The image that emerges from his employment records is that of a poor gentleman who constructed an administrative career for himself from scratch with no great successes or failures. Despite never loving his work, he was unable to devote himself to leisure for financial and social reasons. On the other hand, his letters reveal a much more vivid persona, bordering at times on the outrageous. He comes across as a jolly good fellow, a lover of gossip (about brides and the doddering “old mushrooms” in the civil service), teasing, and outrageous puns.26 His pen and his tongue could be cruel, however, and he did not hold back when deriding critics and censors and all of the other people who had crossed him. He wrote in extreme haste but fluidly, especially when he vented spleen about his various peeves. These included same-sex relationships. In his letters from the late 1830s, he mocks the effeminate manners of male dancers, some openly homosexual, others not, by using feminine endings and misspellings to describe their behavior: “A new dancer has come to us in the theater with the grandest of pretensions; I don’t like him and most of our decent people agree with me entirely. Most of all I don’t like his girlish ways. He prances around as if to say ‘I’m sooo tired!’ ‘I daaanced until I practically faaainted on the stage!’”27 Verstovsky could not help but wag his caustic tongue about the perceived lesbianism of the ladies in his circle as well: “The former actress Semyonova and Princess Gagarina have the most passionate correspondence, one can’t live without the other—it’s magical, simply magical!”28 His letters often include strange drawings altogether unrelated to the subjects under discussion: a chap with a rooster’s comb bowing like an ape to a baroness; a Chinese man with an umbrella riding an elephant; the pope baptizing three babies in a pot.
The group of nobles running the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg was small and tight-knit. The librettist of Verstovsky’s opera Askold’s Tomb, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, was director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from 1837 to 1841. Soon Verstovsky agitated to replace Zagoskin, pledging “to repair all of the cracks in the directorate” that had appeared under his leadership.29 The largest, he complained, had been created by the choreographer Hullen, who was not, in his opinion, a progressive force at the Bolshoi but someone who had “pushed things back by five years, goaded by Zagoskin, and completely destroyed the ballet company. Many fine dancers dispersed and those who stayed were spoiled.”30 The slander did not, however, help him to get the job, at least not immediately. He continued to report to the governor general of Moscow, Dmitri Golitsïn. Thus he was required to attend parties at Golitsïn’s home, which he found tiresome, “more like dusks than evenings,” and worse than the enervating occasions at the English Club that rounded out his social calendar. The older “bastards” at the parties “pranced like cranes”; the bearded, “greasy” youth put on a dissatisfied affect, pretending that they had better places to be.31 The social scene improved when the sovereign visited Moscow, at which time the city became like an “excavated anthill,” everywhere “busybodies sweeping and repairing,” “beards getting trimmed, moustaches already shaved, everyone cleaned up and sobered up!”32
Zagoskin was replaced, first by Alexander Vasiltsovsky, an anxious, humble individual much prone, in his letters to the court, to protestations of worthlessness. Finally, after Vasiltsovsky took sick and could no longer fulfill his duties, Verstovsky assumed the directorship of the kontora of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. He served in the position from 1848 until his own retirement in 1861, a year before he died. He did not like Moscow; its provincialism was not a virtue. But as he confessed at the start of his administrative ascent, “the grace of expected rewards” kept him there. Certainly he was able to reward himself by keeping his opera Askold’s Tomb in the repertoire. And when the management structure of the Bolshoi shifted, returning control from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Verstovsky gladly cast himself in the role of a dedicated public servant and hands-on reformer.33
Throughout the nineteenth century, the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reported to the directorate of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters—except between 1822 and 1841, when the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters were overseen by the governor general of Moscow and the Opekunskiy sovet, the governing board of the Imperial Foundling Home and its bank, to which the Moscow theaters still owed money from the Maddox era. After 1842 the administration of the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters resembled that of the main theaters in St. Petersburg. Repertoire was reviewed by the (initially) three-member Censorship Committee established within the Ministry of Education in 1804, and budgets were set by the State Treasury of the Ministry of Finance—all under the supervision of the Ministry of the Imperial Court and His Majesty the Emperor. Control of the Bolshoi and the Malïy Theaters reverted to St. Petersburg in 1842, when the elderly Golitsïn’s health began its final decline.
The impetus for the administrative restructuring in 1842 was a report ordered by the Ministry of the Imperial Court on the condition of the Bolshoi. The report was compiled by Alexander Gedeonov, the director of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters, and by painting a picture of neglect, it suited Gedeonov’s needs—namely, placing the Moscow theaters under his personal control. The extremely biased conclusion was that Bové’s architectural marvel had not been properly cared for since its opening in 1825. The water tanks were empty, which created a serious fire hazard; the “mechanism” under the stage was insufficient for performances involving frequent set changes; there were not enough stagehands, and they often found themselves double-booked, scheduled to work at the Bolshoi and the Malïy on the same night; the costumes used by the opera were threadbare; those used by the ballet were newer but had been stitched together by a “rather mediocre tailor.”34 The Malïy had a modest “shop” on its premises to store its costumes and props, but the Bolshoi was forced to lease “temporary wooden sheds in total disrepair.” Other difficulties at the Bolshoi included poor lighting. “All of the oil lamps are in a dilapidated state,” Gedeonov commented, “leaving the stage dark” even during performances. The ends of the ceiling beams in the hallways were rotting, posing an obvious danger, and the “retreats” (meaning the latrines) produced a noxious stench.
He saved his harshest words for the Moscow Imperial Theater College, which supposedly existed in a state of “total destruction.” The students who did not live on the premises outnumbered those who did, and the non-residents caused the directorate difficulties: “They missed rehearsals and performances owing to bad weather, sickness, or even just problems in their homes attributable to their extreme poverty.” The college itself was inadequate for the needs of its residents, owing in part to the lack of water for bathing (which had to be brought in from the street and carried up a narrow staircase) and improper sanitation; such squalor, according to the college doctor, “caused the students colds and other serious illnesses with potentially lethal consequences.” The boys who fell ill were confined to a room with four beds on the second floor of the college, with a nurse and attendant next door. A thin wall made of wooden planks was all that separated the patients from the stage used by the students, so that “the dances and other activities held there throughout most of the day cause great concern to the patients and much harm.” The girls’ sick room was on the third floor and much roomier, but the windows had been installed less than a third of a meter above the floor, posing a safety hazard. “Obsessed with fever, suffering intense delirium and disorientation,” the report conjectured, “a patient might, irrespective of all precautions taken, potentially meet misfortune by jumping through the window.” And the teapot in the boys’ sick room had gone missing.
Gedeonov commissioned two independent inspections of the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters and the Theater College in support of his claims and soon found himself in charge of the entire theatrical complex, along with a summer theater in Petrovsky Park in Moscow. When he took over, he arranged for the payment of the debt owed by the theaters to the Opekunskiy sovet. Since he also had to oversee the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters and cou
ld not be in two cities at the same time, he relied first on Vasiltsovsky and then Verstovsky to provide him with regular reports on the situation in Moscow. The offices of the Moscow directorate operated in a three-story stone building in the Arbat neighborhood before moving to quarters on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, just steps from the Bolshoi. According to one source, the bureau contained a small room known as a “lockup,” where artists and employees suspected of malfeasance could be placed under arrest.35 Thus was discipline enforced.
The first order of business in the reports for Gedeonov was financial: an accounting of box-office receipts. This was followed by a description of the success or failure of individual productions, followed by, in the case of the Bolshoi, mention of the health of dancers (who in the ranks had pulled a muscle or sprained an ankle), minor or major accidents (the broken ribs suffered by a musician who fell asleep on the sill of an open window), and the status of repairs to the theater. When praised for their work or asked about their personal affairs, Vasiltsovsky and Verstovsky swooned, grateful for the attention from on high. Gedeonov had a short wick and wore a scowl, but he cared about his employees, guaranteeing salaries for performers in the first and second ranks and granting special privileges after two decades of service. Housing was a never-ending concern, both for the artists and the staff as well as for their families. Gedeonov’s kindness was felt by the eldest daughter of Verstovsky’s clerk; she had been living across from a “filthy kitchen and yard in a room next to laundrywomen” and an actor who “dried and ironed his black underwear” in plain sight. (According to her father’s appeal to Gedeonov, the poor girl also had to endure the “perverse company” of middle-of-the-night card players and horn blowers.) Verstovsky rescued her from the squalor. For such consideration, Gedeonov earned the love and affection of his employees, who praised him, with “sincere souls and contrite hearts,” as “a Father and Benefactor of the human race.”36
Gedeonov had angled for control of the Bolshoi, and though he managed it with care he was also a micromanager, personally involved in ticketing (in general he refused to provide comps to Bolshoi Theater performances, even to high-ranking nobles) and matters as seemingly trivial as the cost of the bouquets tossed at dancers and singers during benefits. He even pursued the case of a malfeasant who, in November of 1845, tossed an apple at the stage during a benefit performance. He took pains to return a beloved pipe that a German count had left in a loge and haggled over the prices for a hurdy-gurdy and carpets imported from Scotland. In addition to setting the salaries of the artists in the Imperial Theaters, he facilitated the granting of vacations and medical leaves.
Once he had been promoted to director, Verstovsky endeavored to prove that he was up to the task of keeping Moscow’s larger and smaller stages running by regaling Gedeonov with up-to-the-minute descriptions of Bolshoi and Malïy Theater operations, placing much greater emphasis on ballet and opera productions than concerts—though he made special mention of Franz Liszt, a composer and pianist he deeply admired and whose recitals in Moscow proved lucrative. Verstovsky inserted himself into all of the operations of the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, insisting on auditions and precise tuning, making sure that bows were repaired and rosin stocked. The music sounded wonderful, as Gedeonov admitted in his otherwise damning assessment of the condition of the Bolshoi Theater in April of 1842. Verstovsky had an obvious personal interest in keeping his own works on the stage and shamelessly promoted Askold’s Tomb, which stayed in the Bolshoi repertoire exactly as long as he remained employed by the Moscow Imperial Theaters. His position enabled him to postpone or problematize the Moscow premieres of works by his rivals, including Glinka.
Verstovsky also took a personal interest in improving the education provided by the Imperial Theater College, complaining in 1841 that “the voice teacher, M. Gerkulani, has yet to have them open their mouths in his classes and teaches solfeggio on the keyboard, which is quite curious. And even more amusing, the dance teacher in the school, M. Peysar, has lame hands. Sitting, he demonstrates what he wants his students to do with just his feet.”37 In truth, the situation was never as bad as he described, and the problems he identified improved after the restructuring. Energetic young teachers were appointed to the staff, ensuring that instruction lived up to the needs of the college and the theaters it supported.
Verstovsky cultivated the image of a hearty good fellow for his superiors, but not for the artists under his supervision, who found him standoffish. The long-time Bolshoi Theater decorator and technician Karl Valts remembered him
inevitably being on the stage before performances, standing before the curtain, and everyone having to come up to him to bow. He never wore the mandatory uniform at the time, but was always dressed in a short jacket and dark grey pants. He was almost bald, but a few unruly hairs remained stuck to his crown, like Bismarck. In conversation with the artists he always kept his hands in his pockets and addressed them in the familiar form. Beside him, like a shadow, arose the figure of the inspector of the Theater College.38
Although he generally treated the artists of the theater with cold derision, Verstovsky fell head over heels for one of them: the beautiful, talented, and overextended singer Nadezhda Repina. She was lowborn, the daughter of a serf musician, but had a proud prima donna career on the stage of the Malïy Theater and inspired some of Verstovsky’s songs, including the most eloquent of his Russian Romances. He married her.
Given the customs of the time, however, it was not an easy marriage to maintain. Rumor had it that, for political reasons, Repina was forced to retire in 1841. Verstovsky signed the resignation papers behind her back just before control of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reverted to Gedeonov. Repina’s feelings on the matter are unknown, but it was said that she returned home from a triumphant performance to learn from her husband that her career was over. She fainted and took to drink.
Verstovsky must also have been distraught at what he had been forced to do. He adored his wife and would not be parted from her, just as he would not be parted from his true self—that of an artist, a composer, not a bureaucrat. Out of frustration with his lot, his paperwork, and the intrigue that he himself had promoted, he would one day wish the Bolshoi away.
But the Bolshoi was now more than a building. It stood as the symbol of a pursuit: the struggle for national identity through cultural identity. Because Moscow had borne the brunt of Napoleon, because it had burned and been rebuilt, because its populace had endured and finally triumphed, the formerly brackish backwater claimed the mantle of national purpose from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Bureaucratic wrangling between Moscow and St. Petersburg aside, Moscow found itself ascendant. Its distance—from St. Petersburg, from Europe—proved a benefit rather than a hindrance. Even before it became the seat of power in the twentieth century, Moscow in the nineteenth, after Napoleon, began to assume importance. The Kremlin, and the Bolshoi, could bide their time on the bend of the river along trading routes that the government could only pretend to govern.
The struggle to represent Russia in the arts continued through the imperial Russian era, through the Soviet era, and into the present day; surely, it is a struggle without end, Romantic in the extreme for its investment in ideals of the people and the nation. Yet the Bolshoi could lay claim to that most clichéd of concepts: the Russian soul.
. 3 .
FLEET AS LIGHTNING: THE CAREER OF EKATERINA SANKOVSKAYA
ALEXEI VERSTOVSKY LEFT behind a long paper trail as first the inspector and then director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. The performers under his control did not. Neither did their performances. What survives from the first half of the nineteenth century are music scores, scenarios, the recollections of eyewitnesses, and the images collected, over time, by devotees such as Vasiliy Fyodorov, an art historian and director of the Malïy Theater Museum under Stalin. But even these collections are selective affairs, labors of love with huge chronological gaps that no scouring of archives, kiosks, and libraries could fill.
The first half of the nineteenth century, the era of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, is even less well represented than the Maddox era—but for the case of the Moscow-born dancer Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Sankovskaya (1816–1878), whose career extended from October 1836 to November 1854. A diva before the phenomenon of the diva existed, Sankovskaya rivaled her illustrious European contemporaries Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler in both lightness and precision.
Yet her name, unlike theirs, has faded from the annals of ballet history, to the extent that the details of Taglioni’s performances in St. Petersburg from 1837 to 1842, and Elssler’s in St. Petersburg and Moscow from 1848 and 1851, are better known, even though Sankovskaya’s career was no less illustrious—and no less controversial—than theirs. Russian critics fawned with great ardor over Taglioni; one of them, Pyotr Yurkevich, even claimed her as St. Petersburg’s own: “Our incomparable sylphide, with one wave of her little foot, rends asunder all the heavy theories of encyclopedic construction,” he enthused, further waxing that she was “beautiful and unattainable, like a dream!”1 Knickknacks bearing her likeness appeared on the streets of the imperial capital, and a patisserie conceived an elaborate tartlet in her honor. The most famous, or notorious, piece of lore surrounding Taglioni’s guest appearances in St. Petersburg has her fans purchasing her dance shoes at auction for 200 silver rubles and then sautéing them for a feast.2 The behavior was odd, but it was not without precedent, as Sankovskaya herself would have known.
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