role of the writers in the Ballets Russes

In histories of European Modernism, it is almost axiomatic that the first performance of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris in 1910 was an aesthetic watershed, culminating earlier experiments by Symbolists and Cubists and forecasting later Modernists' radical syntheses of French arts and literature. Yet the role of French writers in the productions of the Ballets Russes has been neglected by literary critics and historians. Nijinski's choreography of L'Apres-midi d'un Faune stands as the theatrical culmination of Mallarme's poetic. The ballets Sheherazade and The Rite of Spring find a counterpart in the literary work of their admirer Proust, and Cocteau's achievement with the Ballets Russes in Parade serves as apprenticeship for his own later literary work while pointing the way to Surrealism and other avant-garde movements in France.