Moscow. This political gesture signaled the rise of a new cultural atmosphere and the advent of perestroika. Chaliapin maintains his position in Russia as the most famous musician of the twentieth century, surpassing not only his mentor Rachmaninoff but every contender even from the world of pop.
It was not Diaghilev who placed Chaliapin on that pedestal, although he did much to make it happen. But it is hard to deny that Diaghilev played Svengali in the case of Vaslav Nijinsky, turning his short ten years onstage into the longest-lived and most mysterious ballet legend of the twentieth century.
When Nijinsky met Diaghilev in the fall of 1908 in St. Petersburg (and became his lover), the eighteen-year-old dancer was already known to ballet fans: his remarkable performance in the early works of choreographer Mikhail Fokine drew attention. But Diaghilev made Nijinsky an international star.
Diaghilev introduced ballet in his second Russian Season in Paris (1909), and it quickly became the raison d’etre of his enterprise. Ironically, this had not been his original intention. Benois always insisted that Diaghilev had never been a rabid ballet fan. Political and socioeconomic circumstances made him a ballet impresario.
In 1909 bureaucratic intrigues stopped the tsar’s support for the Russian Seasons and they lost their official status as a cultural manifestation of the Russo-French political alliance. The wealthy Western bourgeoisie became the main sponsor of Diaghilev’s enterprise. For that audience, one-act ballets that did not require overcoming linguistic and historical barriers were much more attractive than long, complex, and heavy Russian operas. Plus presenting ballets was much cheaper.
The ambitious Diaghilev had not only wanted to become director of the imperial theaters, he dreamed of an even higher position, as arbiter and manager of all Russian culture. Fate determined otherwise, although the court intrigues and scandals that put an end to Diaghilev’s official career cannot be laid at the feet of fate alone: the clashes were predetermined by the entrepreneur’s modernist tastes, his independent behavior, and his open homosexuality.
The resulting situation was unique for Russia: a powerful cultural enterprise, independent of the government (and consequently at odds with it), supported by Western capital and audiences, and therefore oriented to them. Its success was due to Diaghilev, the first (and still unsurpassed) global impresario of Russian culture.
There were losses for Russia in this case, as well. In culture, the role of personality is supreme; it is tempting to imagine the flowering of Russian culture if Diaghilev had remained in the country. On the other hand, it is not difficult to assume that he would not have gotten along with the Bolsheviks any more than he had with the tsarist court. Perhaps his role was to build a revolutionary yet workable model for the interaction of Russian and Western cultures under the aegis of a charismatic personality.
In 1927, at the end of the Diaghilev era, Anatoly Lunacharsky, still the first Bolshevik cultural boss (although his comparatively liberal reign was coming to a close), called Diaghilev “amuser of the gilded crowd.”29 Lunacharsky meant the impresario’s dependence on a group of wealthy sponsors who were “rootless, feckless, and wandering all over the world in search of amusement” and which could “pay a lot of money, which can grant newspaper fame, but it is greedy. It demands continually new sensations from its ‘amuser.’”30
This was a Marxist critique of the Diaghilev model, perceptive but perhaps not quite fair. For the Communist Lunacharsky hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers, workers, and peasants attending an official exhibition of politically correct realistic paintings in Moscow in 1926 were vastly more important than “ten thousand glazed drones” gathering at Diaghilev’s opening nights. Lunacharsky recorded his conversation with Diaghilev, who defended his patrons (“thirty or forty Maecenas-connoisseurs”) as the progressive cultural elite whom the unwashed masses would follow, in Diaghilev’s expression, “like thread behind a needle.” It was that elite (the leading patrons, connoisseurs, collectors, influential journalists, dealers) who shaped the modern market for high culture.
Lunacharsky naturally considered Diaghilev’s analysis obsolete bourgeois nonsense, and the actual minister of culture condescendingly instructed the would-be minister Diaghilev from the height of his ten-year Soviet experience: “This is the first time in history that art is properly posited as the vital element of people’s lives and not as dessert for the gourmands.”31 But now, more than eighty years after that conversation, the world market for haute culture functions more on the Diaghilev model, and Lunacharsky’s lecture sounds like old-fashioned social rhetoric. In other words, Diaghilev’s ideas turned out to be more practical.
Diaghilev did have his own illusions. He thought he was controlling the tastes of his Western patrons, while in fact it was at least a two-way process. He whetted the artistic appetites of his sponsors, and they urged him on toward ever-greater avant-garde and cosmopolitan offerings. The provincial from Perm was transformed into the cultural arbiter of Paris, London, and New York, along the way changing from an earnest admirer of Repin, Vasnetsov, and Nesterov into the aesthete who commissioned stage sets from Picasso, Braque, Roualt, and Matisse.
Two productions stand out on Diaghilev’s astonishing journey among the milestones in twentieth-century culture: the premieres of Igor Stravinsky’s ballets
We can picture them in late May 1911 in the basement of the Teatro Constanzi in Rome, where they rehearsed
Occasionally the artist Serov (who also helped with a sketch of one of the costumes) and the religious philosopher Lev Karsavin, the ballerina’s elder brother, both living in Rome at the time, would drop by the rehearsals. What a bouquet of talents and what different fates awaited them. The first to die, of angina in 1911 in Moscow, was Serov, forty-six, the highly regarded (by everyone from the tsar to the revolutionaries) maverick of early Russian modern art, whose reputation at home, as opposed to the West, was always high both among connoisseurs and the public.
Benois, stunned by Serov’s death, in his obituary placed him in the ranks of Titian, Velazquez, and Franz Hals (in Russia, many agreed). Benois did not overestimate his own potential as an artist; he considered the only work worthy of outliving him his monumental memoirs. In that masterpiece, Benois, who died in 1960 in Paris, just two months short of his ninetieth birthday and without seeing his work published in full, wrote about his constant bickering with Diaghilev, who had died thirty years earlier, in Venice (just as a fortune-teller had once predicted, “on water”). Benois felt Diaghilev was too taken with the avant-garde, even if the impresario had become with Stravinsky one of the most influential artistic figures of Russian descent in the West. Together they radically reshaped the map of world culture, yet in Russia their fame never equaled Serov’s.
This happened in part because both Diaghilev and Stravinsky were perceived (and still are) as emigre modernists. Having bid Russia farewell in 1914, Diaghilev never returned. Before his death, he waxed nostalgically about the Volga River, the gentle landscapes of Levitan, and music of Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky visited the Soviet Union in 1962, at the age of eighty, after a hiatus of half a century, and was even received by the country’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev. But in response to an invitation to return again, he reportedly muttered, “Enough’s
