Books
I DEVELOPED an unlikely obsession with Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at the age of 14. I slept beneath a poster of Vaslav Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose (a role he came to despise as ‘too pretty’), listened to a lot of Stravinsky and, on my first visit to Venice, was photographed looking mournful on the cemetery island of San Michele by the graves of the impresario and the composer, but not the dancer, who is buried in Montmartre.
I became something of a balletomane, which is what the Arts critic Rupert Christiansen declares himself to be in the preface to his brilliantly eclectic and imaginatively researched account of Diaghilev’s widespread influence. He jumps right in with Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film, The Red Shoes, which perpetuated the myth of Diaghilev in the figure of the ballet company director Boris Lermontov, played by a suavely elegant, demonically demanding Anton Walbrook. The outrageously lurid technicolour of the film, flaring onto the screen in glowing contrast to the grey drabness of post-war Europe, had its equivalent in the Paris Saison Russe of 1909, when the designs of Léon Bakst, in particular those for Schéherézade, had an immediate impact on fashion and interior design. As Osbert Lancaster wrote, the prevailing ‘pale, pastel shades were replaced by a riot of barbaric hues—jade green, purple, every variety of crimson and scarlet and, above all, orange’.
Who was the man who unleashed all this, and more? Mr Christiansen offers a fascinating portrait of the young Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, who grew up in remote Perm, in an upper-middle-class family with musical inclinations and precarious finances. He opted to study law (not for long), chiefly as a way of getting himself to St Petersburg. Uncouth and exuberant, impulsive and excitable, his thick black hair shot through with a streak of white, he cut a provincial figure at first, as brash and bouncy as an un-house-trained labrador.
He was determined to make his mark and had a voracious appetite for new experiences, musical, visual and sensual. His first love was music, Wagner in particular, but the group of cultured young men in which he found himself had their eye on ballet as an outmoded artform that was ripe for development; Diaghilev was always swift to spot an opportunity and both a keen eye, and respect, for the acumen of others. These included Alexandre Benois, art historian, illustrator and stage designer, a friend with whom he frequently quarrelled, but whose approval he craved. It was Benois who came up with what the author identifies as probably the most ‘sharply illu
