But it was not just painting that made Fokine “doubt,” as he once put it, “the canons and dogmas of the old ballet.” He was interested in Russian folk music, learned to play the balalaika, and even went on tour with the Great Russian Orchestra, which specialized in native traditions. Impressed by the enthusiastic audience response to popular songs such as “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” he later reflected that “these songs of Russia brought me, a city dweller, to the people.” He also traveled: to Moscow, to the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Kiev, and to Budapest, Vienna, and cities across Italy, where he collected postcards and recorded details of local costumes, dances, and folklore. His preoccupation with “the people” took on a political edge when he visited his sister in Switzerland around the turn of the century and met a group of political émigrés, who gave him socialist and revolutionary literature and pressed him to lead ballet away from “the narrow circle of balletomanes” and make it “accessible to large masses.” Back in St. Petersburg, Fokine joined a group of dancers from the Maryinsky in a philanthropic society devoted to providing books to workers; the society also opened a school for peasants in a nearby village.6
Nothing eroded Fokine’s confidence in the old ballet more, however, than the iconoclastic dancing of Isadora Duncan. Duncan was a rebellious and charismatic American dancer (from California) who disdained classical ballet: she called it “an expression of degeneration, of living death.” She had invented her own barefooted and free-form “dance of the future” inspired by nature, antiquity, and a heady mix of ideas drawn from Nietzsche, Kant, Walt Whitman, and others. She was a sensation in Europe, and in 1904 she performed in St. Petersburg at a benefit for the Russian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, sponsored by the emperor’s sister. She danced to music by Chopin, against a blue backdrop framed by poplars and classical ruins. Barefoot, bare-legged, and clad in a flimsy Grecian tunic with no bra, she performed her rhapsodic “free-dance” with its graceful walking, skipping, and bending movements and ecstatic poses. Fokine was astonished by her “primitive, plain, natural movements,” and Nijinsky later recalled (rather dramatically) that Isadora “opened the door of the cell to the prisoners.”7
Fokine’s generation was also scarred by the tragic and violent events of Bloody Sunday, January 9, 1905, when Imperial troops fired on a crowd of peasants, workers, and priests gathered to peacefully petition the tsar. Sympathy strikes, meetings, and protests erupted across St. Petersburg. Rimsky-Korsakov, who had sided with the strikers, was dismissed from the prestigious Conservatory of Music; his colleague Alexander Glazunov angrily left in protest (though both would later resume their duties). When the tsar issued his concessionary October Manifesto, riots erupted at the opera (“down with autocracy!”) and the dancers at the Maryinsky organized their own strike. Fokine, Pavlova, and Karsavina led secret meetings, and the students at the Theater School, Nijinsky among them, held protests. Discouraged by years of Imperial mismanagement, they wanted a greater say in the future of their art. The authorities, however, were intransigent and when the tsar pressured the artists to sign a statement of loyalty, the dancer Sergei Legat (Nijinsky’s favorite teacher) lost his nerve and gave in. Tormented by what he saw as his betrayal of Fokine and the others, and already perhaps unstable, he committed suicide. And although the strike was subsequently peacefully resolved, those who had known Legat and taken part in the meetings were never quite the same. The long-established bond joining them to the tsar had been severed. At Legat’s funeral Pavlova laid a ceremonial wreath on the coffin with an inscription that read: “To the first victim at the dawn of freedom of art.”8
Shortly thereafter, Fokine created The Dying Swan, a short solo dance for Anna Pavlova that perfectly encapsulated his emerging artistic beliefs. The dance, to music by Saint-Saëns, recalled Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake—Pavlova was a swan in a pristine white tutu—but Fokine deliberately avoided the showy “self-exhibition” and stiff “ballerina-look” he associated with performers such as Kschessinska. Instead, Pavlova’s dance was improvisatory and astonishingly simple, without a single bravura step: she skimmed the floor on pointe or stepped through an arabesque, bending deeply at the waist or through the back, arms fluid but broken-winged. Film footage of this dance taken later in her career shows the extraordinary reach of her movements, long lines stretched through her body, impulsively ruptured and repaired in a tour de force of balletic restraint and free-form release. The power of the dance lay uniquely in the expressive quality of her movements and in the way she showed the expiring life force, the draining of energy and spirit from a creature of great strength and beauty. It was not a story ballet nor even a variation but a lyrical reflection on death, very much in the image of Isadora Duncan. As Pavlova slowly weakened, gave in, and folded into a gentle heap, the old ballet, it seemed, died with her. Fokine and Pavlova had opened the way to a freer, more intense and immediate style of dance. It was this “new dance” that made the Ballets Russes possible.9
Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) stood for modernism in art: “Astound me!” he liked to say. Although this iconoclastic image is not wrong, Diaghilev’s cult of the new was never just a denial of the old. To the contrary, the forward-looking character of the ballets he produced owed much to his deep engagement with past eras. Born in the nineteenth century and raised in the cultivated world of the old Imperial elite, Diaghilev was the son of an army officer, and the family was literary, musical, and politically progressive: his grandfather, a vodka distiller, had worked to end serfdom, and his aunt was a feminist and prominent figure in reform-minded artistic and intellectual circles. Diaghilev spent his formative years at the family home in the provincial Russian city of Perm, some one thousand miles from St. Petersburg, and often spent summers at the family’s country estate. It was a typically European-style Russian upbringing: the household had French Second Empire furnishing, original paintings by Rembrandt and Raphael, and a ballroom with parquet floors and a grand chandelier. Diaghilev spoke French and German and played the piano, and the family hosted literary evenings and musical gatherings. Locals referred to the Diaghilev residence as “the Athens of Perm.”10
Russian culture, however, was never neglected. Diaghilev revered the works of Alexander Pushkin and made annual pilgrimages to the poet’s grave (once, when the grave was being repaired, he leaned in and kissed the coffin) and was friendly with Pushkin’s son. He met Tchaikovsky, whom he called Uncle Petia, as a child and later attended the composer’s concerts in St. Petersburg: he was there for the premiere of the Sixth Symphony in 1893. Indeed, Diaghilev briefly considered becoming a composer himself and studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov (when that failed he took up painting). Later he even met the legendary Tolstoy and stayed with him at his estate in Yasnaya Polyana (“Seeing him, I understood that the man who walks a path toward absolute perfection acquires moral sanctity”). As if plotting his future steps, he also traveled often to Europe and visited Berlin, Paris, Venice, Rome, Florence, and Vienna. He met Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Brahms (“a small nimble German”), and Verdi (“too old to be interesting”). Perhaps most important of all, Diaghilev heard Wagner’s complete Ring cycle at Bayreuth and deeply admired the composer’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk: poetry, art, and music fusing to create a complete and absorbing theatrical world onstage.11
Diaghilev arrived in St. Petersburg in 1890, ostensibly to study law, and quickly formed a tight-knit circle of friends, many of whom would become key players in the Ballets Russes, including the artists Alexander Benois and Lev Rozenberg (later known as Léon Bakst). Irreverent and passionately engaged with art, music, and literature, it was a society joined by affection and ideas (they called themselves the “Nevsky Pickwickians”): the friends, many of whom were homosexuals, met frequently around the samovar at Diaghilev’s apartment, where they planned, argued, shared gossip, and staged readings and musical events. Their tastes were broad but sharply defined. They were against what they took to be a crass and simplistic realism in art (t
oo many “militia-men, police-officers, students in red shirts, and girls with cropped hair”) and instead revered beauty and nobility, artifice and rules. They were aesthetes (some said decadents) and dandies, and they admired aristocratic grandeur and the French eighteenth century.12
Thus at a time when it was not intellectually fashionable to do so, they worshiped classical ballet. Bakst and Benois had seen the original production of The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, and Diaghilev developed a lifelong passion for its music and dances. Bakst later rhapsodized: “Unforgettable matinee! I lived in a magic dream for three hours.… that evening, I believe, my vocation was determined.” Benois, who revered Versailles (he kept a mannequin of Louis XIV on his desk), was overcome with the music, which seemed “something infinitely close, inborn, something I would call my music.” By 1899 Bakst, Benois, and Diaghilev were all working for the Imperial Theaters. Bakst and Benois designed ballets, and Diaghilev took over production of the hitherto lackluster annual program, which he transformed into an elegant publication featuring original art and commentary. In 1901 Diaghilev and Benois proposed to mount Sylvia, a nineteenth-century French ballet with music by Delibes. It was a dream project but ended in disaster. Diaghilev had powerful enemies at court who resented his growing influence and conceitedness; confrontations, threats, and cabals ensued until Diaghilev, unable to control the situation, was finally dismissed.13
Not everything, however, centered on St. Petersburg and the Imperial Court. Diaghilev was also drawn to Moscow and the Russian arts and crafts movement spearheaded by Savva Mamontov and Princess Maria Tenisheva. Mamontov (1841–1918) was a railway magnate and amateur singer whose success and fortune were tied to the industrial boom and urbanization, to iron and speed, and he seemed to stand for a new age. But he was also an Old Believer with proudly Muscovite tastes: he had his own privately run opera company in Moscow dedicated to developing Russian music and promoting native talent. The great bass-baritone Feodor Chaliapin made his name there, and Mamontov also premiered several of Rimsky-Korsakov’s best works. Indeed, Mamontov worried about the social dislocation and threat to Russian traditions caused by modernization and his own industrial projects. As if to compensate, and in keeping with the tsar’s own desire to turn Russian culture away from Europe and back to Moscow and the east, Mamontov poured his considerable resources into a vast project of documenting and preserving the folk traditions of the people.
Thus from 1870 until 1899 he turned his Abramtsevo estate outside of Moscow into a lively artists’ colony devoted to the study of peasant arts and crafts: it was communal, informal, and collaborative. Tenisheva, whose money also came from industry, created a similar colony at her estate at Talashkino in 1893. The scale of these endeavors was huge: Tenisheva had two thousand peasant women and some fifty villages working on embroidery alone. The artists working on these estates, however, were anything but conservateurs: they did not slavishly reproduce the brightly colored textiles, flat woodcuts, and religious icons typical of peasant craftsmen, but instead used them as inspiration to create their own original—and modern—Russian folk-art styles. Moreover, in a savvy mix of commerce and art that the Ballets Russes would soon replicate, the handicrafts produced on these vast estates were also marketed and sold to Moscow’s burgeoning middle class.
In 1898 Diaghilev and his friends founded a short-lived but influential journal, The World of Art, financed in part by Mamontov and Tenisheva. Devoted to bridging the cultures of Europe and Russia, it featured work by Degas, Gauguin, and Matisse, as well as Alexander Golovin and Konstantin Korovin, both of whom were regulars at Abramtsevo and Talashkino and would become prominent ballet designers at the Imperial Theaters and for Diaghilev. Diaghilev’s close involvement with the Russian arts and crafts movement was a matter of taste and upbringing (like most Russians of his background, he had fond memories of summers on country estates), but it also grew out of his acute sense that Imperial Russia was on the verge of collapse. As the political landscape darkened and the tsar retreated into the occult apostasies of Rasputin and tied his fate—and his country’s—to a “black bloc” of fanatic autocrats and secret police, Diaghilev became increasingly obsessed with capturing a dying Russian culture.
In 1905 he mounted an extraordinary exhibition at the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg: more than three thousand portraits of Russian aristocrats from the time of Peter the Great to the present. It was, he wrote to Tenisheva, a “grandiose enterprise … I hope to present the entire history of Russian art and society.” Karsavina later recalled that seeing these portraits “gave me a criterion of the genuine, and cured me forever of becoming a dupe of pastiche.” The exhibition opened soon after the events of Bloody Sunday, and in an extraordinary and prescient speech at a Moscow banquet Diaghilev explained that he had traveled across Russia to collect these paintings and artifacts and had seen “remote estates boarded up, palaces terrifying in their dead splendor … strangely inhabited by today’s nice, mediocre people unable to endure the gravity of past regalia. Here it is not people who are ending their days, but a way of life.”14
Diaghilev had found his mission. He set himself the task of showing Russia—the Russia that he felt sure was ending—to Europe. His motives were intellectual and artistic, but he was also spurred by the difficulties of his own situation. For in spite of his impressive cultural connections, Diaghilev had always been a provincial and outsider. Benois and others had long remarked upon their friend’s fawning observance of social etiquette and his intense desire to win a position at court, but Diaghilev’s intellectual arrogance and impolitic independence had done little to ingratiate him with the authorities. Like the dancers he would soon employ, his ties to Imperial institutions had badly frayed. In 1901 he had not only been humiliatingly cast out of the Imperial Theaters in the Sylvia debacle: he had also been barred from the civil service and constrained to settle for a minor post with a pittance of a salary. He continued to win support from important quarters, and even from the tsar himself, but his social and professional prospects had been severely diminished. So he turned west: to Paris.
In 1906 Diaghilev mounted a sweeping exhibition of Russian art and music in the French capital, a quasi-diplomatic venture financed by a combination of Russian and French private and state monies. It was characteristically iconoclastic and far-reaching, spanning the history of Russian art from ancient religious icons to modern paintings by Bakst and Golovin (some of them ballet designs). The art was not merely displayed but staged in a lush setting designed by Benois; enhancing the theatrical effect, Diaghilev also presented concerts of new Russian music. In 1908 he went on to arrange a spectacularly successful season of Russian opera, including the European debut of Chaliapin. He hoped to repeat his success the following season, but when he ran into financial difficulties he turned to a much less costly art form: ballet. “Bringing brilliant ballet company eighty strong, best soloists” he cabled to his Paris presenter, “start big publicity.” The tsar, eager to encourage cultural relations with France, granted Diaghilev permission to borrow dancers from the Imperial Theaters for his hastily assembled company, and in the spring of 1909 Fokine, Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky, Benois, and Bakst led the way to Paris. By 1911 many of these dancers had cut their formal ties to the Maryinsky and transferred their loyalty to Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes was officially born.15
Many of the ballets performed by the Ballets Russes in their early seasons abroad, however, were not very Russian in the exotic, oriental sense that Parisians would so adore; indeed, they were distinctly French. Le Pavillon d’Armide was set in the French Romantic era and took its cue from Théophile Gautier. Benois’s decor was sumptuous and courtly, inspired by his cherished Versailles, and through a labored plot device the ballet even featured an appearance by Louis XIV in full Roman regalia. Fokine’s Les Sylphides, to music by Chopin reorchestrated by (among others) Glazunov, clearly recalled Marie Taglioni’s great dance of 1832, La Sylphide. With Pavlova, Karsavina, and Nijinsky in the lead role
s, the ballet was a study of a poet and of sylphides in their woodland habitat, drenched with Romanticism and stylized nineteenth-century movements. Filling out this French theme, the company also performed Giselle in 1910 with revised choreography by Fokine and lavishly romantic sets by the ever-Francophile Benois. These French-themed ballets were not, however, intended to pander to Parisian taste: as we have seen, Russian ballet had deep French roots, and these dances were Fokine’s interpretation of the tradition he had inherited. Indeed, Pavillon and Sylphides (earlier entitled Chopiniana) had been created in St. Petersburg for the Maryinsky Theater well before the tour to Paris was ever planned. This really was Russian ballet—or at least ballet as the Russians knew it.16
“Russian” ballet in the sense that the French came to understand it—exotic, Eastern, primitive, and modern—did not exist until Diaghilev and his artists invented it.* In 1909 Diaghilev wrote to the composer Anatoly Lyadov:
I need a ballet and a Russian one—the first Russian ballet, since there is no such thing. There is Russian opera, Russian symphony, Russian song, Russian dance, Russian rhythm—but no Russian ballet.…The libretto is ready, Fokine has it. It was dreamed up by us all collectively. It’s The Firebird.17
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