av Social Distance Gallery

Half animal, half man, this faun in the afternoon is neither man nor animal. While commentators in the West have traditionally interpreted the action onstage as a stirring animal instinct in the faun — a response to the call of Nature — it is interesting that Nijinsky’s countrymen in Russia have seen quite the reverse. For the eminent Soviet ballet historian, Vera Krassovska, it is “the human stirring in the animal.” The faun is at one with nature and this peacefulness is disturbed by the unexplained sensations he feels.In 1914, Serge Volkonsky, the former director of the Maryinsky Theater, noted (as quoted by Miss Krassovska) that Nijinsky’s way of bringing the nymph’s scarf to his face — just before he closed the ballet with the autoerotic thrust over the scarf that caused the scandal at its Paris premiere — was so refined that “only such a great artist could show you not the animal in man but the human being awakening in the animal.” To Volkonsky, the unity of the choreographic design, set against Debussy’s lush score, was “a human necklace on a string of rhythm.”.