Diaghilev: A Life
by Sjeng Scheijen
Oxford University Press
552 pages, $29.95
HOW DOES one tell the story of Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev, the impresario whose artistic accomplishments over three decades beginning at the turn of the 20th century seem to surpass what is humanly possible? How did this homosexual Russian émigré who spent the majority of his life exiled in Europe do it?
From the beginning: the Diaghilev family was part of the Russian landed nobility, thanks to Sergey’s business-savvy grandfather, Pavel Dmitriyevich, who acquired a monopoly on vodka distilleries near the family manor in Perm. They also had an estate in Bikbarda, about 190 miles away, and worked their way up the social ladder after attaining a residence in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg. Sergey was born on March 19, 1872, in the Russian village of Selishchi, a province of Novgorod. Later, the story would take hold—ostensibly started by Diaghilev himself—that little Sergey’s oversized head caused the death of his mother in childbirth. A new biography by Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, puts this legend to rest by showing that she died three months later, perhaps of puerperal fever, which was endemic in Europe at the time.
Over two years after the death of his mother, his father married Yelena Panayev, a woman from a prominent St. Petersburg family, who fully embraced young Sergey as her own. She doted on the boy, despite warnings from a family physician that his chronic inquisitiveness should be discouraged and met with silence. She was a perennial optimist, which may partly account for her stepson’s wealth of self-confidence. According to Sergey’s lifetime friend, Walter “Valechka” Nouvel, Yelena told young Sergey to forget the phrase “I can’t,” assuring him that “When people want to, they can.” Their relationship was to last until her death in 1919, tenderly documented by the copious correspondence they exchanged over many years.
The Diaghilevs were also a musical family. Sergey’s father was an amateur musician and possessed an impressive tenor voice, which, along with his good nature, helped him to ingratiate himself within the Panayev family, which performed excerpts from the operas of Tchaikovsky and Glinka from Bikbarda to Saint Petersburg. As Scheijen puts it, “Music, literature, and drama were not only central to the children’s education; they were the glue that held the family together.” Sergey himself showed a talent for music at an early age and even wrote his own compositions.
Their life in Saint Petersburg proved to be short-lived. In 1879, for financial reasons, Pavel moved his family back to provincial Perm, where Sergey would spend the rest of his childhood. Despite their declining financial position, the Diaghilevs lived like kings, especially in the more affordable foothills of the Urals, and they still managed to send Sergey back to the capital to attend school. When his father successfully petitioned for bankruptcy in 1890, it fell on Sergey to shoulder the financial burden of his younger stepbrothers with money inherited from his birth mother. He acquired an apartment in St. Petersburg, taking in his half-brothers Valentine and Yury, along with Nyanya, his nanny, and Vasily, his manservant, and attended law school rather than joining the cavalry (as did his siblings)—the only two options for gaining social status in the City of White Nights. He also took some classes at the music conservatory. When he later showed his compositions to his music teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, he was told that he had no talent. Perhaps it was this rejection that convinced Sergey to reinvent himself. Scheijen points out that Sergey himself looked at his compositions with a certain irony, although he does not underestimate the devastating effect the rejection must have had on the young man. In any case, Sergey’s disillusionment and frustration with the art world in general is palpable in this letter written to his stepmother a few years earlier:
Yes, I am beginning to feel strength in myself and to realize that, damn it, I am not a completely ordinary man (!!!). That’s rather arrogant, but I don’t care. One thing frightens me, that I was born in the century when there is neither a public nor “experts nor judges.” Good God, I despair when I see that I understand music better than anyone, no, seriously no one understands anything, but everyone judges, forms his opinion in two minutes and then speaks his mind.
Diaghilev was an open homosexual when such a thing was a rarity, and his first great love was the son of his father’s older sister, Anna Filosofov, Dmitri (“Dima”). The cousins became inseparable, sharing long trips across Europe. It was in Vienna that Diaghilev attended his first major theatrical productions, taking in operas by Mozart, Rossini, Wagner, and Verdi, as well as his first ballet, Die Puppenfie, which inspired him to pen one of his effusive notes to his stepmother: “Oh my darling mother, you mustn’t laugh at me for being delighted by everything. It really is all so delightful!!”
Over a decade before he founded the Ballet Russes, Diaghilev made a name for himself in the art world by putting together an exhibition of Scandinavian artwork at the Stieglitz Museum in St. Petersburg. He followed that with another, featuring exclusively Russian and Finnish artists. The likes of it had never been seen before, taking Russia out of the dark and into the light of the fin de siècle art world. In this same vein, he assembled a group of artists principally composed of the painters Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois—both would later design sets and costumes for the Ballet Russes—his cousin Dima Filosofov, and Walter Nouvel, an art lover and writer who would serve as factotum for Diaghilev’s ballet company. Its purpose in touting Russia as an important player in the world of modern art would include the formation of the journal Mir Iskusstva (“The World of Art”), which challenged the conservative notion that art’s main purpose was a utilitarian one. Instead, it promoted the glorification of individual expression in art, regardless of any practical service to society or any set of æsthetic rules.
At the end of 1900, the new managing director of the Imperial Theatres, Prince Sergey Volkonsky, an older acquaintance of the younger Diaghilev, also gay, hired Diaghilev as “a functionary for special assignments for the management of the Imperial Theatres.” His first job was to publish the Imperial’s annual publication, and Diaghilev employed the help of Bakst for its design. The quality of the issue was a thing of beauty—the paper, the glossy illustrations, even the printing itself. Tsar Nicholas II was said to have pored over its pages with reverence. Yet the journal’s controversial nature divided the artistic community between traditionalists and modernists. Diaghilev took no prisoners in his search to emancipate art. The number of his detractors grew in proportion to his unbridled ambition. His next endeavor—to stage the ballet Sylvia—would meet obstacles that even his most influential allies could not remove. While not totally clear, it seems that Volkonsky caved in to Diaghilev’s detractors on some matter, causing Diaghilev to protest loudly and threaten to pull his collaborators from the project, which led to a government-issued “category-three dismissal,” one usually reserved for gross misconduct, even criminal behavior.
Diaghilev’s uncompromising nature would become one the hallmarks of his personality. A natural born leader, he was controlling and ruthless about getting his own way. But it wasn’t merely selfish capriciousness behind his demands. He was a visionary, and his own tireless work ethic in pursuing his vision left others in the dust. He was a man with a self-proclaimed mission, and nothing could deter him from pursuing it. His powers of persuasion and disarming charm were legendary, and Scheijen records countless anecdotes of his peers attesting to them.
Public disgrace notwithstanding, Diaghilev returned to his work on Mir Iskusstva, but partly due to his lack of interest, the journal eventually folded. He then turned his attention to his new obsession, the lesser-known works of Russian art, particularly of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and he soon gained an unrivaled depth of knowledge on the subject. Through the intercession of many of his friends, his category-three classification was eventually dissolved, and in 1905 he launched an exhibit featuring two centuries of Russian art starting from 1705. The catalogue he produced is still regarded as memorable: “As a testament to Diaghilev’s extraordinary creative and organizational talents, this exhibition ranks with the greatest achievements of the Ballets Russes.” It would also be his Russian swan song.
Diaghilev eventually realized he could reach no further heights in his homeland. His primary purpose—to bring Russian culture to Western Europe—began by his launching an exhibition in Paris, an unprecedented undertaking. He followed this by planning Russian concerts at the Grand Opera in Paris and, in an ironic twist of fate, by acquiring the help of Rimsky-Korsakov to re-orchestrate Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, which was “met with a rapturous reception.” Diaghilev’s Parisian success quickly became known all over, including St. Petersburg, where an ambitious dancer named Vaslav Nijinsky began to hatch plans of his own. It wasn’t long before the seventeen-year-old dancer and the 35-year-old impresario would become an item.
It became evident to Diaghilev that he would have to go beyond the visual arts in order to place Russian art on the map, and he eventually came around to Walter Nouvel’s contention that the future of art would find its ultimate expression through ballet. It is here where Diaghilev could fully exercise his eclectic artistic expertise. Beginning in 1909, his newly-formed Ballets Russes would begin performing in Paris, becoming world famous for its unprecedented artistic collaborations. The company’s productions, all under Diaghilev’s complete control, displayed the choreography of Mikhail Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and even a young George Balanchine; featured musical compositions by Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Claude Debussy; and showcased set and costume designs by Léon Bakst, Pablo Picasso, Alexandre Benois, Natalia Goncharova, and even his close friend Coco Chanel. Diaghilev’s ability to gather the greatest artists of the age would earn him the title of the world’s most successful theatrical producer. From the riotous opening of Le sacre du printemps, with choreography by Nijinsky and music by Stravinsky, to the scandalously gender-bending Jeux, in which two women and a man dance together en pointe—heretofore only done by women—Diaghilev would be known for pushing the artistic envelope and presenting the avant-garde. (Nijinsky would later reveal in his diary that he had meant for the dancers to represent three homosexual men.)
The Ballets Russes would become the single most influential force in the art world for two decades. Almost throughout, Diaghilev’s vigilant dreams and hopes were to have his company perform in Russia. As the author emphasizes, despite some opinions to the contrary, Diaghilev never lost a sense of his Russian identity, and while he spent years traveling the cities of Europe and the Americas, using Paris and later Monte Carlo as his base of operations, he never really made a home outside of Russia. To his closest friends, almost all of them Russian, his homesickness was palpable and a source of an ever-present, underlying melancholy.
Not surprisingly, Diaghilev’s professional relationships were fraught with turbulence, much of it surrounding his often ruthless and duplicitous business dealings, the need for absolute control of every aspect of production, and his general ineptitude for managing money. He often paid his employees from advances for new projects, and when there were no immediate prospects, he sometimes paid them nothing at all. He also suffered little compunction about reneging on professional promises, and on more than one occasion was taken to court, as in the case of Bakst, who had been promised the job of designing the opera Mavre to compensate for his unpaid contribution to The Sleeping Princess, but was replaced by an unknown Russian artist at the last minute. Bakst won his court case, but the price both he and Diaghilev paid—the ending of a thirty-year friendship—was tragic, partly because Diaghilev probably hid the fact that he was broke, and even more so because the two never reconciled before Bakst died, only a year later. The composer Prokofiev also issued a lawsuit when Diaghilev’s protégé du jour, Boris Kochno, sued him in court. When meeting with his lawyer, Stravinsky joined in waging a battle against Diaghilev, whom Stravinsky felt was the real culprit fueling Kochno’s legal action. At one particularly low point, Diaghilev had to flee the country in order to escape his creditors, which included members of his own company.
His love life was no grand jeté in the park, either. Insanely jealous, Diaghilev would become incensed when his bed partners showed an interest in others—especially women. Because the bisexual Nijinsky had a wandering eye, Diaghilev made it known among the company that sex with the young dancer was verboten. This didn’t stop the impetuous Nijinsky from employing the services of prostitutes. Things got worse when the dancer became the company’s featured star. Later, as official choreographer, he became too difficult for Diaghilev to handle. Five years after their affair began, Nijinsky fell in love and married a Hungarian heiress while on tour. The news left Diaghilev broken. But it wasn’t long afterward that he found Léonide Massine to serve as his new protégé. While the young man did not possess the athleticism of his predecessor, nor his exceptional ballon, he was more intelligent and displayed a keen interest in art and literature. Eventually he would take over Nijinsky’s roles and would live to enjoy a more prolific and prominent career as a choreographer, while the unfortunate Nijinsky spent the remainder of his life primarily in a mental institution.
Massine, it turns out, also had a weakness for women and may have been “homosexual” only to advance his career at a time when sexual favors were practically de rigueur for the up-and-coming in the ballet world. He would not even stay in the same hotel with the impresario while in Italy for fear of losing his reputation as a ladies’ man. He would spend many nights carousing with Picasso, hopping whorehouses. According to several accounts, when Massine committed an official faux pas—having an affair with one of the company ballerinas, Vera Savina—Diaghilev summoned the girl to his hotel room, and after getting her drunk and naked, threw her onto the slumbering Massine, “exclaiming, ‘behold your beau ideal.’” One account claims Massine immediately stormed out and broke his contract; another claims Diaghilev summarily fired him and relegated Vera to the corps. In any event, Massine’s betrayal hit Diaghilev even harder than Nijinsky’s, and he suffered a nervous breakdown.
But it was not long before fellow artist and friend Sergey Sudeykin would lighten the aging impresario’s heart—with his gift of seventeen-year-old Boris Kochno, a hand-me-down lover who was both a genuine homosexual and one who preferred older men. The author writes that when Kochno first caught sight of the impresario’s increasingly imposing figure, he almost swooned: “The very next day Kochno was offered the job of Diaghilev’s secretary. When he asked what the duties entailed, Diaghilev replied, ‘A secretary must be able to make himself indispensible.’” Kochno did just that, and more—he even served on some projects as librettist.
With Massine’s absence, however, Diaghilev was without a male lead dancer. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Patrick Healy-Kay (later changed to Anton Dolin), a young Englishman whose affair with the impresario caused a scandal due to the simple fact that he wasn’t Russian, which for some reason was considered socially unacceptable. To make matters worse, the boy proved an inept pupil. Luckily, an ambitious dancer named Serge Lifar had set his sights on stardom and the impresario, and soon he would become Diaghilev’s favorite.
By the mid-1920’s, as the U.S.S.R. became more oppressive, Diaghilev finally gave up all hope of ever returning. For one, many of his male dancers would have been subject to military service had they set foot on Soviet soil. And the Soviet regime would hardly welcome with open arms a man who had made a name for himself as a frontrunner of the artistic avant-garde. Perhaps the greatest irony of the Ballet Russes is that, despite its name, it never once performed in its native country.
Diaghilev’s obstinacy left little room for following advice, even doctors’ warnings regarding his diabetes, and his neglected health had steadily taken its toll. His death on August 19, 1929, was on the front page of every major world newspaper, except for those in his homeland. The Soviets ignored the great man and denied his achievements for decades after his demise.
In a 1902 letter to his stepmother, Diaghilev had written that he considered Richard Wagner’s choice to die in Venice—a city he considered the “ultimate expression of art”—as a stroke of genius, and he ended the letter with his own prediction: “And so I am convinced I will end my days here, where there’s nowhere to hurry to, where one needn’t make any effort to live; and that’s our main problem, all of us don’t just live; we strive terribly to live as if without those efforts our life would come to an end.” Only a few days after seeing a performance of Don Giovanni in Salzburg, he dragged himself to the City of Canals and was soon joined by Serge Lifar, Boris Kochno, longtime patron Misia Sert, and Coco Chanel. Diaghilev died as he often lived—poor and alienated from his inner circle of lifetime Russian friends.
Dean Wrzeszcz is a contributing editor at Gay City News and is working on his first book of autobiographical essays.
