Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 133 h Diaghilev’s Scheherazade and Russian Orientalism understood it, the Orient as a part of the Russian empire and hence its culture, having furnished the original Oriental story with a strong element of sex and violence, which would normally significantly increase the saleability of pop culture products in mass media nowadays. Among the reasons for the ballet’s triumphal success usually various theories related to the quite prominent ho- mosexual, homoerotic and trans-gender features of the ballet’s protagonists are presented, reflected in the role exchange of the two primas, Nijinsky fluid in his femininity playing the Golden Slave, with bisexually extravagant Ida Ru- binstein, dancing Zobeide, the unfaithful wife of King Shahriyar 5 . Thus, both were creating a fusion and a blurring of gender, or exotica-cum-homoerotica. 6 5 Kirstein L. Nijinsky Dancing. London, 1975, P. 99; Taruskin R. Defining Russia Mu- sically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. P. 165 and 176. 6 As Diaghilev’s version of exotica-cum-erotica idea (Rutherford A. The Triumph of the Veiled Dance: The Influence of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley on Serge Diaghilev’s Creation of the Ballets Russes // Dance Research . 2009. P. 27, 93–107, esp. 102). Cf. the perception of Diaghilev’s ballets by John Duncan Fergusson in his Les Eus (c. 1910, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow), where the sexual component is quite prominent while violence is replaced by overwhelming gaiety. Pl. 4. Advertisement of Crème Shalimar, 1919 © Dubarry et Cie Parfumeurs Pl. 5. George Barbier, Ida Rubinstein and Vaclav Nizhinsky , poster of the ballet Scheherazade, 1913