Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Malinovskaya suffered serious health problems of her own but, even while battling fatigue and stress, hung on to her position. In November of 1922, she announced that she had reached an agreement with Lenin’s accountants to keep the Bolshoi Theater operating, thanks to lotteries and other such gimmicks as borrowing from the maintenance budget, selling properties, reducing or canceling royalty payments, even selling the “two hundred jars of perfume and cosmetics” from storage.45 She and Lunacharsky were both fighting to save the theater, under threat from the Central Committee, essentially the board of directors of the Communist Party. A chain of harsh, if contradictory, resolutions had come down. First, there was the decision to close both the Bolshoi and Mariyinsky Theaters, then to establish a “liquidation commission” to consider the possibility of closing them, and then to keep them open but drastically reduce their subsidies.46 Lunacharsky defended the Bolshoi against them all, citing the Russian cultural legacy and importance, pleading ignorance of the resolutions, protesting being excluded from meetings in which they were made, and denying allegations that he had leaked confidential information to Malinovskaya.

  The Soviet government, unlike the tsars, could not afford to make up the difference between income and expenses, which had been more than a quarter of the budget in the past. Having spared Lunacharsky a Central Committee lynching by bridging the gap, Malinovskaya informed the fourteen hundred employees under her direct control that she was overwhelmed with joy at the news that the theater would remain open and expressed her heartfelt gratitude to the artists for performing their duties with “great diligence and discipline.”47

  The troublemakers had left or been expelled, but the ranks still needed to be purified and loyal young Soviet artists enlisted, brought up from the reopened school and recruited from properly proletarian venues. A vision crystallized; a plan came into focus. The Bolshoi would become the people’s ballet and opera house, serving the hammer and sickle and the court in the Kremlin. It would imagine a glorious past for itself, beginning in 1825 with its resurrection after the Napoleonic siege and ending with the premieres of Tchaikovsky’s treasured balletic and operatic classics. The composer’s imperial service and the troubles throughout the theater’s long history would be forgotten, except when the tsars could be blamed. The Bolshoi would retain select glories from previous eras while also creating new ones. Henceforth the Mariyinsky in Petrograd/Leningrad, the first imperial stage, would be the second Soviet stage. One regime had succumbed to another, the seat of power had shifted from one city to another, and likewise the weight of the Russian—now Soviet—tradition had moved from one theater to the other, the Bolshoi.

  But first a further cleanup operation: Malinovskaya began to impose fines on the dancers and singers for feigning illness, for tardiness, moonlighting, leaving cigarette butts smoldering after meetings (the dancers smoked, both to keep their weight in check and in defiance of the general atmosphere), and giving unauthorized interviews to newspapers. Members of the ballet, the opera, the chorus, and the orchestra were sacked for real and fictional misdemeanors, with special attention paid to those who seemed to undermine the foundations on which the theater was being rebuilt and instead pursued a “dangerous, anarchic path.”48

  The ranks thinned but the workload increased, the number of performances almost tripling between 1917 and 1924. Evening performances of the nineteenth-century repertoire alternated with children’s matinees and “experimental” works. On Malinovskaya’s order, special commissions of artists reviewed the rosters, deciding which performers needed to be promoted, demoted, or sent packing. One of the dancers was released in the spring of 1923 because her looks had grown “completely unsuitable for the stage; she’s stopped dancing; and she’s old.” Others lost their jobs owing to “inertia” on the stage, “weak” pantomime, “plumpness,” or not showing up for class. “Hysteria” and “political provocations” ended the careers of two of the choristers.49 Some died; others became soldiers. Still others found work abroad. The chorus and orchestra proved the hardest for Malinovskaya to manage, but she also had problems with the Bolshoi’s stars, the ballet dancers and opera singers at the top. Their freethinking, self-centeredness, and unhappiness about the reduction (not loss) of perks and privileges affronted the collective spirit of the revolution.

  She purged the ranks as well as the talent. Once it became clear that aesthetic innovation or artistic entrepreneurship would not be permitted in the ballet, she lost choreographers and their favorite dancers to chamber theaters, children’s theaters, cabarets, circuses, and the cinema. Gorsky stayed but lost his mind. He was placed in a mental hospital in 1924 after being found naked and babbling to himself in the corridors of the Bolshoi. Other, much more inventive, talents quit for fear of having their experiments rejected by the Old Guard. Progressive standard-bearer Kasyan Goleyzovsky took his talents to the Bat cabaret, silent film, the studio of the theater school, and proletarian cultural spaces. He set almost-nude dances to the music of Scriabin and produced mean-spirited, Max and Moritz–like entertainments for children. The Bolshoi brought him back into the fold more than once, but his projects continued to be rejected. His Red Masks (Krasnïye maskï), based on a tale by Poe, was to have marked a brave new direction for the theater. The sets and costumes invoked the masquerades of the Bolshoi’s past. It was meant to be tense, sexual, and violent, but also transparently allegorical, representing the destruction of the feudal order by a force majeure, the plague. The message of the source text—that death is the great equalizer, even in a luxuriant castle—was to be applied by the audience to the last days of the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II. But Red Masks never reached the stage. Malinovskaya recalled the rehearsals being “nervous,” the ambiance no less ominous than the black-and-red room onstage. Goleyzovsky was disorganized, grew hysterical, and soon became the subject of rumors about “pornography.”50 Malinovskaya formed a commission to investigate the kerfuffle.

  Red Masks ended up being replaced by a much tamer ballet, The Nutcracker—Gorsky’s version of The Nutcracker, in fact, which suppressed the sadder sentiments of the original and excised the Sugar Plum Fairy. Two years later, Goleyzovsky was pardoned and granted permission to stage a biblical parable, Joseph the Beautiful (Iosif Prekrasnïy). The dancing was free and diverse, a kaleidoscopic fusion of shapes and styles, some fluid, others sculpted. The elaborate set comprised multiple platforms connected by bridges at strange angles. Yet once the ambition, and ambivalences, of the project became clear, the ballet and its creators were banished from the Bolshoi, consigned to an “experimental” affiliate.51

  Malinovskaya did not lament the loss of talent, and an argument could be made that, even if her arch-conservative attitudes harmed the theater during the free-for-all cultural revolution, it spared the Bolshoi from serious attacks during the Stalinist era. A short-term loss perhaps ensured a long-term gain. But the restless spirit of the 1920s proved her downfall when the lesser talents of the theater, the artists who kept the place running, began to leave for artistic as well as financial reasons.

  During the 1922–23 season, for example, fifty-seven members of the orchestra decamped to Persimfans, an orchestra that performed without a conductor. Instead of watching one director on a podium, the musicians faced one another in a circle, cuing their own entrances and keeping time together. Other musicians from the theater found work in cafés and restaurants. When Malinovskaya threatened them with dismissal, they fought back through the massive RABIS organization, the All-Soviet Professional Union of Arts Workers, which accused her of dictatorial, anticommunist conduct. The chorus, opera, and ballet joined in the attacks. She was forced to form a commission devoted exclusively to the resolution of conflicts, but the commission itself became embattled. Malinovskaya rallied her backers within the commissariat, who sent a letter to Stalin (head of the organizational bureau of the Central Committee at the time) to defend her honor and prevent her arrest. “Accusing comrade Malinovskaya of forsaking communi
st principles, being patronized by bourgeois elements, protectionism, and other terrible crimes is senseless and baseless,” they wrote.52

  Comrade Malinovskaya survived, but she was pressed, now for her own sake, to provide ideological justification for the Bolshoi’s continued operation. And so on September 2, 1923, as part of her presentation to the council of artists, Malinovskaya outlined the task before them all. “New topics and scripts for the opera and ballet repertoire,” she said, should be “formulated in consonance with contemporary ideological objectives, broadly understood. Libretti from the old repertoire to be rewritten, with attention to literary form, in a manner that responds to current needs and new production concepts; the latter, along with the new vision for the repertoire to come, to be rendered with similar attention to verbal form.”53 Goleyzovsky’s tamer projects might have been part of this new vision had the rhetoric been anything but rhetoric and practice met intention.

  Malinovskaya’s emphasis on the texts—the scenarios and libretti of the ballets and operas under her control—has idiosyncratic explanations. Lunacharsky’s ideological arbiters tended to be writers whose careers stretched back to the Silver Age, the quarter century before the revolution. They themselves had been forced to renounce their own pasts and adapt, chameleon-like, to new political conditions. (Those who did not evolve either put down their pens or packed their bags for Paris.) Some of these writers nurtured dreams of world transformation and thus found it possible, even while queuing for rations, to interpret the events of 1917 in eschatological terms, as the striving for a realm beyond. Alcohol lubricated some of these conjectures, along with narcotics and bouts of psychosis.

  The most notable of the converts was a figure of Mephistophelian countenance named Valeriy Bryusov. He endorsed the revolution, the Bolsheviks, and Lunacharsky, serving the cause from 1917 to his death in 1924. A writer who rose to prominence during the Silver Age, Bryusov produced hackwork for the Central Control Commission (Tsentral’naya kontrol’naya komissiya), which was responsible for ideological discipline within the communist ranks. In this capacity he drafted an aesthetically radical resolution on the state of affairs of the Bolshoi Theater, pointing out that, despite endless promises of reform, little had changed. Dissent in the ranks persisted, and the ideological retooling of the repertoire had yet to begin. “Ideology, in the sense of social and political ideology, as envisioned by the directorate of the Bolshoi Theater,” he lamented, “has manifested itself only weakly in the past three years, chiefly through the elimination of those plays from the repertoire that were obviously contrary to the communist world outlook.” A Life for the Tsar was swept off the stage (though it would return), but most everything else remained. The Bolshoi was “academic” rather than “experimental,” Bryusov continued, and had not contributed to the aesthetic innovations in proletarian cultural venues, which nurtured constructivism, biomechanics, ballet-circus hybrids, and experiments in free movement. Bryusov endorsed the performance of dances by newer Russian artists, including expat Russian artists, who embraced the “simple” over “the imagined splendor of the past” and emphasized the need for synthesis. He believed gesture (plastika) could fuse with sound and image and imagined the corps de ballet leading a hypnotic round dance of the arts. Collective action, and through that action, collective transformation, now needed to be the focus. The theater’s closure had been avoided for the moment, but Bryusov predicted the end if it failed to embrace the future.54

  JUST AFTER BRYUSOV drafted his report, Lenin died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The news reached Stalin by telephone during the eleventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets on January 21, 1924, in the Bolshoi’s chamber concert space. The meeting came to a halt; everyone began to cry. Stalin traveled to Lenin’s home in Gorski to kiss the dead ruler’s lips. The Bolshoi’s orchestra provided accompaniment for the procession of Lenin’s coffin to the Hall of Columns in central Moscow. To beat back the frost, the honor guard lit bonfires in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of mourners flowed past the coffin during the three-day viewing period. Lenin’s remains were not interred, and never have been. His embalmed corpse is displayed on Red Square in a mausoleum designed by a constructivist artist.

  On January 26, before two thousand delegates in the main hall of the Bolshoi, Stalin marked Lenin’s demise by affirming, in vaguely menacing terms, the justness of Lenin’s policies and pledging, in his high-pitched, measured cant, to continue the forced march to a socialist and then communist utopia. Having absorbed the paternalistic credo, delegates to the congress dispersed, and the artists of the Bolshoi went back to work, the first task for the orchestra and chorus being the preparation of a memorial concert for Lenin on February 10, 1924. Lunacharsky gave the preconcert lecture, drafting his speech several times on paper of different sizes with many other hands helping to edit. The music that evening, Lunacharsky explained at the podium, had no obvious connection to the revolution but had been written by Lenin’s favorite composers. The pieces were heroic. The audience heard the Funeral March from Wagner’s Siegfried, along with movements from Beethoven’s Napoleonic Eroica Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration expressed the kind of “mystical beliefs and hopes” that Lenin the atheist despised, but Lunacharsky defended its inclusion on the program by asserting, limply, that its “pathos” could be felt even by those who did not believe in the afterlife.55 The music was eternal, if not its message.

  Just nine days after the memorial concert, the Bolshoi orchestra went on strike. Malinovskaya responded by disbanding it. The musicians could petition to get their jobs back, as long as the instigators were named. But they vowed not to return while she was in the job, and so on March 13, she submitted her resignation to Lunacharsky. The “battle that the union has waged over the last few years became intolerable for me last year and has achieved its goal—I can no longer work,” she explained. “I ask you to relieve me of the directorship of the Bolshoi Theater.”56 She nominated an assistant as her replacement before retreating into the shadows in Lunacharsky’s bureaucratic matrix. But it was not the end for her; indeed, Malinovskaya would return to the directorship in 1930, after Lunacharsky was gone and Stalin was in complete control of the Soviet Union.57

  Ultimately, her achievement was negative, more about destruction than creation. Malinovskaya had culled the ranks, and she could argue that in so doing she had eliminated those employees of the theater who could not adapt to Bryusov’s ideal of synthetic, collective action onstage. She had also, for this same purpose, culled the repertoire—again by ending things, not beginning them.

  Imperial ballets and operas remained on the books, but decisions about which works would be performed were handled by Glavrepertkom, a censorship board that Malinovskaya co-chaired. Glavrepertkom decided the fates of new projects and those from the past, or from outside of Russia, that had hitherto been neglected by the Bolshoi. For a performance to be approved, it needed to be presented to the bureau in the form of a carefully nuanced write-up, an ideologically contextualized description that related the work, whenever it was written, to the present day. Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov was approved by Glavrepertkom because it described a corrupted tsar, but the bureau decided that in the crowd scenes the people had to do less kneeling. Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades received the nod, despite being set in the era of Catherine the Great. Glavrepertkom mandated that she be shown onstage—a pointed reversal of the convention during Tchaikovsky’s time, when the empress, like imperial Russia’s other rulers, could not be portrayed. Fokine’s and Stravinsky’s The Firebird and Petrushka received approval for performance given the “scarceness of balletic material responding to the times,” but also in hopes of luring Fokine and Stravinsky back to Russia from France.58

  Petrushka reached the Bolshoi stage in 1921, the grittiness of the opening and closing crowd scenes amplified with more “chatting” and “laughing” as the samovar hissed.59 The Firebird, in contrast, wa
s not performed. Strauss’s gruesomely decadent opera Salomé raised hackles and was not, at first, approved by Glavrepertkom for the Bolshoi. The extremely dissonant harmonies were a problem, likewise the final scene of necrophilia. Boris Asafyev’s revised orchestration of La bayadère also needed to pass through the censor, as did the decision to expand the title of Esmeralda to Esmeralda, Daughter of the People, with the plot now pitting the people against the Roman Catholic Church and the feudal order. Proposals for ballets about soldiers and soccer players were floated, line-edited, crumpled up, and, on second thought, smoothed out. As time went on, the fearsome censors imposed more radical changes on the standard repertoire, demanding life-affirming, folk-themed productions that focused on ensembles, not egos, and that expressed the ideals (as opposed to the realities) of the revolution. Even Swan Lake was reworked with a redemptive ending. The grimness of its original version, much like the neurosis and decadence evidenced in the Russian “mystic” symbolist dramas that the theaters could no longer perform, ended up in the tsarist dustbin. The Soviet version became much more profitable than the imperialist original.

  The future of the Bolshoi Ballet, and the Bolshoi Opera, was to belong to the New Soviet Man, to the acrobatic, muscular builders of socialism. The heroes needed to be people of action, not witnesses to it (for this reason the artistic and political council of the theater rejected a proposed 1930 opera about John Reed).60 The present also needed a New Soviet Woman, a heroine both onstage and off, who could perform the revised, female-driven repertoire of the imperial era but who was also committed to the bright future. “Russia’s salvation lies with her women,” claimed the ballerina Ekaterina Geltser (1876–1962).61 She embodied the revolution, having trained as an imperial dancer under the tsars to become, under Stalin, an icon of Soviet artistic power.