Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney

her dance teacher Elise Toulemon. (Eurythmics had become so influential that Diaghilev and his dancer-choreographer, the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky, had visited its founder, Jaques-Dalcroze, to ask for help with the dance movements for their ballet.)
    Its composer, Igor Stravinsky, had named the ballet Le sacre du printemps ( The Rite of Spring ). He said that “it represents pagan Russia, and is unified by a single idea: the mystery surge of the creative power of Spring. The piece has no plot.” 2 Nijinsky, who was Diaghilev’s lover, had written to Stravinsky : “Now I know what Le Sacre du printemps will be when everything is as we both want it: new, beautiful and utterly different—but for the ordinary viewer a jolting and emotional experience.” 3
    Stravinsky told his mother not to be afraid if the response to the ballet was negative, saying that “it is in the order of things.” 4 Meanwhile, Nijinsky’s dancers complained that his ideas were incomprehensible and his style entirely without beauty. With Stravinsky and Nijinsky, Diaghilev was intent on confrontation; their united goal was to shock.
    How had it come about that Sergei Diaghilev and his dance troupe, the Ballets Russes, had not only become essential elements of the Parisian avant-garde but were central to the development of the modern movement?
    A younger Diaghilev had described himself candidly to his beloved stepmother in a letter expressing his anxieties about his younger brothers: “As for myself . . . I am first a great charlatan, although one with great flair; second, I am a great charmer; third, I’ve a great nerve; fourth, I’m a man with a great deal of logic and few principles; and fifth, I think I lack talent; but if you like I think I’ve found my real calling—patronage of the arts.” 5 He had written that he felt a force in himself, and had come to realize “that I for the devil am not an ordinary person.”
    Sergei Diaghilev’s father was a cultivated provincial aristocrat who had become a bankrupt. His son learned to convert several vital elements—the collapse of his family, his sexuality and the loss of his homeland through revolution—into an evangelical blurring of all present boundaries. Diaghilev had early flaunted his homosexuality—then a dangerous thing to do in Russia—and established himself as a cosmopolitan dandy with deeply antiestablishment sentiments. If he lacked the essential talent to become an artist, nonetheless, Diaghilev’s remarkable ability to innovate and transform the world of art itself would be carried out with an extraordinary degree of creativity. He loved the tension caused by all that was contradictory: “He loved the friction, the struggle and the fire that was engendered by the new but not necessarily . . . for its own sake.” 6
    Diaghilev had founded an influential art journal in Russia, had mounted highly successful exhibitions and gradually had come to believe that only the ballet exemplified the ideal, which was that all art forms should be united into one. By 1909, he had formed his own company. The Ballets Russes de Diaghilev caused a sensation across Europe. The colors and boldness of the sets and costumes and the foreignness and exoticism of the company’s Russian and oriental themes became all the rage. But while Diaghilev’s aim was a totality of art, it was as much about liberation of all kinds, including sexuality. And sexuality became a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values and one of the central themes of the modern movement.
    Audiences were awed by Diaghilev’s lover, the extraordinary dancer Nijinsky, whom Debussy called “a perverse genius . . . a young savage.” It had been Nijinsky’s elemental faun simulating orgasm in Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune that broke all traditional rules of good taste and brought the underlying eroticism of much of