Just prior to Easter this year, the Eifman Ballet from St. Petersburg took to the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for a short Paris season. The company performed Boris Eifman’s Rodin, a dark ballet inspired by the intertwined lives of the sculptors Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel. It is a sensual, often tortured and definitely controversial production — and in its timing recalls an extraordinary cultural confrontation between Russia and France that was played out on the very same stage in 1913.
Just over one hundred years ago, Parisians were in love with Russia — and vice versa. Towards the end of the first decade of the last century, Parisians had become accustomed to la saison russe. The fortnightly magazine Comœdia illustré, founded in 1908, enthusiastically mapped the growing Russian influence in the performing arts in Paris.
A key figure in this story is the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, a man of artistic genius with a remarkable knack for seizing every promotional opportunity. Diaghilev presented his first Paris stage production in 1908,[1] returning the following year with his newly formed Ballets Russes. In the years from 1908 until the outbreak of the Great War, Diaghilev became Russia’s most successful cultural ambassador, and Paris became the conduit through which Russia’s avant-garde prowess in the performing arts was promoted to the wider world.
In June 1910, Comœdia illustré published the first of several issues devoted to the Ballets Russes. Critics burbled over the primitive energy of Diaghilev’s dancers. The impresario’s productions brought a touch of the Wild East to the Paris stage. Everything about the Ballets Russes was an antidote to the restrained conservatism of French theatre and dance.
Paris had established its cosmopolitan credentials with its 1900 Exposition Universelle, a hugely successful World Fair that had positioned France at the hub of international affairs. However, Parisian high culture was more insular. It took time to adapt to the new order, and yet within a decade the provocative barbarians from Russia had stolen the stage.
Diaghilev was a sorcerer and a charmer with a sharp eye for making money. Parisians did not just take in the performances, they flocked to buy the spin-off products. Women wore Ballets Russes perfumes, transforming the scentscape of the grand Parisian boulevards into something altogether more oriental. The salons of Paris were brightened by new fashions that prompted critics to query if the Russian steppes perhaps lay just beyond the suburbs of the French capital. Cossack sabers and Scheherazade-style pantaloons were suddenly all the rage. In fact, French notions of ‘the East’ were replete with geographical ambiguity. When Parisians spoke enthusiastically of les chers barbares russes they blurred the question of exact provenance. St. Petersburg morphed easily into Siberia and the steppes of central Asia.
Comœdia illustré tracked the rise and rise of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The impresario was feted as being simultaneously “a Parisian amid Parisians” and “the most Russian of Russians.” But there were darker undertones to the narrative in the wider Paris media. The illustrated journal Le Monde artiste queried in 1912 whether or not it might be time to give the Paris stage back to Parisians.
For its 1913 season, the Ballets Russes moved to the brand new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, which opened its doors for the first time just after Easter that year. The building was assertively modern, judged by many to be incongruously out of place in the chic 8th arrondissement. It exemplified ideas of symmetry, order and architectural rigor that later came to be recognized as the hallmarks of art deco (a term coined by architect Le Corbusier in 1925).
The showdown came in May 1913, with the world premiere of the Ballets Russes production of Le Sacre du printemps (in Russian Весна священная; in English Rite of Spring). It was Igor Stravinsky’s third project for Diaghilev, after Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). Both ballets had opened in Paris to great critical acclaim.
Stravinsky’s score for Le Sacre du printemps and Nicholas Roerich’s costumes were as provocative as the building in which the work was premiered. Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky played the lead in a feral performance that enraged the audience by going well beyond the bounds of propriety. The music challenged, even from the opening bars. It elicited derisory laughter and, as the evening developed, fights erupted in the theatre.
Vaslav Nijinsky in The Rite of Spring
The critics of Comœdia illustré took everything in their stride, remaining ever loyal to the Ballets Russes. Other commentators were less positive. “Primitivisme!” exclaimed La critique indépendante, leaving some readers a little uncertain as to whether the remark referred to Nijinsky’s on-stage antics or to the behavior of the French audience. Le courrier musical saw the performance as a sign of Russian impudence. Here was a foreign enterprise openly mocking sophisticated Parisian society. Nijinsky’s erotic postures and the dark, fractured music humiliated the audience, many of whom could identify with the comment in Le Figaro about the stammerings of half-savages (critic Henri Quittard called the work “a laborious and puerile barbarity”).
Le Sacre du printemps broke a spell that held Paris in a trance. A generation of Parisian culture vultures adored what they judged to be the naive untutored energy of Russian dancers, Russian music and Russian design. Now they were caught short. The East was turning out to be just a little too barbaric for French tastes.
The waves of debate in the French media rippled through the Ballets Russes. It was not long before Vaslav Nijinsky split with Diaghilev. It was more than just a professional rift. The two men had been lovers, an arrangement that was unequivocally compromised when, less than four months later, Nijinsky married. Diaghilev expelled the Ballet Russes’ most adventurous dancer.
Meanwhile, Parisians were discovering that there was a darker side to the Russian presence in the French capital. Europe was slipping towards war; Russia was edging closer to revolution; cultural affairs were being sidelined by politics. For 30 years Russia’s foreign agentura had operated openly in Paris, tracking political émigrés from Russia. The City of Light was a focal point for political revolutionaries from across the Tsarist Empire. For French cultural commentators, many of whom surely sympathized more with the émigrés than with the tsarist police in Paris, the antics of the agentura were a reminder that, not only had the Parisian stage been compromised by foreigners, but even the streets of the capital did not entirely belong to France.
Today, one hundred years after that momentous premiere of Le Sacre du printemps in Paris, the affirming flame of Russian life in the city on the Seine is less concentrated on Parisian theatres. It flickers in half a dozen Russian churches across the city. It burns brightly in the media, community associations, and a new generation of businesses that tap a rich vein of Franco-Russian collaboration.
Cast your eye over the map of Paris and the toponyms reveal a web of Franco-Russian connections. Russia lives in the very streets of a city where locals ride métro route 7 from Kremlin to Stalingrad and where the grandest bridge over the River Seine is named after a Russian tsar.
The Pont Alexandre III is a dramatic tribute to the Franco-Russian alliance, the diplomatic accord agreed between the French Republic and Tsar Alexander in 1892. As a mark of the new entente, Paris and St. Petersburg agreed to build new bridges over their respective rivers honoring the partner nation. French President Félix Faure received Tsar Nicholas II in Paris in 1896, where the visiting Russian monarch laid the foundation stone for a bridge named after his late father. The following year, Faure visited St. Petersburg as construction started on the French-built Trinity Bridge (Тройцкий Мост) over the Neva. Paris, one might argue, got the better deal. The Russian counterpart to the Pont Alexandre III is an Eiffelesque[2] essay in metalwork, nicely enhanced by flamboyant art nouveau lanterns. But it pales in comparison with the pomp of the bridge over the Seine in the very heart of Paris. The latter gracefully links the Esplanade des Invalides (on the south bank of the Seine) with the ornamental parklands that cluster around the lower end of the stylish Champs-Élysées (to the north of the river).
The dramatic bridge Pont Alexandre III, built in tribute to the Franco-Russia alliance.
In fact, there is no better spot from which to start exploring Russian Paris. On the arches of this extravagant bridge the nymphs of the Seine dance with the nymphs of the Neva, making it a spot where the spirits of France and Russia intertwine.
It is a short walk from the southern end of the Pont Alexandre III through the quiet streets of the 7th arrondissement to the Petrossian delicatessen. With its traditional wood paneling and its shelves full of both French and Russian products, the Petrossian is a reminder that Russia remains an important thread in the fabric of the French capital. The display slips from Perrier-Jouët and half bottles of the finest Sauternes to Beluga, Osetr and Sevruga caviars.
Around the delicatessen’s half-dozen tables, Madame Petrossian is attending to her Saturday afternoon regulars, who may or may not have Russian blood in their veins.
“There was a time when Petrossian was a focal-point for the Russian community in Paris,” says Madame Petrossian. “Nowadays our clientele is very mixed.”
At one table, an elderly French lady, her silver hair perfectly coiffed, attends to a handsome platter of smoked salmon and blini. Nearby, two young women sip wine while they debate whether to try oeufs de truite or classic white tarama.
This café and store on the Boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg is a Paris institution that traces its roots back to the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution. As we have seen, Paris was a city that, in the years prior to the Great War, had opened its arms to Russians.
After the revolution, a veritable flood of Russians (along with migrants from other parts of the newly-founded Soviet Union) moved to Paris, many of them settling in the 15th and 16th arrondissements in the west of the city. Their native Armenia firmly within the Soviet fold, young Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian quickly realized that the French simply did not appreciate caviar and that the more affluent among the new Russian migrants settling in the capital could not live without it. Two generations on, Armen Petrossian and his Breton-born wife Cécile now manage a business that has expanded from a humble store on a Paris side-street into a modest empire: the company’s network of delicatessens and cafés now extends from Dubai to São Paulo and New York.
Petrossian’s Deli, once the focal point for Paris’ Russian community, now serves a more mixed clientele.
For the Russians who came to Paris in the early 1920s, life was not always easy. Armen Petrossian is fond of telling the story of an elderly man named Mikhail who worked in the Petrossian shop on Boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg in the early days.[3] Mikhail was by all accounts just a general store hand — ready to turn his hand to any job that the Petrossian brothers passed his way. One day however, a customer entered the store and, upon spotting Mikhail, bowed to him with great reverence, exclaiming, “My General!”
Mikhail was certainly not the only general from the tsarist army to run for cover in Paris after the revolution. Russians from the most varied backgrounds fled, usually without their wealth, and sought casual employment in Paris. There were, to be sure, many soldiers and officers of the White forces (including many from Baron Wrangell’s White brigades, evacuated in 1920 from the Crimea to Constantinople). But the growing scrutiny of academic, intellectual and artistic life in the Soviet Union brought a steady stream of Russians to Paris with no overt military connections.
The city’s cab trade relied heavily on Russian drivers — among their number was the St. Petersburg born, young Russian Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, who decades later was to cut a dash in London society as the Communist activist Sofka Skipwith. Prince Feodor Alexandrovich Romanov, a nephew of the last tsar, was a taxi driver in Paris at the same time as Princess Sofka. By 1930, the Union of Russian Taxi Drivers in the French capital numbered over a thousand members.
To engage with the mindset of Russian Paris in the twenties, it is important to understand that the Paris Russians differed in many respects from other twentieth-century émigré communities. Most importantly, they did not see themselves as emigrants from Russia. They had merely moved into exile, taking Russia with them.[5] In the back streets of Montparnasse and around the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (in the 8th arrondissement), posters proclaimed that “L’U.R.S.S. n’est pas la Russie” (the USSR is not Russia).
Russia was thus being reformulated beyond the borders of the old Tsarist Empire, and the dance of national identity was being choreographed from Paris. The Russian Symbolist writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky captured the mood of the time when he asserted that the diaspora community was mapping the trail from “past Russia” to “future Russia.” In 1927 Merezhkovsky proclaimed: “Our emigration is our way to Russia.”
Thus we see a Parisian recreation of Russia within the boulevard périphérique; those among the exiles who did not play the Russian game were derided. There were some fine literary politics, with Vladislav Khodasevich dismissing Russian writers who switched to writing in French as “renegades.”
Many of the key elements of Russian Paris are still evident in modern streetscapes.[4] The Rue Daru and the intersecting Rue Pierre le Grand, named after Peter the Great, are today not quite so exclusively Russian as once they were. But visitors can still see the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and, at the corner of the two roads, the wood-fronted Café à la Ville de Petrograd. It has lost the luster it surely had in the days when Pablo Picasso and his bride Olga Khokhlova held their wedding reception here after marrying in the cathedral opposite.
That was back in 1918, and in the years that followed Russian regulars at the Petrograd included Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov. After a period of dire decay in recent years, during which the word “catastrophique” featured in most reviews, new proprietors took over the Petrograd this spring with the intention of restoring some dignity to this historic culinary fragment of Russia.
The recreation of Russia in a foreign city was not a task completed overnight. Through the 1920s and 1930s there was an incremental consolidation of the Russian community’s Parisian presence. Russians engaged prominently with the wider life of the city. By the early twenties, an annual Russian writers’ dinner was being held at the Salle Bullier, in the chic Val-de-Grâce quarter of the 5th arrondissement. And Russians pulled the wider Paris community into events where French guests might see into l’âme slave — the Russian soul. A sequence of all-night charity balls at the Salle Bullier, organized to raise funds for émigré writers, attracted many of France’s intellectual elite. The invites for some of these starry nights included prints by the avant-garde Russian painter Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov, which today fetch a handsome price on the auction market.
Yet, for all that interaction with the wider city, the Paris Russians looked to create quintessentially Russian spaces within their new home city. A fine legacy of one such initiative is visible today just north of the Parc de Buttes Chaumont in the 19th arrondissement. On the south side of the Rue Meynadier, the land rises steeply to a little plateau upon which stands a two-storey red brick chapel. From Rue Meynadier, the building looks like an unpretentious protestant church, and thus it was until shortly after the Great War. It was a Paris base for German Lutherans. Then it was purchased by the Russian community. Approach it nowadays from the Rue de Crimée to see the elaborate wooden facade in the Russian vernacular style that was added after the building found new life as an outpost of Orthodox faith in the suburbs of Paris.
Locals in this area of Paris, more noted today for its Jewish community than for its Russian connections, still refer to the hill with its Orthodox church as the Colline Saint-Serge. And this temple on its little mount might justly claim to be the home of Paris’ Orthodox soul. The buildings around the church house the Saint Serge Theological Institute, founded by Russian émigrés in 1925 to promote Orthodox education. From the outset, it was truly a piece of Russia Abroad. Lectures presented in the early days at the Institute were refined into some of the defining texts of émigré Russians in Paris. These include Georgii Fedotov’s Saints of Ancient Russia and Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea. The Institute’s library, tucked away behind the church, is a haven of calm in the heart of the city.[6] Some of Paris’ Russian heritage is far less conspicuous than the Colline Saint-Serge. The Church of Saint-Séraphin-de-Sarov is so discreet as to make it almost impossible to find. Tucked away behind 91 Rue Lecourbe, this extraordinary little wooden church with a distinctive blue dome was built in 1933 to serve the growing Russian population of the 15th arrondissement.
Away to the southwest, within the same arrondissement on the Passage de Dantzig, is an equally hidden but more secular piece of Russian Paris. La Ruche is tucked away in a garden off a back street. The name means “the Beehive,” and it is well suited to a building that was for years an energetic hive of artistic activity. La Ruche started life as a wine pavilion designed by Gustave Eiffel for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. After the exhibition closed, French sculptor and artist Alfred Boucher purchased the building for a pittance and reassembled it as the hub of his developing colony for artists. Marc Chagall had his studio here, by all accounts working so diligently as to sometimes annoy the more bohemian residents of La Ruche. Today, it is a beautiful spot, set in quiet gardens. Cats lie in the summer sun. One rusting sign recalls the pleasures of absinthe while another warns of the dangers of a chien lunatique. Russian-style net curtains decorate one window and an elderly woman pushes back Ligurian-green shutters to catch the warmth of the Paris sun. Here, in this distant corner of Paris, it is very easy to rub shoulders with the spirits of Marc Chagall, Marie Vorobieff (better known perhaps as Marevna), Ossip Zadkine and other artists who lived, loved, worked and played at La Ruche.
At La Ruche we are on the edge of the old city, almost on the boulevard périphérique. Yet we must go further to catch the greatest concentration of Russian ghosts in the Île-de-France. About 25 miles south of the city is the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. With its white birches and restrained Orthodox style, this is a place of rare and delicate beauty — at its best on a snowy winter day when the soul of Russia nudges west across Europe. This cemetery is a place to reflect on the émigré spirit. It has the graves of Russian poets, princesses and philosophers. And there are dancers aplenty, among them the earthly remains of Rudolf Nureyev, who turned his back on his native Russia and defected when the Kirov Ballet visited Paris in 1961. His grave is draped with an exquisite mosaic in the style of a prayer rug. It is a good spot to reflect how the Russian soul has over the generations reconfigured itself to fit the contours of the City of Light. RL
Linking Paris and Moscow
As so often in Europe, it is a single train that most tangibly catches the link between distant spots on the continent. As noted in an earlier issue of Russian Life (July/Aug 2011), the restored rail service between Moscow and Nice symbolizes the renaissance of Russian life on the French Riviera. And this Russian Railways (RZD) train has a parallel in the new premium train linking Paris with Moscow.
There is a touch of the East about the Gare de L’Est in Paris. It is the station from which, starting in 1883, the Orient Express departed with a colorful mix of passengers bound for the Balkans. It remains today the most exotic of the Paris railroad termini, with triumphal arches and a beautiful fanlight window at the south end of the booking hall. On display in that hall is Alfred Herter’s monumental painting of a train crowded with soldiers leaving in 1914 for the Eastern Front. In the peak of a morning commuter rush, with summer sunshine illuminating the concourse, Paris’ most interesting train pulls out of the Gare de L’Est: the 8.28 to Moscow. Of course it has a name: the Trans-European Express.
Launched in December 2011 as a thrice-weekly service, RZD’s Paris to Moscow train has been a success. This summer it is running five times each week. Transit time between the two capitals is about 38 hours. The train takes sleeping car passengers only and has an on-board restaurant. One-way fares from Paris to Moscow start at about €340. For those who like their creature comforts, the train also conveys luxury carriages, where first-class passengers enjoy double beds, en-suite facilities, TV and a lounge bar. One may book through most travel agents linked to the RZD reservation system. Reliable agents to approach are Rail Europe (raileurope.com) and Railbookers (railbookers.com).
1. Diaghilev is remembered first and foremost as a ballet impresario, but he had a wider interest in the arts. He sponsored an exhibition of Russian art in Paris in 1906 and concerts of Russian music in 1907. His stage debut in Paris was the 1908 production of Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov.
2. Gustave Eiffel won the initial design competition for the Trinity Bridge in St. Petersburg, but the bridge as eventually built reflects many other influences, particularly from the French engineering company Société de Construction des Batignolles, which built the bridge.
3. This anecdote is recounted in the essay “Courier of the Czar” in the compendium Portraits of Hope: Armenians in the Contemporary World (Berghahn Books, 2007).
4. The new guidebook Only in Paris by Duncan JD Smith (Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2013) gives good hints on where to track down Russian heritage in the French capital.
5. The manner in which migrants ‘took Russia with them’ is a leitmotif of Russian literature. The writer and White exile Roman Gul, writing his memoirs late in life in New York City, called the book Я унёс Россию (I Took Russia With Me). It recalls the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who wryly remarked that, when he left Russia, he brought the motherland with him in a suitcase, a metaphor that holds up well in Sergei Dovlatov’s brilliant memoir of emigration, Чемодан (The Suitcase).
6. The library of the Institut de théologie orthodoxe Saint-Serge houses a fine collection of works on Orthodox spirituality and the Russian community in Paris. The majority of the texts are in Russian or French. It is open to the public most weekdays from 2-5 pm. Find out more about the Institute at www.saint-serge.net.
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