Even before Diaghilev arrived in Petersburg, Tchaikovsky was one of his favorite composers. But his adoration had been naive and provincial, with a preference for the more emotional melodies (“explosions of lyricism,” in Benois’s expression), not respect filtered through intellect and taste, as was the case among St. Petersburg’s elite. Under Benois’s careful tutelage Diaghilev’s delight in Tchaikovsky turned into a focused admiration that was bound to have important consequences for the future of Russian culture in general and the fate of the Petersburg mythos in particular.
For Benois the Tchaikovsky cult began somewhat earlier, with the Maryinsky Theater premiere of one of Tchaikovsky’s most evocative Petersburgian works, the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Rather prejudiced against Russian composers at the time, the Westernizer Benois was unexpectedly struck by “something endlessly close and dear” in Tchaikovsky’s music. It appeared, Benois felt, as if in response to an unconscious expectation and immediately became “his own” for Benois, infinitely and vitally important. So Benois tried not to miss a single performance of Sleeping Beauty; one week he went four times. For Benois and his friends, it was the perfect embodiment of their own inchoate and immature aesthetic.
The Nevsky Pickwickians were attracted to Tchaikovsky’s Western orientation, in this case the special scent of Francophilia—the libretto was based on Charles Perrault’s fairy tale La Belle au bois dormant—but also the traditions of German romanticism. In Beauty’s music Benois heard the echoes of the “world of captivating nightmares” of his beloved writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. Benois was drawn to Tchaikovsky and at the same time frightened by the “mix of strange truth and convincing invention”81 not unlike Hoffmann’s.
Another enchanting quality of Tchaikovsky’s music for Benois was what he called its “passé-ism.” By this Benois meant not only adoring the past as such or Tchaikovsky’s particular talent for stylization but the vibrant sense of the past as being the present. This great gift of Tchaikovsky’s, “something like beatitude,” according to Benois, connected to an acute anticipation of death and a “real sense of the otherworldly.” Benois found a brotherly artistic soul in Tchaikovsky, who, he thought, was, like all the Nevsky Pickwickians, also attracted to the “kingdom of shadows,” where “not only separate individuals but entire eras live on.”82 And the Sleeping Beauty production itself, in which so many masters came together—the composer, the choreographer Marius Petipa, the designers, and the outstanding dancers—became for Benois an example of the endless possibilities of ballet as a true Gesammtkunstwerk.
In those days, few people had a serious interest in ballet. In educated Petersburg circles ballet was despised, an echo of the nihilist ideas of the 1860s. Benois, who had loved ballet in his youth, was beginning to cool toward it when his fierce passion for The Sleeping Beauty turned him into an ardent balletomane once more.
So Benois, the eternal proselytizer, infected all his friends with his fanatical enthusiasm for The Sleeping Beauty, first among them Diaghilev, who moved to Petersburg a year and half after the ballet’s premiere. Without his newly kindled balletomania, claimed Benois, there would have been none of Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons in Paris, nor his famous ballet company, nor the subsequent worldwide triumph of the Russian ballet.
After the cultural awakening caused by The Sleeping Beauty, Benois and his friends awaited impatiently the premiere of The Queen of Spades. Benois’s circle, Diaghilev included, was present in full force that evening at the Maryinsky Theater. The audience’s reaction to the new opera was rather restrained, but Benois was immediately “enthralled by a flame of rapture.” Tchaikovsky’s music, he recalled, “literally drove me mad, turned me into some kind of visionary for a time…. it took on the force of an incantation, through which I could penetrate into the world of shadows that had been beckoning me for such a longtime.”83
The Queen of Spade’s passé-ism took on special significance for the Nevsky Pickwickians because it was directed not at Europe, so dear to their hearts yet remote, but at the city in which they lived. Benois explained:
I instinctively adored Petersburg’s charms, its unique romance, but at the same time there was much that I did not like in it, and there were even some things that offended my taste with their severity and “officiousness.” Now through my delight in The Queen of Spades I saw the light…. Now I found that captivating poetry, whose presence I had only guessed at, everywhere I looked.”84
