Natasha's Dance полностью

The Ballets Russes was the centre of Russian cultural life in Paris. It was a sort of Parisian embassy of the Petersburg renaissance headed by Ambassador Diaghilev. After its wartime tours of America he had brought the company to France in the hope of reuniting his winning team of artists and of ending its perpetual cash flow crises by tapping the French market for the Russian arts that had done so well for it before the war. Fokine having settled in America, Diaghilev needed a new choreographer to carry on that distinctive Russian balletic tradition that went back to the school of Petipa. He found it in Georges Balanchine (ne Georgy Balanchivadze). Born in 1904 in St Petersburg, the son of a Georgian composer, Balanchine had trained at Petipa's Imperial Ballet Academy and worked in the troupe of the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg before going on tour to Europe in 1924. Diaghilev perceived Balanchine as a vital link with the Petersburg traditions, and the first thing he asked him after Balanchine's dancers had run through a few routines they had brought with them from Russia was whether he could transfer them to the stage.⁸³ Balanchine's affinity for the music of Stravinsky made him the ideal choice for Diaghilev, whose plans for Paris had Stravinsky's ballets centre stage. The first collaboration between Stravinsky and Balanchine, Apollon Musagete (1928), was the start of a lifelong partnership between composer and choreographer. It was a partnership that would ensure the survival of the modern ballet - Diaghilev's invention - as an art form.

The Ballets Russes of the 1920s was defined by the principles of neoclassicism. In dance this entailed a return to the Apollonian rigour of the classical academy: an abstract, almost architectural, design in the manoeuvres of the ensemble; the rehabilitation of the male dancer in heroic mode; and the sacrifice of plot to the sensual connections between music, colour and movement. In music it entailed a renunciation of the Russian nationalist school and a stylized imitation of the classical (and predominantly Italian) traditions of Petersburg - as, for example, in Stravinsky's commedia dell'arte Pulci-nella (1920) and his one-act opera bouffe entitled Mavra (1922), which was dedicated to the memory of Pushkin, Glinka and Tchaikovsky.

This re-engagement with the classical tradition was an obvious reaction by the emigres. After the chaos and destruction of the revolutionary period, they longed for some sense of order. They looked back to the European values and inheritance of Petersburg to redefine themselves as Europeans and to shift their 'Russia' west. They wanted to recover the old certainties from underneath the rubble of St Petersburg.

With the death of Diaghilev, in 1929, the Ballets Russes split up. The impresario had always been the inspiration of the group. He possessed the sort of presence that gave people a feeling of anticlimax when he left the room. So when he left the world it was almost bound to happen that his stars should go their separate ways. Many worked in the various 'Ballet Russes' touring companies that inherited the repertoire and glamour of the original Diaghilev organization: Fokine, Massine, Benois, Nijinska, Balanchine. Others, like Anna Pavlova, struck out on their own, establishing small companies that carried on Diaghilev's experimentalist tradition. In England his alumni laid the foundations of the British ballet: Ninette de Valois and the Vic-Wells Ballet (which later became the Royal Ballet), the Ballet Rambert and the Markova-Dolin Ballet were all descendants of the Ballets Russes. Balanchine transported the Diaghilev tradition to America, where he set up the New York City Ballet in 1933.

Paris was an outlet to the West, a door through which exiled Russians reached a new homeland. Most of those who made their home in Paris in the 1920s ended up by fleeing to America as the threat of war approached in the 1930s. The main attraction of America was its freedom and security. Artists like Stravinsky and Chagall escaped from Hitler's Europe to work in peace in the United States. For Stravinsky, this was not a question of politics: he publicly supported the Italian fascists ('I have an overpowering urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the saviour of Italy and - let us hope of Europe', he had told an Italian newspaper in the early 1930s);⁸⁴ and although he loathed the Nazis (they attacked his music), he was careful to put space between himself and his German-Jewish contacts after 1933. It was more a question of his own convenience: he loved order and needed it to work.

The composer Nicolas Nabokov (a cousin of the writer) recalls a