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Faber Faber Diaghilevs Empire How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World.
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384 pages, Paperback
Published October 10, 2024
37 people are currently reading
530 people want to read
About the author
Rupert Christiansen
19 books11 followersRupert Christiansen is an English writer, journalist and critic, grandson of Arthur Christiansen (editor of the Daily Express) and son of Kay and Michael Christiansen (editor of the Sunday and Daily Mirror). Born in London, he was educated at Millfield and King's College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. As a Fulbright scholar, he also attended Columbia University from 1977 to 1978.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 9, 2023
I have always been fascinated by ballet. The watching of it, not the practicing of it. Furthermore, I find myself a bit of a Russophile, especially when it relates to all things Romanov. The Soviet Era interests me a little less.
I admit I had no idea who Serge Diaghilev was before starting this book. I know he lends his name to this title, and figured it would heavily feature him. And it does.
The arts always tend to loosen the rigidity of social structure. I think artists just feel a bit freer to be who they are. The book touches on Diaghilev's romantic relationships, some of which seem questionable, not because they are gay, but because they are basically teacher/student. Positions of power invite question.
The middle was a bit of a slog to get through. However, the beginning and the end both interested me greatly. I particularly liked reading about the baby ballerinas, and how certain ballet dancers Russified their names to make them more palatable to ballet going audiences.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.
I admit I had no idea who Serge Diaghilev was before starting this book. I know he lends his name to this title, and figured it would heavily feature him. And it does.
The arts always tend to loosen the rigidity of social structure. I think artists just feel a bit freer to be who they are. The book touches on Diaghilev's romantic relationships, some of which seem questionable, not because they are gay, but because they are basically teacher/student. Positions of power invite question.
The middle was a bit of a slog to get through. However, the beginning and the end both interested me greatly. I particularly liked reading about the baby ballerinas, and how certain ballet dancers Russified their names to make them more palatable to ballet going audiences.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.
March 8, 2024
Rupert Christiansen’s lively, colorful, personality-filled, occasionally disappointing book is partly the story of a man, partly the story of an organization, and partly the story of an idea.
Sergei Diaghilev is like one of those young men from the provinces, frequent in 19th-century European fiction, who went to a cultural capital to seek their fortune. But he was never entirely provincial to begin with, having come from the landed gentry in Perm, and he made good in a very big way, going beyond St. Petersburg, his initial destination, to Paris, London, New York, and parts beyond, and eventually meeting his end, at the relatively early age of 57, in Venice. At first he was somewhat “brash” and “uncouth,” but he had a way about him; artist and critic Alexandre Benois, who became part of his entourage, said, “he knew how to will a thing”—he made things happen. In 1890, he joined a group of young cosmopolitan men in St. Petersburg, one of whom was a cousin, and that became the starting gate from which he sprang forth.
Though he first displayed in Paris some Russian art and music, in 1906 and 1907 (Fyodor Chaliapin in Boris Godunov was a big hit), Diaghilev soon settled into a new stride. Over the course of two decades, from 1909 to 1929, his fabulous creation, which came to be called the Ballets Russes, presented to Western audiences—to their delight, astonishment, and sometimes consternation—dancers such as Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, and the so-called baby ballerinas, the dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and other choreographers such as Michel Fokine, Leonid Massine, George Balanchine, and Bronislava Nijinska. Also part of the crew, cycling in and out through a revolving door of dazzlement, were commanding talents of art, music, and literature, among them Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau. Not everything they made was good, but when it was good it was sometimes practically earthshaking: many of their works are still known to us in the concert hall and sometimes even on the stage, such as Les Sylphides, Afternoon of a Faun, The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, The Three-Cornered Hat, and Daphnis et Chloé.
So much for the man and the organization. The idea, which continues to reverberate, is harder to summarize. It was sometimes reduced to what Lincoln Kirstein sent up as the one-word “Russian ballet,” the popularity of which explains why the 1948 film The Red Shoes concerns a Russian ballet company, not a French or English one. But the phenomenon wasn’t solely about Russians and not solely about ballet; it involved modernism in all the arts, and even shifting attitudes toward art and culture. And its effects lasted long after Diaghilev died and his original group dispersed, which happened at the end of the 1920s. (This is reported on page 209, and the text goes on for another 100 pages.) Something big was happening here, which had to do with the expansion of the public sphere and the growth of the culture industry among other things, and one would like to hear more about it, but these things aren’t Christiansen’s concern.
He’s at his best in telling the tales of the people and their work. There’s more than one madman in the mix—not only the strange, extravagantly talented, and possibly tragic figure of Nijinsky but also a Spanish flamenco dancer named Félix García. There are marvelous parties. (I know from experience that parties with dancers can be extravagant affairs, but I never attended one at Versailles.) There are critics—Richard Buckle is one—who came close to becoming showmen themselves in their efforts to recapture and celebrate the glories of the Diaghilev years. There are plenty of artistic temperaments, romantic entanglements, and striking performers, sometimes given quirky descriptions by Christiansen (Lydia Lopokova is a “plump little butterball”). And there are many wondrous dances, with a few oddities and ironies along the way. For instance, the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring caused a sensation that’s talked about to this day, yet the dance was performed only 10 times over two months, in Paris and London, and then was dropped from the repertory, never to be seen again in its original form.
In the final section, Christiansen observes that much has been lost (the reconstructions of The Rite of Spring et al. are “hypothetical”), and he speaks critically, almost dismissively, of much that remains, whether it’s Fokine’s Les Sylphides or all of Massine’s work. In Christiansen’s view, only three of the Diaghilev commissions retain their “immediate artistic impact”: Balanchine’s Apollo and The Prodigal Son and Nijinska’s Les Noces. This neglects something of major importance: the music. It also leaves unaddressed, although he touches on it elsewhere, the influence of Diaghilev and his successors on ballet and other varieties of dance.
Ballet may be “dying,” as Jennifer Homans predicted in 2010 (the remark is quoted in the first chapter), but all of us are dying. For now, it seems to be holding its own, as Christiansen acknowledges in his way. In recent weeks, I saw a landmark work by George Balanchine; a new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, about war in Ukraine, was given its first performance; and a program of old and new work by Twyla Tharp relied in part on ballet. And that’s to speak only of New York City.
One more thing is missing. Christiansen can be excused for neglecting it, because it probably hadn’t become an issue when he finalized the text, which was published in October 2022. I have to mention it, though. Speaking of the Ballets Russes at the end of his first chapter, he says, “Led from the front by its mastermind of an emperor, Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, it set out from Russia to ravish the world.” If you notice the word “emperor” and you recall that to ravish sometimes means to take forcibly or impose oneself upon something, you may feel a twinge of discomfort. Is there a connection between what Diaghilev brought to the West and what his country has lately been doing in Ukraine? Do we have to bracket the Ballets Russes as in some way another instance of Russian cultural imperialism? All that I’ll suggest here as an answer is that Russia is represented not only by Vladimir Putin and his minions (and his forebears) but also by Sergei Diaghilev and his colleagues, and for that matter by Alexei Navalny. Conquest, creation, resistance: somehow all are Russian.
Sergei Diaghilev is like one of those young men from the provinces, frequent in 19th-century European fiction, who went to a cultural capital to seek their fortune. But he was never entirely provincial to begin with, having come from the landed gentry in Perm, and he made good in a very big way, going beyond St. Petersburg, his initial destination, to Paris, London, New York, and parts beyond, and eventually meeting his end, at the relatively early age of 57, in Venice. At first he was somewhat “brash” and “uncouth,” but he had a way about him; artist and critic Alexandre Benois, who became part of his entourage, said, “he knew how to will a thing”—he made things happen. In 1890, he joined a group of young cosmopolitan men in St. Petersburg, one of whom was a cousin, and that became the starting gate from which he sprang forth.
Though he first displayed in Paris some Russian art and music, in 1906 and 1907 (Fyodor Chaliapin in Boris Godunov was a big hit), Diaghilev soon settled into a new stride. Over the course of two decades, from 1909 to 1929, his fabulous creation, which came to be called the Ballets Russes, presented to Western audiences—to their delight, astonishment, and sometimes consternation—dancers such as Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, and the so-called baby ballerinas, the dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and other choreographers such as Michel Fokine, Leonid Massine, George Balanchine, and Bronislava Nijinska. Also part of the crew, cycling in and out through a revolving door of dazzlement, were commanding talents of art, music, and literature, among them Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau. Not everything they made was good, but when it was good it was sometimes practically earthshaking: many of their works are still known to us in the concert hall and sometimes even on the stage, such as Les Sylphides, Afternoon of a Faun, The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, The Three-Cornered Hat, and Daphnis et Chloé.
So much for the man and the organization. The idea, which continues to reverberate, is harder to summarize. It was sometimes reduced to what Lincoln Kirstein sent up as the one-word “Russian ballet,” the popularity of which explains why the 1948 film The Red Shoes concerns a Russian ballet company, not a French or English one. But the phenomenon wasn’t solely about Russians and not solely about ballet; it involved modernism in all the arts, and even shifting attitudes toward art and culture. And its effects lasted long after Diaghilev died and his original group dispersed, which happened at the end of the 1920s. (This is reported on page 209, and the text goes on for another 100 pages.) Something big was happening here, which had to do with the expansion of the public sphere and the growth of the culture industry among other things, and one would like to hear more about it, but these things aren’t Christiansen’s concern.
He’s at his best in telling the tales of the people and their work. There’s more than one madman in the mix—not only the strange, extravagantly talented, and possibly tragic figure of Nijinsky but also a Spanish flamenco dancer named Félix García. There are marvelous parties. (I know from experience that parties with dancers can be extravagant affairs, but I never attended one at Versailles.) There are critics—Richard Buckle is one—who came close to becoming showmen themselves in their efforts to recapture and celebrate the glories of the Diaghilev years. There are plenty of artistic temperaments, romantic entanglements, and striking performers, sometimes given quirky descriptions by Christiansen (Lydia Lopokova is a “plump little butterball”). And there are many wondrous dances, with a few oddities and ironies along the way. For instance, the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring caused a sensation that’s talked about to this day, yet the dance was performed only 10 times over two months, in Paris and London, and then was dropped from the repertory, never to be seen again in its original form.
In the final section, Christiansen observes that much has been lost (the reconstructions of The Rite of Spring et al. are “hypothetical”), and he speaks critically, almost dismissively, of much that remains, whether it’s Fokine’s Les Sylphides or all of Massine’s work. In Christiansen’s view, only three of the Diaghilev commissions retain their “immediate artistic impact”: Balanchine’s Apollo and The Prodigal Son and Nijinska’s Les Noces. This neglects something of major importance: the music. It also leaves unaddressed, although he touches on it elsewhere, the influence of Diaghilev and his successors on ballet and other varieties of dance.
Ballet may be “dying,” as Jennifer Homans predicted in 2010 (the remark is quoted in the first chapter), but all of us are dying. For now, it seems to be holding its own, as Christiansen acknowledges in his way. In recent weeks, I saw a landmark work by George Balanchine; a new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, about war in Ukraine, was given its first performance; and a program of old and new work by Twyla Tharp relied in part on ballet. And that’s to speak only of New York City.
One more thing is missing. Christiansen can be excused for neglecting it, because it probably hadn’t become an issue when he finalized the text, which was published in October 2022. I have to mention it, though. Speaking of the Ballets Russes at the end of his first chapter, he says, “Led from the front by its mastermind of an emperor, Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, it set out from Russia to ravish the world.” If you notice the word “emperor” and you recall that to ravish sometimes means to take forcibly or impose oneself upon something, you may feel a twinge of discomfort. Is there a connection between what Diaghilev brought to the West and what his country has lately been doing in Ukraine? Do we have to bracket the Ballets Russes as in some way another instance of Russian cultural imperialism? All that I’ll suggest here as an answer is that Russia is represented not only by Vladimir Putin and his minions (and his forebears) but also by Sergei Diaghilev and his colleagues, and for that matter by Alexei Navalny. Conquest, creation, resistance: somehow all are Russian.
October 25, 2022
Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC. I don't know where my fascination with classical ballet comes from and I am certainly no expert, but this was a very enjoyable history of the ballets russes at the beginning of the 20th century. The dancers like Nijinsky, Karasova and Pavlova, the ballets like L'apres-midi d'un faune, sylphides and the firebird, what an amazing combination! Good reading.
December 26, 2022
An easy read that pulls together a storyline from multiple great sources. The book builds for you connections between dances, dancers, artists and players that laid the paving stones of how we see and produce dance today.
March 11, 2023
Interesting book and the author is a good storyteller. However, I at least came away with the feeling he doesn't like ballet very much.
December 29, 2023
Rupert Christiansen’s excellent account of Diaghilev’s Empire. It is written with a winning mix of expertise and the kind of punchy prose that one expects from a first-class journalist. So much has been written about Diaghilev, his ballet empire and the stellar cast that surrounded him and generally (Buckle, Scheijen) in many more words. This is a page-turner - a great history for those who want to know more and a mine of still surprising facts for those (myself, included) who thought they knew Diaghilev’s story and legacy!
Christiansen has not turned to any original sources (are there any left!) but he has marshalled the written words already published and pulled them together with his own analysis into a thoroughly absorbing narrative, which extends well beyond Diaghilev to examine his myriad successors and survivors. And wonder of wonders it includes a detailed index and an impressive bibliography. It is thoroughly recommended!
.
Christiansen has not turned to any original sources (are there any left!) but he has marshalled the written words already published and pulled them together with his own analysis into a thoroughly absorbing narrative, which extends well beyond Diaghilev to examine his myriad successors and survivors. And wonder of wonders it includes a detailed index and an impressive bibliography. It is thoroughly recommended!
.
January 27, 2024
While this book is impeccably researched, I was excited to see in the introduction that Christiansen wanted to make this book accessible to non “balletomanes,” that is, folks who don’t share his singular obsession with ballet. That certainly characterizes me.
But other than that introduction and ending chapters where I felt the author’s own prose and perspective made things more accessible, this book was mostly a slog. It alters between gossip of the colorful set of characters and intense jargon (I had to keep reminding myself what the Mariinsky method was).
I appreciate the author’s desire to make a book that widens the world of the Ballet Russes, but I don’t know that he necessarily achieved that for me, as I am leaving with a little more understanding than I entered with.
But other than that introduction and ending chapters where I felt the author’s own prose and perspective made things more accessible, this book was mostly a slog. It alters between gossip of the colorful set of characters and intense jargon (I had to keep reminding myself what the Mariinsky method was).
I appreciate the author’s desire to make a book that widens the world of the Ballet Russes, but I don’t know that he necessarily achieved that for me, as I am leaving with a little more understanding than I entered with.
March 22, 2023
In his preface, the author makes it clear that this book is not a product of academic research but rather it traces "the historical moment when, thanks to a unique enterprise and the individual who drove it, ballet became a crucial piece in the jigsaw of Western culture." And, along the way, he hopes to "explain the allure of ballet." Christiansen, a British dance critic, succeeds admirably on both counts. Anyone with an interest in ballet but knows little of its history--and specifically the history of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes--will find this informative and a pleasure to read. Source material is cited at the end of each chapter for those interested in further exploration.
February 25, 2024
Comprehensive and detailed account of Diaghilev and the founding of the Ballets Russes, encompassing not only the heady early days but going on to explore what happened next, taking on the story of ballet to the present day. It’s a fascinating tale and a must-read for any Russophile or ballet enthusiast, as well as anyone interested in European culture in the 20th century, because the author ranges far and wild, looking at all the characters who were so influential in so many areas of the arts. Meticulously researched, informative, well-written and with a good selection of photographs. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
April 8, 2023
This is a highly entertaining and thoroughly researched history of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes that all dancers and dance lovers should read. At times gossipy and a bit snarky, the ethos of the period and the personalities come through wonderfully. I found it a bit long, and in some areas I felt Christiansen got a bit repetitive while trying to make a point, but overall an informative and worthwhile read.
October 12, 2025
This book was a gift - both from a lived one, and in itself. A deeply knowledgeable, affectionate and readable account of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the company’s importance and influence on ballet as an art form. Gossipy at times in a way that is never prurient or spiteful, and almost necessary in a narrative driven by the cast’s personalities, relationships, rivalries and conflicts.
A book by, about, and for balletomanes.
A book by, about, and for balletomanes.
August 19, 2023
Loved this deep gossipy meticulously researched dive into all things “Russian ballet”
February 20, 2024
Totally enjoyed this book!!!
April 18, 2024
Snippy and bitchy and too Anglocentric.
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July 10, 2024This book kind of assumes you know a lot about the world of ballet and the world that is now gone (the WW's) but it's still interesting and worth trying to understand.
April 11, 2025
i really wanted to love this but instead i learnt a very valuable lesson about reading historical books written by authors whom are not themselves historians LOL
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November 30, 2024Maybe straight people just shouldn’t be allowed.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews