Diaghilev: A Life
Where to buy Diaghilev: A Life books online?
Product Description
Featuring an eight-page gallery of full-color illustrations, here is a major new biography of Serge Diaghilev, founder and impresario of the Ballets Russes, who revolutionized ballet by bringing together composers such as Stravinsky and Prokofiev, dancers and choreographers such as Nijinsky and Karsavina, Fokine and Balanchine, and artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Bakst, and Goncharova. An accomplished, flamboyant impresario of all the arts, Diaghilev became a legendary figure. Growing up in a minor noble family tree in remote Perm, he would become a central figure in the artistic worlds of Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid during the golden age of modern art. He lived through bankruptcy, war, revolution, and exile. Furthermore he lived openly as a homosexual and his liaisons, most famously with Nijinsky, and his turbulent friendships with Stravinsky, Coco Chanel, Prokofiev, and Jean Cocteau gave his life an exceptionally dramatic quality. Scheijen’s magnificent biography, based on wide research in small known archives, especially in Russia, brings fully to life a complex and powerful personality with infinite creative energy.
Buy Cheap Diaghilev: A Life Online
Related posts:
Sjeng Scheijen, recently cultural attaché at the Dutch embassy in Russia, has written an eminently readable, thorough biography of Sergei Diaghilev, one of the fantastic artistic facts of twentieth century western culture. That Diaghilev was not himself an artist is ironic, though he initially wanted to paint. But in his many enterprises he help set in motion many of the trends that were to be dominant in twentieth century painting, composition, and dance. It is to some extent unfortunate that Diaghilev’s success with the Ballet Russes has obscured his achievements with the development of the plastic arts, way before he dazzled Parisian audiences with his dance company. It is providential that Mr. Scheijen is not a dance specialist, as he does not let Ballet Russe splendour blind him to the additional significant achievements of Diaghilev, all painstakingly discussed in his book. But Dance is central and one of the delights of this biography is that the biographer lets contemporaries do the telling as to descriptions and analysis of the Ballet Russes. Indeed, I have read very few passages as revealing and absorbing as the long paragraph by Bronislava Nijinska quoted by Mr. Scheijen describing in minute detail her brother’s quick and concentrated practice technique, his ability to make the illusion of being suspended in air by ending a jump not on the balls of his feet but on his extraordinarily strong toes. This is but a precious detail in a book that is full of many such jewels.
The biography has made use of many Russian sources so that there is much illumination on Diaghilev’s early life and career in Russia. Indeed there is much wealth of detail and atmosphere of the initial years of Diaghilev as a disciplined, hard effective art scholar, administrator, organizer, and his pivotal role in the artistic life of St. Petersburg and promoter of Russian art. One learns much about the intricacies of Russian cultural politics of the time and the cliquishness that governed official and bureaucratic life notwithstanding nominal absolutism in all budgetary matters by the hapless Tsar. The first forays to Paris, of Russian composition and staged opera are painstakingly documented. We go through a very appealing and informative approximate third of the book before the seventeen year ancient Nijinsky makes an appearance. Mr. Scheijen’s text is also a corrective on many traditional interpretations of Diaghilev’s personal life that with time have become unquestioned “fact”in all probability because the research has not been thorough. Thus one learns that rather than Diaghilev be the possessive pursuer of Nijinsky, the fantastic dancer himself, unstable, at the core probably heterosexual, but very much a careerist, was the one who originally pursued Diaghilev relentlessly so as to advance his career. In this respect Diaghilev with time, rumor has it that learned to play his empresario role lacking bashfulness, expecting sexual payback from his young protegés. Though it may seem unfair to dwell on this aspect of the biography it being so much more than a listing of salacious detail, but, it is vital to mention because, as so much in this book, thanks to Mr. Scheijen, it is revisionist, painstakingly informed, and contrary to what has been “traditional” Ballet Russe caricature of Diaghilev’s personality. The fact remains that there has never been before or since a cultural figure such as Diaghilev, a man lacking chance who was able to bring together for a while what was best in composition, dance, and art, astonish the world and set its artistic course for the better part of a century. The word “impresario” indeed shortchanges the man. Yet that he also was. Mr. Scheijen never lets one forget that bills had to be paid, at least most of the time. Diaghilev struggled permanently to get the funds together. He also mastered the art of walking out of hotels with fantastic panache, head held high, and leaving the bill unpaid. All told it was a wondrous, full, exciting, tempestuous life. Was there loneliness at the center of so much activity? One can speculate. But, one cannot escape the underlying melancholy of the perpetual Russian exile.
The book has many illustrations throughout the text, and a center section of keenly reproduced colored plates of Ballet Russes designs. This book is painstakingly recommended not only to balletomanes but to anyone interested in the cultural history of the twentieth century. It is the best book I have read about Diaghilev.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5