Ballet in America was on the horns of a dilemma. And so was I.
[8.] Revolution and Counter-revolution: Leonide Massine and the New Ballet Russe De Monte Carlo
IN order that the reader may have a sense of continuity, I feel he should be supplied with a bit of the background and a brief fill-in on what had been happening meanwhile at Monte Carlo.
I have pointed out that de Basil’s preoccupation with London and America had soon left his collaborator, René Blum, without a ballet company with which to fulfil his contractual obligations to the Principality of Monaco. The break between the two came in 1936, when Blum formed a new company that he called simply Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
Blum had the great wisdom and fine taste to engage Michel Fokine as choreographer. A company, substantial in size, had been engaged, the leading personnel numbering among its principals some fine dancers known to American audiences. Nana Gollner, the American ballerina, was one of the leading figures. Others included Vera Nemtchinova, Natalie Krassovska, Anatole Ouboukhoff, Anatole Vilzak, Jean Yasvinsky, André Eglevsky, and Michel Panaieff. A repertoire, sparked by Fokine creations, was in the making.
Back in America, the prime mover in the financial organization of the new Massine company was Sergei I. Denham. It is hardly necessary to add that Denham and de Basil had little in common or that they were, in fact, arch-enemies.
Denham had no more previous knowledge of or association with ballet than de Basil; actually much less. I have been unable to discover the real source of Denham’s interest in ballet. Born Sergei Ivanovich Dokouchaieff, in Russia, the son of a merchant, he had escaped the Revolution by way of China. His career in the United States, before ballet in the persons of Leonide Massine and Julius Fleischmann swam into his ken, had been of a mercantile nature, in one business venture or another, including a stint as an automobile salesman, and another as a sort of bank manager, none of them connected with the arts, but all of them bringing him into fringe relations with the substantially solvent.
No sooner did he find himself in the atmosphere of ballet than he, too, became infected with Diaghileffitis, a disease that, apparently, attacks them all, sooner or later.
It is one of the strange phenomena of ballet I have never been able to understand. Why is it, I ask myself, that a former merchant, an ex-policeman, or an heir to carpet factory fortunes, for some reason all gravitate to ballet, to create and perpetuate “hobby” businesses? I have not yet discovered the answer. As in the case of Denham, so with the others. Lacking knowledge or trained taste, people like these no sooner find themselves in ballet than down they come with the Diaghileffitis attack.