Fokine used Russian national dance forms in a fragmentary fashion for the various characters in the crowd. Fokine complained that the crowd was insufficiently rehearsed, Nijinsky complained that movement for the crowd was never really choreographed but was left for the dancers to improvise, and Benois complained that Diaghilev would not spend the money necessary to realize certain effects. Kirstein writes, "The metaphor of manipulated automata remains poeticallty powerful, now haloed in the nostalgia of many period memoirs. Did Benois see Diaghelev as the charlatan Showman? Was Nijinsky typecast as Petrouchka?"