The Magical Chorus

enough.”³²

In the West, Nijinsky became the personification of men’s dancing, but in the Soviet Union he fell so far off the cultural map that even at the height of perestroika in 1989, when Pravda, then still the country’s most influential newspaper, decided to mark the centenary of the emigre dancer’s birth, it misspelled his name as Nejinsky.

Fokine’s Petrouchka and The Dying Swan (he basically improvised the latter in 1907 as a sad and charming solo for its incomparable first performer, Anna Pavlova) are now ballet emblems of the twentieth century. But while The Dying Swan, which later became the signature piece of another great ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya, is nostalgic and fragile, Petrouchka is all movement and tragic urgency.

The ballet is a puppet drama: pathetic Petrouchka (a mixture of the British Punch and the Italian-French Pierrot) loses his beloved Ballerina to the arrogant and coarse Moor. The puppets are manipulated by the mysterious and powerful Magician. All around is the spectacle of the Russian Shrovetide carnival, which stunned Parisians with the vividness and energy of the music, the beauty of stylized sets and costumes, and the inventiveness of the choreographer in depicting—almost a la Stanislavsky’s Art Theater—the holiday crowds (there were more than one hundred dancers onstage).

Karsavina, who replaced Pavlova as chief star of Diaghilev’s company, was the ideal Ballerina in Petrouchka, a sensual and naive toy. The artistic presentation of that naivete was informed, however, by Karsavina’s fierce intellect. It could be said that both she and her brother were philosophers, only she danced and her brother wrote books.

Of all the members of that carefree and happy Roman group, Lev Karsavin had the most tragic fate. Exiled on Lenin’s personal orders from Bolshevik Russia in 1922 (with other leading anti-Soviet intellectuals—Berdyaev, Frank, Ivan Ilyin, Fedor Stepun, and Pitirim Sorokin), Karsavin settled in Paris, lectured on medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne, befriended Matisse and Fernand Leger, and then found himself living once again on Soviet territory after World War II, in Lithuania.

Karsavin was arrested and deported to Siberia, to the Abez camp in Vorkuta, where Nikolai Punin, a prominent theoretician of avant-garde art, was also serving time. There Karsavin and Punin used to lecture fellow prisoners on the fine points of the icon of the Virgin of Vladimir or Malevich’s Black Square.³³ The camp guards had other forms of amusement: the prisoners were regularly awakened in the middle of the night, lined up and marched to a big pit, and then spread out around its perimeter in preparation to be executed. Each time, the prisoners prepared to die, but they were returned to their barracks.³⁴ Karsavin died of tuberculosis in 1952 and was buried without a coffin, in nothing but a shirt with his camp number, tossed into a hole dug out of the frozen ground. Punin died there a year later.

Nijinsky’s life, while different, was tragic and symbolic in its own way. In Petrouchka he danced himself, as the insiders at the premiere knew full well: a puppet manipulated by the all-powerful Magician Diaghilev. Nijinsky was famous for his phenomenal leaps, in which he seemed to hang in the air for an instant. But for the role of Petrouchka, Fokine did not create any virtuoso steps. Nevertheless, it was a signature role for Nijinsky, as was the Faun in L’Apres-midi d’un faun, choreographed by Fokine to music by Debussy.

Fedor Lopukhov, a great choreographer and classmate of Nijinsky’s (whom he did not like very much), told me that in ballet school Nijinsky was awkward, to the point of seeming mentally retarded.³⁵ Benois recalled that Nijinsky had a lot of trouble with the role of Petrouchka in rehearsals. The artist was astonished by the metamorphosis that occurred when Nijinsky put on Petrouchka’s patchwork costume and tasseled cap and applied the whiteface makeup with round spots of rouge and crookedly drawn eyebrows. Suddenly Benois saw the beseeching eyes “of that horrifying grotesque, half-puppet half-human.”³⁶

For the first time in the history of the dance, on June 13, 1911, on the stage of the Theatre Chatelet in Paris appeared a hero who could have come from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel, as the French press noted instantly. But the Parisian critics understandably missed the influence of Alexander Blok’s Symbolist drama The Fair Show Booth, produced in St. Petersburg in 1906 by the avant- garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold: the characters included an awkward and suffering clown Pierrot (played by Meyerhold himself), who bled cranberry juice instead of blood.

Petrouchka might have seemed to be a triumph of Mir Iskusstva. And it was, if one takes into account Fokine’s production, Benois’s design, and Karsavina’s interpretation: a nostalgic look at old St. Petersburg by a sophisticated group of Russian Europeans gathered in Paris. But Nijinsky and Stravinsky, encouraged by Diaghilev, boldly leaped beyond the Mir Iskusstva stylized aesthetics toward the avant-garde.

Nijinsky left Diaghilev in 1913, after choreographing the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps. It was a desperate attempt by Petrouchka to escape his master, and it led to a nervous breakdown.

Nijinsky’s last performance was on September 26, 1917, as Petrouchka (a joke of fate); he was twenty-seven. Sojourns in expensive clinics treating schizophrenia followed. The most famous dancer of the twentieth century, Nijinsky died in London in 1950, leaving not only his legend but an astonishing document, his diaries of 1919. In those notes, Nijinsky surprises us by his naive wisdom. Calling himself a crazy clown and “God’s fool”(“a fool is good where there is love”), Nijinsky writes about his fascination with the religious teaching of Leo Tolstoy (the dancer was a vegetarian, “meat develops lust”), his bisexuality, his rejection of war, and his love of Russia and dislike of the Bolsheviks. Nijinsky wanted people to stop deforestation and overuse of oil. He also admits his addiction to morphine and masturbation, and he concludes bitterly: “Now I understand Dostoevsky’s Idiot, for they take me for an idiot.”³⁷

There is a photograph taken in 1929 with Nijinsky with a terrified smile standing between Karsavina and a pompous Diaghilev in tails: the impresario had brought the “crazy clown” to a performance of Petrouchka, in the hope that watching it might return his sanity. Diaghilev died that year; Nijinsky survived him by almost twenty-one years.

Coming after Petrouchka (but conceived before it), Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps is arguably his most successful and organic work. It may well be the greatest score of the twentieth century. The audience at the premiere of Sacre on May 23, 1913, in Paris, famously rioted. The French public resisted the overwhelming onslaught of Stravinsky’s music, afraid to hear its message, loud and clear: the world was on the brink of catastrophe.³⁸

The First World War, which broke out in July 1914, took millions of young lives, destroyed the old European order, and triggered a series of destructive revolutions. European civilization never did rebound from that blow, which was foretold by the turbulent, cruel rhythms of Sacre du printemps.

The Russian empire, which entered the war on the side of France and England against Germany and Austro- Hungary, turned out to be a colossus with feet of clay. At first the war was hailed by many leading Russian intellectuals: they thought it “a great blessing” (the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov). Berdyaev then also believed that the war had a providential significance: “It punishes, kills, and purifies by fire, reviving the spirit.”³⁹

The figure of Razumnik Vasilyevich Ivanov, whose pen name was Ivanov-Razumnik (1878–1946), stands apart.