He may have married but wasn't he gay?
>>>I did not pass any nasty comment about the Princes gender<<<
I think you and the readers are smart enough to understand what you did - intentended or unintentended??
Any Author or Milkmaid can bring a rumor to live.
Author - because he wants to sell his book, cause his writing skills are not good enough......
Milkmaid - because she hates her mistress or master
If you quote a "rumor" - you need to identify it as such, and don't just throw it on the wall like spaghetti and see if it sticks!
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Igor Stravinsky & Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries, London, London, New-York, 1959, p. 35-36 :
“Already a celebrity when I first knew him, Nijinsky was to become even more celebrated shortly afterwards becaause of a scandal. Diaghilev had taken charge of his costuming - they were living together - with the result that Nijinsky appeared at the Imperial Theatre in the tightest tights anyone had ever seen (in fact, an athletic support padded with handkerchiefs), and little else. The Tsar’s mother had attended a performance and was shocked. Diaghilev and Prince Wolkonsky, the director of the Theatre and a man of similar sensibilities, were thought to have conspired against public decency. The Tsar himself was shocked. He alluded to the matter in conversation with Diaghilev, but was so curtly answered that Diaghilev was never thereafter in official good odour. I discovered this for myself when Diaghilev asked me to approach Ambassador Izvolsky in an attempt to secure a passport for a dancer of conscription age. When Izvolsky understood my request to be on Diaghilev’s behalf, he became quite coldly diplomatic. (But I was often Diaghilev’s ambassador in later years, especially his “financial” ambassador - or, as he called me, his tax-collector.) To return to the Imperial Theatre scandal, the truth is that the exhibitionist was not Nijinsky but Diaghilev. Nijinsky was always very serious and high-minded and, in my judgement, never conscious of his performances from Diaghilev’s point of view. I was even more certain of this later, in Paris, when he danced the Afternoon of a Faun. This ballet’s famous representation of the act of love was Diaghilev’s idea. Even so, Nijinsky’s performance was such marvellously concentrated art that only a fool could have been shocked by it - but then, I adored the ballet myself.”
Of course Stravinsky says many things ... that are sometimes true and sometimes not…
Prince Serguei Volkonsky was NOT the director of the Imperial Theatre at this time (1910), he had been ten years earlier, in 1900. A GREAT friend INDEED of Diaghilev then, their collaboration at the Imperial Theatre had led to an hysterical dispute, and to the abrupt dismissal of Diaghilev. They got reconciled in Rome in April 1911.
