[2][3] During his years at University, Diaghilev's cousin Dmitry Filosofov introduced him to a circle of art-loving friends who called themselves The Nevsky Pickwickians.

[2] In the late 1890s, Diaghilev created several art exhibitions that were intended to introduce the contemporary artists to the local public and, later, to the Europeans.

The exposition of British and German watercolorists in 1897 at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts became a huge success—one which Diaghilev repeated in 1898 with the exhibition of the Russian and Finnish artists at the Stieglitz Academy with the works of those such as Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov, and Isaac Levitan.

Though the young art connoisseur had no private fortune, he managed to gain the protection and support of such high nobility as the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and later even Nicholas II.

[7] The Russian-Finnish exhibition of 1898 became the first action of the recently formed society ‘Mir iskusstva’, established by Benois and Diaghilev earlier that year.

Soon, with the help of Savva Mamontov (the director of the Russian Private Opera Company) and Princess Maria Tenisheva, the group founded the journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art).

As recalled by Benois, Diaghilev, as the art director, created the style and designed the publication, wrote critical essays, and, in 1904, published a monograph on Dmitry Levitzky.

Nevertheless, Benois remembered him as the member of Mir iskusstva least interested in philosophy and literature, frequently revealing huge gaps in his knowledge of the classics.

Diaghilev himself travelled to acquire the portraits and wrote a catalogue of 2300 art works with information on the artists, models, and other relevant data.

The paintings were combined into groups and accompanied with notes, and the interiors were decorated differently in order to emphasize their meanings and double the effect.

The post was usually a nominal one, but since Diaghilev managed to actively engage into the theatrical world, he was soon made responsible for the production of the Annual of the Imperial Theaters.

As editor-in-chief, he reformed the edition and converted it into a full-scale luxurious magazine with critical essays, playbills, articles about artists and lots of pictures.

Apollinary Vasnetsov, Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, Valentin Serov, Eugene Lansere and other contemporary artists began working on decorations and costumes.

After several increasingly antagonistic differences of opinion, Diaghilev refused to go on editing the Annual of the Imperial Theatres and was discharged by Volkonsky in 1901.

In 1907, he organised ‘Concerts historiques russes’ with famous composers like Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Glazunov, Feodor Chaliapin, and Félia Litvinne.

The tour was supported and sponsored by Diaghilev’s royal patrons Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich of Russia and Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

In the spring of 1908, Diaghilev mounted a production of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, starring Feodor Chaliapin, at the Paris Opéra.

The first season included Le Pavillon d'Armide, Polovtsian Dances, Nuit d’Egypte, Les Sylphides, and operas Boris Godunov, The Maid of Pskov and the first part of the Ruslan and Lyudmila.

Leading dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Ida Rubinstein, Mikhail Mordkin immediately became world-known stars.

[16] During these years, Diaghilev's stagings included several compositions by the late Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, such as the operas The Maid of Pskov, May Night, and The Golden Cockerel.

His balletic adaptation of the orchestral suite Sheherazade, staged in 1910, drew the ire of the composer's widow, Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, who protested in open letters to Diaghilev published in the periodical Rech.

Diaghilev commissioned ballet music from composers such as Nikolai Tcherepnin (Narcisse et Echo, 1911), Claude Debussy (Jeux, 1913), Maurice Ravel (Daphnis et Chloé, 1912), Erik Satie (Parade, 1917), Manuel de Falla (El Sombrero de Tres Picos, 1917), Richard Strauss (Josephslegende, 1914), Sergei Prokofiev (Ala and Lolli, 1915, rejected by Diaghilev and turned into the Scythian Suite; Chout, 1915 revised 1920; Le pas d'acier, 1926; and The Prodigal Son, 1929); Ottorino Respighi (La Boutique fantasque, 1919); Francis Poulenc (Les biches, 1923) and others.

Around the turn of the century, however, harmonic and metric devices became either more rigid, or much more unpredictable, and each approach had a liberating effect on rhythm, which also affected ballet.

On the other hand, he was capable of great kindness, and when stranded with his bankrupt company in Spain during the 1914–18 war, gave his last bit of cash to Lydia Sokolova to buy medical care for her daughter.

He died of diabetes[30] in Venice on 19 August 1929, and his tomb is on the nearby island of San Michele, near to the grave of Stravinsky, in the Orthodox section.

[32] Diaghilev was played by Alan Bates in the 1980 movie Nijinsky, [33]and the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Petersburg State University is named after him.