Nijinsky (5 page)

The Mariinsky's younger dancers – Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Valsav's adored teacher Sergey Legat and others – were as appalled as Duncan by the massacre of unarmed, peaceful demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace; Mikhail Fokine in particular had well-established connections with émigré dissidents and was influenced by anarchist writers like Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin. But they also had their own issues about which to protest. The Imperial Theatres were intimate, interbred places where former lovers worked together for years after their relationships had ended, members of the same family taught and danced alongside one another, and throughout their careers artists were constantly working in direct competition with their peers. Getting out of the Imperial Theatres was almost as hard as getting into them because the artists had essentially handed their careers over to the Tsar in return for their training. In the autumn of 1905 they led a strike against the management, demanding better working conditions and greater autonomy for the artists, and proposing an elected committee which would have a say in artistic questions as well as salaries and appointments.

When Sergey Legat, under intense pressure from the governing board, signed a declaration of loyalty to the Theatres and then, overcome by having betrayed his friends (and possibly unhappy because of his tumultuous affair with Marie Petipa, twenty years his senior, whom he apparently suspected of infidelity and who also, apparently, had persuaded him to sign the declaration), slit his own throat,
*
the dancers
had their own revolutionary martyr. Sergey Diaghilev, who had served a short, frustrating stint in the administration of the Imperial Theatres three years earlier, published an article eleven days after Legat's suicide, blaming his death on Vladimir Telyakovsky, the theatre's Director, and privately echoed the dissatisfied dancers' complaints that careers at the theatre were determined not
‘by talent
but by toadying, tattling and malicious gossip'.

Telyakovsky managed to bring the striking dancers round by promising them amnesty. He admonished them not with anger, according to Karsavina, but with mild fatherliness and she attested to the fact that not one of the rebels later suffered professionally from their involvement in the protest. The world of the theatre was dearer to her than ever after this upheaval, she wrote, surrendering to the perennial argument of established power: everything that had happened had served only to remind her that she ought to be thankful for the opportunities she had been given, rather than ungratefully demanding change.

The students at the Imperial Theatre School were sheltered from these storms but they too had their ‘revolutionary demands': better instruction in theatrical make-up and permission for the older students (boys only) to smoke, and to wear their own shoes, collars and cuffs rather than the school's regulation ones. Though he was not a smoker, Vaslav supported these demands, reporting back to Bronia about the meetings he attended. The death of Legat, whom Vaslav had worshipped, was a terrible blow; to add insult to injury his students were not permitted to attend his funeral.

He also found himself, inadvertently, in the front line. A large group of railway workers were protesting on Nevsky Prospekt during the Bloody Sunday riots when Vaslav, on his way home to visit Eleonora, got swept up along with them. Cossack cavalrymen were riding through the demonstrators to scatter them while rows of foot soldiers fired on the panicking crowds. Taking Vaslav for a protestor, a Cossack slashed at him with his whip, cutting through his overcoat and the top part of his boot as if with a sabre. He narrowly avoided falling beneath the hooves of his attacker's galloping horse. Anatole Bourman also described (in
an unsubstantiated anecdote) how the next day he, Nijinsky and their classmates searched through the mutilated, waxen corpses on marble slabs in the morgues and hospitals of St Petersburg, desperately looking for their friend Grigory Babich's beautiful sister, who had gone missing and was never found.

But while the avenues of open protest were closed to the young dissidents at the Mariinsky after the theatre's governing board regained control in late 1905, a powerful means of expressing their ideas still remained to them: their work. Just as the actors of pre-revolutionary France led by the great François-Joseph Talma strove for a new authenticity on stage to reflect the political debates taking place around them, so too did Fokine and his favourite dancers learn to express their liberal ideology through their performances.

The twenty-something ballets Fokine would go on to choreograph between 1906 and 1909, in the majority of which Nijinsky would dance, rejected the established traditions of the Mariinsky and, by extension, the traditions of the Tsar's regime. Where once a ballet representing an Egyptian dance would have demonstrated its ‘Egyptian-ness' merely by adding a row of hieroglyphic motifs to the edging of a traditional short, stiff tutu (the kind Kshesinskaya favoured, because they showed off her sturdy legs to perfection), Fokine put his dancers in tunics (
à la
Isadora), kohled their eyes and darkened their skin with make-up, and included in his choreography profile positions gleaned from studying Egyptian culture.
This ethnographic
method, as the historian Lynn Garafola explains, was an implicit criticism of Russia's stridently jingoistic politics.

‘Complete unity of expression'
was paramount and his method of working was collaborative. He would take the dancers into his confidence and encourage them
‘to participate in the creation'
of their roles. He was less interested in having the
corps de ballet
dance in perfect, rigid unison than, in crowd scenes, allowing the dancers to express their roles individually, creating an overall atmosphere that evoked the story or era he was describing instead of demonstrating the company's superlatively disciplined training.

Fokine was particularly opposed to the focus on the individual ballerina at the expense of the ballet as a whole. He saw a
prima ballerina
as first among equals, rather than a star around whom everything revolved as if by divine decree. The Imperial Theatres, though, were organised to celebrate stars. When Kshesinskaya danced, her make-up, hairstyle and costume were chosen to set her off to her best advantage, rather than to create a character or enhance the narrative, and she was always emblazoned with her own fabulous jewels whether she was playing a swan or a peasant-girl. After every solo, which had been tailored to show off her athleticism and technical virtuosity, Kshesinskaya would come to the front of the stage to receive the audience's applause, interrupting the company's performance and the atmosphere they had collectively created on stage. Fokine deplored these traditions.

One artist who instinctively understood Fokine's desire to stop dancers performing
‘for the audience's
pleasure, exhibiting himself as if saying, “Look how good I am”' was the young Nijinsky. Fokine never needed to explain to him ‘this new meaning of the dance'. Nijinsky may not have been
‘an articulate
conversationalist, but who could so quickly and thoroughly understand what I tried to convey about the dances?' recalled Fokine of working with him in his early career. ‘Who could catch each detail of the movement to interpret the style of the dance? He grasped quickly and exactly, and retained what he had learned all his dancing career, never forgetting the slightest detail.'

In the spring of 1905 Fokine cast Nijinsky as a Faun in a student-only revival of
Acis and Galatea
, his first work commissioned by the Mariinsky and the first time that Nijinsky, still two years from graduating, would dance a solo and a
pas de deux
in public.
Acis and Galatea
contained many of the Duncanesque traits that would become hallmark Fokine: it was inspired by his study of Pompeian frescos and he urged the dancers to form asymmetrical groups on stage and to relax when they weren't dancing to create an air of naturalness. He was, however, unable to persuade the authorities to allow his nymphs to dance in sandals rather than pointe shoes.

On the night of the performance, Nijinsky overshadowed everyone
else on stage. Eleonora sat proudly in the audience – she later said that watching Vaslav perform at the Mariinsky was like going to church on Sunday – and Bronia, watching from backstage, said she had never seen Vaslav dance so brilliantly. Years later she would remember this image of her brother as if she could still see him.
‘As he extends
upwards, a barely perceptible quiver runs through his body; his left hand close to his face, he seems to be listening to sounds, only heard by him, which fill all his being. He radiates an inner force that by its very radiance envelops the theatre, establishing a complete rapport with the audience.' When Vaslav came to the front of the stage, he acknowledged the applause
‘like a bashful schoolboy'
; he was, after all, only sixteen. The next day, the critics – who attended student performances like this precisely because they were looking for the next big thing – singled him out as the most distinguished of the young debutantes.

ALTHOUGH THE IMPERIAL THEATRE SCHOOL
suggested to Vaslav that he graduate in the spring of 1906, his mother insisted that he remain at the school until the following year so that he would be eighteen when he officially became an Artist of the Imperial Theatres. Even so, following his 1905 debut at the Mariinsky, he began to behave (as only a younger sister could phrase it, half proud and half teasing) as if he were already an Artist, wearing an immaculate white collar and cuffs, his hair smoothly brushed, and holding his head slightly thrown back. When his mother urged him to pay attention to his lessons, he responded grandly that he was studying
‘not merely to be
a
premier danseur
but to become an Artist of the Dance'.

He began performing regularly at the Mariinsky, partnering Anna Pavlova for the first time in January 1906. Bronia recalled the senior girls as well as her classmates starting to say to her,
‘Bronia, tell Vaslav that I adore him,'
and ‘Nijinsky, what a nice fellow … he is a
doushka
[darling].' In his turn, Vaslav developed crushes on friends of Bronia's and girls he partnered on stage. These romances never turned into anything more than innocent flirtations, with shy smiles exchanged and notes passed in the school's halls, partly because Vaslav, adoring his mother and sister, was devoutly respectful towards women, but also
because Eleonora, mindful of Foma's thwarted career, insisted that for the sake of his art a young dancer must not fall in love and tie himself down too soon.

Foma reappeared in Vaslav's life in his final years at the school. He came to St Petersburg to see some of Vaslav's performances, but his comments were usually critical, forcing Vaslav onto the defensive: if he thought Vaslav was being praised for his elevation, he would remind him that he needed to work to become a dancer, not a jumper; when Vaslav partnered a ballerina well he would derisively call him a
porteur
. Jealous of Vaslav's talent and potential, he made a great show of demonstrating his own dances to his children, and though Bronia was impressed – and struck continually by the physical similarities between her, Vaslav and Foma, from the musculature of their legs and feet to the almond shapes of their nails – Vaslav dismissed them as acrobatics. When he left after his first visit, Bronia cried, but Vaslav was glad to see him go. He had not forgiven him.

In 1907, the year he graduated, Foma gave Vaslav a hundred roubles as a graduation present and invited him to visit him in Nizhny Novgorod. The plan was to stay for a week but on the first night his father took Vaslav to a restaurant and told him that now he was a man it was time for him to meet Foma's mistress and the mother of his ten-year-old daughter: Rumyantseva, the woman for whom he had left Eleonora and the children a decade earlier. In response, Vaslav poured out all the pain he had endured over the years as, powerless, he had watched his mother struggle to bring them up alone, taking in boarders, unable to pay her bills, making sacrifice after sacrifice to give her children a roof over their heads and pay for firewood and even food. As Rumyantseva approached their table, Vaslav got up and left the restaurant, setting off for St Petersburg that night. Foma never contacted Vaslav or Bronia again.

As an Artist of the Imperial Theatres, Vaslav was now distinguished with the rank of
coryphé
, one step below soloist, with an annual salary of 780 roubles, 180 more than a member of the
corps de ballet
. This was starting out, as Tamara Karsavina, who had begun her career as a
coryphée
five years earlier, put it,
‘amongst the chosen'
. Vaslav danced at the Tsar's summer theatre in Krasnoye Selo that summer and returned to St Petersburg – after his disastrous trip to Nizhny Novgorod – in the autumn for his first season as an Artist at the Mariinsky.

Very quickly Mathilde Kshesinskaya singled out Nijinsky, choosing him to partner her first in one of her favourite ballets,
La Fille Mal Gardée
, in November 1907 and then as a regular partner. She found Vaslav
‘a charming boy, friendly and very modest'
; perhaps their shared Polish roots further predisposed her to favour him. His modesty was also crucial, for Kshesinskaya did not care to share the spotlight. She had this trait in common with her rival, Anna Pavlova, though at least Kshesinskaya, from the lofty height of her connections with the Tsar and her years as undisputed
prima ballerina assoluta
, was willing to help younger dancers – especially if, like Vaslav, they made her look good. Tamara Karsavina remembered her teaching all the younger girls which forks to use at the gala dinners they had to attend, where ten baffling pieces of cutlery might await them. Pavlova also danced with Vaslav, but from the day she heard the audience shout his name louder than hers she was wary of him. Bronia recorded her repeated questions about the ‘secret' of Vaslav's jump. Half-jokingly, she would take off Bronia's shoes to examine her feet after class to see ‘what secrets Nijinsky shares with his sister'.