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The Ballets Russes was meant to be a synthesis of all the arts, and it has often been described as a Russian brand of Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, in which music, art and drama are united. But in fact that synthesis had less to do with Wagner than with the Russian peasantry. It had its roots in Mamontov's Private Opera which had been founded on the spirit of artistic collaboration at Abramtsevo. The whole purpose of the colony was to bring together all the arts and crafts to unite life and art-through a collective enterprise which its pioneers equated with their own idealized notion of the peasant commune. What

16. Church at Abramtsevo. Designed by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1881-2

the artists at Abramtsevo admired most about peasant culture was the synthetic nature of its arts and crafts. Simple artefacts, like textiles or ceramics, brought artistic beauty into people's daily lives. Collective rituals like the khorovod were total works of art - little 'rites of spring' - combining folk song and ceremonial dance with real events in village life. The colony was an attempt to re-create this 'world of art'. The whole community - artists, craftsmen and peasant builders - became involved in the building of its church. Artists combined with singers and musicians, costume-makers with set-builders, to stage productions of the opera. This was what Diaghilev meant when he said the Ballets Russes was built on the foundations of peasant arts and crafts.

'I am sending you a proposal', Diaghilev wrote to the composer Anatoly Lyadov in 1909.

I need a ballet and a Russian one - the first Russian ballet, since there is no such thing. There is Russian opera, Russian symphony, Russian song, Russian dance, Russian rhythm - but no Russian ballet. And that is precisely what I need - to perform in May of the coming year in the Paris Grand Opera and

in the huge Royal Drury Lane Theatre in London. The ballet needn't be three-tiered. The libretto is ready. Fokine has it. It was dreamed up by us all collectively. It's The Firebird - a ballet in one act and perhaps two scenes.¹²⁶

Diaghilev's enthusiasm for the ballet was not always evident. His professional entree into the art world had been through painting, and his first job in the theatre was a long way from the stage. In 1899 he was employed by Prince Sergei Volkonsky, the grandson of the famous Decembrist, who had just been appointed by the Tsar as Director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. Volkonsky asked Diaghilev to run the theatre's in-house magazine. Eight years later, when Diaghilev took his first stage productions to the West, it was opera, not ballet, that made up his exotic saisons russes. It was only the comparative expense of staging operas that made him look to ballet for a cheap alternative.

The importance of the ballet as a source of artistic innovation in the twentieth century is something that no one would have predicted before its rediscovery by Diaghilev. The ballet had become an ossified art form; in much of Europe it was disregarded as an old-fashioned entertainment of the court. But in Russia it lived on in St Petersburg, where the culture was still dominated by the court. At the Marinsky Theatre, where Stravinsky spent much of his childhood, there were regular Wednesday and Sunday ballet matinees - 'the half-empty auditorium' being made up, in the words of Prince Lieven, of 'a mixture of children accompanied by their mothers or governesses, and old men with binoculars'.¹²⁷ Among serious intellectuals the ballet was considered 'an entertainment for snobs and tired businessmen',¹²⁸ and with the exception of Tchaikovsky, whose reputation suffered as a consequence of his involvement with the form, the composers for the ballet (such as Pugni, Minkus and Drigo) were mostly foreign hacks.* Rimsky-Korsakov, the ultimate authority on musical taste when Stravinsky studied with him in the early 1900s, was famous for his remark that the ballet was 'not really an art form'.¹²⁹

Benois was the real ballet lover in the World of Art group. It appealed

* Cesare Pugni (1802-70), in Russia from 1851; Ludwig Minkus (1826-1907), in Russia from 1850 to 1890; Riccardo Drigo (1846-1930), in Russia from 1879 to