On the Rite of Spring
Originally composed 24 January 2026. To read on Substack, click here.
I’ve spent the week watching and reading about the Russian-by-way-of-Paris ballet The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky and scored by Stravinsky, which I first watched in college and had come back up in conversation recently for whatever reason.
Having been on an unhealthy modernism kick over the past year, I half expected—as might be the case for many of us when revisiting The Waste Land or The Persistence of Memory—that my deep dive would simply bring me closer to a work of art that I faintly remember enjoying and just didn’t have the background knowledge to appreciate the first time. That’s not really what happened. Dismayed as I am to report, my multiple rewatches have provided much less interpretive clarity than I’d have liked.
Still: the Rite, viscerally disturbing—and, in many ways, inaccessible—as it is, refuses to shake my attention.
On a purely aesthetic level, my eyes and ears are hopelessly captured from the very beginning of the ballet even if they don’t really comprehend a lot of the technical choices at the level they wish they did. Some of this has to do with the diseased-sounding music and primitivistic choreography, much of which still feels subversive to a contemporary viewer. That all said, the shallow philistinism I embrace these days basically precludes me from fixating like that on a dance piece’s formalistic innovation, let alone have an interesting thought about it. And considering how iconoclastic Stravinsky is as a musical figure today, that the score is still beloved by conductors everywhere, I went into my first viewing expecting the music to be nothing if not impressive.
What I really keep catching my feet on, I think, is the human sacrifice at the end. That it should provoke more contempt inside of me, but doesn’t.
A lot of my favorite writing and music is tendentious on some level. This is a right all artists have and should exercise freely. The fact that the Rite’s 1913 premiere incited a violent riot made up entirely of incensed Parisians automatically makes me like it more. But each viewing makes me feel like I’m exposing myself to something dark and reactionary, for which the Eliots and Pounds of the world have done very little to warm me up.
This final scene of the ballet which I’m talking about depicts the sacrificial murder, by a prehistoric Slavic village, of a young virgin to some unseen pagan deity in order to end a harsh winter. A central Russian spring, I’m told, lasts about thirty minutes and feels like the earth splitting open right under you. And considering what we know about the Russian winter, this effortless victor against the likes of Hitler and Napoleon, one can imagine that the sense of relief carried in by spring’s coming is hard to overstate.
In the ballet, we’re unambiguously made to understand that this role of the sacrifice is a heroic one, the ballerina being assigned an incredibly demanding solo which goes on for almost five minutes as she dances herself to death, so to speak. This bride of renewal is worshipped and revered. But she’s not mourned. And it’s understood, even by the inner logic of this little village, that she’s not really killed to bring about spring. She’s killed to preserve a cultural tradition.
In that vein, what disturbs me is not the act of killing an innocent, but that the the village feels no need for apologetics—nor does the ballet itself. The argument put forth is not a piece of moral commentary or satire, but a nihilistic unmasking. We all know that this is just how things are—can we all just drop the act? It’s a paradigm I admittedly hate—one that implies there’s inherent virtue in the concerted acceptance of structural brutality, reeking of the smugness I tend to associate with the sort of person who thinks cynicism is what makes an adult.
Most accounts of the famous riot at the premiere cite its central grievance as a general disgust with the risky artistic choices made by the Ballets Russes’ ringleaders. But that falls fairly flat if one knows anything about the company and its reputation in the dance world at the time: the work in question was preceded by the lewd and flirty L’Après-midi d’un faune and the utterly confounding Les Jeux (Diaghilev wanted the latter to be about a gay threesome, Nijinsky wanted to depict a plane crash, and I suppose half an hour of a boy and two girls chasing a lost tennis ball was their way of meeting in the middle). Both pieces were lauded and criticized alike for their choreographic risks and their novel demands of the orchestra, but ultimately did not incite the sort of rage that the Rite would forever be associated with in the historical record.
A more contemporary take—one that also helps start to explain why I can’t stop thinking about the damn thing a hundred and thirteen years later—would weigh more heavily the fact that this premiere occurred on the precipice of the First World War. Consider how incendiary it must have been, as Europe was teeing up to embark on its most lethal boondoggle yet, to be told that collective prosperity is necessarily built on the backs and bones of society’s young and vulnerable—and perhaps, by extension, that those who send them to their deaths can embrace this truth as a natural part of the Way Things Work. In his book Rites of Spring (truly my bible as I write this), Modris Eksteins comments that the Rite is “perhaps the emblematic oeuvre of a twentieth-century world that, in its pursuit of life, has killed off millions of its best human beings. The unknown soldier…is Stravinsky’s victim.”
It might be unfair, though, to cite the lack of condemnation (it really is difficult to overstate how celebratory this framing of the sacrifice is) as some sort of endorsement by the ballet of what it seems to be pointing out: that at the core of all social order is structural violence. And saying that Stravinsky and Company approved of this phenomenon feels to me like it’s far from a given, especially considering his score was originally titled “The Victim.” But then the question is a little different: can someone be widely understood as an innocent victim and also be murdered by her village for the greater good?
Consider Rene Girard’s formulation of the scapegoat mechanism: that society’s deep internal conflicts are best resolved by the collective redirection of animosities toward some external, vilified, othered representative of society’s evils. Then, by exacting violence and destruction upon the representative, you cleanse your world of the malfeasance they symbolize and you bring about the harmony that was so deeply lacking beforehand.
What the Rite posits is different, and undoubtedly more horrifying: it’s more than possible to skip this first step. That is, a society doesn’t need to convince anyone that its victims are subhuman or inherently deserving of harm in any way—they simply need to present their own form of context-dependent paganism, a belief system which verifies that on balance, the moral tradeoff at hand is essentially worth it. The victims of structural violence can be widely understood to be innocent as long as the harm done toward them can be rationalized as an essential component of a wider ideology, one that may be indispensable to the contemporary social order as it’s understood by those who live under it.
And I think that’s what’s disturbed me, watching it this week. The needless sacrifice of innocent life, in the name of a specious belief in nature gods, should be unambiguously received as something primitive and contemptible. And it isn’t. It’s familiar.
ICE agents executed a second peaceful protester in Minneapolis this morning, all on camera. The last act of Alex Pretti’s life was to reach his arm out to a woman who had been battered—battered by the same agents who would go on to shoot him in the back ten times after shoving him to the ground. As was the case with the killing of Renee Good a few weeks ago, a number of right-wing politicians and commentators are bound to spin Pretti’s actions as some form of provocation. Others—who may feel squeamish about taking such a hard line— simply plead ignorance and say they don’t really know what to think based on what they see on video.
Many, though, will do what tends do be done after all public instances of gratuitous violence committed by state actors. In their heads, they may freely contend that what happened was undoubtedly wrong, that the agents conducted themselves poorly. That this man’s life was cut far too soon in an absolute affront to rule of law. But that, regardless, protecting an institution like ICE is essential to creating the country we ought to have with the borders we ought to have—whether or not its practical consequences seem to be, more or less, widespread physical harm directed toward liberals and nonwhite people. To those in the somewhat conflicted cohort, it’s not that might makes right. It’s that we want spring to come, and we believe that this agency is part of making it happen.
Is Stravinsky and Company’s political project made up of this same reactionary drivel? Does it actually mean to push back against such a view? Is the Rite pointing out a repugnant phenomenon or participating in it? We can’t really know for sure, and it almost doesn’t matter. The tone of the entire piece makes one thing clear: if this is progressive activism it’s of the kind that understands itself to be extremely futile—there’s clearly not room for anything like a missionary in this village. Where’s the act three, in which a band of cosmopolitan Ruso-Parisians put on a ballet showing the villagers the spuriousness of their views? If what the Rite shows us is true, then there’s no hope for the convincer, the idealist who dares those around him to step into the light. You start to feel a deep, dark positivism contaminating the whole affair.
And there’s the rub: modernism as a descriptive method feels so apt and effective for a time like today, and I find it relatively easy to read into a lot of modernist art and literature in a way that bolsters many of my own political positions. We see the world laid bare in a way that is at once shocking and honest, repudiating the outdated thinking of an old guard that’s overstayed its welcome. But the modernists themselves? They’re nobody’s first draft picks for a desirable political coalition: Stravinsky was, in his own words, “above all, a fascist;” Dali loved Hitler; Pound famously nursed a bromance with Mussolini—and regarding my beloved literary hero Eliot, to quote a scathing essay by George Orwell, “a reactionary or Austrofascist tendency had always been apparent in his work.”
Modern life is easy to despise, and modern sensibilities are fun to offend. But such a position forces you into the same rooms as Nazis more often than you would like. The difference between us and them, I think, is the relish of glowing bleakness with which they receive the horrors around them—the delightful shock of edgy subversion we sometimes associate with modernism and the modernists can be spun and interpreted in ugly ways. Some of us may leave the theatre feeling uneasy. But some of us may feel the temptation to step onto the stage and join the village.
You can’t bring up the Nazis and not talk about how to fight them. You can’t have every work of art you consume remind you of them and then just sort of fade out on a vague note of consternation. But the honest takeaway here is that, like the violent Parisian crowd in 1913, I’m staring out at a world that confuses me in a way for which I had no way of preparing, and I’m certain that I’ve unconsciously developed my own personal form of Slavic paganism to make sense of it all. What I see in front of me is a village with its hands tied as violence and gruesome spectacle mutate into twisted virtues of their own. Sacrifice without spring. And in response, pragmatism without principle.
I’m not saying this with any sort of conspiracy in mind—there’s no puppet master steering the long march to nothing in which we all seem to be engaged. But there never needed to be. As can be seen within the world of the Rite, there need not be any centralized leadership more powerful than the ideology that undergirds all popular wisdom and social organization. A truly hegemonic belief system makes one feel insane for existing outside of it and presents itself as a singular cure for said insanity. In Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless” (which I have a few unrelated issues with and was quoted in Canadian PM Mark Carney’s Davos speech last week, undoubtedly making it my least cool citation), we’re provided with some idea of how this tended to manifest in practice for those living in the Eastern Bloc under Soviet totalitarianism:
“The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people…with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. Individuals need not believe all of these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with this who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it.”
From the outside, the character of the victim shown in the Rite remains infuriating to all of us not because of her fate but because of her acquiescence. And that part, at least, I do believe was understood by Stravinsky. We can surmise this from the change in the title. In that vein, one point is fairly obvious: how can the ballet be titled “The Victim” if the entire village, including the victim herself, is completely unable to see her as such?
The other point, one that’s heavier in my mind, is a little shakier but feels much more important. How can anyone seriously imply that the status of “victim” is reserved solely for the one who’s sacrificed, and not for those who are left behind?
