What Disappears: Researching the world of the Ballets Russes
By Barbara Quick
What Disappears, my new novel set in the world of the Ballets Russes (Regal House), had a decades-long gestation. When I started it, the story was about my maternal great-grandmother and her family, Russian Jews in Kishinev in the time of the tsars. Dance had nothing to do with that first draft, which I called The Russian Winter. I went on to write another completely unrelated novel — and then another and another, all the while growing older and taking dance classes — although mostly not ballet — whenever I could.
An acquaintance in the academic world invited me to look at her library of first-edition books about the Ballets Russes, gorgeous books with heavy vellum pages and lavish full-colour illustrations by the greatest painters and designers of the Belle Époque. Over the years that followed, the seed of a story connected to The Russian Winter began to germinate inside me. At least one of my main characters would be a ballerina who danced with the Ballets Russes. Not a famous ballerina or even a regular member of the company. She would be someone on the fringes — someone whose career would be mostly aspirational. An outsider — maybe, as many of the best social observers turn out to be, an exile.
I needed to build a bridge between my Jewish family of tailors in Kishinev and that stellar collection of artists, designers, dancers, writers, choreographers, and composers brought together by legendary impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
As with each of my novels set in a remote time and place, I got my hands on every relevant book I could find, as well as every archive that could be mined for insights into what things were really like for the people who were alive then. Besides recreating the historical figures who would dance through my novel, I needed to create living, breathing fictional characters from scratch.
Fiction writers get to play God. All the characters, fictional and historical, would need to interact in convincing ways, and their dialogue would need to ring true.
Fortunately, memoirists of the time wrote compendiously about their day-to-day lives and adventures. They described the era’s famous parties, both those they attended and those they hosted, in glorious detail. I could appropriate bits and pieces of the conversations they themselves recorded. When it came to breathing life into them again, I could rely on the lessons they gave me in how they spoke and how they thought about themselves and the world around them.
In one of my hunting trips on the Internet, I scored an age-spotted, slightly smelly copy of Tamara Karsavina’s charming memoir, Theatre Street. Published in 1930 in London — written in English by the linguistically gifted Russian ballerina herself — the memoir is a treasure trove. (An added bonus: the book’s delightful preface was written by one of Karsavina’s ardent admirers, none other than J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.) Thus I was able to have the endearing ballerina boast in my novel, as she had in real life, that the fetching pigskin purse she bought in London was “made of real pork”!
The era’s premier fashion designer, Paul Poiret, was another goldmine, shedding light on le tout Paris in his exuberant 1931 autobiography, King of Fashion. He holds back nothing when describing his world-famous soirees, which served the double purpose of marketing and advertising the must-have items of fashion and home decor created by Maison Poiret.
Did he exaggerate at times in his memoir, out of simple exuberance or, more likely, in his desire to preserve his fame in the most flattering light for posterity? No doubt. But I could read between the lines. In an early draft of the novel, I’d made up a fashion designer who was so devoted to an aesthetic view of the world that he used the women who loved him, and whom he loved in return, without any regard for their feelings. After I discovered Poiret, I ditched my made-up character and allowed the historical figure to wreak havoc in my characters’ lives.
I read histories of the Jews in Russia, histories of the working class in France, and about the run-up, in both countries, to the First World War. I made a study of early feminism, public education, family structure, and the scant opportunities available in both these countries for women and girls.
I read biographies of the era’s historical figures whose lives have been preserved for history — and social histories of the masses whose individual lives have gone unchronicled. These people also needed the breath of life blown back into them, from the baker’s assistant delivering bread in a rowboat during the Great Parisian Flood of 1910, to Anna Pavlova’s superstitious and much-abused maid, to the chain-smoking stagehands at the Théâtre du Châtelet.
Because dance is all about movement — and ephemeral — I needed to do more than read. I also sought out every relevant historical photo and every bit of archival film footage I could find, hoping to come upon visual evidence of what Nijinsky himself is reported to have said when an admirer asked him how he achieved his famous gravity-defying leaps. “It is easy,” he said in his imperfect French. “I simply launch myself into the air — and pause a little bit before I come down.”
I did my research by doing due diligence, immersing myself in the world of ballet. And I also did my research by living my life and letting this novel take form inside me — before writing and rewriting it — until it became What Disappears.
Tags: ballet ballet history Ballets Russes Barbara Quick books on dance dance in fiction international dance news Russian dancers Tamara Karsavina Vaslav Nijinsky