work. In the early years of the twentieth century the choreographer was still seen almost as a theatrical technician, bringing the artistic direction of the stage designer and librettist to life. But building on the ground that Fokine had seized, with Nijinsky insisting on total control over every detail of his compositions, the choreographer would become for the first time and unequivocally an artist in his own right.
What seems to me to have been modern about Nijinsky’s style was his capacity to experiment, to re-examine established ways of moving and seeing and try to create from those discoveries a new aesthetic. Motivated by the same impulses as many of the visual artists and writers who were his contemporaries, he sought to pare down a tradition he saw as having become over-embellished and sentimental to return to first principles. He refused to be satisfied with prettiness or the charms of predictability, seeking instead a new distillation of reality and beauty.
One aspect of this disregard for convention was his conviction that art should not be confined by gender. His willingness to dance en pointe if Diaghilev had let him play the Firebird or in Jeux and his blurring of gender roles on stage demonstrates to me not a desire to take on feminine qualities, as many interpreted it at the time, but rather courage in taking risks and a passion for creating something new – a curiosity about finding out what his body and his art were capable of. ‘Had Nijinsky tried to follow an approved pattern of male perfection, he would never have given the full measure of his genius,’ wrote Karsavina. His willingness to challenge assumptions was an essential aspect of what he achieved on stage. The fact that his sexuality would not be an issue to audiences today is a triumphant legacy for a man who was defined by his sexuality in his lifetime.
It is hard to recreate a sense of the importance of art at the start of the twentieth century. In his 1977 autobiography, the critic and writer Arnold Haskell regretted the loss of the idea he had known in his youth that art was inspirational and important. People were schooled in it, they sought to understand it, they had faith in it as something numinous and transcendant, something that made man greater than a lump of clay or a hairless ape. He mourned that sense of urgency. No longer would a friend bang on his door to say, Come, come now; we’re going to see Nijinsky. Haven’t you seen Faune yet? – Don’t worry about what you’re wearing, the taxi’s waiting, we must get there in time – before racing him off to the theatre.
Haskell never saw Nijinsky dance, but those audiences who did were enraptured by him; there is an appreciable difference between what they said they saw in him and what they described seeing in other dancers. The essay accompanying a book of prints of Nijinsky published by the illustrator George Barbier in 1913 raved about him in the fragrant prose of the time, translated by the young Cyril Beaumont. ‘Ah! What poet could tell of the mysterious boon we accept from this foreign fairy with the oriental face, and weightless body? The spell of his subtle talent and his wondrous youth gives back to us, in desire without a pang, some magical illusion of our departed youth. It is as if this divine genius for defying the earth’s attraction and for treading the unseen paths of the air belonged to us too a little.’
The critic Carl Van Vechten, one of several people who ‘remembered’ being at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for the premiere of Sacre (but was actually there for one of the later performances), and who saw Nijinsky both in Paris in 1912 and 1913 and in New York in 1916, declared that as a performer he had no rivals. Nijinsky was simply ‘the greatest of stage artists … he communicates more of beauty and emotion to me as a spectator than other interpretative artists do’: ‘his dancing has the unbroken quality of music, the balance of great painting, the meaning of fine literature, the emotion inherent in all these arts’.
Another American critic, Stark Young, agreed. ‘I have never seen any other artist so varied in his compulsion, so absorbing in his variety, so glamorous in his stage presence as was Nijinsky.’ The theatre designer Edward Gordon Craig, who deplored most of Diaghilev’s excesses (Diaghilev teased him about wanting to get rid of actors altogether since he so loved abstraction), shouted with delight when Nijinsky as the Rose leapt into the wings, though he found his ‘tiny, almost unnoticeable movements even more marvellous than his dancing and later observed that all he did was Art’.
In roles that had as their common theme a sense of myth and otherworldliness, Nijinsky communicated to his audience a sense of the ‘saturated moment’ described by Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot – a mystical combination of thought, sensation and experience that created a unified poetic whole. ‘Looking at him, one is in an imaginary world, entire and very clear.’ When Robert Walser saw him dancing at Bellevue, soon after he was institutionalised, he thought his dancing was like a fairy tale, with all the layers of meaning that implies.
Nijinsky had a passionate connectedness to his work, identifying himself completely with his art. He was different in every role, submerging himself into the part he was playing without any sense of the post-war irony or detachment which has characterised later twentieth-century performance. ‘It was not only the face, the façade, that changed, but the mind and the personality behind it which altered. The change was not skin-deep, but soul-deep,’ wrote Cyril Beaumont. Reading these words again as I type them, the nature of Nijinsky’s illness comes insistently and poignantly to mind. He could ‘play upon movement in the same way that a great actor clothes words now with fire, now with the most melting tenderness’.
Perhaps the closest we can get to Nijinsky today is his various publicity photographs in which the intensity of his gaze and the immediacy of his presence is so powerful that you almost forget you are looking at a piece of paper. When Lincoln Kirstein’s Nijinsky Dancing, containing reproductions of several of these portraits, came out in 1975, Clement Crisp said that no live Petrushka had ever moved him as much as these photographs of Nijinsky in character.
The dance critic Edwin Denby noted that in these pictures Nijinsky’s poses were never exhibitionistic. He was so centred in the pelvis and, because of that, had such extraordinary balance, that when he lifted a leg it was as if a table was being lifted by one leg while keeping the top horizontal; he used the whole foot, not just the ball. ‘He looks as if the body remembered the whole dance, all the phases of it, as he holds the one pose; he seems to be thinking, I’ve just done that, and then after this I do that, and then that, and then comes that; so his body looks like a face lighting up at a single name that evokes a whole crowd of remembered names.’
‘I do not see anything in these pictures that would lead one to suppose that Nijinsky’s subsequent insanity cast any premonition-ary shadow on his phenomenally luminous dance intelligence,’ Denby wrote. ‘In their stillness Nijinsky’s pictures have more vitality than the dances they remind us of as we now see them on stage.’
What endures of Nijinsky’s work is of course impossible to pin down and there is an ongoing academic debate about what exactly he should be remembered for. As Joan Acocella wrote, concluding her Introduction to his diary with the thought that he was ‘probably’ a genius, ‘never was so much artistic fame based on so little artistic evidence: one eleven-minute ballet, Faun, plus some photographs’. It is true that no one can judge a work of art they have not seen. But that does not stop me wishing I had had the chance.
Paris, 29 May 1913. Onstage in the noisy, overheated theatre, the Chosen One waits to begin the solo that is at the heart of her tribe’s appeasement of their cruel gods. She has been selected from among her companions and prepared for the ritual by the elders of the tribe; the responsibility with which she has been entrusted weighs heavily upon her. The noise of the orchestra – and of the hissing, cat-calling audience – crashes around her like thunder.
Her head hangs down, her heels and elbows jut out, her trembling knees turn awkwardly in. The uncomfortable pose is an expression of her internal state, at once proud, scared, brave, hopeful, angry and ecstatic. Her peers encircle her, focused on her, willing her on to her end. She must dance with her whole self, or the sacrifice will not work; they have chosen her to be their victim, their most precious victim, and she represents them all. When the music begins and she starts to dance, they marvel at her courage, power and beauty even as they watch for her to fall.
Later observers have found in Sacre an irresistible prelude to the Great War, the portent of an entire society’s self-destruction. The Maiden’s obedient, almost joyful submission to the rite, the way she is honoured by her people rather than mourned, the celebration of life and youth through sacrificial death – all these were impulses that animated the generation who fought and died between 1914 and 1918. As the cultural historian Modris Eksteins has written, the Chosen Maiden in Sacre would become, a few years later, the Unknown Soldier, memorialised in national tombs all over Europe – an ambivalent tribute to which I imagine Nijinsky would have been acutely sensitive.
Throughout his long afterlife, the fatal, frenzied solo of the Chosen Maiden has become a vivid metaphor for the tragic figure of Nijinsky going insane, dancing himself to lunacy but perhaps only feeling truly alive as he danced. If the music and choreography of Sacre ‘can be interpreted as a sign that the end of civilisation was at hand’, then Nijinsky becomes at once the emblem and prophet of modernity and its victim.
Very few lives have clearly definable points at which everything changes, but for Nijinsky one of those points was the first night of Le Sacre du printemps. It sped on a series of events – events which were en train anyway, but which were hastened or made inevitable by Sacre’s bold, perhaps foolhardy, refusal to cater to the traditional ballet audience and consequent commercial failure, and which would inexorably lead to the tragedy of Nijinsky, less than six years later, being committed to Bellevue as a madman.
Because of his vertiginous fall, the heights he scaled and the depths to which he plunged, and because it is almost impossible to recapture anything of what he achieved, the memory of Nijinsky survives today like a fly caught in amber. He has become for me a glorious, glowing emblem of youth and talent, cut off in its prime but preserved forever as a reminder that art and beauty will always be the highest of human ideals.