Perpetuating the Myth: Sergey Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes

It is a well-documented fact that a major twentieth-century artistic revolution developed from and within ballet, the most misunderstood and disparaged of the theatre arts. Between 1909 and 1929,¹ Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were central to the creation and the promotion of radical trends and ideas, which had a significant impact on various art forms. Yet the true essence of the synergetic alchemy between such a formal medium and the Ballets Russes' modernism remains an unsolved mystery. Such elusiveness, in turn, feeds into the legends that surround the celebrated ballet company and its leader, Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev. Entangled in narratives that edge on and shift between historicized mythology and mythological history, the Russian impresario and his brainchild linger in the imagination of many as unsolved puzzles.

The 2009 centenary celebrations of the company's inception provided a unique opportunity to readdress, reassess and expand those narratives. Yet, contrary to modern historiographical trends, none of the recent revisitations have dealt fatal blows to the existing histories and myths. If anything, the conferences, symposia, publications, and even the critical re-stagings of salient works from the Diaghilev repertoire (which have been flourishing for the past two years) have not only contributed to keeping those documented legends alive, but have created new ones.

This is not to say that those initiatives lacked scholarly value and depth. The celebrations stimulated both the discovery of materials that had long been inaccessible and a rarely seen before exchange of interdisciplinary discourses, which added greatly to a broader understanding of both the Ballets Russes and their leader's ever so baffling persona. The new research outcomes, whether they be proceedings, articles, edited books, or single authored monographs, thus followed and developed the analytical line of publications such as Lynn Garafola's Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,² one of the most exhaustive late twentieth-century studies on the subject. Not unlike Garafola's work, the new analyses of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes break free from the dance-centred angle that characterized earlier, though historically significant writings, to focus on a broader plurality of factors.

The move away from the somewhat constraining boundaries of dance scholarship proved critical but successful, as demonstrated by Sjeng Scheijen's Diaghilev, A Life. Sheijen is not a dance-oriented biographer, and his treatment of the Ballets Russes seasons, in the second half of the book, is symptomatic of his non dance-specific approach. Those used to the overenthusiastic tones employed by earlier dance writers in describing the distinctiveness of specific performances might be disappointed. In this new biography, the discussion of seminal works such as Les Sylphides, Firebird and Petrushka never prompts those lengthy detours on choreographic highs and lows found in most dance-centred works. The success, or the initial lack of success, of those choreographic milestones is tackled instead in a surprisingly succinct, though never hasty, way. The author justifies his interpretation by claiming that the "marketing of the venture has obscured its artistic achievements, which are also difficult to convey historiographically. Les Sylphides and the dances from Prince Igor are still performed today, but very few will be able to see in these ballets "the birth of the new art" (184, 185). This belief draws also upon the fact that "[a]lmost all famous eyewitness accounts of those first evenings were written years, sometimes decades later—a fact that undermines their reliability and makes the emotions they describe difficult to comprehend" (183).

Controversial as they may sound, these choices help the author maintain a consistent focus on the man behind the Ballets Russes. Not an easy task; Sheijen, the last in a long series of illustrious biographers, had to distance his reading of Diaghilev's extraordinarily multifaceted...