Diaghilev's Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World - Paperback

by Rupert Christiansen (Author)

A Best Book of the Year at The New Yorker and The Telegraph

"Amusing and assertive . . . [Christiansen's] delight is infectious." --Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

Rupert Christiansen, a renowned dance critic and arts correspondent, presents a sweeping history of the Ballets Russes and of Serge Diaghilev's dream of bringing Russian art and culture to the West.

Serge Diaghilev, the Russian impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, is often said to have invented modern ballet. An art critic and connoisseur, Diaghilev had no training in dance or choreography, but he had a dream of bringing Russian art, music, design, and expression to the West and a mission to drive a cultural and artistic revolution.

Bringing together such legendary talents as Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, this complex and visionary genius created a new form of ballet defined by artistic integrity, creative freedom, and an all-encompassing experience of art, movement, and music. The explosive color combinations, sensual and androgynous choreography, and experimental sounds of the Ballets Russes were called "barbaric" by the Parisian press, but its radical style usurped the entrenched mores of traditional ballet and transformed the European cultural sphere at large.

Diaghilev's Empire, the publication of which marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev's birth, is a daring, impeccably researched reassessment of the phenomenon of the Ballets Russes and the Russian Revolution in twentieth-century art and culture. Rupert Christiansen, a leading dance critic, explores the fiery conflicts, outsize personalities, and extraordinary artistic innovations that make up this enduring story of triumph and disaster.

Author Biography

Rupert Christiansen is the dance critic for The Spectator. He was also the dance critic for The Mail on Sunday from 1995 to 2020 and has written on dance-focused subjects for many publications in the United Kingdom and the United States, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper's & Queen, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Literary Review, Dance Now, and Dance Theatre Journal. He was the opera critic and arts correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1996 to 2020 and is the author of a dozen nonfiction books, including Romantic Affinities and City of Light. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and lives in London.