Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World
Rupert Christiansen
(Faber & Faber, £25)
I DEVELOPED an unlikely obsession with Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at the age of 14. I slept beneath a poster of Vaslav Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose (a role he came to despise as ‘too pretty’), listened to a lot of Stravinsky and, on my first visit to Venice, was photographed looking mournful on the cemetery island of San Michele by the graves of the impresario and the composer, but not the dancer, who is buried in Montmartre.
As Coco Chanel put it: “Diaghilev invented Russia for foreigners”
I became something of a balletomane, which is what the Arts critic Rupert Christiansen declares himself to be in the preface to his brilliantly eclectic and imaginatively researched account of Diaghilev’s widespread influence. He jumps right in with Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film,, which, had an immediate impact on fashion and interior design. As Osbert Lancaster wrote, the prevailing ‘pale, pastel shades were replaced by a riot of barbaric hues—jade green, purple, every variety of crimson and scarlet and, above all, orange’.
