Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 153 h Diaghilev’s Scheherazade and Russian Orientalism the main characters of the Nights have their visual prototypes among Naser al-Din Shah Qajar’s court, exactly as Bakst depicted members of the Roth- schild family as the characters of the Sleeping Beauty tale 29 . Such a specific detail had a significant ethnographic point: quite a few of the Qajar eunuchs were of African origin. Scheherazade goes home? The return of Scheherazade back to the Persian-speaking world is of special im- portance. Anne Heaton staged it in Teh- ran in 1971 in the Roudaki Hall, right after Rudolf Nurejev and Margot Fon- teyn staged the first Russian Orientalist ballet Le Corsaire there in 1969. It was quite a faithful European reproduction. The arrival of Scheherazade to- gether with Vis & Ramin to Dushanbe happened due to the efforts of Sazman-e Bale-ye Iran (‘Les Ballets Persans’) company. It was founded in Stockholm in 2001 by Iranian dancer and producer Nima Kiann, who left Tehran with his parents during the Iran-Iraq war. In his libretto, he followed the ancient literary trope of emulation ( tazmin ). Although Kiann kept Rimsky-Korsakov’s music and some of Fokine’s choreography, he replaced Diaghilev’s vicious finale with a sweet happy ending with no Shah- razad: it is not Zobeide and the slave who are killed but the kings who perish, while Zobeide is reunited with her beloved in her husband’s opulent palace. each. There were 43 painters of the royal atelier engaged in this huge project commissioned by Naser al-Din Mirza (future Shah), using the Persian text by Molla and ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Ṭasūjī, who prepared it in 1843 specially for this production. It took the whole team seven years to accomplish the project (Golestan Palace Library. Portfolio of Miniature paintings and calligraphy, ed. M.H. Semsar. Tehran, 2000. P. 223). It is most curious that the main characters of the narrative look like the most important Qajar courtiers, including Prince Naser al-Din. 29 Lobanov-Rostovsky N. Collecting Bakst // Designing Dreams: A Celebration of Léon Bakst. Ed. by Célia Bernasconi, John E. Bowlt, Nick Mauss. Milan: Mousse Publilshing and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2016. P. 84–93. Pl. 19. Poster of the ballets Scheh- erazade and Les Sylphides, performed in Tehran, in the Roudaki Hall in January-February 1976