Sergei Diaghilev

gigatos | June 7, 2022

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Summary

Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev (March 19, 1872, Selishchi, Novgorod Province, Russian Empire – August 19, 1929, Lido Island near Venice, Kingdom of Italy) – Russian theatrical and artistic figure.

One of the founders of the “World of Art” group, organizer of the “Russian Seasons” in Paris and the company “Diaghilev”s Russian Ballet”, entrepreneur. He played one of the decisive roles in the popularization of Russian art in Europe and the world at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, “discovered” many talented ballet dancers, composers and artists.

Diaghilev spent his youth in St. Petersburg, where during his university studies he became interested in painting and became one of the founders of the “World of Art” association. The first step in Diaghilev”s career was the organization of a series of exhibitions of current European and Russian artists, which were a great success. Having joined the Imperial Theaters, he was appointed editor of the “Yearbook of Imperial Theaters” and reformed the publication, turning it into a high-quality art magazine with several supplements, quality illustrations and literary articles.

In 1906, with the help of influential patrons, he held the first Historical Russian Concert in Paris, presenting a Russian opera to the French public and, in 1909, a ballet. The success of the Russian ballets was so overwhelming that it contributed to the wave of fashion “for everything Russian” that swept Europe in the early 20th century. The company began to tour annually, and gradually began to cover not only Paris but also London and other European cities, as well as the USA and South America. After the revolutions of 1917, the company ceased contact with Russia and continued working under the name of Diaghilev until his death in 1929.

Diaghilev had rare organizational skills, a fine taste in art and a special flair that helped him to find new names and create “stars” from his protégés year after year. Many artists and composers, as well as a whole galaxy of dancers owed their international fame to Diaghilev. However, contemporaries remembered him as a controversial figure, a personality with a complex character, often violating personal agreements and financial obligations. Toward the end of his life, Diaghilev lost interest in ballet, became interested in books, and assembled a collection of rare editions.

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Family and Early Years

Sergei Diagilev was born on March 19 (31), 1872 in Selishchi, Novgorod province, into the family of a colonel, hereditary nobleman Pavel Pavlovich Diagilev. His mother died a few months after Sergei”s birth, presumably of sepsis. His father”s brother, Ivan Pavlovich Diagilev, was a patron of the arts and the founder of a musical circle. The Diaghilev family owned a vodka distillery in Bikbard and several distilleries in the Perm region; they built a church in Nikolayevsky and a Kamsko-Beryozovsky monastery. The Diaghilevs had a mansion on Furshtatskaya Street in St. Petersburg. Shortly before Sergei was born, his aunt, his father”s sister Maria Koribut-Kubitovich, was widowed and moved in with her three children. Together with his older sister Anna (married Filosofova), they formed a close-knit family and raised their children together. In 1873 Sergei”s father met Elena Valerianovna Panaeva, the daughter of an engineer Valerian Panaev, and married her in 1874. The stepmother raised Sergei as her own child and became one of his closest people for the rest of his life.

In Perm, the Diaghilevs” house was located on the corner of Sibirskaya Street and Pushkin Street (former Bolshaya Yamskaya Street). The mansion in the style of late Russian classicism was built in the 1850s by the architect Rudolf Karvovsky. The Diaghilevs often went abroad for the winter or stayed in St. Petersburg and spent their summers in Bikbard. In St. Petersburg the family began every other Thursday musical evening, where the famous singer Alexandra Panaeva-Kartseva, who married a nephew of Peter Tchaikovsky, often sang, and Modest Mussorgsky was a guest. Pavel Petrovich and Elena Valerianovna Diaghilev loved music, and it was largely thanks to their stepmother that Sergei developed an interest in art. Due to financial difficulties, in 1879 the family left St. Petersburg and finally moved to Perm, where they continued the tradition of musical evenings. From an early age Sergei was taught to sing and play the piano, and at the age of 15 he wrote his first romance.

After graduating from the Perm Gymnasium in 1890, Diaghilev returned to St. Petersburg and enrolled in the Law Department of St. Petersburg University, while also taking music lessons from the composer N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He graduated from the Faculty of Law in six years instead of four. By his own admission he “liked the university” terribly for its atmosphere and dandy uniform, however he never planned to work in the field of law. Diaghilev used his student years as Leo Tolstoy advised him – to “look around” and choose his path in life. On July 23, 1896 he received his diploma, and seven months later held his first organized exhibition of paintings. Further active years of Diaghilev can be divided into two periods: in 1898-1906 he lived in Russia and worked mainly in the field of fine arts, from 1906 until his death he worked as an impresario abroad.

The Petersburg Period

A verbal self-portrait of the young Diaghilev about himself at 23:

I am, first of all, a big charlatan, albeit with brilliance; second, a big charmer; third, a sassy; fourth, a man with a lot of logic and little principle; and fifth, a talentless person, it seems; however, I seem to have found my real purpose: patronage. All data except money, but that will come.

In the late 1890s Diaghilev organized a series of exhibitions that resonated widely in St. Petersburg. During this period, Diaghilev sought to “bring Russian art closer to the world” – to introduce the Russian public to modern European art, which was practically not represented in the country. Russian cultural world, he wanted to get rid of the “provincialism” and “having cleaned, to exalt in the West”. In 1897, an exhibition of British and German watercolors was held, followed by an exhibition of Scandinavian artists in the halls of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. In 1898, Diaghilev organized an exhibition of Russian and Finnish artists in the Stieglitz Museum, presenting the works of the leading young masters – Vrubel, Serov and Levitan. In the same year, he opened the first exhibition in Germany, which was a great success; the Russian artists were rated “even higher than their European counterparts”. The organization of such exhibitions was very expensive; without any personal savings, a very young Diaghilev managed to secure the support of such influential patrons of the arts as Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and, through him, Nicholas II.

The Russian-Finnish exhibition of 1898 at the Stieglitz Museum was the first appearance of the “World of Art” association. After it, the idea was born to create a “journal-manifesto of the same name,” which would publish articles and works by circle members and other authors who were united by a common view of art and its future. In their opinion, the magazine was primarily supposed to “serve the god Apollo” and popularize the activities of myrists in many branches of culture. Already in February 1898 the first issue was published. Together with Diaghilev, the edition was headed by A.N. Benois, and sponsored by Savva Mamontov and Princess Maria Tenisheva. Diaghilev was its editor (from 1903 – together with Benois), from 1902 he directed the edition. According to Benoit”s recollections, Diaghilev formed the format and appearance of the magazine, in 1898-1904 he also wrote articles on art history himself, in 1902 he published a monograph on the artist D. G. Levitsky. He then planned to write similar studies on Fyodor Rokotov, Borovikovsky and Stepan Shchukin. Benois noted that of all the artists of the World of Art Diaghilev was “especially alien to philosophy and literature”, read little and showed serious gaps in his knowledge of the classics.

On 6 March 1905 he opened Diaghilev”s Historical and Artistic Exhibition of Russian Portraits of the XVII-XVIII centuries in the Oval Hall of the Taurida Palace, for which he had prepared a catalog with descriptions of 2,300 paintings and references to the artists and models. The exhibition was designed by Alexandre Benois. The exhibition was a broad success and revolutionary in terms of the synthesis of art and the formation of a holistic impression on the visitors. The combined effect of the design of the rooms, the arrangement of paintings, signatures and logical order multiplied the effect received by the viewer.

In 1906 at the Autumn Salon in Paris Diaghilev opened the exhibition “Two Centuries of Russian Art and Sculpture”, which occupied 12 halls in the Grand Palais and included 750 works by 103 authors. It featured both paintings by young artists (Benois, Grabar, Kuznetsov, Malyavin, Repin, Serov, Yavlensky, Roerich, Somov and others) and works by past masters, as well as 36 ancient Russian icons. Leon Bakst designed the exposition. The retrospective presented to the public was, according to contemporaries, one of the main events in Paris and to a large extent laid the foundation for the success of the Russian Seasons and the “fashion for everything Russian” that swept Europe in the following years.

In 1899 Prince Sergei Volkonsky received the post of director of the Imperial Theaters and on September 10 of the same year he appointed Diaghilev an official on special assignments. Although such a position was often purely nominal, Diaghilev developed a flurry of activity. In parallel with his work on art exhibitions, from October 1, he became editor of the Yearbook of Imperial Theaters. Diaghilev radically reformed the publication, turning it into a full-fledged art magazine with publications of analytical articles, reviews, season calendar, a complete list of artists and productions. Three separate supplementary books with historical and literary materials were published for the magazine. Contemporaries noted the magnificent design of the edition – Diaghilev engaged artists, who designed headpieces, vignettes and fonts, and transferred the printing to the expensive coated paper. The magazine was richly illustrated and included pictures of authors and artists, sketches of decorations and costumes. A new editor began to promote the publication and set up marketing channels. The first issue of the yearbook, according to Volkonsky, was “a new era in Russian book publishing. At that time Diaghilev was 27 and “a handsome and secular lion,” and from the success of the publication, according to Benois” recollections, he “lost all proper awareness of his position: <…> that he was already at the goal, that he was the only one, that it was impossible to do without him at all.” Diaghilev began to appear more and more often at rehearsals of the Imperial Ballet. Soon the ballerinas nicknamed him “shenshelya” (chinchilla) for his gray hair, and in her memoirs Matilda Kshesinskaya quoted the poem:

Now I”ve found out I”m in the box, I”m afraid I”m going to lose my way!

Diaghilev “emphatically applauded Kshesinskaya” and accompanied her home after rehearsals, while the ballerina was flattered by the attention of the exhibition organizer and connoisseur of art who already had weight in artistic circles. Later they often had conflicts, but both “to the end of life believed that they were friends.

Together with Diaghilev, many contemporary artists came to the Imperial Theaters (Apollinariy Vasnetsov, Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin, Evgeny Lanceret). During the 1900-1901 season, Director Volkonsky commissioned Diaghilev to stage Leo Delibe”s ballet Silvia. Diaghilev invited artists from the World of Art group to work on it, which caused a “silent revolt” among the directorate”s officials. Volkonsky was persuaded to revoke Diaghilev”s appointment order. He defiantly refused to edit the Yearbook, and in his wake many authors and artists announced their break with the directorate. The scandal ended when, in March 1901, Diaghilev was dismissed “on the third point,” that is, with a lifetime ban from holding public office. However, he managed to come out of this situation a winner – on his side was the Emperor Nicholas II, who 14 times appealed about this situation, both supporters and opponents of Diaghilev. In the end, through the efforts of Kshesinskaya, Volkonsky himself was dismissed a week after Diaghilev. According to evidence from friends, Sergei Pavlovich did not value the role of an official and the scandal passed easily, but in the spring of 1901 he went abroad and almost a year and a half has not been at the theater.

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Abroad

Inspired by the success of the 1906 exhibition, Diaghilev organized the Historical Russian Concerts in Paris in 1907. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Glazunov, Fyodor Chaliapin, Felia Litvin and other major musicians participated. Together with the musicians involved in the Historical Concertos, Diaghilev visited Camille Saint-Saëns in Paris. The funds for the preparation of the tour were provided by the Russian treasury, guided by political considerations and counting on their help to strengthen the position of the Russian Empire in Europe. Grand Duke Andrey Vladimirovich and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna were the patrons of Diaghilev”s undertaking.

In the spring of 1908 Diaghilev held the first Russian season abroad, the central event of which was the opera Boris Godunov with F.I. Chaliapin. The sets were designed by Boris Anisfeld based on sketches by Benois and Bakst. To achieve maximum authenticity, the artist Ivan Bilibin traveled to the Arkhangelsk region to buy national costumes, and Bakst sought props at St. Petersburg “flea markets.

Despite its success with the public, the Commercially, the Historic Concerts lost 85,000 francs from the season, so the following year Diaghilev decided to present the ballet in Paris first, which garnered a particularly enthusiastic response. It is noteworthy that Diaghilev treated ballet with disdain at the time:

It can be watched with equal success by both the smart and the stupid – there is no content or meaning in it anyway; and it does not require even a little mental effort to perform it.

According to the memoirs of the premier Serge Lifar, to the end of his life Diaghilev retained his snobbish attitude toward the company”s ordinary artists; he spoke of the dancers in the corps de ballet “nothing but a herd of sheep.

In 1909, along with the continuation of the opera seasons, the first Russian ballet season took place in Paris. Since after a quarrel with Kshesinskaya and repeated conflicts with the directorate of the imperial theaters, the Russian treasury refused to sponsor the tour, Diaghilev had to seek help from his patroness Misa Sert. With her patronage, he managed to rent the Châtelet, a less prestigious theater than the Grand Opéra. The program for the first season included the ballets Armida”s Pavilion, Polovtsian Dances, The Feast, Cleopatra (or Egyptian Nights), and La Sylphide, as well as the operas Boris Godunov and The Maid of Pskov and the first act of Ruslan and Lyudmila. Ballets were mostly staged as the second act after the opera. The main roles were danced by Tamara Karsavina, Vaclav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Karalli, and Mordkin. Diaghilev”s approach was innovative – he synthesized dance, music and scenery into one overall work, whereas previously each of these arts was presented to the public separately. The success of the productions was “astonishing even for the performers themselves” – audiences and critics alike were in raptures. The incredible success of the season instantly made the solo dancers international stars.

Diaghilev”s first ballet seasons featured leading dancers from the Imperial Theaters – Mikhail Fokin, Anna Pavlova, Vaclav Nijinsky and Bronislava Nijinskaya, Tamara Karsavina, Adolph Bolm, Ludmila Schollar, Vera Carally, and Lyubov Chernysheva. From 1911 until his death in 1929, his company performed under the title Diaghilev”s Russian Ballet. Until the beginning of the First World War, the program also included opera (Igor Stravinsky”s The Nightingale, Alexander Borodin”s Prince Igor, Rimsky-Korsakov”s May Night).

From the second ballet season of 1910, the entreprise was already performing at the Grand Opera, and Diaghilev annually presented exclusively world premieres to the Parisian public. In 1910 they staged Giselle or Willis, Carnival, Schéhérazade, The Firebird and Orientales. The choreography was choreographed by Michel Fokine, while in 1910-1913 the role of one of the interpreter”s “artistic directors” was performed by the composer Stravinsky. Stephen Walsh remarked that “Diaghilev and Stravinsky were like Russian cartoon characters: they hugged each other and drank together in the evening, but fought bitterly over money and contracts in the afternoon”. In 1911, the 6th Russian Season included the ballets The Underwater Kingdom, The Phantom of the Rose, Narcissus, Peri and Petrushka. Because of the scandal between the composer, who wanted to give the lead role to Tatiana Trukhanova, and Diaghilev, who was categorically against it, the premiere of Peri never took place.

After Fokine, Diaghilev”s leading choreographers were Viacheslav Nijinsky, Leonid Myasin, Bronislava Nijinskaya, and George Balanchine. Up to 1913, the ballets were designed mainly by artists who were members of the World of Art, in particular Alexander Benois, Léon Bakst, Alexander Golovin, Nikolai Rerikh and Boris Anisfeld. The ballets of this period were dominated by the graceful stylistics of Impressionism and belle époque. In The Afternoon Sleep of a Faun, a new trend emerged – a transition from neo-romanticism to “wild,” expressive Fauvism. From the middle of the 1910s, Diaghilev radically changed the stylistics of performances, abandoning exoticism, court pageantry and Orientalism and turning to the avant-garde. The first performance of the new musical form and choreography was Eric Satie”s ballet Parade, which premiered in Paris in 1917 and caused a scandal in society. Moving away from the World of Art style and living permanently in Europe, Diaghilev began to collaborate primarily with European artists, and his regular collaborators were the émigrés Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. For example, for the ballet The Games, for which a tennis match was the backdrop, the costumes were made by French couturier Paquin and the music by Claude Debussy.

In 1911-1914 Diaghilev”s troupe performed six Russian Seasons in London. During its first tour, it became clear that British audiences received the repertoire differently: in the opera Prince Igor, the Cuman dances were called “wild leaps”, the love affair between a slave and a mistress in “Schaherezade” was considered indecent, and in “Armida” they did not applaud Nijinsky. However, the romantic ballets, the sets by Bakst, the primas Kshesinskaya and Pavlova were a huge success. Diaghilev signed a contract for one million francs for the season in the summer of 1914. Plans for 1915 collapsed due to the outbreak of World War I; Diaghilev fired Nijinsky, losing his best premiere. It was only in 1916 that a new tour of the entreprise took place, this time in the United States.

Beginning in 1922, the company settled in Monte Carlo under the patronage of Prince Pierre. According to Benois, this period was the least dignified for Diaghilev – by that time he had lost all the friends and authors with whom he had begun the Russian Seasons, and he began to impose his artistic views on the artists, thus introducing “much that was absurd and tasteless. Of those close to him, only his cousin Pavel Grigorievich Koribut-Kubitovich kept in touch. Kshesinskaya wrote that by that time the Russian Ballet left only a facade – the artists were recruited from foreigners and given Russian names, the new productions, in her opinion, were ugly. Few people understood the transition of the entreprise to the avant-garde. In many respects it was dictated by the spirit of fashion – in the post-war years, romanticism and neo-renaissance already seemed to be a relic of the past. Diaghilev”s entreprise was in dire financial straits and was forced to follow the fashion itself rather than dictate it.

At the beginning of 1926, the company”s Berlin tour took place, which turned out to be a serious loss – only a quarter of the tickets were sold. In 1927, Diaghilev became interested in collecting rare books and “completely lost interest in ballet”. The company existed until 1929. According to the recollection of the permanent director Sergei Grigoriev, their last performance was in Vichy on August 4, 1929.

In 1921 Diaghilev was diagnosed with diabetes. According to Stravinsky”s recollections, he did not know how to follow a diet, to stay slim he “starved himself”, but he often “ate” constant stress with boxes of chocolates. He did not take insulin as he was “afraid of injections”. In 1927 he developed furunculosis, a deadly condition that could lead to sepsis, and antibiotics were not yet known at the time. In the summer of 1929 in Paris, Dr. Dalimier ordered Diaghilev to keep a diet and get plenty of rest, warning that non-compliance with the recommendations would have dangerous consequences for his health.

Diaghilev ignored the injunction, traveling with the troupe to Berlin, then to Cologne and via Paris to London, where he again visited the doctor, who advised him to hire a nurse, which was also not done: he was cared for daily by Kokhno, doing the necessary treatments and dressings. After sending the troupe on vacation and returning to Paris, he again visited Dalimier, who insisted on a course of treatment with thermal waters in Vichy. Instead, Diaghilev and his protégé Igor Markevich undertook a “musical” trip along the Rhine, visiting Baden-Baden (where he discussed the new ballet with Hindemith and saw Nabokov, who later wrote: “Despite his appearance, he seemed to be in a good mood. He talked cheerfully about his plans for the rest of the summer and for the new fall season.”), Munich (for the operas of Mozart and Wagner), and Salzburg. From there, Diaghilev sent his cousin Pavel Koribut-Kubitovich a letter insistently asking him to come to Venice. After parting with Markevich in Vevey, Diaghilev left for Venice on August 7. The next day he checked into the Grand Hotel.

By that time he had already begun to get blood poisoning due to abscesses. From August 12 he no longer got out of bed; Lifar took care of him. Even while sick, Diaghilev continued to make plans and hum from Wagner and Tchaikovsky. On August 16, Kokhno came to see him, and on the 18th, Misia Sert and Chanel visited. After receiving a telegram from Koribut-Kubitovich, who was in no hurry to come at his call, Diaghilev remarked, “Well, of course, Pavka will be late and will come after my death. In the evening a priest came to see him. During the night Diaghilev”s temperature rose to 41 °, he no longer regained consciousness and died at dawn on August 19, 1929. Since Diaghilev had no money with him, the funeral was paid for by Misia Sert and Coco Chanel. After a short funeral service in accordance with the rite of the Orthodox Church, the body was taken to San Michele Island and buried in the Orthodox section of the cemetery.

The marble tombstone bears Diaghilev”s name in Russian and French (Serge de Diaghilew) and the epitaph: “Venice is the constant inspiration of our appeasements,” a phrase he wrote shortly before his death in a dedicatory inscription to Serge Lifar. On the pedestal, next to the impresario”s photo, there are almost always ballet shoes (they are put in sand to keep them from being blown away by the wind) and other theatrical paraphernalia. In the same cemetery next to Diaghilev”s grave is the grave of composer Igor Stravinsky, as well as poet Joseph Brodsky, who called Diaghilev “Citizen of Perm”.

Diaghilev”s official heiress was his father”s sister, Yulia Parensova-Dyaghilev, who lived in Sofia (she renounced her inheritance in favor of Nouvelle and Lifar). On August 27, Nouvelle organized a memorial service for the deceased in Paris, in the Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky. Diaghilev”s personal collection of ballet materials – sketches, drawings, costumes – went to Serge Lifar.

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Personal Life and Character

Sergei Diaghilev was a complex, contradictory figure, had a difficult character and made both many admirers and patrons and a host of enemies. Diaghilev”s patrons in different years were Dmitry Gintsburg, Princess Edmond de Polignac, Viscount Rosermere, Misia Sert, and Coco Chanel. Thanks to his promotional and managerial genius, many artists who could have been known only in their homeland have become global stars. At the same time in the company Diaghilev was always the one who was feared and with whom they had no close relations. Artists complained that it was very difficult to get a fee from Diaghilev, and the pace of work with constant tours and new productions, which he set the entire troupe, was so exhausting that it squeezed all the strength out of them. The fact that Diaghilev had a complicated approach to finances was common knowledge – Sergei Pavlovich often borrowed large sums of money, the Emperor several times gave him large subsidies for the “Russian Seasons”, and then – friends of patrons. While concluding six-figure contracts with operas and music halls, he often did not give contracts to his artists, relying only on verbal agreements. Correspondence and documents contain evidence of Diaghilev not paying debts, delaying royalties, and making promises he had no intention of keeping. For example, Claude Debussy, whom Diaghilev with great difficulty persuaded to participate in preparing the 1909 season and then refused his services, wrote: “our Russian behaves as if the best way to deal with people is to deceive them first. And in 1910, Diaghilev”s old friend Benois refused to work on a new ballet for the “Russian Seasons” because he had not yet received royalties for the previous year.

After a similar incident, the friendship and collaboration with Leon Bakst, one of the main co-authors of the success of the Russian Seasons, ended. Throughout 1918, Bakst worked on costumes, sending Diaghilev several sketches which the impresario did not like. In early 1919 Sergey Pavlovich sent Myasin to Paris to negotiate on cooperation on the London production with André Derain and the premiere took place in the summer. Diaghilev sent a telegram in mid-May to persuade Bakst himself to abandon the production. When Bakst refused, Diaghilev paid for an entire campaign in the British press that criticized Bakst”s work as outdated and outdated.

According to the composer Nikolai Nabokov, he was “the first great homosexual to declare himself and to be recognized by society. Diaghilev realized his homosexuality at an early age and for 15 years was in a relationship with his cousin Dmitry Filosofov. The reason for the breakup was Filosofov”s affair with the poetess Zinaida Hippius, in a “triple marriage” with her and Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Filosofov spent 15 years.

Diaghilev had intimate relations with Vaclav Nizhinsky, and later with other protégé dancers: Leonid Myasin, Boris Kokhno, Anton Dolin, Serge Lifar, as well as with the musician Igor Markevich.

Diaghilev was “tyrannically” jealous and ruthless of former favorites, and he took cruel revenge on artists for disobedience. For example, he removed Bronislava Nijinskaya for her refusal to dye her hair for a role, and when Vera Nemchinova did not tell him about her new contract with Cochrane, he stopped cooperating with her forever. Diaghilev”s lovers were strictly forbidden to have relations with women, for example, secretary Mavrin was fired from his post overnight as soon as it became known about his relationship with ballerina Olga Fedorova. Even Karsavina was dismissed from his role for flirting with his latest lover, Sergei Lifar. Lifar, like Nijinsky and Myasin, Diaghilev sent him to study with Cecchetti, took him to the major museums of Europe, and tried to develop his artistic taste. He also completely isolated Lifar from contact with others outside of rehearsals and performances, punishing dancers by firing them for flirting and severing relationships with friends.

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Diaghilev and Nijinsky

Nijinsky became Diaghilev”s first favorite and protégé, becoming famous after the start of the Russian Seasons. Wenceslas trained at the Imperial Ballet School, was noted for his outstanding talent and danced at the Mariinsky Theater from May 1908. A dancer who could seemingly hover in the air and possessed an incomparable technique of dance, he was the first male ballet dancer to eclipse the prima ballerinas in popularity with the public.

Diaghilev put Nijinsky in a “golden cage” – he received no royalties and “himself could not even buy a train ticket”, all expenses were covered personally by Sergei Pavlovich, and purchases were made by the servant Vasily assigned to Watslav. Diaghilev sought to shield Nijinsky from any contact with colleagues offstage and was jealous of both women and success. When Nijinsky began to take his first steps as a choreographer and his influence on the company became a hindrance in Diaghilev”s eyes, they began to have conflicts.

During a sea tour to Buenos Aires, Nijinsky fell in love with his longtime admirer Romola de Pulska, married her a month later and sent a letter to Diaghilev about it. The reply was a notice of immediate dismissal from the company. For the next two years, Sergei Pavlovich made numerous efforts to prevent Nijinsky from staging his ballets, forbade artists and composers to work with him, sued him, and contributed to the dancer”s complete ruin. In 1916, Diaghilev sent him a telegram from Madrid inviting him to take part in a tour of the company in Spain. Nijinsky did not know that in Spain a telegram was considered a document with the power of a binding contract. Diaghilev, however, was aware of this and deliberately used the ruse to force Nijinsky to take part in a tour of South America. Several accidents on this trip nearly cost Nijinsky his life. The strain of many years of touring life, the collapse of his career and Diaghilev”s betrayal provoked Nijinsky”s schizophrenia. Having fallen ill at the age of 28, he never recovered, spending the rest of his life in hospitals.

A similar tragedy befell another dancer who collaborated with Diaghilev – the Spaniard Felix Fernandez-Garcia. He had been invited by Diaghilev to perform the solo in the Triangle and had participated in the Russian Seasons since 1918. Fernandez-Garcia taught Myasin flamenco and cante hondo, and his pupil achieved considerable success and was constantly praised by Diaghilev. In order to dance the lead role, he had to abandon improvisation and work to the metronome, something the Spaniard had never been able to do and which Diaghilev knew, yet the latter continued to insist and criticize Fernandez-Garcia, driving him to a nervous breakdown that eventually drove him to madness.

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Relationship with Myasin

Back in the early 1910s, Diaghilev discovered a new talented dancer, Leonid Myasin, and instructed Enrico Cecchetti to “make a second Nijinsky out of him. After his break with Nijinsky, Myasin became a new favorite; he received major roles and permission from Diaghilev to direct his own ballets. Although Myasin was given more freedom than Nijinsky, he also suffered from Diaghilev”s jealousy. In 1920, while preparing a new version of The Sacred Spring, Leonid began an affair with the English ballerina Vera Clarke, who had recently joined the company and performed under the pseudonym Savina. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti”s diaries describe the story of how in Rome Diaghilev hired private detectives to follow the couple and report back to him on their meetings in hotels. In the end Diaghilev got Savina drunk, dragged her naked into the next room and threw her on the bed of a sleeping Myasin with the exclamation: “Look, here is your ideal. Myasin immediately left the hotel and ended all relations with Diaghilev. He was dismissed from the company and Savina was transferred from a promising soloist to the corps de ballet.

Diaghilev took the break with his favorite and for several days did not let anyone near him except Nouvelle and his servants Beppo and Basil. According to the artist Mikhail Semyonov, “Diaghilev seemed to have gone mad”; “his friends, fearing for his health and even his mind, did not let him out of their sight day and night,” wrote Arnold Haskell.

Beginning in 1924, Myasin, by then married to Savina, again collaborated with Diaghilev, who was left without a choreographer after the departure of Bronislava Nizhinskaya. According to the composer Dukelsky, while working on the ballet Zephyr and Flora, he told him that “Leonid has no soul, no heart, no taste, and the only thing he is interested in is money.

Diaghilev”s inestimable contribution to the popularization of Russian art and ballet in the world, the discovery of many talented performers, and his rare organizational skills were recognized both by his friends and enemies. According to artist Mikhail Nesterov, Diaghilev “without any “patriotic” motives, not thinking even a little about the “glory of the Fatherland”, but thinking only about himself, about his own well-being … made Russian art famous. The revolution that Diaghilev and the Russian Seasons made in the cultural life of the world was the beginning of a fundamentally new ballet performance, which synthesized several arts – music, acting, choreography and scenography.

According to A.N. Benois, “none of the undertakings would have been realized if Diaghilev had not led it and brought his energy to a place where there was already a lot of creativity, but where there was no main thing – a unifying role. M.F. Larionov believed that “Diaghilev was an enthusiast who gave himself with a kind of pagan passion to art. “Someone said that the entreprise was Diaghilev”s personal business… Only an evil tongue and a malicious mind could utter such a slander against this crusader of beauty,” asserted N.K. Roerich.

Describing Sergei Diaghilev, contemporaries used unusual figurative metaphors: Valentin Serov called him “the radiant sun,” Alexander Benois “Hercules” and “Peter the Great,” Akim Volynsky said he was “the yellow Devil in the arenas of European countries,” Andrei Bely “Nero in a black tuxedo over flaming Rome,” Vaclav Nijinsky called him “the Eagle who choked the little birds,” and Sergey Sudeikin called him exclusively “the Monster.” Jean Cocteau said that Diaghilev was “a monster, a sacred monster, a Russian prince who was satisfied with life only if miracles happened in it.

In her book of memoirs, Romola Nijinska noted that already in the 1910s Diaghilev had completely forgotten that “he did not teach the dancers to dance” and that his company”s success would have been impossible without the most important thing – the school they received from the Imperial Ballet. Marius Petipa used to say that the success of the Russian Seasons was the success of advertising, not art. Diaghilev”s success was based on a constant search for novelties, akin to the modern fashion industry, as well as scenography and set design, while Petipa”s classical school had always prioritized dance.

Diaghilev”s troupe gave seasons in Paris and London, and toured Italy, Spain, Germany, and the United States. “The Russian Seasons” were a means of promoting Russian ballet and the visual arts. Over the twenty years of their existence, they completely changed traditional perceptions of theater and dance, and also contributed to the flowering of ballet in countries where the genre was not developed. After Diaghilev”s death, Myasin reorganized his former company into the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, which existed until 1939, and the last choreographer of the entreprise, Balanchine, moved to the USA and opened a ballet school there.

Even before the First World War, Diaghilev dreamed of showing his entreprise in St. Petersburg. In the early 1920s, with the help of Mayakovsky, whom he brought to Berlin and Paris in every possible way, Diaghilev tried to organize a tour of the troupe or at least his own trip to the USSR, but then abandoned the idea.

Sergei Diaghilev”s two brothers, Yuri and Valentin, were victims of repression in the late 1920s. Valentin Diaghilev and his wife were arrested by the NKVD in the late summer of 1927. News of this reached Sergei Pavlovich only six months later, at his request about the fate of his brother tried to learn the French consul. Soon after it became known about the death of Sergei Pavlovich, Valentin was shot in Solovki, probably on trumped-up criminal case. Yuri was exiled (according to other reports, subjected to administrative exile) and died in Tashkent (according to other reports, in Chirchik, Tashkent Oblast) in 1957.

His elder nephew Sergei Valentinovich Diaghilev was a symphony conductor. Like his father, Valentin Pavlovich, he was repressed in 1937 under the corresponding political article. He spent 10 years in camps and 5 years in exile. After rehabilitation he returned to Leningrad, where he continued his creative work. He died on August 13, 1967.

His younger nephew Vasily Valentinovich Dyagilev, a neuropathologist, decided to hide his kinship with his famous uncle.Great-nephew Sergei Alexandrovich Dyagilev is a composer and conductor. He lives in St. Petersburg.

Image in art

Diaghilev”s roles were performed in the drama theater:

From memories of Sergei Diaghilev by Zinaida Kamenetskaya. – Tretyakov Gallery : magazine. – 2009. – № 3 (24).

Sources