Serge Lifar as a Dance Historian and the Myth of Russian Dance in Zarubezhnaia Rossiia (Russia Abroad) 1930–1940

Abstract

Serge Lifar built his career during the 1930s, a decade crucial to understanding his ‘années noires’ – or ‘black years’, as the French historian Henry Rousso called the period of the German occupation of Paris (1940–1944). Lifar's powerful and respected position at the Paris Opéra, the social connections he had built and maintained and the psychological impact of exile: all these elements help clarify Lifar's accommodating attitude towards the German occupants of his adopted city. 1 During the 1930s Lifar came to be accepted in French intellectual society as the ‘heir’ of Serge Diaghilev. Through his publications he made a powerful contribution to the process by which Diaghilev's Ballets Russes assumed its paramount position in the development of modern ballet, a process set in motion by the impresario himself. 2 Lifar played this role chiefly in France. In the English-speaking world, where relatively few of his books appeared in translation, other writers served to canonise the Diaghilev endeavour, albeit for somewhat different ends. 3 A list of Lifar's publications in Russian and other languages (French above all) displays the growing influence of his actions and authority, the power of his connections (inherited primarily from Diaghilev), and his relentless will to overcome the problems of emigration as he secured not only success as a dancer and choreographer but also a public reputation as an intellectual. 4 The recent discovery of new evidence has led to the identification of the respected Pushkin authority Modeste Hofmann 5 as the writer whose unacknowledged work enabled Lifar to establish himself as an historian. This evidence, provided by Hofmann's grandsons André and Vladimir Hofmann, raises serious questions about the authority of Lifar's books. An interplay of subjective relationships is woven into the texture of these narratives in which survival and ambition, a paternal attitude and filial respect, exist in constant tension. Neither the making of these books nor the myth of Russian dance which they espouse can be understood without placing their authors in the milieu they shared in Paris as Russian émigrés.