Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Since Guerinot had a bad reputation (Verstovsky never forgot the flicking episode), he was blamed for disgracing Weiss, but Verstovsky also had extremely harsh words for Sankovskaya, whose alleged conspiracies against younger talents had exhausted his patience. “I am quite willing to accept that as long as she remains in the Moscow Theater she will constantly disrupt the order and disturb the peace with her tireless intrigues,” he fumed. “After several days discussing her benefit and all of her incessant whims all I wanted to do was collapse in bed!” The twilight of her career consisted of “making others feel sorry for her, as if she were some downtrodden waif or pig in the poke.” This was no way to treat his star dancer, Verstovsky knew, but he had had enough of Sankovskaya’s self-centeredness and the “little illnesses” that led her to petition for a reduced workload, performances of parts of ballets—a solo variation here, a pas de deux there—rather than entire works.30 She lay in her bed all covered in bouquets, claiming to be at death’s door but refusing to see a doctor.

  Verstovsky was no less disgusted with Guerinot, who had taken sick leave for—he claimed—a bad leg but found time to go to the ballet school each day to “whisper in Sankovskaya’s ear for an hour or two.”31 He wanted both of them removed, especially Guerinot, and rejoiced at the thought of a twenty-two-year-old dancer and ballet master from St. Petersburg, Irakliya Nikitin, replacing him at the Bolshoi. The news of Nikitin’s coming to Moscow “finally lets the stone roll from my heart,” he told his supervisor.32

  Weiss submitted a complaint of her own, accusing Sankovskaya of conspiring with Guerinot against her, just as she had conspired against two other dancers in fits of pique. Given that Weiss had not succeeded in mobilizing the public against her, Sankovskaya purportedly hatched a plan with her partner to humiliate her during the October 29 benefit. But the catcalls from the “450” students who had received free tickets failed to quell the enthusiasm of the general public, who called her to the stage fifteen (not ten) times after the performance of La sylphide. The apple was “huge,” Weiss recalled, “and it was thrown at me with such force that it broke into small pieces when it struck my breast, and certainly would have killed me had it hit my head.”33

  That was the end of Guerinot. Gedeonov refused to renew his contract. Sankovskaya, too, was removed from the Bolshoi, but just to give tension over the apple attack a chance to dissipate. Gedeonov dispatched her to St. Petersburg, where she performed La sylphide at the Great Stone Theater before touring abroad. She triumphed. Although Verstovsky engineered her departure, he regretted the significant loss to ticket sales and recognized that nothing could compensate for it. Sankovskaya’s Moscow fans remained feverishly committed to her while awaiting her return; they exacted revenge for her banishment by pulling pranks on those who presumed to take her place—pranks that were far more bizarre than the dancers themselves ever contrived.

  Weiss recovered from the apple attack, performing two weeks later on a program that featured Zampa, ou la fiancée de marbre to sustained applause from the auditorium and the loges. “After my performance yesterday I was received very warmly,” she informed Gedeonov with gratitude; “1,000 rubles in bouquets were tossed to me by the local nobility.”34 She remained in Moscow (there is reference to her performing in an 1846 vaudeville depicting “a day in the life” of a hapless theater prompter, Ein Tag aus dem Leben eines alten Souffleurs), and she must also have appeared in St. Petersburg. Toward the end of her run, she suffered the minor misfortune of having a scarf and gold bracelet stolen from her Moscow apartment, after a man posing as an administrator with the Imperial Theaters lured her and her mother to an official meeting. Another long investigation followed.

  The claque dreamt up their worst prank, however, against another, much more gifted dancer, Elena Andreyanova, who had the double misfortune of rivaling Sankovskaya and partnering with Nikitin, the dancer who had replaced Guerinot.

  Like Sankovskaya, Andreyanova performed in a manner evocative of Taglioni and Elssler and came into prominence at the time that those two ballerinas, the twin poles of the Romantic era in dance, visited St. Petersburg. She was nicknamed the “northern Giselle” when she toured in the role to Paris, but she suff ered terrible nerves and, according to a corpulent theater observer named Jules Janin, “trembled like a northern birch tree” when she made her first entry on the Paris stage.35 The consensus among critics was that Andreyanova had tremendous power in her limbs and had committed herself to a heroic bearing. Her chiseled facial features, thick brows, and dark eyes added to her expressiveness. Comparisons between Andreyanova and Sankovskaya inevitably emphasized the former’s boldness, resolve, and strength, and the latter’s gentleness, lightness, and smoothness in transitions. The distinction was that of the real versus the ideal, with Andreyanova revealing the effort, making her triumph over hardship explicit. Sankovskaya, in contrast, concealed it.

  In Moscow, Sankovskaya’s supporters found Andreyanova lacking in refined lyricism, the gift of being able to sing a phrase with her body. But she was celebrated in St. Petersburg and received special treatment from Gedeonov, who lavished food and wine on her. Once she became his mistress, she was protected from other officials and officers of the court and felt sure that she did not need to purchase support, as had Sankovskaya, from a claque. The old balletomanes of St. Petersburg fell hard for her, as they did for other dancers, seating her in her carriage after performances before retiring to oysters and Champagne in private dining rooms to luxuriate in unrequited love, but they were harmless compared to the zealots in Moscow.

  Aware of Gedeonov’s intimate relationship with Andreyanova, Verstovsky made sure to praise her talent to the heavens when she performed Giselle at the Bolshoi Theater at the end of 1843. He also felt obliged to ridicule Sankovskaya—and her fans—after her appearance in a vaudeville by Jean-François Bayard, as part of a December 17 benefit performance for the actor Alexander Bantïshev:

  Although M. Bantïshev’s benefit brought him only 2,000 rubles, the public, especially the upper ranks, shouted to their hearts’ content. No sooner had they caught sight of Mlle. Sankovskaya than they let out three hurrahs! If someone had been brought into the theater blindfolded and asked where he was, doubtless he would have said that he had been brought to the public square just as a high-ranking general had arrived, the hurrahing being of just such a distinction! Desiring to show that she had been moved to tears by the ovation, Mlle. Sankovskaya made of her body a pose so filthy that I would be embarrassed to name it. Then, upon making her typical coarse gestures, those that rope-climbers make as they climb up ropes, she began to dance in a manner so unseemly that I couldn’t bear to look at it, especially now that we have come to love Mlle. Andreyanova’s dances.36

  Verstovsky acknowledged that Sankovskaya was a skilled entertainer, amusing a broad swath of the public in the up-tempo, satiric grab bags of “music, singing, dancing, calembours [puns], marivaudage [affectation],” and ridiculous happenings that defined the French vaudeville and its Russian derivations.37 But, he claimed, she had a disastrous outing on December 17. Trolling for laughs, she went too lowbrow, embarrassing herself before the merchants and audiences in the crowd. Verstovsky made it seem as though she had given the vaudeville a bad reputation by crossing the thin line in her performance between delicate ballerina and bawd. He would make the same invidious comparisons to Andreyanova—and repeat his tales of conflicts with Sankovskaya over dressing rooms and costumes—in 1845 and 1848, when Andreyanova returned to the Bolshoi Theater as part of extensive tours around the Russian Empire. He was unable, however, to change the minds or tame the behavior of the ballet-goers known as “Sankovistï.”

  His decision, in February of 1845, to assign Sankovskaya additional vaudeville appearances at the Malïy Theater while Andreyanova starred at the Bolshoi backfired. There were no apples thrown or flicks administered, but Andreyanova was subject to jeering from the free-ticket-holders in the galleries. The noise threatened to drown out the legitimate ap
plause from the gentlemen in the seats and dampened the enthusiasm of the ladies, who expressed their approval through the vigorous shaking of their kerchiefs. Meanwhile, at the Malïy Theater, bouquets covered Sankovskaya’s ankles as she took her last bow. Andreyanova rightly anticipated trouble for her subsequent engagement at the Bolshoi in November of 1848 and reserved even more seats than she had in the past for her fans from St. Petersburg.

  According to the nineteenth-century journalist Mikhaíl Pïlyayev, the incident occurred during Andreyanova’s benefit performance of Paquita, a ballet best known for its Grand Pas classique, which exists in various versions in the present-day repertoire. The full-length version danced at the Bolshoi in 1848 was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Pierre-Frédéric Malavergne, tomusic by Édouard Deldevez and Ludwig Minkus. The three scenes and two acts told of the love of a Spanish gypsy for a French officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The gypsy discovers that she is of noble blood and, as the fates ordained, the cousin of the officer, which allows the two of them to get married. The pas de trois of the first act and grand classical pas of the second were created with Andreyanova’s skills in mind, sculpted, as it were, onto her body. She danced the 1847 premiere in St. Petersburg before bringing the ballet to Moscow.

  The “agent of the antic” directed against her at the Bolshoi was a tradesman who had been given a free ticket and a few rubles by a student named Pyotr Bulgakov, the leader of the Sankovskaya claque, for the favor of flinging an offending object onto the stage from a stall on the right-hand side. Pïlyayev intimates that the tradesman was a blockhead, but he had good aim and impeccable timing. A dead cat landed at Andreyanova’s feet at the end of the pas de trois. The cat had a note pinned to its tail, or to a ribbon attached to its tail—the anecdote is fuzzy on this point—that read “première danseuse étoile.”

  The French dancer in the role of the French officer, Frederic Montessu, picked up the feline and, cursing at the audience, sent it sailing into the wings. Andreyanova shielded her face in horror; “it was evident from the convulsing of her chest and shoulders that she was in tears,” Pïlyayev recalls. Confusion reigned. The entire cast filled the stage; noblemen shouted, banging the feet and arms of their chairs; noble ladies waved kerchiefs with even more vigor. Petals rained down on the star as the sound of her sobs reached the loges. The police arrived and nabbed the culprit. The performance continued, but Andreyanova refused to dance; an alternate took her part. Still, she was thrice summoned for a curtain call by the public.38 For Andreyanova’s sake, Bulgakov was banished from Moscow and police placed at the front of the stage for her subsequent appearances, after which, as Petipa relates, “the public literally overwhelmed her with flowers and valuable gifts.”39

  More is known about the scandals than the glories of the Moscow stage, because the scandals generated heaps of documents, and the glories, at least at this point in time, inspired nothing more specific than poetic tributes, bouquets of words: “Sankovskaya in Sylphide / Is so sweet / Lord forgive the sins / That have been committed.”40 She was the most radiant figure in recollections of ballet of the period, and as the case of the altogether unknown teenage dancer Avdotya Arshinina demonstrates, the celebrated performers faced many fewer hardships, and many fewer threats to their well-being than the dancers in the shadows, whether in Russia, Europe, or America. Arshinina doubtless lacked Sankovskaya’s skills and never had a chance of becoming a dancer of the first rank, but the sins committed against her put all of the tales of kicks in the shin, apples, dead cats, and the antics of the Sankovistï into the ghastliest of contexts. Those were elite-dancer problems.

  On January 5, 1847, Arshinina was dumped at the door of a hospital experiencing “fits of madness” and “constant delirium.”41 Pale and emaciated, she had severe injuries on her head and body as well as bruised, infected, “blackened” genitalia.42 The crime was the talk of the town and the subject of discussion in legal circles for years. It exposed a wretched economy wherein lesser-skilled dancers were promised access, through their art, to aristocratic circles, only to become sex slaves. Bribes were essential to the enterprise, along with drugs, masquerades, and small black masks.

  The first person to be arrested in connection with the assault was Arshinina’s own father, a mediocre fiddler on the books of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. He had been living in a pitiful state, the police reported, with his three young daughters in a cold, damp apartment, unable to care for them after his wife’s death, with no money for food or clothing. Desperate, he “sold” Arshinina, his oldest daughter, to a “master,” Prince Boris Cherkassky, for 10,000 rubles.43 Before taking formal possession of her, Cherkassky showered her with gifts: enamel earrings with diamonds, a gold bracelet, a cloak of fox fur with sable collar, indoor silk fabrics, sweets, and more than 2,175 in rubles that Arshinina asked a sister to hide away for her. Her father was bribed into the sale with a coat and a silver snuff box. The actor who introduced Arshinina to the prince was paid, along with the proxies who purchased sedatives for the prince at pharmacies on Arbat Street.

  The events leading up to the crime were pieced together from police interrogations conducted at all hours of the day and night. Essential information came from the prince’s custodian, who revealed that, on New Year’s Eve of 1846, Cherkassky and Arshinina attended a masquerade at the Bolshoi. Hidden behind a mask, Arshinina danced and made the rounds of the theater on the arms of several noblemen until the stroke of midnight, at which time she was returned to Cherkassky. Three of the people who had promenaded with her—a college registrar, a teacher, and a merchant—joined her and the prince at his home. They dined and drank vodka and Champagne. The glass given to Arshinina contained a sedative. She was raped, first by the prince and then, after the prince had fallen asleep, by the others. Arshinina returned to consciousness during the assault and managed to tear herself free. She ran into the yard wearing just a blouse but was caught and dragged back inside. The next morning she was taken to her father’s apartment, bloodied and unresponsive. He and the prince’s physician tried to restore her health before taking her to the hospital. The evidence of the violence she had suffered—her clothes and the bottle containing the sedative—was burned in a stove. The bottle shattered; the chemical compound it contained turned the flames different colors.

  The head physician of the hospital noted her “loss of innocence” and “highly morbid condition.”44 Cherkassky rejected Arshinina’s accusation that he had forced himself upon her in a demonstration of “extreme passion”—despite the fact that, from her bed in the hospital, she was heard crying out “Prince! Prince! What are you doing to me! Have you no fear of God!” and “Father, why have you ruined me?”45 Before her father was arrested, he arranged (through Verstovsky) to see her in the hospital, where he heard her shrieking, “Why is this happening to me?” among other incomprehensible ravings.46 She died of her injuries thirteen days after arriving in the hospital.

  Fearing prison less than the humiliation of a conviction, Cherkassky tried to place the blame on Arshinina herself. He first attributed the inflammation in her lower abdomen to improper menstrual hygiene, then to excessive horseback riding, and, even more feebly, to dehydration caused by dancing. Cherkassky’s liaison with Arshinina had been consensual, he argued, as had been his relationships with other Imperial Theater dancers. He paid them not for the favor of sex but out of pity for their poverty.

  The case took another bizarre turn when Cherkassky accused an interrogator of abusing his power by pulling on his beard, but the senior medical officer in the case found the prince’s facial hair to have “perfect integrity.”47 Cherkassky also drew attention to the “magnitude” of his member; the medical officer concluded it was not as huge as he had boasted.48 The prince sat in custody for months but was not, in the end, convicted, owing to trivial discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts. Arshinina’s father was sentenced to prison in Siberia for two years and banished from Moscow.

  SANKOVSKAYA HEARD ABOUT the crime
, as did everyone in the Moscow Imperial Theaters. The director noted the date of Arshinina’s death in a report sent to the court in St. Petersburg, adding the hope that she might rest in peace. The crime, however, belonged to the realm of the dispensable underclasses, not to the court. Fyodor Dostoyevsky made this realm the subject of his novels, raging against its cosmic injustices and commonplace brutalities. Sankovskaya and her rivals escaped it, both onstage and off.

  Her world was one in which, according to a historical meditation published in the second-to-last year of Soviet power, “actors, singers, dancers, the professoriate, students, and literati resembled a tight-knit family of distant lineage—one that preserved, before it began to die, the antiquated psychology native to the centuries-old Russian capital.”49 The sentiment is appealing, making the Romantic era in Russia less lonely for great, elite artists than the Romantic era in France and Germany. But it cannot compensate for the lack of data about Sankovskaya’s achievement, the fact that most of the records of her career went up in flames. The reviews are inspired but insubstantial, lacking specifics. There is no known information about what her parents did, whether she got married, the nature of her foreign appearances, her teaching and training regimen, and what she did in her free time. Perhaps the lack of day-to-day details is justified. Perhaps little is known about her existence because there is in fact little to know, her life and art having been one.