Nijinsky Read Online Free PDF

burden on Eleonora, who would have to pay to outfit Vaslav herself. This was granted only on condition that while he was at home Eleonora would birch him, which she forced herself to do. It was a turning point. From the moment he was reinstated as a boarder a month later, having ‘felt a great pain in my soul’ to have caused his mother such distress and jeopardised his future, Vaslav devoted himself to achieving his potential.
    After the annual examinations that took place the following spring, Bronia, by then a student at the school herself, first heard her fifteen-year-old brother being talked about as a future star. Mikhail Fokine, one of the instructors at the Girls’ School, rushed into class late, coming straight up to Bronia where she stood at the bar in her blue serge practice dress. ‘You have such a brother that I must congratulate you!’ It was almost unheard of for a teacher to talk about a student in front of other students, but Fokine could not control his raptures. ‘For Nijinsky today we should have come up with a new grade. If anybody had suggested it, I would have given a 20 or even a 30 [the highest mark was 12]. He surpassed anything we have seen.’ Fokine said that Vaslav had danced as part of a group and was then asked to dance his role alone. When he had finished, the examining board (comprising the Director, Vladimir Telyakovsky, and all the instructors) had burst into spontaneous applause. ‘I’m late because we could not leave right away; we were all talking about Nijinsky. A great future awaits your brother.’
    Nikolay Legat, another teacher present that day, agreed with Fokine’sassessment. Vaslav possessed a rare otherworldly quality. While remaining totally natural, he was somehow transformed when he danced: ‘exalted, vibrant, free and so ecstatic’ . Far more than mere technical brilliance – that marvellous jump, during which he appeared to be suspended in the air – even at school Nijinsky seemed to belong ‘to a plane above ours’ which he could only make his audience understand through dance. This elusive quality, possessed so abundantly by Nijinsky, lies at the core of what makes dance, and ballet in particular, so powerful. In their desire to fly, ‘above all to ascend’ , dancers become, like angels, a ‘link binding man and god, heaven and earth’. Even as a boy it was these celestial heights that Nijinsky strove to inhabit.
    Although the Imperial Ballet School was a place of ‘convent-like seclusion’ , very occasionally events from the outside world intruded into its rarified atmosphere. One such moment occurred in the winter of 1904–1905 and continued on through 1905, when Russia was shaken by the first powerful stirrings against the Tsar and the old regime.
    The Imperial Theatres – with their rigid traditions and hierarchy, political in-fighting and insistence upon the strictest obedience to their decisions – replicated in miniature the Tsar’s entire unwieldy and unpopular administration. As a reminder of the extent of their dependence on the monarch, every year the season opened on the first Sunday in September with a performance of Glinka’s
A Life for the Tsar
. Debentures were handed down from generation to generation. Balletomanes, as they were known, followed the objects of their adoration from performance to performance, if necessary from city to city. When Kshesinskaya went to perform at the Bolshoy in Moscow, the front row of stalls at the Mariinsky would be empty: her fans were all in Moscow. As the favourite of the Tsar and his cousins, she had her pick of roles, even though in 1905 she was several years over the age of thirty; younger dancers, with arguably more talent, found their careers at a standstill because she still reigned absolute.
    As if to underline the younger dancers’ artistic grievances, Isadora Duncan came to St Petersburg in December