Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Sankovskaya triumphed—at least according to Dmitriyev. In his recollections, he arrives at the Bolshoi in a foul mood, burdened, like Goethe’s Werther, by suicidal thoughts caused by boredom, loneliness, and the harsh autumn frost. He seeks distraction, but there is no Academy of the Arts in Moscow for entertaining edification, no Hermitage. For “aesthetic feeling,” he has recourse to the theater alone. His spirits sink further when he realizes that the program for the evening is neither a play nor an opera but a benefit for a ballerina. There is no point in returning to the “dreariness,” “grief,” his neighbor’s “stupid mug,” and the “inescapable samovar” of his room, so he surrenders the seven rubles in his pocket, a colossal sum, for a ticket. The crowds in the side rooms of the theater beam obtuse happiness, and he grinds himself into his seat thinking that they have all been duped. The orchestra interrupts his recollection of Lermontov’s verses on the torments of ignorance.

  And then he sees her. The curtain rises to reveal a house in a mythical elsewhere (Scotland) and a man flopped in an armchair, napping, or in Dmitriyev’s description, tugged to sleep by forces beyond his control. Sankovskaya comes into view in a window above the stage and then glides down over the railing of a ladder to the floor, her skin and tulle white as the moonlight. She kneels before the armchair and then, again in Dmitriyev’s description, rises to dance for the man, expressing her unreserved willingness to submit to his desire. Then she disappears, as ungraspable as “air’s pure translucence.”

  The man in the chair, James, is soon to be wed, but he is dissatisfied with his intended bride, Effie, a conservative, salt-of-the-earth type. He seeks the escape symbolized by the sylph, the enchanting other, and falls in love with her. Dmitriyev too became smitten with Sankovskaya, waiting for her to return to the stage with his heart stopped and then, when she did, watching her skim across the floor, rapt. He grew aware of the interloping temporalities, the places where the music ends but the dancer continues her delicate runs, and appreciated the special visual effects: the sylph’s ascent into the ether with her partner at the end of the first act, and her disappearance through a trapdoor in the second. Nothing is said of the tragic ending of the ballet, when James, desperate to possess the sylph, flees his bride for the forest (the realm, in the Moscow staging, of benign witches illuminated by street lamps). There in the woods James grasps the sylph, trapping her in his cloak. She loses her wings, the source of her power, and dies. A writer for the fashion journal Galatea provides the detail Dmitriyev excluded: “The expression on her face as she battled death was uncommonly aff ecting.”19

  Beyond noting the perspiration that accumulated on Sankovskaya’s body like “spring dew,” Dmitriyev revealed little about the specifics of her dancing: how high Sankovskaya jumped, how often she rose up en pointe, whether or not she soared above the stage with wire supports, the thickness of the leather on the heels of her slippers. The details were apparently incidental to the spell that she cast on him and his fellow students and professors.

  La sylphide was the centerpiece of Sankovskaya’s career, but Dmitriyev believed that her dancing was most true to herself in the Ballet of the Nuns scene from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s supernatural opera, Robert le diable (1831). The scene was made famous in Paris by Marie Taglioni, who on at least three occasions took the lead role in a shocking spectacle: The ghost of the abbess Helena (Taglioni) leads her sisters, also risen from the grave, in a morbid seduction ritual. The abbess comes not from some benign spiritual beyond but from the lower depths of hell. She and her sisters have been condemned to the underworld for succumbing to unclean thoughts and are forced forever to do the bidding of the Evil One. The opera’s protagonist, Robert, is lured into their lair in search of the magic branch that will allow him to reclaim his true love. He resists the necrophilic temptations and, through the intervention of his angelic half-sister, survives Taglioni’s—and Sankovskaya’s—balletic night of horrors.

  In Paris in 1831, the ballet was cast in an eerie green light produced by a long row of gas jets lit one by one by an attendant. The garments worn by the dancers, catching the light, made strange shapes. The effect was dangerous (Taglioni’s pupil Emma Livry died in horrible fashion when her skirt brushed up against a gas jet on the stage) but alluring, transforming the Ballet of the Nuns into an etheric bacchanale. On the ghost abbess Helena’s cue, the ghost nuns remove their habits to reveal, in the ethereal moonlight, translucent tulle and the pale skin beneath it. Edgar Degas immortalized the scene in 1876 in an impressionistic painting. The ghost nuns are seen processing to the front of the stage, swooning and flopping onto their knees in supplication. A reviewer for the Parisian Journal des débats described the wraiths dropping “their veils and their long habits, revealing only their light ballet tunics. Each of them drinks deeply of Cyprus wine or Val de Pegnas to refresh her mouth in which spiders have perhaps been spinning their webs; this gives them the courage to dance, and here they are spinning like tops, dancing rounds and the farandole, and dispensing themselves like women possessed.”20 The spectacle also possessed Dmitriyev, though his description does not come from an actual gaslit performance of the Ballet of the Nuns in Moscow; at the time of his writing, in 1859, the technology had not yet been installed in the Bolshoi. The nuns he saw would have moved in dimness. Dmitriyev insists, against the historical record, that Sankovskaya surpassed Taglioni in the role of the ghost abbess and that she calibrated it perfectly, exposing the dangers of her art, its seductive Satanism.

  Dmitriyev was sufficiently captivated by Sankovskaya to turn up night after night at the theater hoping to see her perform again, but she never did. That led him to conclude she had left for Paris, again, or London, or had perhaps even suffered the bittersweet fate of the sylph. His account is emblematic of the love she received from liberal Moscow students, who crowned her their own personal tsarina, while also attesting to the reverence with which critics of the period described each step and gesture in her embodiments of Esmeralda, Giselle, and Paquita. Certain sensational details are omitted from his tribute, including the evening when the police were called to the Bolshoi to restore order after the ovation from the fawning students threatened to exceed acceptable decibel levels—the theater being no place for mass demonstrations. The noise ordinance came directly from Tsar Nicholas I, who had quashed the uprising that followed his ascension to the throne, in December of 1825, and thereafter maintained order in the empire through callous means. His was a rule of censorship, intolerance, and the persecution of the foreign, the nonconforming outsider. Sankovskaya, the made-in-Russia emblem of spiritual freedom, was, for the social class most ground down, a light in the dark.

  The adoration of youthful audiences, both for Sankovskaya the great artist and Sankovskaya the perspiring human being behind the pirouettes, brought the French phenomenon of the claque (taken from the French word for clapping) to Moscow. Her devotees—her claque—could be counted on to applaud, cheer, and stomp their feet at the end of intricate sequences, giving her a moment to regain her balance and sneak in a breath. The rest of the audience sometimes followed their example, making the success of the evening so resounding that no critic could quibble. In Paris, the claque could support or sabotage a performance, by talking or hacking or clapping off-beat, if the dancer fell out of favor with the claque or refused to provide free passes to the performance. There is no evidence to suggest that Sankovskaya ever offended her fans; their adoration lasted from 1836, when she made her debut, to 1854, when she left the stage.

  INDEED HER FANS remained so overcommitted to her as to make the Bolshoi stage perilous for actual or potential rivals, and Sankovskaya was spared the indignities suffered by lesser lights. One of them was her own sister, the lesser-known Alexandra, who had a modest career in Romantic roles, together with folk fare and masquerades. But during her years at the Imperial Theater College and on the Bolshoi Theater stage, Alexandra—billed as Sankovskaya II—was bullied for her imperfections at the barre and, once to great ala
rm, abused in front of the entire theater.

  The villain was the thirty-four-year-old ballet master Théodore Guerinot, a native of rural France who had danced in St. Petersburg for four years before accepting a renewable three-year position in Moscow in the fall of 1838. He specialized in mime and was touted for superb acting, his facial mannerisms extolled as “polysyllabic.”21 His behavior behind the scenes, however, lacked such nuance. He was, frankly, a cad. Guerinot enjoyed betraying his lover, the French dancer Laura Peysar, sometimes feigning innocence when caught in the act and at other times placing the blame on whatever insidious seductress had forced herself upon him that evening. Peysar exorcised her personal anguish by literally throwing herself into her art. She took on dangerous roles requiring elaborate stunts and almost killed herself when a boom holding her above the stage collapsed. She broke her leg in the fall. Her career ended, and Guerinot left town.

  His debut in Moscow included the saltarello from the second act of the popular comic opera Zampa, ou la fiancée de marbre (Zampa, or the marble bride). Though the saltarello has benign rustic Italian origins, Guerinot and his onstage partner, Alexandra Voronina-Ivanova, made the quick triple-meter steps seem like devil’s work. He was hailed by an anonymous reviewer in Moskovskiye vedomosti for performing as though each phrase was an on-the-spot, in-the-moment invention. Guerinot provided “excitement in the randomness” of the phrases, “giving the dance a new look each time … You begin to think, in truth, that he is dancing on impulse, that each rapid change in his movement is the product of a rush of imagination, rather than being a requirement of this inventive dance.”22 After making this memorable first impression, Guerinot was appointed “ballet master and first dancer of mime” at the Bolshoi Theater in October of 1838.23

  In Moscow he worked alongside, and then replaced, the Napoleon-era ballet master and pedagogue Adam Glushkovsky, who chose to retire from his position at the same time as Sankovskaya’s mentor, Félicité Hullen. Guerinot brought French ballets from St. Petersburg to Moscow and, for 17,000 rubles a year, masculinized them, making the roles of the men as compelling as those of the women. His productions at the Bolshoi included La fille du Danube (The daughter of the Danube), which Filippo Taglioni had choreographed for his daughter, Marie, as well as the slave-girl drama Le corsaire and Le diable boiteux (The devil on two sticks), whose Paris premiere featured Fanny Elssler in a Spanish castanet dance called the cachucha. Guerinot partnered with Ekaterina Sankovskaya in several ballets, and both of them were lauded in the press for their performances, though the critics in question lamented the underbudgeted, dreadful-looking sets and costumes in the Moscow version of La sylphide, as opposed to the lavish Taglioni version in St. Petersburg. Guerinot was as expressive and evocative in his mime, demonstrating that “male dancing can be significant in its own right.” Sankovskaya was “gentle” and, despite the disappointing staging, the ideal of grace. She might not have “floated through the air” and “glided through the flowers” as captivatingly as Taglioni, and her white tunic and wreath might have been a bore, but in the end she received five curtain calls—the same as Taglioni.24 And Sankovskaya was the better actress of the two dancers.

  Trouble for Guerinot came in 1842 with a staging of Rossini’s opera William Tell, which has dancing in the third act. Since the opera concerns a rebellion against a repressive regime, in this case Austrian, the Censorship Committee of the Ministry of Education delayed approving it for production, having detected hints of revolution. To reach the stage, the opera had to be renamed Charles the Bold and the libretto reworked to enhance its patriotic as opposed to insurrectionist elements. The flash point, both onstage and off, was an aggressive pas de trois performed by Guerinot and the two Sankovskaya sisters. As soon as the dance ended, Alexandra ran off, her bladder full. She did not hear the call back to the stage and arrived late for her bow. She was supposed to enter the stage ahead of Guerinot and her sister, whose ranks exceeded hers, but since she was slow getting back, the order had to be reversed. Guerinot lost his temper. He went into the wings, grabbing Alexandra by the arm, and dragged her onto the stage. She stumbled and had to pull herself free to keep from falling. Backstage, he slapped and kicked her in front of the chorus. She fainted and took to bed for six days.

  Alexandra’s account of the attack, which she turned into an official complaint against Guerinot, prompted an investigation and interviews with audience and staff members who had witnessed the incident or heard about it. The slap was described as but a flick in the comically muddled recollection of a certain Captain Lieutenant Mukhin, who recalled Guerinot “lifting his hand and flicking her on the left cheek right next to her eye.” Her “astonished and enraged visage” prompted him to conclude “that she had indeed been affected by the flicking.” But, he mused,

  whether or not M. Guerinot kicked her in the shins, or she him, as M. Guerinot testifies, that I did not see, for I was looking above their legs. Yet, in all likelihood, and given that she was ahead of him, she would have had to direct her kick behind her to M. Guerinot. Still, I cannot say anything definitive about this. Upon returning backstage, I, as a person external to the proceedings and having no obligation to say anything, refrained from doing so until the Repertoire Inspector, Court Counselor Verstovsky, arrived, declaring: “M. Guerinot has quarreled with Mlle. Sankovskaya; she has called him a swine.” To which I, as an eyewitness to the event, deemed myself obliged to rejoin immediately: “And so is she justified, for M. Guerinot flicked her.”25

  The case went to St. Petersburg for a ruling. Guerinot was fined two weeks’ pay by the minister of the court for his behavior—an indication, perhaps, that such incidents were somewhat routine. He was also made to apologize to his victim, which he did to her satisfaction, and advised that further incidents might lead to the termination of his employment. That the Russian word for “kick” is spelled with a soft sign in the Moscow records of the assault but without a soft sign in the St. Petersburg records—pinka instead of pin’ka—might seem a trifling detail, but it proves telling. People spoke differently in the two cities. Muscovites retained a domestic dialect that the court had abandoned; the Russian language was spoken more gently in Moscow than in the capital. But the art had a harder edge.

  GUERINOT’S REPUTATION DETERIORATED. He was disparaged by the director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Verstovsky, who joked in a letter to his supervisor in St. Petersburg that “no matter how much one tries to teach Guerinot—to behave himself—he never ceases being a scoundrel.”26

  His swan-song benefit was on October 29, 1845; next came the expiration of his contract and what decorum obliged those in the know to call “unpleasantness.” The unpleasantness, however, extended beyond Sankovskaya’s sister to another dancer, Luisa Weiss, whose beauty helped to compensate for her technical limitations. Weiss had begun her career in Darmstadt, Germany, dancing in the theater built by the grand duke of Hesse, and then relocated to London, where she performed, depending on the source, either to great acclaim or partial success. Prince Alexander Nikolayevich (the future Tsar Alexander II) had a strong connection to Darmstadt, having married Princess Marie of Hesse in St. Petersburg in 1841. He invited Weiss to Russia and showed an intense interest in her performances at the Bolshoi—so intense, in fact, as to suggest that the dancer from Darmstadt was his mistress. Gedeonov also expressed interest in her, editing the letters that she wrote to the Moscow Imperial Theaters in hopes of a more lucrative contract. Weiss’s ties to the court, and the special treatment she received, including imported footwear and payment in advance for her performances, made her a subject of gossip, as did her falling-out with Sankovskaya. The tattle within the theater was that Sankovskaya considered Weiss a threat and was conspiring with Guerinot to bring her down.

  As part of the October 29, 1845, benefit for Guerinot, Weiss performed La sylphide, to constant, loud applause from most of the audience, the exception being Sankovskaya’s claque, who tried to drown out the clapping with catcalls. There w
ere several curtain calls—ten according to one count, fifteen in another. During the last of them, an apple was thrown at Weiss from the loges, plopping unceremoniously down at her feet.

  The next day, Verstovsky reported the incident in lavish detail to Gedeonov, noting that the apple toss was unprecedented and that he had ordered an investigation above and beyond what the officer on duty in the theater reported. Weiss, he added, refused to dance again at the Bolshoi, and her mother and brother, who lived with her in Moscow, were very upset. Thus was compromised his attempt to “counterbalance public opinion in relation to Mlle. Sankovskaya, who is an obvious attraction for the ballet but cannot always be relied upon by the directorate due to poor health.”27

  Since Prince Alexander was Weiss’s benefactor and would hear about the incident from her, Gedeonov decided that he needed to get involved. He wrote a letter to the prince explaining what had happened in language suitable for a child, first mentioning that, in recent times, audiences had engaged in the commendable custom of gently lobbing bouquets of flowers onto the stage, and that, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, audiences tended to behave themselves. Though the apple had caused no damage, he stressed the need to find the person who threw it. Prince Alexander took the matter seriously, appointing a special officer to investigate on his behalf.

  Subsequently Gedeonov reported that Guerinot had distributed a large number of free tickets to students, including those of the fencing instructor in the theater. He also learned that, on the morning of October 30, a day after the apple toss, Guerinot was overheard asking one of the students whether the performance, including the final curtain call, had gone according to plan. The silliness of the drama escalated when Verstovsky decided to get involved. He interviewed everyone who might have had anything to do with the incident and then expressed frustration at the discrepancies in their accounts. One eyewitness claimed that Weiss had encountered the apple after her third curtain call, not her tenth, and that it was half eaten, chewed, in fact, right down to the core. Surviving chunks of apple served as evidence to prove that it had actually posed no threat to Weiss’s safety. Verstovsky dismissed this account as biased, coming from a dancer who “placed Mlle. Sankovskaya incomparably higher than Mlle. Weiss in all respects.”28 His investigation revealed, even less helpfully, that the apple had been thrown from a loge registered under the alias Zolotov. “A person by that name does in fact exist,” Verstovsky explained to Gedeonov, but he was a deeply spiritual man, “an Old Believer from the other side of the Moscow River, and does not attend the theater.”29 Someone else asserted that the apple had been thrown after most of the audience had departed, as the chandelier was being raised. But the chandelier, Verstovsky replied, was fixed in place.