Nijinsky (3 page)

Financially there were always worries. One month Foma and Eleonora could afford a clean, comfortable apartment with a nanny to look after the children while they danced in a glittering
belle époque
theatre; weeks later and thousands of miles away they would be forced to leave the children alone in cold rooms bleakly lit by paraffin lamps to perform alongside clowns and trained animals to make enough money to feed the family. Jobs could be cancelled at a moment's notice and injury was a constant threat. When Foma broke his leg, no money came in until he could dance again. There was never any possibility of saving for the future; survival was their only concern. The Nijinskys were by no means unusual in coping with such grave anxieties – these were the ordinary trials of the late nineteenth century, the dull hum of despair that throbbed beneath daily life for the vast majority of people – but they touched Vaslav's childhood with a sense of struggle against an uncaring universe that would linger with him for the rest of his life.

When times were good, Foma and Eleonora worked with the greatest dancers of their day – Maria Giuri, Virginia Zucchi, Carlotta Brianza, Enrico Cecchetti – and, although they were never employed by
the legendary Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg, they did perform at the theatre attached to the tsar's summer palace in Krasnoye Selo, just outside St Petersburg. When times were bad, they took roles wherever they could – as dancers in light opera and musicals, in
café-chantants
and, most frequently, as part of circuses.

Though being a circus performer was very far from being a
premier danseur
, the highest rank at the Imperial Theatres, the work had its attractions. Foma liked theatre-circuses like the one in Nizhny Novgorod because they allowed him to stage spectacular pantomime ballets on a grander scale than in an ordinary theatre; the children liked the clowns. Watching them, Vaslav quickly learned to juggle, turn cartwheels and walk on his hands. In 1896, Foma accepted a summer engagement in Vilno with Salamonsky's Circus and Vaslav and Bronia were taken on as performers in one of the animal acts. Vaslav played a heroic chimney sweep, who assisted an animal fire brigade in rescuing more animals from a small burning house. He and Bronia were overjoyed at being ‘artists' in their own right and Bronia noticed that every evening after his performance, Vatsa, as she called him, would be unusually quiet, thinking about what he could improve upon the next day.

In his wonderful 1975 album of Nijinsky images,
Nijinsky Dancing
, Lincoln Kirstein emphasises the importance of Vaslav's early exposure to the circus, arguing that it gave him a broader vocabulary of mime and mimicry than the limited repertoire taught in the traditions of classical ballet, as well as fostering in him a powerful sense of sympathy for the underdog and a love of the surreal, the satirical and the absurd. Like Charlie Chaplin, who grew up in the parallel world of the music hall, the adult Nijinsky was a master at the art of communicating pretension and status – and sending them up – with the smallest of gestures.

As a man Vaslav would make no secret of his unwillingness to perform alongside circus acts and remembered feeling physical pain at the idea of his mother having to degrade herself by taking circus work, but the very strength of his later feeling shows the power of its early impact on him, positive as well as negative. For all his later successes, he, like Chaplin, never stopped seeing himself as an outsider: a shivering little
boy with his nose pressed up against a window-pane, looking in at a world of warmth and security of which he could never feel a part.

As the years went by, one argument recurred over and again, prompted by Eleonora's desire to settle in one place so that the children could begin their schooling and Foma's competing urge to keep moving and resentment of the family that tied him to jobs he didn't want to take. By the mid-1890s he had fallen in love with another young dancer in their company. During their engagement at the summer theatres outside St Petersburg in 1897, after many anguished nights of discussion inevitably overheard by their frightened children, Foma and Eleonora decided to separate. They agreed that when the season ended, Eleonora would take Stassik, Vaslav and Bronia, then aged eleven, eight and five, to live in St Petersburg, while Foma accepted an engagement in Moscow, where he would live with his mistress.

Each of the children, Bronia recalled, was deeply affected by the impending separation from their father, but Vaslav reacted to it differently from his brother and sister, defending his mother violently and behaving with stormy recklessness and disobedience towards Foma. As the day of their parting drew near, Vaslav could hardly bear even to look at him.
‘It was as if
he were throwing him out of his heart.'

Eleonora had never lived in St Petersburg and she had no family and few friends there but she had chosen it for a single reason that eclipsed every other concern: the Imperial Theatre School. Each year, the school received thousands of written applications for fewer than twenty places on offer. Acceptance into the school meant the one thing Eleonora longed to give her children: an assured future. From the age of eleven onwards, the state – or rather the Tsar – assumed responsibility for all the students' expenses. When they graduated in their late teens they were almost certain to become Artists of the Imperial Theatres with a place in the
corps de ballet
of the Mariinsky Theatre, a government position which was equivalent to that of a junior civil servant, and they would be obliged to remain with the Mariinsky for five years after graduation. If the young dancer demonstrated enough special talent to
become a soloist, greater rewards were guaranteed: recognised status in society and, on retirement, a generous pension.

The reigning
prima ballerina assoluta
of the day, Mathilde Kshesinskaya, epitomised the
demi-mondaine
heights a dancer could scale: she had seduced the young Nicholas II before he ascended the throne and then become the richly rewarded mistress of two of the Tsar's cousins, bearing a son who was never quite sure which of the imposing Grand Dukes who visited his mother was his father. Isadora Duncan disingenuously described Kshesinskaya as
‘a charming little
lady, wrapped in sables, with diamonds hanging from her ears and her neck circled in pearls'; in fact the dazzling jewels only served to emphasise her steely ambition and hunger for the spotlight.

In August 1898, Vaslav was one of the three hundred nine-year-olds – one hundred boys and two hundred girls – invited to the school to audition for entry that September. Just ensuring his presence at the audition had required Eleonora to pull every string she could, but her connections were impeccable: she had worked with Enrico Cecchetti, head of the Girls' School, and his Polish assistant, Stanislav Gillert, was a friend. Gillert had told Sergey Legat, one of the Boys' School instructors, about Vaslav. And though neither Eleonora nor Foma had performed at the Imperial Theatres, their careers would have been known to their peers. At least one or two of the twenty-five examiners would have been looking out for Foma and Eleonora Nijinsky's son.

The Imperial Theatre School was housed in a magnificent ochre-plastered, marble-pilastered building that extended over an entire block abutting the Alexandrinsky Theatre where the students of its drama section would one day go on to perform. Eleonora had dressed Vaslav as if for a wedding in an expensive blue sailor suit, black patent pumps and a hat – of which Vaslav was inordinately proud – with the word ‘RUSSIA' spelled out in gold letters on a dark blue ribbon. Bronia, with the prospect of her own audition for the school two years ahead of her, was the most eager and enthusiastic of audiences.

‘Before leaving
the house, Vatsa had to show Mama one more time how he would bow to everyone at the examination, as she had taught
him: “Draw your feet together, then, without bending your back, bow your head low and hold your arms in line with the seams of your trousers. Smile so you will look pleasant. And don't you dare play any pranks there.”

‘We all looked at Vaslav, and I thought he was the most handsome boy with his dark brown hair … his long, thick, black eyelashes … his high cheekbones. His face was radiant, his expressive, slanted, dark brown eyes sparkled with excitement, and his almond-shaped teeth flashed in spontaneous smiles. Then Mama crossed herself and blessed Vaslav, and we were ready to go.'

Eleonora and Bronia waited in one of the ballet school's large, light practice rooms while Vaslav went off with the other boys for his examination. The candidates were watched closely while they walked, ran and jumped for the assembled instructors, artists and directors. Even in this pressurised environment Vaslav shone; he reported back to his mother and Bronia that when they saw him jump, the inspectors
‘praised me very
much'. Next, the boys' insteps and the turn-out of their hips and legs were inspected. Successful applicants would be handsome and well built, obviously, but other specialised qualities were considered essential for potential classical dancers: straight knees, arched feet, flexible, open hips and shoulder blades that lay flat against the back.

Most were dismissed at this stage, and then in the infirmary the few remaining boys stripped while doctors examined their hearts, lungs and joints. Finally their eyesight and hearing were tested: the instructors whispered to them through a closed door, an approximation of the stage whispers they would have to learn to decipher. Three more applicants were dropped as unsuitable, but Vaslav's was one of the names read out as having received a place for a preliminary trial year at the school. If the chosen boys showed progress in Dance and General Subjects they would be formally enrolled as students the following year.

In May 1899, at the end of this first year, Vaslav was officially admitted to the Imperial Theatre School and the following year, aged eleven, he became one of six boarding students in his year, winning a prestigious Didelot Scholarship which would fund his academic career. Although
life at the school was austere and rigorous in its total dedication to ballet, the students were considered an elite and treated as such. Every boy was given six sets of linen underwear, practice clothes and shoes and a blue woollen dress suit with a high velvet collar embroidered with silver lyres, the school's insignia. Outside the school they wore military-style peaked caps and, in winter, double-breasted coats with astrakhan collars, silver buttons and scarlet silk linings. The female students wore brown cashmere day dresses – with pink dresses given out as coveted marks of distinction for the juniors and white for seniors.

Inside the school's vast, temple-like premises, the future stars of the Mariinsky Theatre, fewer than twenty boys and girls in each year, lived in almost total seclusion in a world centred around realising their potential for the delight of the Imperial family and the court. No expense was spared in funding this lavish enterprise: the state spent two million gold roubles a year to ensure its brilliance. The ground floor of the school housed the Mariinsky's make-up, wardrobe, set and administrative departments. On the first and second floors, vast practice rooms with sloping floors that replicated the slant of the Mariinsky's stage were lined with mirrors and windows and punctuated by portraits of ballet-loving tsars and tsarinas. Inside the compound were separate dormitories, classrooms and infirmaries for the boys and girls, a bathhouse, even a church. Naturally, the students had their own chiropodist.

At half past seven every morning the boys were woken by a brass bell and the heavy green curtains of their dormitory window were drawn back by a servant. After washing with cold water, they breakfasted on bread and tea before walking around the block as a warm-up and then beginning their ballet lesson, the focal point of the day. Lunch was at twelve, followed by academic classes (never Nijinsky's strong point; he was always behind in his lessons), dinner at five, more classes – this time in specialised areas like music, ballroom dancing, character dance, fencing and gymnastics – supper at nine and then bed. Once a week they filed through a series of ever-smaller courtyards to a tiny wooden bathhouse which, lit up on winter evenings, looked as though it belonged in a forest in a fairy tale, and lay inside it on wooden benches with steam
billowing around them while they were scrubbed until they were pink.

The teachers at the Imperial Theatre School – dancers, actors and choreographers – were the best in the world: the octogenarian Frenchman Marius Petipa, celebrated for his good taste and the elegance of his style; Pavel Gerdt, the great character dancer; tall, lean Christian Johansson, who always carried a violin under one arm and led what was known as ‘the class of perfection', which aimed to transform the senior students from dancers into artists. His line of teaching stretched directly back through the Bournonvilles
père et fils
, Maximilien Gardel and Auguste Vestris to Jean-Georges Noverre, Marie Antoinette's
maître des ballets
. Enrico Cecchetti represented the newer Italian style of ballet, athletic and highly technical, which had produced the most celebrated dancers of the late nineteenth century.

From his first year at the school, Vaslav attracted his teachers' attention. He was a particular favourite of Sergey Legat, the younger of two brothers who were both soloists at the Mariinsky and instructors at the school, as well as the lover of Marius Petipa's fiery daughter Marie (this was a very small world); and of Mikhail Obukhov, who early on singled him out for individual lessons and throughout his years at the school gently encouraged him to realise his potential.
‘The little devil
never comes down [from a jump] with the music,' Obukhov said to Tamara Karsavina, the first time she watched Nijinsky in a class.

Despite these mentors, Vaslav's introduction to the school was not easy. Not until the summer holidays after his first year did he confess to Bronia that he was being bullied. He told her his classmates pushed him and provoked him, and said things like,
‘Are you a
girl, to dance so well?'. But according to one of his fellow students, the reality was much worse. As a Pole, with a strong accent, and notably poorer than the others, he was despised by his peers, ignored in all the school games and
‘made to feel
inferior at every turn'. They ordered him about, scorned him and sneered at him; no one would sit at his desk or share their lunch with him. To these insults Vaslav – or
Yaponchik
(Little Jap), as they called him, because of his slanted, Tatar eyes – responded with dogged perseverance.