Natasha's Dance

6

In 1916 Diaghilev was asked where the Ballets Russes had its intellectual origins. In the Russian peasantry, he replied: 'in objects of utility (domestic implements in the country districts), in the painting on the sleighs, in the designs and the colours of peasant dresses, or the carving around a window frame, we found our motifs, and on this foundation we built'.¹¹¹ In fact the Ballets Russes was a direct descendant of the 'going to the people' in the 1870s.

It all began at Abramtsevo, the artists' colony established by the Mamontovs on their estate near Moscow, which soon became the focus for the arts and crafts movement. The railway magnate's wife Elizaveta was a well-known sympathizer of the Populists and, soon after the estate was purchased in 1870, she set up a school and a hospital for the peasants in its grounds. In 1876 a carpentry workshop was added where pupils who had graduated from the school might learn a useful trade. The aim was to revive the peasant handicrafts that were fast disappearing as the railways brought in cheaper factory products from the towns. Artists like Gartman and Elena Polenova took their inspiration from this peasant art and, under Polenova's direction, new workshops were soon set up to cater to the growing middle-class market for pottery and linen in the peasant style. Polenova and her artists would go around the villages copying the designs on the window frames and doors, household utensils and furniture, which they would then adapt for the stylized designs of the craft goods manufactured in the colony's workshops. Polenova collected several thousand peasant artefacts which can still be seen in the Craft Museum at Abramtsevo. She saw these artefacts as the remnants of an ancient Russian style that was still alive, and which gave them, in her view, a value that was higher than the Muscovite designs that had inspired artists in the past. For the latter were a part of a dead tradition that was now as remote to the Russian people as 'the art of Africa or Ancient Greece'.¹¹² In her own pictures and furniture designs Polenova tried, as she put it, to express 'the vital spirit of the Russian people's poetic view of nature', using animal motifs and floral ornaments which she had sketched from peasant artefacts.¹¹³

15. Elena Polenova: 'Cat and Owl' carved door, Abramtsevo workshop, early 1890s

Urban fans of this 'neo-national' style took it as a pure and authentic Russian art. Stasov, for example, thought that Polenova's 'Cat and Owl' door could be taken for the work of 'some amazingly talented but anonymous master of our ancient Rus''.¹¹⁴ But in fact it was a fantasy. By the early 1890s, when the door was carved, Polenova had

moved on from copying folk designs to assimilating them to the art nouveau style, which made her work even more appealing to the urban middle class.

Other artists trod the same path from ethnographic to commercial art. At the Solomenko embroidery workshops in Tambov province, for example, the artists' designs were becoming increasingly attuned to the bourgeois tastes of the city women who could afford these luxury goods. Instead of the gaudy colours favoured by the peasants in their own designs (orange, red and yellow), they used the subdued colours (dark green, cream and brown) that appealed to urban tastes. The same change took place at the textile workshops of Talashkino, established by Princess Maria Tenisheva on her estate in Smolensk in 1898. The local peasant women 'did not like our colours', Tenisheva recalled, 'they said they were too "drab"', and she had to pay the weavers bonuses to get them to use them in their work.¹¹⁵

The folk-like crafted goods of Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention. Maliutin was the creator of the first matriosbka, or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. At that time he was working at the Moscow zemstvo's craft workshops at Sergiev Posad which specialized in making Russian toys. Contrary to the popular belief today, the matrioshka has no roots in Russian folk culture at all. It was dreamed up in response to a commission from the Mamontovs to make a Russian version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each smaller doll portrayed a different aspect of peasant life; and at the core was a baby tightly swaddled in the Russian style. The design became immensely popular and by the end of the 1890s several million dolls were being manufactured every year. The myth was then established that the matriosbka was an ancient Russian toy.¹¹⁶ At Talashkino Maliutin also applied his distinctive style to furniture, ceramics, book illustrations, stage designs and buildings. Urban admirers like Diaghilev saw his work as the essence of an 'organic peasant Russianness' which, Diaghilev claimed in one of his most nationalistic utterances, would herald a 'Renaissance of the North'.¹¹⁷ But the real Russian peasants took a different view. When, in 1902, Tenisheva put on an exhibition of the Talashkino products in Smolensk, less than fifty people came to see it and, as she recalled, the

peasants 'viewed our things not with delight but with dumb amazement which we found hard to explain'.¹¹⁸

It is not immediately obvious what attracted Diaghilev to the neo-nationalists of Abramtsevo and Talashkino - a marriage that gave birth to the folklore fantasies of the Ballets Russes. In 1898, he delivered a tirade on 'peasant art', attacking artists who thought to 'shock the world' by 'dragging peasant shoes and rags on to the canvas'.¹¹⁹ By artistic temperament the impresario was aristocratic and cosmopolitan, even if he came from the provincial town of Perm. At his grandfather's house, where he had been brought up from the age of ten, there was an atmosphere of cultivated dilettantism, with regular concerts and literary evenings, in which the young Sergei, with his fluent French and German and his piano-playing skills, was in his element. As a law student at St Petersburg University in the early 1890s, Diaghilev was perfectly at home with young aesthetes such as Alexander Benois, Dmitry Filosofov (Diaghilev's cousin) and Walter ('Valechka') Nouvel. There was a general mood of Populism in these circles, especially at the Bogdanovskoe estate near Pskov which belonged to Filo-sofov's aunt Anna Pavlovna, a well-known activist for women's liberation and a literary hostess whose salon in St Petersburg was frequently attended by Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Blok. The four students would spend their summers at Bogdanovskoe; and it was then that they first conceived the idea of a magazine to educate the public in the great art of the past. Together with the artist Leon Bakst (an old schoolfriend of Benois, Filosofov and Nouvel at the May Academy in Petersburg) they established the World of Art movement, which arranged concerts, exhibitions and lectures on artistic themes, and founded a magazine of the same name which lasted from 1898 to 1904. Subsidized by Tenisheva and Mamontov, the magazine would come to feature the folk-inspired artists of their colonies alongside modern Western art - the same combination that would later be repeated by Diaghilev and Benois in the Ballets Russes.

The co-founders of the World of Art saw themselves as cosmopolitans of Petersburg (they called themselves the 'Nevsky Pickwickians') and championed the idea of a universal culture which they believed was embodied in that civilization. They identified themselves with the aristocracy, and saw that class as a great repository of Russia's cultural

heritage. In a passage of his Memoirs that is crucial to an understanding of the World of Art, Benois underlined this point when he reminisced about the Filosofovs, one of Russia's ancient noble families:

Theirs was the class to which all the chief figures of Russian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries belonged, the class that created the delights of the characteristic Russian way of life. From this class came the heroes and heroines in the novels of Pushkin and Lermontov, Turgenev and Tolstoy. This was the class that achieved all that is peaceful, worthy, durable and meant to last for ever. They set the tempo of Russian life… All the subtleties of the Russian psychology, all the nuances of our characteristically Russian moral sensibility arose and matured within this milieu.¹²⁰

Above all, they identified with the artistic values of the aristocracy. They saw art as a spiritual expression of the individual's creative genius, not as a vehicle for social programmes or political ideas, as they believed the Russian arts had become under Stasov's leadership. Their veneration of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky stemmed from this philosophy - not 'art for art's sake', as they frequently insisted, but the belief that ideas should be integrated in the work of art.

Reacting against the nineteenth-century realist tradition, the World of Art group sought to restore an earlier ideal of beauty as the artistic principle of what they envisaged (and successfully promoted) as Russia's cultural renaissance. The classical tradition of St Petersburg was one expression of this ideal. The World of Art circle made a cult of eighteenth-century Petersburg. It was practically defined by nostalgia for a civilization which they sensed was about to pass away. Benois and his nephew Eugene Lanceray each produced a series of prints and lithographs depicting city scenes in the reigns of Peter and Catherine the Great. Benois lamented that the classical ideal of eighteenth-century Petersburg had been abandoned by the vulgar nationalists of the nineteenth century. In the revolutionary year of 1905, Diaghilev mounted an exhibition of eighteenth-century Russian portraits in the Tauride Palace, shortly to become the home of the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet. He introduced the portraits as 'a grandiose summing-up of a brilliant, but, alas, dying period in our history'.¹²¹

But peasant art could also be regarded as a form of 'classicism' - at least in the stylized forms in which it was presented by the neo-nationalists. It was impersonal, symbolic and austere, strictly regulated by the folk traditions of representation, a mystical expression of the spiritual world yet intimately linked with the collective rituals and practices of village life. Here was an ancient, a different 'world of art', whose principles of beauty could be used to overturn the deadening influence of nineteenth-century bourgeois and romantic art.

For Diaghilev, money played a part. Always keen to spot a new market opportunity, the impresario was impressed by the growing popularity of the neo-nationalists' folk-like art. Fin-de-siecle Europe had an endless fascination for 'the primitive' and 'exotic'. The savage of the East was regarded as a force of spiritual renewal for the tired bourgeois cultures of the West. Diaghilev had spotted this trend early on. 'Europe needs our youth and spontaneity', he wrote on his return from a tour there in 1896. 'We must go forth at once. We must show our all, with all the qualities and defects of our nationality.'¹²² His instincts were confirmed in 1900 when Russia's arts and crafts made a huge splash at the Paris Exhibition. The centre of attention was Korovin's 'Russian Village', a reconstruction of the wooden architecture he had studied on a trip to the Far North, complete with an ancient teremok, or timber tower, and a wooden church, which was built on site by a team of peasants brought in from Russia. The Parisians were enchanted by these 'savage carpenters', with their 'unkempt hair and beards, their broad, child-like smiles and primitive methods', and as one French critic wrote, 'if the objects on display had been for sale, there would not be a single item left'.¹²³ There was a steady flow of peasant-crafted goods from Russia to the West - so much so that special shops were opened in Paris, London, Leipzig, Chicago, Boston and New York in the 1900s.¹²⁴ The Parisian couturier Paul Poiret travelled to Russia in 1912 to buy up peasant garb, from which he drew inspiration for his fashionable clothes. The term 'blouse russe' echoed round the fashion halls, and models could be seen in clothes which bore the mark of Russian sarafans and homespun coats.¹²⁵

But there was more than business to draw Diaghilev to the neo-nationalists. The fact that artists such as Polenova and Maliutin were increasingly rendering their 'peasant art' in the stylized forms of mod-

ernism brought them into line with the ethos of the World of Art. Diaghilev was particularly attracted to the paintings of Viktor Vasnet-sov, which displayed less folk content than a general sense of peasant colouring. Vasnetsov believed that colour was the key to the Russian people's understanding of beauty, and he developed his own palette from the study of folk art (the lubok woodcuts and icons) and peasant artefacts, which he collected on his tours of Viatka province in the 1870s. The artist brought these vibrant primary colours to his brilliant stage designs for Mamontov's production of The Snow Maiden (plate 15), a production that became the visual model for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

Vasnetsov's designs were an inspiration for the neo-nationalists who followed in his footsteps from Abramtsevo to the World of Art. Their fairytale-like quality was clearly to be seen in later stage designs for the Ballets Russes by Alexander Golovine (Boris Godunov: 1908; The Firebird: 1910) and Konstantin Korovin (Ruslan and Liudmila: 1909). Even more influential, in the longer term, was Vasnetsov's use of colour, motifs, space and style to evoke the essence of folk art, which would inspire primitivist painters such as Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. These artists, too, gravitated towards the folk tradition, to the icon and the lubok and to peasant artefacts, in their quest for a new poetic outlook on the world. Introducing an exhibition of icons and woodcuts in Moscow in 1913, Goncharova talked about a 'peasant aesthetic' that was closer to the symbolic art forms of the East than the representational tradition of the West. 'This art does not copy or improve on the real world but reconstitutes it.' Here was the inspiration of Goncharova's designs for the Ballets Russes, such as Le Coq d'Or of 1914.

The Ballets Russes was meant to be a synthesis of all the arts, and it has often been described as a Russian brand of Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, in which music, art and drama are united. But in fact that synthesis had less to do with Wagner than with the Russian peasantry. It had its roots in Mamontov's Private Opera which had been founded on the spirit of artistic collaboration at Abramtsevo. The whole purpose of the colony was to bring together all the arts and crafts to unite life and art-through a collective enterprise which its pioneers equated with their own idealized notion of the peasant commune. What

16. Church at Abramtsevo. Designed by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1881-2

the artists at Abramtsevo admired most about peasant culture was the synthetic nature of its arts and crafts. Simple artefacts, like textiles or ceramics, brought artistic beauty into people's daily lives. Collective rituals like the khorovod were total works of art - little 'rites of spring' - combining folk song and ceremonial dance with real events in village life. The colony was an attempt to re-create this 'world of art'. The whole community - artists, craftsmen and peasant builders - became involved in the building of its church. Artists combined with singers and musicians, costume-makers with set-builders, to stage productions of the opera. This was what Diaghilev meant when he said the Ballets Russes was built on the foundations of peasant arts and crafts.

'I am sending you a proposal', Diaghilev wrote to the composer Anatoly Lyadov in 1909.

I need a ballet and a Russian one - the first Russian ballet, since there is no such thing. There is Russian opera, Russian symphony, Russian song, Russian dance, Russian rhythm - but no Russian ballet. And that is precisely what I need - to perform in May of the coming year in the Paris Grand Opera and

in the huge Royal Drury Lane Theatre in London. The ballet needn't be three-tiered. The libretto is ready. Fokine has it. It was dreamed up by us all collectively. It's The Firebird - a ballet in one act and perhaps two scenes.¹²⁶

Diaghilev's enthusiasm for the ballet was not always evident. His professional entree into the art world had been through painting, and his first job in the theatre was a long way from the stage. In 1899 he was employed by Prince Sergei Volkonsky, the grandson of the famous Decembrist, who had just been appointed by the Tsar as Director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. Volkonsky asked Diaghilev to run the theatre's in-house magazine. Eight years later, when Diaghilev took his first stage productions to the West, it was opera, not ballet, that made up his exotic saisons russes. It was only the comparative expense of staging operas that made him look to ballet for a cheap alternative.

The importance of the ballet as a source of artistic innovation in the twentieth century is something that no one would have predicted before its rediscovery by Diaghilev. The ballet had become an ossified art form; in much of Europe it was disregarded as an old-fashioned entertainment of the court. But in Russia it lived on in St Petersburg, where the culture was still dominated by the court. At the Marinsky Theatre, where Stravinsky spent much of his childhood, there were regular Wednesday and Sunday ballet matinees - 'the half-empty auditorium' being made up, in the words of Prince Lieven, of 'a mixture of children accompanied by their mothers or governesses, and old men with binoculars'.¹²⁷ Among serious intellectuals the ballet was considered 'an entertainment for snobs and tired businessmen',¹²⁸ and with the exception of Tchaikovsky, whose reputation suffered as a consequence of his involvement with the form, the composers for the ballet (such as Pugni, Minkus and Drigo) were mostly foreign hacks.* Rimsky-Korsakov, the ultimate authority on musical taste when Stravinsky studied with him in the early 1900s, was famous for his remark that the ballet was 'not really an art form'.¹²⁹

Benois was the real ballet lover in the World of Art group. It appealed

* Cesare Pugni (1802-70), in Russia from 1851; Ludwig Minkus (1826-1907), in Russia from 1850 to 1890; Riccardo Drigo (1846-1930), in Russia from 1879 to

to his aristocratic outlook, and to his nostalgia for the classical culture of eighteenth-century Petersburg. This retrospective aesthetic was shared by all the founders of the Ballets Russes: Benois, Dobuzhinsky, the critic Filosofov and Diaghilev. The ballets of Tchaikovsky were the incarnation of the classical ideal and, even though they never featured in the saison russe in Paris, where Tchaikovsky was the least appreciated of the Russian composers, they were an inspiration to the founders of the Ballets Russes. Tchaikovsky was the last of the great European court composers (he lived in the last of the great European eighteenth-century states). Staunchly monarchist, he was among the intimates of Tsar Alexander III. His music, which embodied the 'Imperial style', was preferred by the court to the 'Russian' harmonies of Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.

The Imperial style was virtually defined by the polonaise. Imported into Russia by the Polish composer Jozek Kozlowski towards the end of the eighteenth century, the polonaise became the supreme courtly form and the most brilliant of all the ballroom genres. It came to symbolize the European brilliance of eighteenth-century Petersburg itself. In Eugene Onegin Pushkin (like Tchaikovsky) used the polonaise for the climactic entry of Tatiana at the ball in Petersburg. Tolstoy used the polonaise at the climax of the ball in War and Peace, where the Emperor makes his entrance and Natasha dances with Andrei. In The Sleeping Beauty (1889) and in his opera The Queen of Spades (1890) Tchaikovsky reconstructed the imperial grandeur of the eighteenth-century world. Set in the reign of Louis XIV, The Sleeping Beauty was a nostalgic tribute to the French influence on eighteenth-century Russian music and culture. The Queen of Spades, based on the story by Pushkin, evoked the bygone Petersburg of Catherine the Great, an era when the capital was fully integrated, and played a major role, in the culture of Europe. Tchaikovsky infused the opera with rococo elements (he himself described the ballroom scenes as a 'slavish imitation' of the eighteenth-century style).¹³⁰ He used the story's layers of ghostly fantasy to conjure up a dream world of the past. The myth of Petersburg as an unreal city was thus used to travel back in time and recover its lost beauty and classical ideals.

On the evening of the premiere of The Queen of Spades Tchaikovsky left the Marinsky Theatre and wandered on his own through the streets

of Petersburg, convinced that his opera was a dismal failure. Suddenly he heard a group of people walking towards him singing one of the opera's best duets. He stopped them and asked them how they were acquainted with the music. Three young men introduced themselves: they were Benois, Filosofov and Diaghilev, the co-founders of the World of Art. From that moment on, according to Benois, the group was united by their love of Tchaikovsky and his classical ideal of Petersburg. 'Tchaikovsky's music', Benois wrote in his old age, 'was what I seemed to be waiting for since my earliest childhood.'¹³¹

In 1907 Benois staged a production of Nikolai Cherepnin's ballet Le Pavilion d'Armide (based on Gauthier's Omphale) at the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Like The Sleeping Beauty, it was set in the period of Louis XIV and was classical in style. The production made a deep impression on Diaghilev. Benois' own sumptuous designs, Fokine's modern choreography, the dazzling virtuosity of Nijinsky's dancing - all this, declared Diaghilev, 'must be shown to Europe'.¹³² Le Pavilion became the curtain-raiser to the 1909 season in Paris, alongside the Polovtsian dances from Borodin's Prince Igor (also choreographed by Fokine), in a mixed programme of Russian classical and nationalist works. The exotic 'otherness' of these mises-en-scene caused a sensation. The French loved 'our primitive wildness', Benois later wrote, 'our freshness and our spontaneity'.¹³³ Diaghilev could see that there was money to be made from the export of more Russian ballets in this vein. And so it was, as he wrote to tell Lyadov, that they cooked up the libretto of The Firebird. Diaghilev and Benois and Fokine, with the fabulist Remizov, the painter Golovine, the poet Potemkin and the composer Cherepnin (of Le Pavilion fame) dreamt up the whole thing around the kitchen table in the true collective spirit of the Russian tradition. But in the end Lyadov did not want to write

the score. It was offered to Glazunov, and then Cherepnin, who turned

it down, and then, in a state of utter desperation, Diaghilev resorted to the young, and at that time still little known composer, Igor Stravinsky.

Benois called the ballet a 'fairy tale for grown-ups'. Patched together from various folk tales, its aim was to create what Benois called a 'mysterium of Russia' for 'export to the West'.¹³⁴ The real export was the myth of peasant innocence and youthful energy. Each ingredient of the ballet was a stylized abstraction of folklore. Stravinsky's score

was littered with borrowings from folk music, especially the peasant wedding songs (devichniki and khorovody) in the Ronde des princesses and the finale. The scenario was a patchwork compilation of two entirely separate peasant tales (for there was no single tale of the Firebird) as retold by Afanasiev and various lubok prints from the nineteenth century: the tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird, and the tale of Kashchei the Immortal. These two stories were rewritten to shift their emphasis from a tale of pagan magic (by the grey wolf of the peasant stories) into one of divine rescue (by the Firebird) consistent with Russia's Christian mission in the world.¹³⁵

In the ballet the Tsarevich is lured into the garden of the monster Kashchey by the beauty of the maiden princess. Ivan is saved from the monster and his retinue by the Firebird, whose airborne powers compel Kashchey and his followers to dance wildly until they fall asleep. Ivan then discovers the enormous egg which contains Kashchey's soul, the monster is destroyed, and Ivan is united with the princess. Reinvented for the stage, the Firebird herself was made to carry far more than she had done in the Russian fairy tales. She was transformed into the symbol of a phoenix-like resurgent peasant Russia, the embodiment of an elemental freedom and beauty, in the pseudo-Slavic mythology of the Symbolists which came to dominate the ballet's conception (as immortalized by Blok's 'mythic bird', which adorned the cover of the Mir iskusstva journal in the form of a woodcut by Leon Bakst). The production for the Paris season was a self-conscious package of exotic Russian props - from Golovine's colourful peasant costumes to those weird mythic beasts, the 'kikimora', 'boliboshki' and 'two-headed monsters', invented by Remizov for the Suite de Kashchei - all of them designed to cater to the fin-de-siecle Western fascination with 'primitive' Russia.

But the real innovation of The Firebird was Stravinsky's use of folk music. Previous composers of the Russian national school had thought of folklore as purely thematic material. They would frequently cite folk songs but would always subject them to the conventional (and essentially Western) musical language canonized by Rimsky-Korsakov. To their trained ears, the heterophonic harmonies of Russian folk music were ugly and barbaric, and not really 'music' in the proper sense at all, so that it would be highly inappropriate to adopt them as a part of their

17. Gusli player. The gusli was an ancient type of Russian zither, usually five-stringed, and widely used in folk music

art form. Stravinsky was the first composer to assimilate folk music as an element of style - using not just its melodies but its harmonies and rhythms as the basis of his own distinctive 'modern' style.*

The Firebird was the great breakthrough. But it was only made possible by the pioneering work of two ethnographers, whose musical discoveries were yet another product of the 'going to the people' in the 1870s. The first was by Yury Melgunov, a pianist and philologist who carried out a series of field trips to Kaluga province in the 1870s. On these trips he discovered the polyphonic harmonies of Russian peasant song, and worked out a scientific method of transcribing them. The other was by Evgenia Linyova, who confirmed Melgunov's findings by recording peasant singing with a phonograph on field trips to the provinces. These recordings were the basis of her Peasant Songs of Great Russia as They Are in the Folk's Harmonization, published in St Petersburg in 1904-9,¹³⁶ which directly influenced the music of Stravinsky in The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. The most important aspect of Linyova's work was her discovery that the voice of the peasant chorus singer was not inflected with individual characteristics, as previously believed by the kuchkist composers, but rather strived for a kind of impersonality. In the preface to her Peasant Songs she described this last quality:

[A peasant woman called Mitrevna] started singing my favourite song, 'Little Torch', which I had been looking for everywhere but had not yet succeeded in recording. Mitrevna took the main melody. She sang in a deep sonorous voice, surprisingly fresh for a woman so old. In her singing there were absolutely no sentimental emphases or howlings. What struck me was its simplicity. The song flowed evenly and clearly, not a single word was lost. Despite the length of the melody and the slowness of the tempo, the spirit with which she invested the words of the song was so powerful that she seemed at once to be singing and speaking the song. I was amazed at this pure, classical strictness of style, which went so well with her serious face.¹³⁷

* Because he had found, in Russian peasant music, his own alternative to the German symphonism of the nineteenth century, Stravinsky did not share the interest of other modernists such as Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in serial (twelve-tone) music. It was only after 1945 that Stravinsky began to develop his own form of serialism.

It was precisely this 'classical' quality that became so central, not just to the music of Stravinsky, but to the whole theory of primitivist art. As Bakst put it, the 'austere forms of savage art are a new way forward from European art'.¹³⁸

In Petrushka (1911) Stravinsky used the sounds of Russian life to overturn the entire musical establishment with its European rules of beauty and technique. Here was another Russian revolution - a musical uprising by the lowlife of St Petersburg. Everything about the ballet was conceived in ethnographic terms. Benois' scenario conjured up in detail the vanished fairground world of the Shrovetide carnival of his beloved childhood in St Petersburg. Fokine's mechanistic choreography echoed the jerky ostinato rhythms which Stravinsky heard in vendors' cries and chants, organ-grinder tunes, accordion melodies, factory songs, coarse peasant speech and the syncopated music of village bands.¹³⁹ It was a kind of musical lubok - a symphonic tableau of the noises of the street.

But of all Stravinsky's Russian ballets, by far the most subversive was The Rite of Spring (1913). The idea of the ballet was originally conceived by the painter Nikolai Roerich, although Stravinsky, who was quite notorious for such distortions, later claimed it as his own. Roerich was a painter of the prehistoric Slavs and an accomplished archaeologist in his own right. He was absorbed in the rituals of neolithic Russia, which he idealized as a pantheistic realm of spiritual beauty where life and art were one, and man and nature lived in harmony. Stravinsky approached Roerich for a theme and he came to visit him at the artists' colony of Talashkino, where the two men worked together on the scenario of 'The Great Sacrifice', as The Rite of Spring was originally called. The ballet was conceived as a re-creation of the ancient pagan rite of human sacrifice. It was meant to be that rite - not to tell the story of the ritual but (short of actual murder) to re-create that ritual on the stage and thus communicate in the most immediate way the ecstasy and terror of the human sacrifice. The ballet's scenario was nothing like those of the romantic story ballets of the nineteenth century. It was simply put together as a succession of ritual acts: the tribal dance in adoration of the earth and sun; the choosing of the maiden for the sacrifice; the evocation of the ancestors by the elders of the tribe which forms the central rite of the

sacrifice; and the chosen maiden's sacrificial dance, culminating in her death at the climax of the dance's feverish energy.

The evidence of human sacrifice in prehistoric Russia is by no means clear. Ethnographically it would have been more accurate to base the ballet on a midsummer rite (Kupala) in which Roerich had found some inconclusive evidence of human sacrifice among the Scythians - a fact he publicized in 1898.¹⁴⁰ Under Christianity the Kupala festival had merged with St John's Feast but traces of the ancient pagan rites had entered into peasant songs and ceremonials - especially the khorovod, with its ritualistic circular movements that played such a key role in The Rite of Spring. The switch to the pagan rite of spring (Semik) was partly an attempt to link the sacrifice with the ancient Slavic worship of the sun god Yarilo, who symbolized the notion of apocalyptic fire, the spiritual regeneration of the land through its destruction, in the mystical world view of the Symbolists. But the change was also based on the findings of folklorists such as Alexander Afanasiev, who had linked these vernal cults with sacrificial rituals involving maiden girls. Afanasiev's magnum opus, The Slavs' Poetic View of Nature (1866-9), a sort of Slavic Golden Bough, became a rich resource for artists like Stravinsky who sought to lend an ethnographic authenticity to their fantasies of ancient Rus'. Musorgsky, for example, borrowed heavily from Afanasiev's descriptions of the witches' sabbath for his St John's Night on Bald Mountain. Afanasiev worked on the questionable premise that the world view of the ancient Slavs could be reconstructed through the study of contemporary peasant rituals and folk beliefs. According to his study, there was still a fairly widespread peasant custom of burning effigies, as symbols of fertility, in ritualistic dances marking the commencement of the spring sowing. But in parts of Russia this custom had been replaced by a ritual that involved a beautiful maiden: the peasants would strip the young girl naked, dress her up in garlands (as Yarilo was pictured in the folk imagination), put her on a horse, and lead her through the fields as the village elders watched. Sometimes a dummy of the girl was burned.¹⁴¹ Here essentially was the scenario of The Rite of Spring.

Artistically, the ballet strived for ethnographic authenticity. Roerich's costumes were drawn from peasant clothes in Tenisheva's collection at Talashkino. His primitivist sets were based on archaeol-

18. Nikolai Roerich: costumes for the Adolescents in the first production of The Rite of Spring, Paris, 1913

ogy. Then there was Nijinsky's shocking choreography - the real scandal of the ballet's infamous Paris premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on 29 May 1913. For the music was barely heard at all in the commotion, the shouting and the fighting, which broke out in the auditorium when the curtain first went up. Nijinsky had choreographed movements which were ugly and angular. Everything about the dancers' movements emphasized their weight instead of their lightness, as demanded by the principles of classical ballet. Rejecting all the basic positions, the ritual dancers had their feet turned inwards, elbows clutched to the sides of their body and their palms held flat, like the wooden idols that were so prominent in Roerich's mythic paintings of Scythian Russia. They were orchestrated, not by steps and notes, as in conventional ballets, but rather moved as one collective mass to the violent off-beat rhythms of the orchestra. The dancers pounded their feet on the stage, building up a static energy which finally exploded, with electrifying force, in the sacrificial dance. This rhythmic violence was the vital innovation of Stravinsky's score. Like most of the ballet's themes, it was taken from the music of the peas-antry.¹⁴² There was nothing like these rhythms in Western art music

(Stravinsky said that he did not really know how to notate or bar them) - a convulsive pounding of irregular downbeats, requiring constant changes in the metric signature with almost every bar so that the conductor of the orchestra must throw himself about and wave his arms in jerky motions, as if performing a shamanic dance. In these explosive rhythms it is possible to hear the terrifying beat of the Great War and the Revolution of 1917.