Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  From her European role models, Sankovskaya adopted the distinctive features of Romantic ballet: the all-white, unadorned costume, including the tutu, and dancing with heels off the ground. For choreographic exotica, she donned pantaloons and Turkish-style slippers. Before her time, moving sur les pointes, or on the knuckles of the toes, had been an acrobatic feat, invented by Italian gymnasts and then adopted, for expressive purposes, by such French dancers as Fanny Bias and Geneviève Gosselin.3 Excluding the winsome oil portrait that hangs in the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow, the extant images of Sankovskaya are fanciful, showing her floating, hovering. The lithograph that Fyodorov preserved of her comes from a staging of Le corsaire in 1841, when she was at the height of her powers. She is either landing from a jump with toes extended, or in piquée arabesque. She looks “as fleet as lightning” in the ballet—radiant for an instant, then gone forever.4

  Little is known about her life, besides mention of her mother and sister, also a dancer, and the quarrels she had with rivals in their looking-glass world. Born in Moscow in 1816, Sankovskaya entered the Moscow Imperial Theater College when she was nine, on the petition of her mother. She boarded at the school as a kazennaya vospitannitsa, a nonpaying, state-supported pupil. Before learning character dances, she studied the mazurka, the quadrille, and other social dances considered indispensable for the perfection of bearing and posture. The most important initial instruction came from Mikhaíl Shchepkin. He was the dominant presence at the Malïy Theater, devising a method of acting that privileged emotion and sensation over thought. He rejected two-dimensional representations and stock characterizations, instead encouraging his students to connect as intimately as possible with their subjects. Although Shchepkin at first had doubts about Sankovskaya’s potential as a performer in his idiom, labeling her “talented, but capricious” in one of his notebooks, he became her mentor, instilling in her a commitment to naturalness of expression that she maintained throughout her career.5

  Sankovskaya first danced small roles in ballets on historical and mythological themes, including Charles Didelot’s The Hungarian Hut (Vengerskaya khizhina), in which she appeared disguised as a boy, nerves setting her arms and legs atremble. Sankovskaya’s first solo appearance was at the Malïy Theater in 1831, at age fifteen, in the role of a smitten milkmaid. The ballet, one of Didelot’s more trifling concoctions, pits the milkmaid and the peasant lad she loves against her grandmother. In the role, Sankovskaya impressed the litterateur Sergey Aksakov. Despite grumbling about the corps de ballet coming too close to the front of the stage in the concluding village wedding dances and the lack of soulfulness in the pantomime, Aksakov noted a tremendous improvement in the teaching at the Theater College. Sankovskaya and her onstage partner “were sweet and captivating,” he wrote. “They will mature, and their gifts will bear brilliant fruit.”6

  In 1836, Sankovskaya’s teacher, Félicité Hullen, decided to take her to Paris for the summer, “for the betterment of her talent.”7 The Imperial Theaters granted permission for the trip but did not fund it, so Hullen footed the bill. Little is known about the adventure. In Paris, Sankovskaya seems to have been brought into direct contact with Fanny Elssler, who saw in her less a performer in her own style—earthbound, tacquetée, defined by intricate footwork—than the likeness of Taglioni, capable of creating the illusion of supernatural lightness in her jumps, as befitted her slight build. According to a writer for the ephemeral arts and politics journal Moskovskiy nablyudatel’ (Moscow observer), “the spirit of the Parisian sylph [Taglioni] enlivened that of the petite Muscovite.”8 Sankovskaya absorbed the impressions gained from her time abroad into her own style, one that assimilated each step, each combination, into a single image. She returned to Moscow a professional, a Bolshoi ballerina.

  The unknown author of the think piece in Moskovskiy nablyudatel’ noted that, owing to inexperience, Sankovskaya “sometimes sacrificed herself and her art by indulging an ungracious tour de force,” but that, nonetheless, each movement, each lift and fall of her torso, “was sheer delight.”9 Officialdom cleared her path to greatness; two months after her return from Paris, Sankovskaya received word of the successful completion of her studies at the Theater College and her appointment to the Moscow Imperial Theaters as a “dancer of the first rank,” “première danseuse.”10 The official who signed the papers pointed to her performance in Fenella as justification for the appointment, “Mademoiselle Sankovskaya performed with exceptional distinction in the ballet Fenella and, on two other occasions, in divertissements. After the last of these performances Madame Hullen was called to the stage; the public of Moscow wanted to express gratitude to her for nurturing such a wonderful dancer.”11

  Fenella uses an abbreviated arrangement of the music of a grand opera, La muette de Portici (The mute girl of Portici), by composer Daniel Auber and librettist Eugène Scribe. Set in Naples in 1657, the plot concerns a love triangle during a period of rebellion and volcanic eruption. Alphonse, the son of the Spanish viceroy of Naples, is betrothed to a princess, Elvire, but has seduced the fishermaid Fenella. The death of Fenella’s brother prompts her, at the end, to throw herself into burning lava. Neither the composer nor the librettist of the original 1828 opera intended for the heroine to be silent, performing only in mime, but the atypical absence in Paris of a suitable soprano for the role, and the presence of an alluring ballerina, Lise Noblet, led to the switch. Reviewing the score, Hullen decided that La muette de Portici should have been a ballet in the first place and so enlisted an arranger (Erkolani) to help her choreograph it for the Bolshoi. Fenella mimes rather than sings in the original five-act version for the Paris Opéra; in Hullen’s four-act version, she dances rather than mimes. Gesture is the domain of the other characters, those who tell the story; Fenella becomes an idealized conception. She feels and expresses her feelings in movement, but also reaches for higher spiritual values. Hullen gave the part of Fenella to another dancer for the April 15, 1836, premiere, with Sankovskaya, listed as a student on the playbill, in supporting parts. Soon thereafter, the starring role was hers.

  Sankovskaya was contracted to dance in ballets, operas, and divertissements as instructed by the Imperial Theaters and as her strength and stamina permitted. Her first solo dance at the Bolshoi was a pas du fandango. Announcements in Moskovskiye vedomosti have her partnering in a new Parisian pas de châle on November 27 and December 28, 1836, and appearing in the lead role in the one-act ballet La servante justifiée (The serving girl justified) on December 11. Eleven announcements for Sankovskaya’s performances appear in 1837 and encompass everything from benefits to appearances in masquerades. Her talent and popular appeal convinced the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to make her promotion retroactive; it was moved back from the opening of the 1836–37 season to the opening of the 1835–36 season. She earned 800 rubles per year in the first three years of her professional career, along with 200 rubles in housing allowance. She was also granted a shoe budget, but it was rescinded in 1845, when she was told that she would have to pay for her footwear herself, and also absorb the growing costs of her dresses, gloves, tights, and hats. An impressive stack of documents from 1845 finds her urging the release from customs of the twelve pairs of “white silk shoes” she had ordered from Paris, but the specifics of the design of the footwear, essential to the understanding of Sankovskaya’s technique, are not listed.12 The assumption is that she skimmed the stage, like Taglioni, on some combination of half-, three-quarter, and full pointe, but the sources are vague. As a student, the dancer Anna Natarova recalled seeing Sankovskaya in La sylphide. “She astonished everybody by running around the stage and going through her pas, all on pointe,” Natarova claimed. “This was new at that time.”13

  Tsar Nicholas I took a special interest in Sankovskaya, as did many nobles with Moscow ballerinas, the imperial ballet being during his reign a harem of sorts for the court. Upon signing her first contract, Sankovskaya received an oversized diamond from the tsar and a lump-sum b
onus of 150 rubles. Sexual affairs with dancers were a rite of passage for an adolescent nobleman, and it was not uncommon for older nobles to rely on the ballet school for lovers, plucking them from classes like fruit from hothouse gardens. Nicholas’s son, the future Tsar Alexander II, inherited his father’s tastes, and there is evidence to suggest that he took one of Sankovskaya’s rivals as a mistress. Besides personal pleasure, however, Nicholas found within the corps de ballet a model for obedient troop behavior. And vice versa: For a performance of the ballet The Revolt of the Harem (Vosstaniye v serale) in 1836, he assumed the duties of a ballet master by assigning the dancers weapons training.14 He broke down their initial resistance to the idea by making them rehearse outside in the snow.

  The extent to which the Bolshoi Theater became a seraglio, and whether Sankovskaya was abducted by infatuated noblemen, will never be known. It is clear, however, that she existed above and apart from the lesser, poorer dancers whose futures lay in the laundries or on the streets as licensed prostitutes, dressed in yellow, carrying medical checkup forms of the same color. The term “ballerina” and the Table of Ranks for dancers (first dancer, second dancer, coryphée, corps de ballet) had not yet been codified by the Imperial Theaters, but there is no doubt Sankovskaya rose to the top, and stayed there. She far surpassed her teacher to become the finest Russian dancer of the first half of the nineteenth century. The administration of the Moscow Imperial Theaters recognized her talent early, increasing her bonus to 500 rubles and then 1,000 rubles upon the signing of contracts in 1838 and 1839. Later, she earned bonuses based on the number of times she starred in a ballet, seven rubles per outing in 1845, rising to ten, fifteen, eighteen, and finally twenty-five in 1851. Her contracts also guaranteed her an annual benefit or half-benefit performance, a lucrative perk, and for one of them she tried her hand at choreography, restaging the 1845 ballet Le diable à quatre (The devil to pay), which Joseph Mazilier had originally choreographed to music by Adolphe Adam, for presentation at the Bolshoi at the end of 1846. The subject of class conflict (a hot-tempered marquise magically trades lives with the good-hearted spouse of a cobbler) might have explained its appeal to Sankovskaya, but it was also chockablock with madcap caprice, including an episode in which a hurdy-gurdy player has his instrument broken over his head. Sankovskaya also performed in St. Petersburg and in 1846 toured abroad to Hamburg and Paris, among other cities—a first for a Moscow-trained dancer.

  Bohemian students idolized her for reasons both religious and philosophical, as did the prominent theatrical observers Sergey Aksakov, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, and Mikhaíl Saltïkov-Shchedrin. Appraisals and descriptions of her performances in the press are nonetheless few and far between, since the theatrical review had only just been legalized in 1828 for the semiofficial culture and politics newspaper Severnaya pchela (The northern bee), and strict rules were put in place, by the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Moscow police, about who could write reviews and how it was to be done: nothing anonymous, nothing unsolicited, and so nothing troublemaking. The gaps in critical thought were filled by periodicals like Moskovskiy nablyudatel’, diaries, and memoirs. Sankovskaya’s devotees saw spiritual liberation in her movement and found it difficult to believe that she was merely human, prone to injuries. Injuries excited alarm but also, like Taglioni’s and Elssler’s infirmities, increased Sankovskaya’s allure.

  She had rivals, both early in her career and later on, and gossip raged, as it tends to, about her efforts to damage their careers. The first in the long list of competitors was Tatyana Karpakova, who had also trained with Hullen and had also been taken to Paris for exposure to the more rigorous lexicon of the Parisian repertoire. Karpakova danced from childhood and had sufficient nuance and timing to earn parts in theatrical comedies, though a critic of the time lamented her refusal to surrender cliché, the crass jumps that dancers recycled from ballet to ballet. Two years after graduating from the Moscow Imperial Theater College, Karpakova married a classmate, Konstantin Bogdanov. She had children whom she did not raise, ceding their upbringing, in keeping with the habit among artists, to the Theater College. As Karpakova slowed down, her name faded from the repertoire, and, after Sankovskaya’s ascension, the theatergoing public forgot about her altogether. In 1842, tuberculosis sentenced Karpakova to a premature death around age thirty.

  KARPAKOVA HAD A DIFFICULT time escaping the strictures of academic classicism: her pantomime was considered cold, impersonal. Sankovskaya, in contrast, performed with passion, exhilaration, the seeming naturalness of her filigreed movement disguising a brutal training regimen. Her health suffered the strain even in her twenties, and she found herself unable to do all that was expected of her, which brought her into conflict with the administration of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. For all her fame, she remained a servant of the state, forced to do as she was told and obliged to explain every bruise, sniffle, or absence to her employers. Requests for time off needed to be submitted long in advance, likewise appeals for long-term medical treatment. As director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Verstovsky grew tired of her complaints, suspecting that she was exaggerating or inventing her health problems. He accused her of reveling in the attention generated by her absences from the stage and noted that she quickly returned to form whenever another dancer challenged her position.

  In March of 1843, her doctor recommended that Sankovskaya be permitted to travel to Bad Ems, Germany, the preferred summer retreat of the European and Russian nobility, to take the thermal mineral waters and sea salts. She was suffering from myriad ailments: frail nerves, gastrointestinal disorder, irritation of the liver, persistent low-grade fever, and constant back pain. The request was rejected because Sankovskaya had not herself discussed her situation when she was in the offices of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to arrange a benefit performance, and because the doctor’s report did not explain how the facilities in Bad Ems could help. She filed the same request in March of 1844, by which time the back pain had increased and Sankovskaya had developed a cyst on the inside of her left thigh above the knee. In addition, she had a hernia, the result of a pulled groin. Her doctor also noted abdominal pain and the discoloration of the skin characteristic of jaundice. On April 10, Sankovskaya was given leave to travel abroad and issued a foreign passport for four months of treatment in Bad Ems, her pay suspended for the duration, from May to August. Before leaving, she had to prostrate herself before the intendant (director-in-chief) of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Alexander Gedeonov, pledging, once she had recovered, to dedicate herself to justifying his benevolence. She perhaps did not need to go so far, since Gedeonov was, as the ballet master Marius Petipa recalled, a “very kind” man. Though he seemed harsh, earning the nickname “grumbler benefactor,” he generally forgave bad behavior. (Petipa relates the case of a “bit player” who turned up drunk for a performance and threw up onstage. Gedeonov admonished the “disgusting creature” but allowed him to keep his pension, even after the actor pulled a pair of pistols on him.)15

  The thermal mineral springs, despite their reputation as a fountain of youth, did little to alleviate the abuse Sankovskaya’s body had suffered through the years. Her health continued to decline. In August of 1848, she was fined 259 rubles and 54 kopecks for failing to perform; she had been out sick for three months. When she finally returned to the Bolshoi, she was upstaged by a visiting dancer from St. Petersburg.

  Her health problems obliged her to work, for a period, without a contract. She took her last bow near the end of 1854, having established the benchmark for subsequent generations. Official papers exchanged between the Moscow and St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters indicate that, to Verstovsky’s consternation, she received special treatment in her final years onstage. Sankovskaya retired past her peak but not conspicuously so, beloved by the Moscow public as “the soul of our ballet,” a hometown girl made good.16 A farewell benefit was arranged at the Malïy Theater but canceled, due again to her health, but also to a decline in the si
ze of her audiences. Verstovsky thereafter started to promote her protégés, especially the bright young Praskovya Lebedeva—the one dancer, in all his years of correspondence, to earn his genuine praise. Sankovskaya received another diamond and a pension equivalent to her salary in the late 1840s. After leaving the stage she taught social dances to girls and boys in gymnasia and manor houses. One tale has her setting a “sailor’s dance” on the future great method actor Konstantin Stanislavsky.17 His technique owed much to Sankovskaya’s childhood instructor Mikhaíl Shchepkin. Before her death on August 16, 1878, her career had come full circle.

  FIVE YEARS AFTER Sankovskaya’s retirement from the stage, a tribute of sorts was published in the journal Otechestvennïye zapiski (Notes from the Fatherland) under the title “Recollections of a Moscow University Student.”18 The text is autobiographical, but it is drenched in mystical perfume and meanders from what is known about Sankovskaya’s career. The student in question, Nikolay Dmitriyev, exhausts superlatives in describing the effect on him of Sankovskaya’s dancing during a glum time in his life. He recalls her performance in 1837 of the lead role in La sylphide, an early staple of the repertoire first choreographed by Filippo Taglioni in Paris in 1832 for his daughter, Marie, who overcame serious physical challenges to serve as her father’s muse. La sylphide was profoundly influential, providing the archetype for, as an obvious example, the act 1 madness scene and act 2 dance-love-nexus of Giselle. At its most basic level, La sylphide concerns striving for the ideal, but it ends in grief and leaves open the question as to whether the eff ort merited the sacrifice. Marie Taglioni was in St. Petersburg performing the part of the ethereal heroine on the exact same night that Sankovskaya danced the ballet in Moscow. This was neither a scheduling coincidence nor a conflict but what Sankovskaya’s teacher, Hullen, had conceived as a duel in satin slippers.