Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Napoleon’s soldiers entered Moscow on September 14, 1812, after exchanging grapeshot and cannonballs with the surrounding Russian positions. The colorful cupolas and golden spires of the city had made a fairy tale–like impression on the French from afar. But the streets were quiet, save for scattered drunkards and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Napoleon established quarters in the Kremlin without fanfare the following morning; he assumed administrative control of the ancient capital without such control having been ceded to him. The tsar and Moscow’s ruling class ignored his arrival and refused to meet with him. Tolstoy imagined Napoleon’s disappointment in a single sentence: “The coup de théâtre had not come off.”14

  Two-thirds of the population of just over a quarter million had evacuated. Before the invasion, the muddle-headed governor general of Moscow, Fyodor Rostopchin, had regaled the population with tales of French sadism. He acted surprised, however, when the terrified masses packed up and left. Rostopchin predicted Napoleon’s defeat in his proclamations, but also pledged to leave him nothing but ash. The noble class locked up their stone manor houses and headed to their rural homes. Their carriages clogged the road. They packed up their human goods (cooks, maids, nurses, footmen, and jesters) along with their dressing tables and portraits. The carriages mingled with carts containing merchants and tradesmen and their families, along with injured Russian soldiers and—according to anecdote—deserters disguised as women. “Moscow was shaken with horror,” a noblewoman recalled of her pampered exodus. She responded to Rostopchin’s exhortations to stay in the city and accusations of treason by planning her “flight” and the packing of her precious objects.15 The poor had no choice but to heed Rostopchin and take shelter in churches. Shopkeepers guarded their shelves against looting. The governor general ordered saboteurs, traitors, and spies for the French captured. Then he unlocked the prisons and madhouses. He ordered business papers destroyed and treasuries emptied. The looting began.

  Rostopchin had been told by Kutuzov that Moscow would not be defended, so he fulfilled his promise to burn it down. The city had been tactically abandoned; sacrifice would be the price of its survival. Rostopchin ordered water tanks drained and charges placed in the granaries, tanneries, dram shops, and storehouses. Small fires illuminated the cart-jammed bridges, the shredded, discarded uniforms, and the human and animal waste on the streets. The flames spread easily in the late-summer breeze, ravaging block after block of wooden buildings, engulfing a hospital, and forcing the rabble onto the river’s edge. Voices of the doomed mingled with the echoes of prayer and discordant singing. The flames increased the strength of the wind and the wind the strength of the flames. When the fire threatened his quarters in the Kremlin, Napoleon gathered his precious articles de toilette and left. He and his commanders took in the spectacle of the city in self-immolation from a suburban palace.

  One of Valberg’s (and Didelot’s) distinguished students, Adam Glushkovsky, would become the first great ballet master of the post-Napoleonic era; during the war, he served as a teacher and ballet master in Moscow, reporting firsthand from the front lines. Relying on his own memories and those of his peers, he compiled a harrowing true-life account of the Napoleonic invasion.

  Nine months before the Napoleonic invasion, in January of 1812, Glushkovsky arrived in Moscow. A mustachioed man with a wide-open face and the wardrobe of a musketeer, he was touted less for his leaps and jumps than for his acting. He danced at the Arbat Theater and taught at the Imperial Theater College, passing the lessons he had received from Didelot on to the children in his classes. He lived at the college but took his meals gratis in the home of the ballet master Jean Lamaral. When word came from the Moscow governor general that he would have to evacuate, he buried a trunk of his belongings in the woods. (The trunk stayed safe; he found it intact upon his return.) He spent his final wages, a bag of copper coins handed to him on the eve of the French attack, on boots and a coat for the road. Then he seated himself in a cart with his students, bound for the church towns northeast of Moscow known as the Golden Ring. The famished horses could barely lift their hooves, and the procession bogged down. He and the students settled for the night in a refugee camp before receiving word that the French would soon be upon them. The convoy lurched onward.

  They moved through hamlets to the town of Vladimir, in hopes of taking shelter and refreshing their horses. The town was crammed with Russian soldiers, French captives, and assorted people of rank. The scene was repeated farther along the road, in the town of Kostroma. There the vagabond entertainers performed in the local wooden theater in exchange for food, a bath, and a bed. After just two days, however, the regional governor announced that he could not accommodate the theater school refugees in Kostroma, despite being directed to do so, on official paper, by the theater directorate in Moscow. Housing was instead found in the picturesque fishing village of Plyos. For three months, the students occupied merchant dwellings built into the hill above the Volga River. Glushkovsky and the other teachers who had evacuated (the instructors of holy law, diction, voice, and drawing) settled into buildings on the shore. To the horror of the eavesdropping local crones, Glushkovsky’s girls lifted their skirts above their ankles and hopped about while practicing their fandangos with the boys. Word spread of the “unclean spirit” that had taken hold, and of the “devil’s helper” teaching them their steps.16

  Snow fell, and the students sledded down the hill to their classes. News of their presence spread to the aristocratic families residing in the area, and Glushkovsky became the featured entertainment as well as the instructor, in character dancing, of the darlings of the households. He took sick, however, after performing a solo from an Anacreontic Didelot ballet in a cold hall wearing only a light silk tunic. The fever threatened his life, but he declined the treatments offered by the village doctor—tea laced with vodka and bloodletting—in favor of hot wine and chest compresses soaked in vinegar. He convalesced back in Kostroma, where the governor finally found space for him and his students. The governor lived “like cheese in butter,” staging operas on birthdays and hosting dance events capped with fireworks displays over the Volga.17 The students of the Moscow Imperial Theater College continued their education in exile in the governor’s private theater. Glushkovsky boasts of having a contented French prisoner as a servant, touting the lad’s skills as a basket weaver and tooth puller.

  He recorded what he heard from his friends still in Moscow about conditions in the city beset by the French. One of those left behind was a touring violinist, Andrey Polyakov, who told Glushkovsky about the filth and the smell of the invasion, how the fire flowed up and down and all around the boulevards of the city:

  Buildings on both sides of Tverskoy Boulevard burned; the heat was so intense that it could barely be withstood; in places the ground cracked and buckled; hundreds of pigeons rose over the wall of flame, then fell, scorched, onto a bridge girder; the smoke corroded the eyes; the wind carried embers a great distance; sparks fell like rain onto people; the thunder of collapsing walls sent them into terror; the aged and women with babies at their breasts fled their homes moaning and wailing and beseeching God’s protection; others, the weak, died in the fire; charred dead dogs and horses littered the road in places; French soldiers fell to their deaths from roofs while trying to put out the fire.18

  Polyakov’s description of wartime Moscow evokes the horrors of Dante’s Inferno and the divine last judgment. These points of comparison were made knowingly, as a best attempt to get across the inexplicable misery. He did not see everything that he describes, but his account is convincing and in keeping with other eyewitness descriptions of water boiling in wells from the heat of the flames and charred paper falling from the sky far outside Moscow. At the end of Tverskoy Boulevard, Polyakov saw two Russian soldiers hanging from a lamppost. It had been turned by the French into a gibbet. The signs in Russian stuck to their chests identified one as an arsonist, the other a defector to the French side who had second-guessed his decision
and so met his end. Upper Petrov Monastery offered another ghastly scene. The sacred fourteenth-century grounds had become an abattoir. Pigskins sagged from hooks in the walls, cattle and lamb parts slicked the floors. French soldiers with bloodstained hands carved and distributed slabs of meat from the altar. Horses whinnied for food from the choir lofts.

  After three days the fire had run its course, and the September weather turned glorious. Napoleon returned to the Kremlin, instructing his officers, in between card games and reports from the field, to reestablish order on the streets. Polyakov witnessed French soldiers smoking, eating, and mucking about before forming ranks for morning inspection. One or two trumpets blared; drums rattled. Napoleon himself arrived on a white horse, and the soldiers smartened themselves up. Napoleon gave them a quick, bored glance, ignored their salutation, then released them back to their tobacco. Thus the occupation settled into a routine. Millers returned to their mills, washerwomen to their washing. Theatrical life also resumed, after a fashion, with the performance of six French comedies and vaudevilles in a pleasant serf theater on an undamaged street. The texts were tweaked in honor of Napoleon and the depleted Grande Armée. Among the performers were Frenchmen employed by the Imperial Theaters alongside officers who had once trod the boards in Paris. The audiences were uncouth, with Glushkovsky describing undisciplined adjutants in berets “coolly smoking tobacco from Hungarian pipes with small stems,” unresponsive to the performances except during the patriotic speeches, at which point they leapt to their feet to shout “Vive l’empereur! Vive la France! Vive l’armée française!” During the intermission they swilled wine and gorged on chocolates and fruit; afterward they remained in the halls of the theater dancing polkas.

  Russian forces refused to capitulate, and engaged in a war of attrition. The people of Moscow starved; pigeons and crows were killed for soup. When they had all been eaten, only the sourest of staples remained—cabbage. Napoleon’s men roamed the ashes “as pale as shades, searching for food and clothing but finding nothing, wrapping themselves in horse blankets and torn coats,” with “either peasants’ hats or women’s thick, torn scarfs” covering their heads. “It was like a masquerade,” Glushkovsky recalled of the weird getups on the streets. Nothing remained of the belief in liberating conquest that had borne the French into Moscow, a city with a texture that they could not fathom. Napoleon ordered the Great Retreat, but not before imagining a heroic return and, in a letter to his aide Hugues-Bernard Maret, vowing to blow up the Kremlin. Rumors of the impending bombing reached Polyakov’s mother, who died of fright. Marshal Éduoard Mortier carried out the plan in the middle of the night on October 20, laying the charges to raze the citadel. But rain, or perhaps heroic Cossacks, put out the fuses attached to the barrels of gunpowder. Most of the towers and walls remained intact.

  The French retreat was a pitiful sight. Battered, famished soldiers skittered along litter-strewn, stench-filled streets in twos and threes to their formation points. Most made it out; some were killed on the spot, others were captured. Those who had tended to sick Russian babies at the start of the occupation or otherwise demonstrated a human touch were given shelter in cellars. Mobs awaited the retreating soldiers in the forests, seeking revenge for the burning, the looting, the desecration of churches, the butchering of livestock. Tools of iron and wood gouged out eyes and vital organs.

  The withdrawal continued into November. The temperature dropped. Subzero winds put out campfires; frozen corpses were cannibalized. Napoleon survived to regroup, but his command was fragile and his straggling forces humiliated. European allies became foes, and after a series of defeats he was forced to abdicate. Ambitions crushed, Napoleon would be imprisoned in exile on the island of St. Helena, where at least the climate was more forgiving.

  WHEN DIDELOT RETURNED to St. Petersburg in 1816 from his purported leave, he resumed his duties in an utterly transformed political and cultural landscape. Tsar Alexander I recognized that he had the self-sacrificing Russian masses to thank for rescuing his rule from Napoleon. Their triumph against improbable odds inspired the cultural shift, the enthusiastic embrace of all things Russian. Cossacks took the stage to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat. Gypsies and peasants joined them and were paid to give lessons in their native crafts to performers otherwise trained in pliés, battements, ronds de jambe, and courtly dances. The new fad for the prisyadka squatting position and choral round dances, accompanied by pipes, hurdy-gurdies, and assorted noisemakers, did not last but left an impression nonetheless. Didelot adapted to the patriotic turn by adding Russian dances of the streets and the fields to the pedagogical curriculum of the ballet school in St. Petersburg. In 1823 he staged the second ballet to be based on a text by Alexander Push-kin. Titled The Prisoner of the Caucasus, or The Shade of the Bride (Kavkazskiy plennik, ili Ten’ nevestï), it included a dark-eyed oriental heroine, lasso-wielding barbarians, a ghost, and, in the final act, a chorus of praise for the tsar. It had little to do with Pushkin, but Pushkin was not in the slightest offended. Rather, he wanted to know everything about it, telling a friend that he had once courted the beloved ballerina in the lead role.

  Moscow, the battered survivor of the siege, became the seedbed of the new nationalism. Plans for rebuilding included a colossal theater for ballet and opera, one that would surpass Maddox’s long-gone Petrovsky Theater, an enterprise tainted by corruption and its owner’s English origins. A proper school would be established, with a proper curriculum, headed by an exceptional pedagogue: Glushkovsky. His first and ultimately greatest contribution to ballet in Moscow was as a teacher, and he carved out a chapter for himself in ballet history. He correctly described keeping his students alive during Napoleon’s invasion, providing them with a school (three of them, in fact, between 1814 and 1829, the year of his retirement as teacher), and improving every aspect of the training for everyone.

  Glushkovsky formed a professional troupe from his most talented disciples and set about enriching the theatrical repertoire with patriotic pageants, after the example of Valberg, and longer plot-based ballets based on the texts of Pushkin, following Didelot. In his account of the period, Glushkovsky described the installation of boards, straps, and cushions in his classrooms to help the students develop lift and improve their turnout at the hip and ankle. He spoke about the types of movements privileged by his teachers and which of their ballets he resurrected once a new theater was opened in Moscow—ballets that emphasized gracefulness and flow over coarse contrast. The repertoire changed to mirror the newly nativist cultural context. “In 1814, 1815, and 1816,” he claimed, “in the Petersburg and Moscow theaters, Russian national dances reigned supreme.” These dances supplanted “the French recherché manner.”19 The French element eventually reasserted itself, but he continued to make room for folk fare. He blended materials of diff erent urban and rural origins in order to represent magical extremes or the desire to overcome commonplace situations.

  Glushkovsky took on overlapping duties and honed his ballet-making skills during the rebuilding of Moscow, its fantastical rise from the ruin of total war. Juggling the positions of dancer, teacher, and ballet master caused him great stress, however, and he begged the directorate for help. Yet in 1831 his duties only increased when he was appointed chief inspector of the ballet and its director. Glushkovsky had to be present at rehearsals and oversee the staging of up to eighteen ballets in a single season, by his own count. He had to haggle for funding, find replacements for ill and injured dancers, and provide both dancers and dances for operas, melodramas, and the ballet groups inserted into vaudevilles, among other things. Out of consideration for the colossal load on his shoulders, the directorate of the Imperial Theaters allowed him and his wife, Tatyana, herself a dancer, to escape Moscow for a month each summer to “correct” what he termed his “ruined health.”20 Having served with what his overseers termed “great zeal” and “commendable behavior,” Glushkovsky petitioned for retirement in 1838, at the age of forty-six, and thereafter received a pe
nsion of 4,000 rubles along with a parting gift of a pair of diamond rings. The pension was impressive for the middle class, though an abyss below what an aristocrat earned each year from his serf estates.

  GLUSHKOVSKY’S CAREER IS associated with the invention of “Russian” ballet, which emerged at once as an assemblage, an orientation, and an ideal. The East Slavic Cossacks brought some of their traditional dances to the theaters and schools of the post-Napoleonic Russian imperial ballet, as did the inhabitants of the interior steppe, Siberia, and the Caucasus Mountains. Glushkovsky and his successors also had access to the dances of nomadic peoples. These were altered and exaggerated, losing their ethnographic substance to become symbols, stylized representations, of the “Russian” empire. Later, the folk fare would be relocated to dream scenes, hallucinations, or the parade-of-nations pageants as found in French ballets dating back to the time of Jean-Georges Noverre and Louis XIV. “Dances of the peoples” in nineteenth-century Russian ballets would be confined to the margins and would fall out of the plot.