Mir iskusstva became the first Russian art group to desire close contacts with the West. The influence of the growing Russian bourgeoisie, which thirsted for mutually beneficial exchange with western Europe, was an important factor. Therefore, the appearance of someone like Diaghilev was to be expected. That he turned out to be more than a traveling salesman of Russian culture, in fact a genius with a unique creative vision, can be considered an unexpected premium. But for the ambitious careerist, his talent was sometimes more of an obstacle than an aid. It made it impossible for him to compromise with the all-powerful imperial bureaucracy, which did not need visionary but merely energetic servants, like Telyakovsky.
That is why Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes turned into an émigré organization. It was basically Mir iskusstva transplanted from Petersburg to Paris, since Benois, like so many other members of Mir iskusstva, and Bakst before him became leading collaborators of Diaghilev’s enterprise. They were joined by Stravinsky and Fokine. In 1910, this group created the work that many consider to be the peak of Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons, Petrouchka.
The collaborative effort on Petrouchka was typical for Mir iskusstva. The main author was Stravinsky, who played an excerpt for Diaghilev while he was in Lausanne in 1910. The music came from a planned concert piece for piano and orchestra called Cry of Petrouchka. Diaghilev immediately wanted to develop this into a ballet, and he wrote to Benois in Petersburg, asking him to compose a libretto.
Benois was delighted. Petrouchka, the Russian Guignol, had been his favorite marionette character since childhood. Just recently Petrouchka had amused crowds in the capital at the fairs and shows set up on the Field of Mars during the pre-Lenten Mardi Gras, called Maslenitsa in Russian, or Butter Week. By the early twentieth century the tradition of popular festivities on the Field of Mars had died out, and Benois, a confirmed passé-ist, longed to immortalize that colorful Petersburg carnival.
Diaghilev returned to Petersburg, and the libretto for Petrouchka was born over the daily evening tea and bagels in his apartment. Then Stravinsky joined Diaghilev and Benois. Later Benois insisted that he had written almost the entire plot of Petrouchka, with the three dolls—Petrouchka, Ballerina, and the Moor—mysteriously coming to life and playing out their traditional drama of love and jealousy in the midst of the boisterous Russian carnival. But he admitted that sometimes the “program” was made to fit music that had already been written. As for Stravinsky, he was delighted by his collaborator: “This man is unusually subtle, clear-sighted, and sensitive not only to movement but to music.”30
Benois later recalled that before the premiere, when they had to decide who would be presented as the author of the libretto, he suggested ceding the authorship to Stravinsky, and it was only after a combat de générosité that they decided both Stravinsky and Benois would be listed as authors. Stravinsky subsequently regretted the decision deeply, because it gave Benois the right to one sixth of the royalties not only from theatrical but also from concert performances of the ballet’s music.
Stravinsky lived abroad after 1910, and Petrouchka was composed in Switzerland, France, and Italy, and first shown in 1911 in Paris. Nonetheless, it was a purely Petersburgian composition. Stravinsky admitted this even at the end of his life, when he usually tried to minimize the Russianness of Petrouchka by insisting that its characters and even the music had been inspired by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Stravinsky “forgot” to add that at the turn of the century Hoffmann had been expropriated by Mir iskusstva; there was even a going expression, “Petersburg Hoffmanniade,” describing everything unusual, grotesque, or eccentric in the life of the capital. Benois constantly proclaimed that Hoffmann was his idol and artistic guide, and in that period Stravinsky used to acknowledge that he was fully in “Benois’ sphere of influence.”31
The audience for the Parisian premiere of Petrouchka saw a picture of the fair in Petersburg in the reign of Nicholas I, around the 1830s, with the spire of the Admiralty in perspective and striped lampposts in the corners. Benois and Fokine invented a multitude of colorful types in the fair crowds: merchants, coachmen, nursemaids, military men, policemen, gypsies with a bear. Against the background of this festival the tragedy of Petrouchka unfolded—a marionette caught up in the storm of human passions. This traditional theme in Russian literature, the suffering of the little man, was seen through the prism of Hoffmann. “You could find here Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, and Blok,” stated a Russian critic after the show.32
