DIAGHILEV'S EMPIRE

The dance critic for the Spectator recounts a seminal period in the history of ballet.

He was the original Ed Sullivan, a man with “no creative gift of his own” but whose genius was “to spot and gather the necessary talents, to render them effective, and to get results.” Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), the son of Russian landed gentry, “a great charmer,” arrived in St. Petersburg at age 18 determined to make his mark. After joining forces with the Nevsky Pickwickians, a “small fraternity of young men of the upper middle class,” Diaghilev formed the Ballets Russes, a troupe of Russian artists who set the standards that made ballet “a crucial piece in the jigsaw of Western culture.” Christiansen, an “incurable balletomane,” takes readers through the 20-year history of the Ballets Russes and the talents behind it: choreographer Alexander Gorsky; dancer Anna Pavlova; and, most notably, Vaslav Nijinsky, who shocked audiences with his “supernatural hovering jump,” was one of Diaghilev’s many male lovers, and whose mental state degenerated to the point that he was confined to a Swiss sanatorium in 1919 and thereafter “alternated between long periods of catatonic docility and episodes of violent self-harm.” Christiansen often notes that many of Diaghilev’s paramours—Nijinsky, “entirely heterosexual” dancer Léonide Massine, composer Igor Markevitch—were not gay, a debatable assertion next to comments such as that set designer Leon Bakst was “secretly cursed with perverse sexual tastes.” This mars an otherwise well-researched work full of entertaining stories, as when Nijinsky, dancing Giselle for the Mariinsky in front of duchesses, forgot “to wear mitigating baggy trunks or a support strap, leaving the bulges of both his genitals and his buttocks exposed.” When the ladies demanded decency, “Nijinsky, never one for a tactful compromise, refused and went on to dance the second act unencumbered.” The Mariinsky fired him.

A comprehensive look at the influence of one of ballet’s most famous companies.