René Blum, an intellectual French gentleman of deep culture and fine taste, took over the unexpired Diaghileff Monte Carlo contract. Blum was at hand for, at the time of Diaghileff’s death, he was at the head of the dramatic theatre at Monte Carlo. In fulfilment of the Diaghileff contract, for a time Blum booked such itinerant ballet groups as he could. Then, in 1931, he organized his own Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. George Balanchine, who had staged some of the last of the Diaghileff works, became the first choreographer for the new company. For the Monte Carlo repertoire, he created three works. To it, from Paris, he brought two of the soon-to-become-famous “baby ballerinas,” Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova, both from the classroom of Olga Preobrajenska.
Early in 1932, René Blum joined forces with one of the most curious personalities that modern ballet has turned up, in the person of a gentleman who wished to be known as Col. W. de Basil.
De Basil had had a ballet company of sorts for some time. I first ran into him in Paris, shortly after Diaghileff’s death, where he had allied himself with Prince Zeretelli’s Russian Opera Company; and again in London, where the Lionel Powell management, in association with the Imperial League of Opera, had given them a season of combined opera and ballet at the old Lyceum Theatre. With ballets by Boris Romanoff and Bronislava Nijinska, de Basil had toured his little troupe around Europe in buses, living from hand to mouth; had turned up for a season at Monte Carlo, at René Blum’s invitation. That did it. De Basil worked out a deal with Blum, whereby de Basil became a joint managing director of the combined companies, now under the title of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. A season was given in the summer of 1932, in Paris, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
It was there I first saw the new company. It was then I took the plunge. I negotiated. I signed them for a visit to the American continent. A book could be devoted to these negotiations alone. It would not be believable; it would fail to pass every test of credibility ever devised.
I feel that this is the point at which to digress for a moment, in order to sketch in a line drawing of de Basil, with some of the shadows and some of the substance. Unless I do, no reader will be able to understand why I once contemplated a book to be called To Hell With Ballet!
To begin with, de Basil was a Cossack and a Caucasian. Neither term carries with it any connotation of gentleness or sensitivity. De Basil was one of the last persons in the world you would expect to find at the head of an organization devoted to the development of the gentle, lyric art of the ballet. Two more dissimilar partners in an artistic venture than de Basil and Blum could not be found.
René Blum, the gentle, cultured intellectual, was a genuine artist: amiable, courteous, and fully deserving of the often misused phrase—a man of the world. His alliance with de Basil was foredoomed to failure; for one of René Blum’s outstanding characteristics was a passion to avoid arguments, discussions, scandals, troubles of any sort. Blum commanded the highest respect from his artists and associates; but they never feared him. To them he was the kind, understanding friend to whom they might run with their troubles and problems. Blum’s sensitivity was such that he would run from de Basil as one would try to escape a plague. René Blum, you would say, was, perhaps, the ivory-tower dilettante. You would be wrong. René Blum gave the lie to this during the war by revealing himself a man of heroic stature. On the occupation of France, he was in grave danger, since he was a Jew, and the brother of Léon Blum, the Socialist leader, great French patriot and one-time Premier. René, however, was safely and securely out of the country. But he, too, was a passionate lover of France. France, he felt, needed him. Tossing aside his own safety, he returned to his beloved country, to share its fate. His son, who was the apple of his father’s eye, joined the Maquis; was killed fighting the Nazis. René Blum was the victim of Nazi persecution.
Let us look for a moment at the background of Blum’s ballet collaborator. The “Colonel” was born Vassily Grigorievitch Voskresensky. In his native milieu he had some sort of police-military career. Although he insisted on the title “Colonel,” he certainly never attained that rank in the Tsar’s army. He was a lieutenant in the Gendarmes. After the revolution, in 1918, he turned up as a captain with Bicherakoff’s Cossacks. Later on he turned naval and operated in the Black Sea.
There is an interval in de Basil’s life that has never been entirely filled in with complete accuracy: the period immediately following his flight and escape from Russia. The most credible of the legends surrounding this period is that he sold motor-cars in Italy. Eventually, he turned up in Paris, where my trail picked him up at a concert agency called Zerbaseff, which concerned itself with finding jobs for refugee artists. It was then he called himself de Basil.
At the time I met him, he had a Caucasian partner, the Prince Zeretelli whom I have mentioned, and who was a one-time manager of the People’s Theatre, in St. Petersburg. It was this partnership that brought forth the Ballet and Opéra Russe de Paris, which gave seasons at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, in Paris, and, as I have mentioned, at the Lyceum Theatre, in London.