The Unknown Diaghilev

This article on modernist ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev by the American scholar Simon Karlinsky appeared in a 1992 issue of the magazine Tema (Theme). It represents the Russian LGBTQ community’s attempt to reconstruct a a cultural and intellectual history shattered by the traumas of revolution, war, and repression. The magazine’s choice of Karlinsky as author, and Diaghilev as subject, reflects the ambient fascination with exponents of LGBTQ identities who had Russian roots, but self-actualized in the West.

Karlinsky was born in the Manchurian city of Harbin to Russian parents who had fled there after the Bolshevik Revolution. His interests in music and literature took Karlinsky from Harbin first to Western Europe, then to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1964 until his death in 2009. His controversial 1976 monograph, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, explored repressed homoerotic desire as a powerful force in Gogol’s oeuvre. He also wrote monographs on the famously sexually fluid Russian poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Zinaida Gippius. For the publishers of Tema, Karlinsky represents the openly gay Russian intellectual who has achieved prominence in the Western academy through scholarship centered on the influence of homosexual, sexually fluid, and/or gender fluid Russian cultural figures.

Karlinsky’s subject, Sergei Diaghilev, is remembered primarily for his work in early twentieth-century ballet. As the artistic director behind the famous “Ballets russes” touring company, Diaghilev exerted enormous influence on twentieth-century dance on both sides of the Atlantic. Diaghilev was openly gay. His romantic relationships with prominent cultural figures — including art and literature critic and publisher Dmitri Filosofov (Diaghilev’s cousin), dancer Vaclav Nizhinsky, and choreographer Leonide Massine —were public knowledge. So formidable was his impact on the world of dance that heterosexual artists like Massine are said to have entered into romantic relationships with him in order to become his protégés.

Karlinsky’s article goes as far as to assert Diaghilev’s homosexual desire was a formative influence on the twentieth-century balletic canon. Diaghilev, who spent much of his life abroad and died in Venice in 1929, twelve years after the Bolshevik Revolution, here becomes an index of a cosmopolitan prerevolutionary émigré milieu where homosexual relationships occurred in plain sight. For Karlinsky, he also represents a productive Russia-West cultural encounter in which an avowedly gay impresario became a cultural ambassador from Russia to the West. It is difficult to assess the precise effect the Tema article would have had on the early-’90s LGBTQ Russian reader. Would they have felt a sense of pride and identity with Diaghilev and Karlinsky? Or, would their reactions have been more complex? For a reader seeking to reconnect with Russia’s suppressed LGBTQ legacy, this account of the life and loves of Diaghilev, who spent most of his career in the West, delivered by Karlinsky, a gay scholar of Russian literature and culture, born in Manchuria and writing from his well-established seat in American academe, may have evoked a compounded sense of displacement.