Part 3
The weak spot about all this combativeness and intellectual ardor, which proved fatal and unavoidable amid these divergent points of view, was the lack of creative ability on the part of the group. This group had deposed and duly trampled under foot the art of the “wanderers” with its social tendencies and its worship of the moujik. It had done this to the greater glory of an art that is unselfish and creative. But almost immediately its members turned toward literature. Among all those former members of the Club (I except only Serov and the Moscovites), there was not a single painter in the real sense of the word. Benois, who never when working at a canvas could completely overcome his amateurish clumsiness, Lanceray, later Doboujinsky--they all were first and foremost illustrators, rather than painters, who were steeped in precious recollections, who gleaned from every style and who discovered forgotten beauties.
With this select group, then, the motif prevailed more and more over its execution ; the brush became a means of interpreting a history perceived with a sort of sentimental homesickness mixed with irony. Is it surprising, then, that the retrospective attitude got the upper hand more and more, and that the offshoots of this movement were sacrificed to a propaganda for the past?
As a matter of fact, discovery followed upon discovery. Preceding generations, going into Russian extremes, became infatuated with the idea of progress. Accordingly they either ignored or misunderstood their national past. Then, under Nicholas I the czar-gendarme, the old architecture was disfigured by German builders. As for the unique and grandiose beauty of the structures in the style of the Empire and of Louis XVI,--buildings without parallel in the occidental world--these were confounded by the public with that implacable hatred that it bore toward the regime that had erected and that was maintaining them. An educated Russian could not possibly find anything beautiful about the Winter Palace, this fine masterpiece of Rastrelli; he would decline to admire the Admiralty Building because the defeat of Tsushima was prepared within its formidable walls. The writer of this sketch was himself brought up in this atmosphere of hateful contempt for the “official ugliness” and the “style of the barrack.”
Benois and his friends discovered this slandered beauty and became enamoured of it. Later on we shall see how Bakst discharged his debt of gratitude to old Petrograd, this wonderful city which rose miraculously from the surface of the waves.
But the surprises were not yet over. In his history of modern Russian painting, Benois with boldness and with charming eloquence recalled the founders of this style of painting, the portrait-painters of the eighteenth century, especially Levitzky and Borovikovsky. He cast
overboard all existing estimates and showed up the emptiness of the “wanderers” school. But his justified and impetuous enthusiasm proved--or nearly so--the undoing of “Mir Iskousstva”.
The magazine deteriorated before one’s eyes. Side by side with it Benois brought out a collection, or analytical inventory, called “The Art Treasures of Russia”. The creator became a collector. Ceaselessly he and his friends collected. Bric-a-brac occupied a prominent place. Icons of the school of Novgorod were dug up, likewise family portraits done by serfs in the old households of the nobility, mahogany furniture dating back to the Peace of Tilsit, and popular likenesses.
For a time Diaghileff allowed himself to drift. As usual he treated this craze for the past on a grand scale. He even resumed it in a definite effort of which I shall speak later. But for the present he and his friends felt themselves reduced to the role of custodians of a museum or of benevolent guides, a thing that was repugnant to his ambition and his temperament. He looked for a way out. The stage alone seemed to offer it.
Naturalism had just won its greatest triumphs, thanks to the Moscow Art Theater. But if comedy was taken possession of by the naturalists, the opera and the ballet could react. Already Mamontov, the famous mæcenas who discovered Shaliapin, had ordered stage decorations from the Moscow painters, Vroubel and Golovin. At Petrograd everything was given a trial. I cannot, without exceeding the limits set me, speak at greater length of what became of this movement; some day, perhaps, I shall be able to strike its balance. As a matter of fact, I have already had to enlarge considerably upon my subject in order to set the subject of my sketch down in his proper surroundings, in that unique atmosphere, created by historical and personal contingencies, which is ignored for the most part by the Russian people, and which entirely escapes the attention of the foreign reader. Besides, this union of a handful of men who were determined to restore the artistic greatness of their country was so brotherly, so fraternal that it would be wrong to differentiate between their respective roles and artificially to isolate their efforts.
THE THREE KNOCKS
Resolutely Diaghileff turned his co=workers towards the theater. The time was propitious. Vsevolojsky, the director of the Imperial theaters, had just resigned his position which he had filled so brilliantly. Himself a dilettante nobleman and a man of good taste he had personally designed most of the costumes that, under his direction, were built for the ballet and the operas. He had to a large extent reconstructed the Russian and foreign repertoire, devoting himself to Tchaikovsky and making a place for Wagner. A galaxy of stars surrounded him. Marius Petitpas, the greatest living choreographer, exercised his successful dictatorship over the ballet. A brilliant young woman, just out of school, was about to eclipse the celebrated Italian virtuosos. Highly respected painters--the Shishkovs and the Botcharovs--who were experts at the art of stage decoration, executed the ideas of their director. In short, he did everything. Was it his fault that his activity fell within the worst epoch of a century that was called the stupid century? Is he to be blamed that the sources of his inspiration and the quality of the documents consulted by him bore the marks of that terrible decadence of the artistic instinct of which the year 1900 marks the climax and presages its end? However that may be, he prepared a glorious end for an obsolete art. The old opera passed away in beauty.
Yet with all the extraordinary perfection of execution, a certain uneasiness was germinating. Vague manifestations of independence were threatening the rigorous traditional discipline. In the midst of this crisis the helm was given to a young man. Prince Serge Volkonsky, who had distinguished himself in the Court theater by his splendid bearing and his clever acting, belonged to one of the noblest Russian families. His grandfather had taken part in the famous “Decembrist insurrection” of 1825; his grandmother had followed her husband to his Siberian convict prison with a devotion that inspired Nekrasov to write a celebrated poem. Volkonsky let the dead bury their dead and from the very first made his appeal to the young men and women--to Diaghileff and his friends. They plunged into their work: a revival of Delibes’ “Sylvia” was decided upon.
The Mir Iskousstva painters agreed to make their first attack upon the stage together. Accordingly, they divided up the work by acts, Alexander Benois leading--Benois who even today, after his successful collaboration with Stravinsky, retains a real feeling of reverence for Delibes whom he places, without hesitation, in a class with Wagner. Bakst and Serov also collaborated.
But the opera was never put on. There is a veritable hoode about this “Sylvia”, which kept haunting the Russian artists and yet was never produced. The late Andrianov, an exceedingly good dancer, was about to show an abridgement or sketch of this piece, but the attempt came to naught; Fokine dreamed about it vainly for many years.
As to this first attempt at cooperative work, it failed for personal reasons. From the beginning Volkonsky felt his prestige as manager
threatened by the consuming energy and the unscrupulous ambition of his “employé”, Diaghileff. To be sure, Diaghileff, conscious of his actual superiority, carried himself as though he were the boss. Fearing he would be supplanted by this maire du palais , the director requested Diaghileff to resign voluntarily. Diaghileff would do nothing of the sort. Exasperated, Volkonsky promptly discharged him, by applying the famous “paragraph three” of the rules and regulations to his case, by the terms of which the “government secretary Diaghileff” was forever barred from all public appearance. Who knows but that to this act of administrative jealousy we owe the grandiose effort of the “Russian Season”? Excluded from official life, Diaghileff, the great condottiere of art, could unfold his full power!
Diaghileff left, his friends followed, a great gap closed in about the director, and several months later, not being able to have the last say in a quarrel with a star who was both famous and powerful, Volkonsky had himself to resign and leave.
Bakst, however, had not participated in this boycott of the prince; he plunged into his work for its own sake. But it was not at the Marie Theater that he made his real debut . Grand-Duke Vladimir Alexandrovitch had brought back with him from one of his frequent trips to Paris the text for a pantomime, the author of which was Fèvre, the comedian. This play, The Heart of the Marchioness”, found favor with the directors. It was decided to play it at the Hermitage Theater, an auditorium reserved exclusively for the Imperial family and the members of the Court. It was connected with the Winter Palace by a passage. The French actors of the Michel Theater, under the direction of the maître de ballet , Enrico Cecchetti, executed the pantomime before an audience of grand dukes and chamberlains.
Vladimir entrusted the scenery to Bakst. The latter conceived a semicircular pavilion as stage setting. For costumes he went straight to authentic sources and utilized the elements for devising a good ensemble. He brought a new idea to the theater: that of style. That is, at least, what eye-witnesses claim; nothing has been preserved of this work of his.
As the pantomime was tremendously successful, the Emperor had this show put on at a gala benefit performance in the Marie Theater--and this is how Bakst for the first time appeared on the most famous of all Russian stages. This winter of 1900, then, when for the first time he went upon the stage that, according to Goethe, “means the universe”, decided his future. Who could today imagine what the fate of modern scenerie would be without the contribution of Bakst? And who could conceive of a Bakst remaining a stranger to the theater? It took him ten years to find his place. The three knocks struck home. For the first time the curtain rises over a work of Bakst. Ten years later Paris will crown “Sheherazade”.
THE THEBAN GATE
Meanwhile Colonel Teliakovsky had succeeded Volkonsky. He owed his appointment as director to the fact that he had been in the Horseguards with Baron (later Count) Freedericksz, minister of the Court. A ludicrous figure he was--this horseman promoted
to be stage manager--, without either ideas or prestige and consequently unable to contribute anything of value. But he gave others a free hand--and that is a great deal during a period of fermentation and revival.
Thus, soon after his appointment, he authorized an experiment of far-reaching importance. Alexander Theater was preparing to bring out Euripides’ tragedy, “Hippolytus,” the attempt being made to produce it as nearly like the ancient original as possible. The young stage director, Osarovsky, hoped to make a grand coup . The play was translated by Merejkovsky in exceedingly beautiful verse and with an extremely intense modern feeling. Among the Russian intellectuals of that time, Nietzschean ideas were held in great fascination. Now, in this early masterpiece the philosopher had transfigured the whole conception of the spirit of the ancients. Under the marble-like and placid guise of the Greece of Apollo’s time he had revealed the Dionysiac ecstacy, the pathetic distress and the mystic impulse of the masses. What had been considered as the key to their souls, viz., this sovereign and plastic art, was but a sham emancipation.
For a quarter of a century the government had tried to curb turbulent youth by means of the classical ferule. Greek was loathed as much as was the royal blue of the gendarme uniform. But the translation by Merejkovsky and the enthusiastic eloquence of Professor Zielinski, scholar and poet, who commented upon it as “the birth of tragedy”, caused great surprise and soon extreme fondness for it. It was necessary, however, in order to bring about this rehabilitation of antiquity, to make use of the best possible medium, namely, its consecration by the stage.
The scenery and costumes for “Hippolytus” were ordered from Bakst. After an interval of four years there followed “Oedipus at Colonnæ” and Sophocles’ “Antigone”.
It was an arduous task indeed, for the problem was that of adapting the essential dualism of the Greek tragedy--its lyric choruses and its active players, its dithyrambs and its dialogue, Dionysius and Apollo--to the arrangement of the modern theater, with its odd-shaped stage, like a box opened toward the side of the spectators. Bakst made the attempt. Once having entered upon the road to Thebes he solved the enigma of the Sphinx without stumbling and forced open the gate. By raising the background of the stage he made the foreground available for the proscenium , with the altar of the god of the tragedy in the middle. On this proscenium the choruses executed evolutions, the choristers chanted the strophes and anti-strophes rhythmically, while the ensemble of supernumeraries scanned certain final verses. At the end the leader of the chorus would ascend the steps which connected the proscenium with the platform in order
to pronounce Fate’s supreme sentence upon the protagonist who had been prostrated by the gods.
Thus, for the first time, an attempt was made at a logical dissociation of the rhythmic and dramatic elements of the ancient theater. Years were
to elapse before the German Max Reinhardt invented the monumental staircase and the proscenium of Lysistrata; and still a longer period until that same intrepid pioneer let loose upon the arena of a circus the hysterical multitude of a chorus of wild persons. Bakst was the first, not only in Russia, but in the world, to try to work out a stage and a conventional plastic language that was in accord with our modern conception of ancient art.
The Greeks who faced each other in the tragic dilemmas of “Hippolytus” and especially of “Oedipus” were no longer those classical personages
with rounded gestures, draped in white, blue or red tunics that looked like a schoolboy’s drawing after a plaster=cast relief of Phideas. They displayed the angular shoulders of the warriors on one of Aegina’s bas=reliefs; the conical helmet with a visor protecting the brow and the nose, as well as the metal shin protectors, tended to simplify the lines of the actor. On the other hand the garments were brightcolored; the purple robe of Creon was resplendent with its ornamentation copied from Ionian pottery. The sixth century dispossessed the fifth, archaic art crowded out the classical canons, the intense colors of many hues
obtained preference over the marble whiteness of the statues. People breathed again; they felt themselves freed.
The great age of Pericles, which for three centuries had been exploited by every academy of Europe, which had been vulgarised, debased, enervated by the Alma=Tademas and the Siemiradskis, seemed gloomy, formal, deathly cold. Besides, an art that is perfect and definite, and that has reached its zenith affords no occasion for further research, for further development. It condemns its followers either to imitating it or else to diminishing it. Instinctively Bakst took issue with the academic rules. The fact that he possessed this divination of the right road to take is what placed him several years ahead of his contemporaries.
For he was quite alone in his passion for this Greek antiquity which at every new turn seemed different from every preconceived notion. His friends of the “Mir Iskousstva” were entirely taken up by their craze for rococo curios or for the majesty of imperial architecture; Diaghileff was looking for Russian portraits of the eighteenth century and was preparing the famous exposition of the Tauride Palace; Alexander Benois was living at Versailles, fascinated by the sight of regal splendor. The only one who followed his efforts with solicitude was Serov. So that, when Bakst felt the urgent need of testing his intuitions by direct observations, of knowing positively what he had merely guessed at, he succeeded in persuading the great portraitist to join him on his voyage of exploration into archaic Greece--a journey that was one of the outstanding events of his intellectual life.
Our great master has reserved to himself the task of some day telling in detail the thrilling events of this journey. With that devotion to friendship that is characteristic of him he has kept a minute account of the utterances and impressions of Serov’s manly and delicate mind. It will make a splendid volume some day.
Serov had guided Bakst’s first steps. This Greek expedition was Bakst’s return gift. With the help of these antique realities, which served him as striking arguments, he turned the tormented realist, the sensitive psychologist that Serov was, to a study of syntheticized painting expressing itself in broad and severe forms. And so Serov, pupil of Repine the “wanderer”, portraitist of important Moscow merchants and of great Russian intellectuals, brought back from this voyage a memorable “Abduction of Europa”. His days, however, were counted. And once again Bakst had to continue his solitary way unaided.
TERROR ANTIQUUS
Bakst did not go to Greece in order to say his “prayer upon the Acropolis”, to venerate the Attic serenity, “the sublime grace and the sweet grandeur” discovered by Winkelmann and Goethe. He visited hot Argos, and Mycenæ with its tomb of the Atrides which several years before had inspired the poet d’Annunzio with the panting dialogue of his “Dead City”; Mycenæ whose gates called forth in him something like a homesickness for Egypt. He strolled about Crete, among the remnants of the palace of Minos, dreaming about Medea the Sorceress, about the Minotaur conquered by Theseus, about the monsters, the Titans, all those brutal or mystic figures--the Gorgons, the Eurynies--who by their incessant assaults shook the pedestal where the Divine Archer defied them. The fantastic and passionate conception of the stage decorations for the Greek tragedies and ballets which were to earn such applause in Paris had its origin in these meditations of his in the occult presence of Hellas’ clear sky.
But there was something else that made his heart beat fast as he strolled among the cliffs of Crete. That was the wind which blew up from the shore--a wind that was perfumed and that seemed to come from the vast Orient hidden in the fog. Who knows but that in such moments the call of the ancient Asiatic was indistinctly awakened in this Occidental Jew? Certain it is that underneath the chisel and the polishing tool of Greek culture he discovered the lavish, ardent and sensual oriental raw material. And the archaic sculptures, massive, with rigid frontlets, straightway transported him to Egypt. Then, too, his readings--Maspéro and the book by Fustel de Coulanges about the “Antique City” which had captivated him--confirmed his theories. He therefore did not hesitate to take from the Egyptians the ornaments in live colors with which he embellished the costumes for his “Oedipus”.
One cannot help but wonder, when one lets “Cleopatra”, “Helen of Sparta” and “St. Sebastian” pass in review, what would have happened if this extraordinary man had not been born on the banks of the Neva and in the fullness of the nineteenth century! Would he, under the pharaohs, have added new figures to the dancers on the tombs of Sakkarah? Or earlier still, would he, as a Phœnician sailor, in his leisure moments have designed the figures on the prows of the triremes of Hamilcar? He would well have fitted into the brilliant, arid, implacable atmosphere which forms the setting for Flaubert’s “Salambô”. But enough of these digressions.
What he had observed and meditated upon during these feverish weeks he intended to mass together in one single work, a decorative synthesis and at the same time a philosophical symbol: Terror antiquus, ancient terror!
In the foreground of the picture, cut off by the frame at knee-length, a colossal archaic Cypris rises. The hair of the idol is draped about its head in fluted curls; the large eyes with their distended pupils have a magic fixedness; a ferocious grin plays about the corners of the lips. The goddess carries a blue dove in the palm of her hand. Powerfully modeled, she turns her back to the picture, to the fury of the elements, to the panic distress of men. Impassive, implacable she turns away from this world which is tumbling. Behind the statue the eye
beholds a landscape, an archipelago seen from a high elevation, and displayed like a map in relief; cliffs submerged by the rising waves; diminutive humanity seeking refuge under the porticos of the temples and attempting to escape the inevitable; an enormous stroke of lighting rending the air. It is the twilight of the gods, the last judgment of the Greek world, the end of Atlantis.
With its mysterious mixture of congealed grandeur and mad anguish the panel, when it was exhibited (if I am not mistaken) with the Association of Russian Artists, created something of a sensation. People flocked to the lectures of Viatcheslav Ivanov, the poet=philosopher and author of a treaty on Dionysios and the religion of the gods, who explained this Greek Apocalypse.