A memory of Le Spectre de la Rose with Nijinsky and Karsavina

As I have already said, my sister, four years my senior, was with me.  She had come to the capital partly to see me, partly to visit family friends, who were entertaining her with all the lavishness of Russians of position in the Imperial régime.  It was through one of these friends that the tickets for the special performance of Le Spectre de la Rose came -- and we were asked if we would care to go to it.  My sister's hostess and her husband apparently did not wish to see Fokine's work -- they said something about not liking new-fangled things, which I did not understand.

Of course we accepted joyously.  It was the accepted thing that if one was in Petersburg one missed no possible opportunity of seeing the ballet -- especially when one normally lived, as my sister and I did, in an inaccessible province in the far south.  I could not understand why anyone should decline to go; it was like refusing cream cakes or those delicious sugar candies that were sold in the wonderful shops on the Nevsky Prospekt.  That was the childish thought that sprang to my mind, and I remember it with astonishing clarity.  It is an indication of my boyish normality and of my utter immaturity.

The performance was given in a small semi-private theatre, which a rich landowner had built for his own amusement, and began with some divertissement that I cannot recall, beyond that it was of the type I had seen even at my age, a hundred times before.  And then at last came Le Spectre de la Rose.  The small orchestra played the opening bars of Weber's Invitation to the Waltz, a piece that was unknown to me though it was famous all over Europe.  The curtains slid back.

As though drawn by some magnetic force, I leant forward and glued my eyes to the stage.  Bakst's décor fascinated me.  The tall window with its lace curtains tied back with ribbons, the canary in its cage, the furniture that was like nothing I had ever seen before and looked as though it had come from some other, remote world -- all this was a miracle, and I experienced an odd feeling of fear that the curtains might close and I should never see it again.

But fear vanished, even the décor grew dim, when Karsavina appeared, the rose in her hand.  It was impossible to believe that she was flesh-and-blood.  She was a feather, and the stage was there not to support her but to limit her movement so that the audience could see her.  I do not pretend that I knew what she was trying to express -- or, rather, was expressing with the utmost conviction to older and more formed minds; I knew nothing at my age of the poignancy of a young girl returning from a ball bewildered by her first encounter with love and gallantry, of which the rose she carried was a souvenir.  That did not matter.  Karsavina danced as I had seen no one dance before.  I was enthralled, absorbed, barely aware of myself any longer.

She sank into the chair and fell asleep.  My trance was momentarily over and I wanted to cry out and tell her that she must never, never stop dancing . . . but already I was too well schooled in the discipline of the ballet.  I waited, expectant, eager.

For what seemed to me eternity, the stage was occupied by none but the sleeping Karsavina.  Then, magically, Nijinsky was there.  He had entered by that famous leap which caused so much controversy and was opposed by some on the grounds of "athleticism in the ballet" so that, for a time, the superbness of Karsavina and the glory of the ballet as a whole were forgotten, and people went to see Le Spectre de la Rose for the leap alone.

I could add nothing to that discussion if I wished to stir again the old embers, which I do not.  No doubt, as a boy, I should have remembered that before all else.  But I was barely conscious of it.  All I knew was that Nijinsky was on the stage, wafted there by some magical aid that had nothing to do with everyday human muscles.  Nijinsky danced, as lightly as Karsavina, yet differently.  This time, perhaps because of his costume of rose petals, I had no difficulty in following the book.  He was the rose itself come to life and dancing just like fallen rose petals dance when the soft summer breeze lifts them into the air.

Before I had been entranced.  Now I was bewitched.  My whole world was that small stage on which spirits moved.  Karsavina awoke and joined the spirit of the Rose.  The pain of my delight was almost unbearable.  And at last Nijinsky left.  Out of a memory more than forty years' old, a memory based on a child's experience, I defy all the books and all the critics.  He did not leap.  He was wafted out of that open window by a zephyr.  Since that time, in Italy, in France, in English gardens, in a hundred places where roses grow, I have seen petals caught by a small eddy of wind and gently borne aloft out of sight; and never have I failed to think of Nijinsky and the Spirit of the Rose.  If others assert that Nijinsky leapt, then for them, to their eyes, he did; but for me, the middle-aged man who looks back on it through the eyes of a small boy, Nijinsky was puffed away by the slightest, most caressing of winds.

Charm of Ballet by George Borodin [George Sava]. 1955.  Pages 30-2.