Nijinsky Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘hot-house’ smell inside. The three main state-funded theatres in St Petersburg blazed white and gold, with blue brocade on the Mariinsky walls, egg-yolk yellow on the Alexandrinsky’s and crimson in the Mikhailovsky.
    But while audiences experience the public face of a theatre – the crystal and gilt opulence of the vast public spaces, the luxury of the red velvet seats and the buzzing, glittering crowd all around them – performers are in thrall to quite a different spell. When the young Rudolf Nureyev’s sister was studying theatre, she sometimes used to bring home costumes for him to look at. ‘That to me was heaven,’ Nureyev remembered. ‘I would spread them out on the bed and gaze at them – gaze at them so intensely that I could feel myself actually inside them.I would fondle them for hours, smooth them and smell them. There is no other word for it – I was like a dope addict.’
    As a student Tamara Karsavina, who entered the Girls’ School four years before Vaslav, learned to love rehearsing out of hours, when the theatre was dark and empty, the chandeliers shrouded in dust sheets and brown holland covers over the seats. ‘The theatre in its unguarded moments, curtain up, stage abandoned, and lights lowered, has a strange poignancy,’ she wrote. ‘The faint ghostliness of it touches a vulnerable spot of incurable sentimentality, a professional disease of those bred in the artificial emotions of the footlights.’
    Karsavina was one of several of Vaslav’s contemporaries who came from a similarly theatrical background. Her grandfather had been a provincial actor and playwright and her father, Platon Karsavin, had been a great dancer and a teacher at the Imperial Theatre School; Pavel Gerdt, a legendary character dancer and one of the teachers at the school, was her godfather. Kshesinskaya’s father and brother were dancers in the Imperial Theatre. Léonide Massine, six years Nijinsky’s junior, was the son of a French horn-player in Moscow’s Bolshoy Orchestra. Lydia Lopokova’s father was a lowly usher at the Alexandrinsky – perhaps the very man the young Prince Lieven remembered waiting to assist him up the stairs – but he got four of his five children into the Imperial Theatre School and Fyodor, Lydia’s brother, went on to become
maître de ballet
at the Mariinsky. The theatre was in their blood.
    In 1903 Vaslav narrowly avoided being expelled from the school. Since his accident three years earlier he had learned to get along with the boys in his class but they still encouraged him to perform wildly dangerous pranks. One day he and some others were on their way to the theatre for a matinee performance, covertly hitting lampposts and trees with their slingshots out of the carriage window. As they turned into St Isaac’s Square, one of their darts hit (but did not knock off) a top hat on a passing gentleman’s head. It was unfortunate for Vaslav that this gentleman was a government official. He went to the school’s Director and demanded that the guilty boy be expelled.
    It was hard to determine who the guilty boy was – there had beentwo carriages filled with boys, most of them carrying slingshots – but his classmates encouraged Vaslav to confess on the grounds that he was such a good dancer they would never expel him. Questioning revealed that Vaslav was considered the best shot at school and his past years of poor academic work, bad conduct, regular disciplining and warnings sent home to Eleonora sealed his fate. Initially he was expelled but, after hearing arguments from Eleonora, Vaslav’s tutors and the offended official, whom Eleonora had persuaded to relent, the school’s Director agreed to suspend him for two weeks and then allow him back as a nonresident, returning all the clothes and books with which the school had supplied him – a terrible humiliation and a heavy