Diaghilev. With Diaghilev

Serge Lifar, the famous dancer, choreographer, and premier of the Paris Opera, who led the ballet troupe "Grand Opera" for many years, and was the closest friend of the legendary founder of the Russian ballet Sergei Diaghilev, wrote two memoirs about him. For the first time, Serge Lifar's book about Diaghilev was published in Paris in 1939 in Russian with a print run of 615 copies, and immediately became a bibliographic rarity. The era of the "World of Art", the first Russian seasons in Paris, which brought worldwide fame to the Russian ballet, and, of course, the truthful and revealing pages of the memoirs about Diaghilev, their personal and creative relationships. . ."In my memoirs, the image of Diaghilev remains alive and, as I dare to think, truthful, but this image was too intimate: it was a sketch of the portrait of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, not S.P. Diaghilev, the great man, the creator of a new artistic culture, the creator of a new aesthetics, the creator of the "World of Art" and the Russian ballet. .I so vividly imagined this, that alone with myself, I blushed deeply and immediately dismissed the possibility of this. No, anything but this — I will never become a "favorite"! But what then to do? I knew that if I continued to meet Diaghilev, I would not be able to roughly and sharply push him away, I would not be able to refuse him in anything, — even if it were my suicide…" .Serge Lifar