The Ballets Russes and Its World

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Summary: Enough is enough already!!!!!!!!!
Review: Many years ago Dame Ninette de Valois said to Richard Buckle that she thought everything that had been said about Diaghilev had already been said and how right she was.

If ever a lemon was squeezed dry it was Diaghilev's.

Please, everybody, enough is enough about Diaghilev.

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Summary: Lynn Garafola's "The Ballets Russes and Its World"
Review: Thank you to Dr. Garafola and Nancy Baer for their long-awaited, wonderful and beautifully illustrated book on the Ballets Russes. It is an extraordinary contribution to the fields of dance and art history. It will be well-appreciated in classrooms and libraries across America. It is also a useful text as it can be appreciated both by the aficionado of ballet history, as well as by the novice, trying to learn through scene design and costume shapes the myriad interpretations of the twenty-year life of Diaghilev's Russian ballet company. Any return to the modernist era is of use to students of history and performing artists of any generation.

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Summary: It's a lovely coffee table book and that's about it.
Review: The paper is lovely and the photographs, well, I've seen them a hundred times before. It's a lovely coffee table book, anyone can look cultured if they have this is on display.

I agree with other reviewers who think that a/it's enough about Diaghilev, and, b/the articles are almost too esoteric for words, and c/ Diaghilev would, indeed, not like all this intrusive, not to say, mis-conceived, in-depth analysis, of his world.

I also have the feeling that the writers involved couldn't even pronounce Diaghilev's name correctly. Not to mention the profusion of errors of both facts and judgements with which this book is littered.

Better luck next time, and remember, you can't fool all of the people all of the time!

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Summary: Diaghilev died in 1929. It's time to let him rest in peace.
Review: When I read a book I like to think there was a raison d'etre behind it's publication. I can't make the connection with this one. It's time, I think, to let the whole Diaghilev thing go. Sure, it was a time of great creativity in the Arts, and, he was his own fundraiser, and his own master, without the stultifying effects of any official committees to hamper his artistic vision. Such a person could not possibly exist today. If Diaghilev had one fault, it was that he made the Arts, and certainly, ballet, much too popular.

This book reminded me of Nesta MacDonald's "Diaghilev Observed" in as much that the editors/authors are writing about something they are not fully party to and have no real understanding of, and therefore, no real conception of what they are about. Whereas Mrs MacDonald tried to turn Diaghilev into the Conversative Party Member for Kensington [South], Garafola and her colleagues seem to see Diaghilev as a staunch Republican with close affiliations with the Klu Klux Klan.

I'm afraid it's well nigh impossible to try to see Diaghilev as a Politically Correct Figure in the year 2000. He was a complex, paradoxical figure, with all, for better or worse, of the values and all of the prejudices of his time.

It would be too long and too tedious to enumerate the many many misconceptions and faulty logic in this book, but I will point out a few things: Diaghilev did NOT invent the one act ballet, and I nearly fell down when I saw that 'most of the earlier ballets in the Diaghilev repertoire are no longer performed'. HEL-LO? Amazing statement! And completely inaccurate. Isadora Duncan was NOT an influence on anyone, except, briefly, the young Michael Fokine. Isadora Duncan was a joke! Finally: I take it that Garafola and her contributors have never lived in an Occupied Country? Therefore I find this book's attitude to Serge Lifar nothing more than sanctimonious cant. No-one has the right to judge whether he did right or wrong if they have not lived under such conditions.

I often get the feeling that Diaghilev would loath all this rubbish that is churned out about him from people who really don't have a clue as to what he was about, and he'd probably loathe all these marauding authors and editors even more!