Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  The ballet master Alexei Bogdanov might have lacked Petipa’s brilliance, but he possessed a certain ribald showmanship, as did his immediate successors: the Spanish ballet master José Méndez, who devised the fashionable exotic ballet-féerie India, and Ivan Clustine, who invented the unfashionable exotic ballet Stars (Zvyozdï), to a scenario by the Bolshoi Theater machinist Valts. Clustine was a decorous individual who presented himself somewhat above his merit; he referred to himself in his dealings with the kontora not as an artist with the theater but as one of its most beautiful attractions.128 As a reflection of his refined sensibilities, his ballet was set during the time of Louis XIV and relied on old-fashioned group dances. Clustine took the lead role, that of a grandee who abandons the beautiful Claremonde (danced by Giuri) upon falling in love with the Morning Star, Venus (danced by Roslavleva). Pantomime interrupts the reveries: the grandee is challenged to a duel by Claremonde’s brother, then wounded, and then returned to his forgiving bride.

  Pchelnikov signed the contracts for these performances before leaving the Bolshoi Theater to become a censor in the private theaters. His successor as director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Telyakovsky, discovered a “peaceful and calm” but ultimately boring “patriarchal ambiance” in the Bolshoi Ballet at the time of his appointment. “There was no excitement, no rows or incidents, people did not even fight hard for certain positions in the company since the members of the troupe were kind, charming and modest, and significantly, in Moscow, the St. Petersburg breed of loud and expansive balletomanes was unknown.”129 Telyakovsky stirred things up in Moscow by appointing a young ballet master of promise to the Bolshoi, Alexander Gorsky. In so doing, he secured the future of the Bolshoi Ballet—and thus an essential tradition and repertoire.

  BORN IN 1871, GORSKY was destined for a life no longer than Tchaikovsky’s. He was frail and often infirm as a child. When he was eight years old, his father, a bookkeeper, enrolled him in the Commercial School in St. Petersburg, but his sister’s success as a student at the St. Petersburg Ballet School led her brother to audition and enroll. Gorsky’s father paid for his tuition the first year, after which the aspiring dancer received a scholarship on merit. His first trip to Moscow came in 1896, where he joined the lovelorn Kshesinskaya on the stage to celebrate the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. He appeared as a piece of bronze, one of the elements doing battle on behalf of the Genie of the Earth against the King of the Corals and the forces of the sea. On June 1, 1889, Petipa adopted Gorsky into the corps de ballet at the Mariyinsky, where he danced as Prince Fortuné in The Sleeping Beauty and in the Chinese dance of The Nutcracker. Through Petipa, he fell into the circle of Vladimir Stepanov, inventor of a choreographic notation system codified in L’alphabet des mouvements du corps humain (Alphabet of movements of the human body, 1892). In 1896, Gorsky used the Stepanov system to notate Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty. Since he received no financial support from the Imperial Theaters for the project, he had to pay his assistants out of pocket. He then used the notation during the nine days and seventeen rehearsals it took him to stage the ballet at the Bolshoi in 1898. There were problems, but his effort flabbergasted the ballet master at the time, Clustine, and Gorsky declined an invitation to become first soloist at the Mariyinsky in order to serve as Bolshoi régisseur.

  He had little experience as a choreographer and no real interest in being one until he began to consort with a group of artists—furniture and ceramics makers, silk weavers, easel painters, and the writer Chekhov—who frequented the estate of the industrialist and arts enthusiast Savva Mamontov. In time, they were joined even by an archeologist, and together developed a neonationalist, folk-fantastic style that fueled Gorsky’s creative imagination. He began to search for a more Muscovite ballet aesthetic, and found it in the original Bolshoi Theater version of Don Quixote from 1869. There the gap between how Russian peasants and French courtiers danced was narrowed. Gorsky staged a naturalistic version of Don Quixote at the Bolshoi Theater on December 6, 1900.

  The props for Gorsky’s Don Quixote came from St. Petersburg, and dozens of pages of official paper were devoted to the transport of the reservoirs for the fountain, arrows, quivers, the spider, the black iron shield, and the essential bridle and saddle for the donkey/horse. The tutus also came from St. Petersburg, though the dancers in Moscow, possessing a slightly different choreographic vocabulary, referred to them not as tyuniki but as pachki. The Bolshoi sets were altogether different, however, from those used in the north. The Mamontov-sponsored designers Alexander Golovin and Konstanin Korovin saturated the Bolshoi stage with color, transporting the title character past his old jokes and creaky gestures into a fresher realm of pastel green, blue, and pink. Gorsky sought a real-life look and feel, with the actions motivated by dramatic concerns instead of being fitted into geometrical shapes, the ideal under Petipa in his dotage, if not his youth. The new Don Quixote privileged crowd scenes, hubbub, over tight-knit ensembles. The standard Petipa formula remained in place: “plot in the first act, the vision scene for the female corps de ballet and soloists—where the men trespass only in their dreams—and, finally, a marriage celebration.”130 But in Gorsky’s hands, as in those of his twentieth-century successors at the Bolshoi, Moscow’s balletic “exuberance” supplanted St. Petersburg’s balletic “academicism.”131

  The production sparked a heated debate in the press and sent Petipa, the original choreographer, into hysterics. (Gorsky is one of the “ignoramuses” referred to in Petipa’s memoirs.) This Don Quixote offended, and the ancien régime fought back in the pages of Peterburgskaya gazeta, the mouthpiece of Petipa’s balletomane supporters. Gorsky was accused of sacrificing dance to the other arts and dogged with accusations of plagiarism—“dirty hands”—and bad taste in the changes he imposed on the music. He was called a “decadent” and a “Moscow schismatic” who took his best ideas from vaudevilles and singing cafés (cafés chantant).132 Elsewhere, he was told that he had “destroyed the centuries-old traditions of the art of ballet,” “an art no less ancient than love.” To this, he responded that “we know nothing about ancient dances, excluding the dozen or so wondrous poses on which our art was built—by us.”133

  Although the drubbing in the press rattled him, it did not cause him to deviate from the course he had set. His style attracted a ballet-averse public to the Bolshoi; the theater went from being typically half full or less to sold-out. Beyond attracting audiences, Don Quixote earned Gorsky critical support among the younger dancers of the Bolshoi, whom he lectured in fatherly fashion on his vision for the free-flowing future of ballet as represented by the enduringly popular variation that he created for Kitri and her fluttering fan in the final act.

  In 1901, Gorsky staged Swan Lake, preserving much of Petipa and Ivanov’s version while imposing his own thoughts. It would change further, both inside and outside of Russia, sometimes owing to budget problems or an acute shortage of swans or swan costumes, at other times to more serious political considerations. The Soviets abolished both the mysticism of the ballet and its tragic ending. A close with a silver lining was devised, then taken out, then put back in. The ballet provided rich material for feminist critiques and Freudian analysis, but it has also been taken to be a parable about ballet itself—the softness of its materials, its abused, fragile performers, the fact that the ballerina dies if she fails to break free, if she adheres to the rhythms of the score rather than generating her own, if she repeats phrases rather than developing them. Ballet serves to define the beautiful, the youthful, and the divine and so suffers more than the other arts from the delusion of an original ideal, the contention that the first version, however audiences may have reacted to it, must be the best.

  There are no definable versions, however, and no ideal to be found, much less preserved. Certainly the merits of Swan Lake cannot be based on the awkward Reisinger-Tchaikovsky collaboration of 1877. The ballet became famous only after several transpositions: first at the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariyinsky i
n St. Petersburg, then everywhere abroad. That which goes by the title Swan Lake in the world’s theaters is an estranged and abstracted version of what was imagined by Petipa and Ivanov and Gorsky; Tchaikovsky and Minkus and Drigo; Karpakova, Sobeshchanskaya, Legnani, and Kshesinskaya. The dancers retired as the heroines of an art that sought their destruction, one that requires new bodies in order to perpetuate itself.

  Gorsky’s efforts to transform the art exacerbated the anemia, attacks of nerves, and heart problems that had plagued him since childhood. He continued to emphasize naturalism—in one instance swapping out tutus and pointe shoes for robes and sandals. His less fanciful, more muscular style came to define the dancing at the Bolshoi, which finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, stood as a solid theater with a notable past and promising future. The series of coronations—three within forty years—had put Moscow and the Bolshoi in the spotlight as the city and the stage hosted nobility from St. Petersburg and around the world. The theater itself now had actual spotlights, its lighting and equipment having been modernized along with the ballet technique and training. Some of the greatest dancers and dances of the century were nurtured at the Bolshoi in the years after 1883, when it was spared from being shuttered. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Bolshoi could lay just claim to its own tradition, apart from St. Petersburg and from Europe.

  When Petipa died in 1910, Gorsky became the most important choreographer in Russia. He had already outgrown the Stepanov system of dance notation as a way of recording and preserving movement. The musical symbols at its basis proved inadequate for denoting physical space. As an alternative, Gorsky began to photograph his dancers for the purpose of assessing precision in their poses. His interest in the camera became an obsession as he filled an album with “choreographic photo-etudes.” He departed from the “neutral” photographic conventions of the day by poeticizing facial expressions in subtle interplays of light, in luminous impressions.134 The images are blurred, ghostly, preserving the traces of ephemeral gestures.

  Gorsky became the most important choreographer in imperial Russia, tsarist Russia. There followed the Revolution of 1917. The choreographer to whom he is most often (and invidiously) compared, Michel Fokine, left his home base in St. Petersburg to join the Ballets Russes in Paris. One of the grandchildren of the Bolshoi Theater architect Alberto Cavos, Alexandre Benois, provided designs and costumes for the expat Paris troupe. Gorsky traveled too, but remained attached to Moscow. He died, bearded and ragged, in a sanatorium in 1924. He is remembered less as a successful reformer than as an icon of the glorious Bolshoi Theater—as newly imagined by the Soviets.

  . 5 .

  AFTER THE BOLSHEVIKS

  THREE YEARS INTO World War I, the Russian Empire collapsed. It would be reconstituted under the control of the Soviets rather than the emperors and empresses of the House of Romanov. Tsar Nicholas II surrendered power on March 2, 1917, under pressure from the people as well as his advisers. His abdication came after a decade of strikes in the cities, havoc throughout the countryside, disasters on land and sea (in the Russo-Japanese War), shortages of food and fuel, and a program of anti-Jewish pogroms. In 1905, the tsar had reluctantly decreed a parliament into existence, but the Duma, as it was known, did nothing to quell the unrest. Marius Petipa recalled the most ominous of the pre-1917 revolts, Bloody Sunday, in his memoirs, complaining, in declining health, about the inconveniences it caused.1 The Russian Revolution that followed was, in truth, a coup d’état in two phases: The first took place from February 23 to 27, 1917, and led to the establishment of an ineffective, unelected provisional government; the second, on October 25 and 26, 1917, brought to power a band of socialist zealots under the spell of Vladimir Lenin, an anti-tsarist political activist from the city of Simbirsk, on the Volga River. (His real surname was Ulyanov, and Simbirsk would one day be called Ulyanovsk. He adopted “Lenin” as his insurrectionist moniker after spending time in a tsarist prison on the Lena River.) Lenin served as the ideological arbiter of the hardline Bolshevik (meaning majority) faction of the Russian Socialist-Democratic Labor Party. His group was fanatical. In its version of communism, there was to be no intermediate, bourgeois phase in the transformation of Russia into a socialist state. Lenin’s pseudo-Marxist political posturing had no practical basis. It was a utopian fantasy, and like all such imaginings, destined for tragedy. He and his followers clung to a belief in the inevitable, dialectical-materialist triumph of socialism over all other forms of political thought while promising justice to the presumed victims of the rotten, decadent, autocratic system.

  The Great War, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the formation of a provisional government, the rise of regional socialist parties, divisions among the Bolsheviks, their antipodal Mensheviks, and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries between them—together, these forces spread chaos across the Russian Empire. Lenin could not rein in what he had unleashed but managed to exploit the power vacuum to his advantage. Having sown disorder, he and his accomplices presented themselves as the sole possible solution. Lenin justified his monstrous achievement with impressive rhetoric, but when words failed and he faced being shunted aside or strung up, he turned ruthless, ordering his agents to liquidate real and imagined counterrevolutionaries along with the anarchists, including released prisoners, who had occupied Moscow’s great houses during the tumult. “The filth was indescribable,” a British agent, Bruce Lockhart, said of one of the mansions after the routing of a group of anarchists, a political force much feared by Lenin. “Broken bottles littered the floors, the magnificent ceilings were perforated with bullet-holes. Wine stains and human excrement blotched the Aubusson carpets. Priceless pictures had been slashed to strips.” The anarchists had been hosting an orgy, Lockhart concluded, unpoetically. “The long table which had supported the feast had been overturned, and broken plates, glasses, champagne bottles, made unsavoury islands in a pool of blood and spilt wine. On the floor lay a young woman, face downwards,” a “prostitutka” with a bullet hole in her neck.2

  One man took to the task of liquidating the opposition with exceptional ruthlessness. Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jugashvili, a Georgian-born disciple of Marxist-Leninist politics who spent his boyhood in religious schools and his youth in tsarist prison, is better known by his adopted moniker, Joseph Stalin.

  After the Russian Empire had unraveled at the edges and collapsed at the center, Lenin became its leader. The country lay in ruin. Factories and farms ceased operation in 1917. The banks failed, along with the transport system. Towns and cities lost contact with one another. Out of desperation, Lenin encouraged the surrender of Russian territory to the Germans, French, and British, then simply hoped for their eventual, exhausted withdrawal. But the end of the Great War coincided with the start of a civil war that pitted, generally and reductively speaking, anti-Bolshevik “Whites” against pro-Bolshevik “Reds.” (The color scheme refers to the Jacobins and the Socialists in the French Revolution.) The essential function of Lenin’s barely functioning government was to confiscate fuel and food supplies from foreign armies and the anti-Bolsheviks. Yet soon it began to turn against its own. The epithet “enemies of the people” was applied to those who resisted sacrificing their belongings, properties, and lives to the regime.

  Under the threat of a German invasion of Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed during the First World War) in March of 1918, Lenin, his wife, his guard, and his inner Bolshevik circle relocated to Moscow. Street fighting, shortages, and unusual cold had reduced life in the city to survival. Yet for political and practical reasons, Moscow became the capital of Soviet Russia and, after 1922, of the Soviet Union. (The term “Soviet” derives from a word for council, as in the councils of workers and soldiers that came into being in the run-up to the revolution and had undergirded the provisional government after the abdication of the tsar. Lenin brought these groups into his fold under the slogan “all power to the Soviets.”) The Bolsheviks took over the gilded offices and apartments of the Kremlin,
which a pro-Bolshevik militia had confiscated in November 1917 from imperial government officials. They also crowded into the opulent Metropole and National Hotels as well as the sequestered mansions of noblemen. The Cheka, the all-powerful political police established by Lenin in December of 1917, established its headquarters in the offices of a former insurance firm. Its mission was quashing resistance.

  An obvious target was Tsar Nicholas II. On the night of July 16, 1918, he and the tsarina, their son and four daughters, their cook, doctor, valet, and their pet spaniel were led into the cellar of a merchant’s house in Ekaterinburg. The tsarina asked for a chair; two were brought in. Family members were arranged in rows as if to have their picture taken, and then, after a single sentence decreeing their death was read aloud, they and the others were executed by a twelve-member firing squad. The bullets careened off of the chests of the girls, who had sewn diamonds into their clothes for safekeeping. Bayonets and rifle butts finished the job. The corpses were loaded onto a truck and driven into a forest, stripped naked, doused in acid to disguise their identities, soaked in gasoline, lit on fire, and buried in a shallow grave. Lenin learned of the killing in his Kremlin office, marking the report “Received. Lenin.”3