MOSCOW. (Anatoly Korolyov, member of the Russian Pen Club for RIA-Novosti) - In 2009, Europe and Russia celebrate 100 years of the Diaghilev Seasons in Paris, named after the brilliant Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The echo of the bygone event still rocks the world of global culture, and here's why.

One hundred years ago, the tacit capital of culture was Paris. It set trends in painting, music, ballet and stage design. Paris was the center of the world and all the young geniuses of the world strove to move there to learn their craft. Bringing an unknown Russian ballet there in 1909 was a great risk. Nevertheless, Diaghilev decided to do it. What is more, not did he plan to overwhelm, captivate and conquer the capricious global cultural elite, he envisioned knocking Paris off its pedestal.

The only theater he managed to get in 1909 was Theatre du Chatelet.

This was a cramped, uncomfortable theater that was not amenable to sensation, and Diaghilev proceeded to renovate it. He ordered the theater's old floor to be replaced; he enlarged the stage and changed the audience space. Diaghilev turned the worn down and provincial Chatelet into a newly fashionable Paris theater.

In addition, Diaghilev took to taking his ballet company to Larue restaurant for dinner, together with all of the Paris journalists, who soon filled the newspapers with reports of the Chatelet renovation and interviews with Diaghilev. Having given countless interviews, Diaghilev orchestrated Paris's anticipation to a fever pitch and gouged sky-high prices for the boxes, while keeping the balconies and galleries cheap.

Diaghilev's charm was so great that he was befriended by the entire Paris elite of the time, headed up by the kings of esthetic trends, Jean Cocteau and Jacques-Emile Blanche.

But one thing was to orchestrate great PR, and quite another to prove one's claim to fame.

In the first fateful day of the tour, Diaghilev showed Paris and the world a never-before-seen spectacle - the ballets "Le Pavillon d'Armide," "Prince Igor" (with scenes of Polovets dances) and the ballet suite "The Feast." On stage at the Chatelet, Tamara Karsavina, Alexandra Baldina, Vera Caralli, Sofia Fyodorova and the genius who overwhelmed everyone, Vaslav Nijinsky, danced with Asian splendor and icy perfection.

The following evening was devoted to opera, with the great Feodor Chaliapin singing, and then ballet again - the premiere of "Les Sylphides" with Anna Pavlova and "Cleopatra" with the phenomenal Ida Rubinstein, carried by slaves dressed in topaz and emeralds out to the podium, sprinkling rose petals onto a vast blue carpet.

The words "success" and "triumph" could not even begin to describe the excitement that gripped the French public, press and elite 100 years ago. The power and beauty of the Russian ballets was in stark contrast to the miniature world of Parisian marionettes of the time. The French ballet of the time was a tedious flurry of pale rags and scenery made out of painted cardboard. Painted cardboard dolls in wigs jumped around this grayness, imitating the esthetics of Versailles from 200 years ago.

It had no blood, no passion, just wall-to-wall powder and chalk.

And suddenly there was celestial scenery, the costumes designed by Alexandre Benois, the baroque bacchanalia of Leon Bakst, the monumentalism of Nicholas Roerich, the refinement of Alexandre Golovine and, of course, the music by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glazunov and Mussorgsky.

The critics, enraptured by the Russians, admitted with some embarrassment that French ballet, as it turned out, had become hopelessly out of date: "We don't know how to dance," "That's a nice kettle of fish," "Our theater is ridiculous," "There now - we're in decline."

Conclusions were made about the decline of Europe from the triumph of the artists from St Petersburg.

Here, for example, is what critic Abel Bonnard wrote at the time: We no longer know what dance is. We are no longer savage enough for that. We are too cultured, too civilized, too threadbare. We have lost the habit of expressing our feelings with our entire body. We barely let them appear on our faces and shine through in our words...

Everything Russian - from dances to feather hats - became fashionable. Fashion-conscious women on the Champs Elysees dressed like Ida Rubinstein and fashion-conscious men wore monocles like the maestro Diaghilev. The prices of sapphires spiked when it became known that Nijinsky collected them.

In short, the epicenter of European culture moved to St Petersburg in 1909, and the wave of Russian Art Nouveau created a constellation of names and phenomenal manifestations in music, painting, ballet, poetry and literature. The Revolution of 1917 intensified the supremacy of the Soviet radicals, and it was in Russia that Constructivism, Abstractionism and Suprematism were born and it was Russians who shared the glory of founding Futurism with the Italians.

And only the reincarnation of a free country into a Stalinist dictatorship stopped this wave of flowering and Russia became the world's cultural wasteland for many years. And after all, Paris has long since been superseded by New York.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.