Sjeng scheijen diaghilev biography of abraham lincoln
13. Diaghilev’s Modish Moderns
The Impresario
Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) was raised in Perm, a city near the Ural mountains of Russia. His family was one of landed gentry, with their fortune based on vodka. From 1870 to 1890, the family lived on their sizable estate near Perm in the summers, and in a large mansion in Perm itself during winters. The young boy’s mother had died just three months after his birth. But his father remarried two years later, and Diaghilev’s cultured stepmother, Elena Valerianovna Panaeva, encouraged an interest in the arts, including hosting small concerts in the family home and seeing that the young Sergei had piano lessons.
The year 1890 was a crucial one, for Sergei’s father went bankrupt and all the family properties were auctioned off. The young man had just graduated from the local gymnasium. Because he had an inheritance from his mother, with his cousin he was able first to travel in Europe and then to settle in St. Petersburg to study law, graduating in 1896. In that more cosmopolitan urban setting, Diaghilev became a member of the informal literary and artistic circle that the painter Alexandre Benois wrote about so fondly, and he became more knowledgeable about both theatrical and visual arts.
At first acquaintance, it had seemed to his St. Petersburg friends that Diaghilev was not very interested in ballet. Also, his musical talents seemed limited, though he pursued studies in composition and singing at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and could play the piano reasonably well. But his professors discouraged him from pursuing a career in music. Furthermore, he was not a choreographer; he was not foremost a writer; he was not a painter.
Apparently Diaghilev early on recognized that his talents lay not mainly as a creator, but as a director and organizer. The 1905 portrait that Léon Bakst painted of Diaghilev, with his nanny asleep in the background, shows a young man of elegant bearing, complete with gold watch chain and
Bibliography
The biggest collections of Stephen Graham’s manuscripts and letters can be found in the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas) and the Strozier Library (Florida State University). Graham was not systematic in the way he wrote or recorded his thoughts. I have therefore in the text, when using material from the Harry Ransom Center and Strozier Library, given definite titles (eg ‘Journal for 1921’) to works that often took the form of rough notes and sketches. The problem is compounded by Graham’s penchant for using engagement diaries to record his thoughts and activities, ignoring the actual dates of the pages on which he wrote. I have noted where this is a particular issue in the footnotes.
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Springfield, IL)
Catherine Blair Papers
Vachel Lindsay Papers
British Broadcasting Corporation Archives (Caversham)
Various records relating to Graham’s career at the BBC and on policy relating to broadcasts to the USSR.
Bradford University Library (Special Collections)
New Atlantis Archive
British Library (India Office Library and Records)
Evelyn Wrench Papers
Viscount Reading Papers
Cambridge University Library (Special Collections)
Papers of the Royal Society of Literature
University of Chicago Library (Special Collections)
Harriet Monroe Papers
Harriet Moody Papers
Columbia University Library (Rare Books and Manuscripts)
Charles Crane Papers
Florida State University (Strozier Library, Special Collections)
Stephen Graham Papers
Marion Hay Papers
Garrick Club Library Collections
Dorothy Allhusen Papers
Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas)
Stephen Graham Papers
Vachel Lindsay Papers
Wilfrid Ewart Papers
T.I.F. Armstrong (John Gawsworth) Papers
Christopher Morley Papers
P.E.N. Papers
Alice Henderson Papers
Haverford College Library (Special Collections)
Christopher Morley Papers
Indiana University at Bloomington (Lilly Library)
Lewis Browne Papers
Lambeth This year, instead of writing all the commentary myself, I’ve asked ten other dance writers to pitch in. Because each writer is spending more time with a particular book, each entry is more like a review than just a blurb. So what was meant as a quick gift guide has turned into quite an education. Big thanks to Mindy Aloff, Barbara Forbes, Ann Murphy, Lynn Colburn Shapiro, Robert Johnson, Bonnie Sue Stein, Marina Harss, Rosemary Novellino-Mearns, Morgan Griffin, and Emily Macel Theys. La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972) was a choreographer, teacher, and coach whose impassioned belief in the principles of classical ballet, coupled with her obsession concerning the spiritual importance of high art, defined her. Trained in the Imperial School of the Maryinsky Theater, she joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes as a dancer and then, after a period of teaching and dancemaking mostly in Kiev, rejoined Diaghilev as a choreographer. From there, she went on to create an international repertory (nearly all of it eventually lost) for companies throughout Europe, in South America, and, finally, in the United States, where she, her second husband, and their daughter settled after World War II. Her legacy as a teacher, based in Los Angeles, included such stars-in-the-making as Allegra Kent, Cynthia Gregory, and Cyd Charisse. Dancers tended to love her; however, Nijinska’s affiliation with the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, her particular brand of choreographic abstraction, her privileging of form and symbolic ideas over physical attractiveness for its own sake, her incorrigible temper, and the strangeness of the choreographic imagery in her work contributed to her controversial reception among critics and impresarios. When Frederick Ashton, her student in the 1930s, became artistic director of The Royal Ballet, he revived her two Ballets Russes masterpieces: the 19 .
By Lynn Garafola
Oxford University Press, 2022
Reviewed by Mindy Aloff