Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  She also became an emblem of loss, being one of those dancers (and there was an alphabetic assortment of others) associated with the pitting out of the aristocratic inheritance of ballet. During her career the image of the art changed, recalling a revolution of another time: the French Napoleonic period, which the Bolsheviks embraced as a model in terms of the patriotic, defiant response of the masses to autocratic oppression. Exactly how the Bolshoi ballet master Adam Glushkovsky had inspired a new nationalism after the war of 1812 was lost to the Bolsheviks a century later, but he was remembered for adding folk fare to his creative arsenal. His embrace of the Russian people was important to the Soviets, but so too were the “important advances” of Parisian ballet masters under Napoleon—chiefly Pierre Gardel.62

  In Paris, the demise of the social and political system of the Kingdom of France, the end of the ancien régime, influenced every aspect of early nineteenth-century ballet, from the choice of topic to décor to choreography. During the Napoleonic era ballet technique acquired a new brilliance, steps were redefined, legs came to be lifted above hip height, and bravura feats increased in frequency and velocity as ballet masters invoked ancient Greek and Roman notions of physical prowess. Defenders and disciples of the old belle école chafed. Something similar happened at the Bolshoi after 1917, sweeping away the Russian ancien régime represented by the Mariyinsky Theater and choreography of Marius Petipa. At least in terms of ballet, the Russian Revolution out-revolutionized (and in the opinion of conservative balletomanes, out-coarsened) the French Revolution and Napoleon. Dancers displayed even higher extensions and more daring acrobatics. Lines became less graceful, more graphic. Populist folk aspects of ballet were enhanced. Geltser did not author these developments, but, because she rose to fame during this period of radical rethinking, she ended up representing the newly muscular, assertive, revolutionary style. Much might not have been the result of her conscious intention, but one thing surely was: In her performances, even those from before the communist coup, she scrubbed small details from the ballets she danced, preferring simpler texts. She toughened up the classics.

  AS A CHILD GELTSER trained at the Bolshoi. She danced under Petipa in St. Petersburg, and even appeared before Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. To bolster her imperial bona fides, she routinely fibbed that her father, the long-serving imperial dancer Vasiliy Geltser, had authored the scenario for Swan Lake. She lived through two tsars, two revolutions, and two wars, morphing from an “idol of pre-revolutionary millionaires and dapper officers of Moscow” into a judge in the “great accordion-playing contest” of 1928. She also danced to those accordions, “evoking frenzied delight in the popular audience which jammed the state experimental theater.”63 The first ballerina to be named a People’s Artist of the RSFSR, Geltser received the Order of Lenin in 1937, and kept it pinned proudly to her fur coats and blouses (though sometimes, in old age, upside down). During the Soviet phase of the Second World War, she won a First Class Stalin Prize, and at her retirement in 1951, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, which she affixed, aristocratically, to her hair. She sold off her collection of imperial diamonds to purchase portraits and landscape paintings, amassing a significant collection over the course of her life. She was an actress as much as a dancer, and was celebrated for her psychologically and emotionally nuanced performances. But she was conservative, the darling of the Glavrepertkom censorship board. She avoided the riskier experiments of the choreographic avant-garde in the 1920s, and instead embraced the strictures of 1930s drambalet, the censor-approved storytelling ballet.

  Her love life was bifurcated. She married her longtime mentor, the ballet master Vasiliy Tikhomirov, in 1900. The ambitious, self-aggrandizing ballerina needed a suseful partner, and the influential, methodical, thoughtful, and indeed loving Tikhomirov proved perfect for her. But she soon surrendered her heart to Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, a lieutenant general of Swedish-Finnish descent in the Russian imperial service. After the revolution Mannerheim became independent Finland’s commander in chief, establishing a series of defensive fortifications, known as the Mannerheim line, to prevent Soviet invasion. The fortifications would stymy Stalin’s troops at the start of the Soviet-Finnish war, in the winter of 1939–40. As early as 1901, a year after her marriage, Geltser and Mannerheim began an affair in St. Petersburg. He too was married at the time. Divorce never came up; Geltser did not once consider leaving her career with Tikhomirov to be with the uniformed Mannerheim as he roamed the Russian Empire. It was a sporadic passion, a hobby, and Tikhomirov turned a blind eye to it, allowing Geltser the dancer and Geltser the person to coexist in imagined harmony.

  Geltser and Tikhomirov were both fêted for their Soviet service. Mannerheim, meanwhile, became persona non grata in the RSFSR, a scabrous white devil. Legend has him turning up in Moscow in January 1924 to see Geltser a final time. The illicit lovers exchanged symbolic vows before a priest in a Moscow church, then had pictures taken to preserve the moment. It was a frigid night; the ballerina wore a white shawl thrown over a chinchilla fur coat on top of a ball gown. They parted for good sometime during the official period of mourning for Lenin. Geltser fainted while standing in the line to view the catafalque, having contracted pneumonia in the frost.

  When she was a child, in imperial Russia, she saw the Bogdanov ballet The Delights of Hashish at the Bolshoi. She remembered Lidiya Geyten in the lead role, the chandelier in the main hall, and the bouquets. Back at home she pirouetted in the mirror. Geltser dreamed of becoming an actress like Sarah Bernhardt or Eleonora Duse, but her father guided her into the dance division of the Imperial Theater College. She disliked being confined to the dorms and came across as disinterested and scatterbrained. But she found inspiration in her eventual principal teacher, José Méndez. He taught her to dance in an Italian manner, and in 1896 her father sent her with her mother to the imperial ballet school in St. Petersburg for refinement in the French style. Power and precision were to be blended with grace and lightness. Geltser trained with the octogenarian Christian Johansson and mocked the no less aged Petipa for his preposterous Russian and deteriorating French. Yet she fell under his spell. (He ridiculed her in turn for botching counts and missing tempo changes, and for the bunched muscles in her feet.) Her letters to Tikhomirov back in Moscow express her initial sense of disorientation: “It’s horribly difficult for me, new pas every day, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. [Johansson] says that my biggest problem is lack of softness in my pliés, unfinished poses, and lack of softness in the hands and torso.” She did not know the names of the movements Johansson taught, confused his precepts, and was told that she had to undo most of her habits. “It’s amusing,” she added, “how everyone scolds the Italian school.”64 The rapid pas de basque in Mlada flummoxed her, but she performed better than Johansson expected—a modest triumph.

  Johansson continued to hector her over the next two months. Geltser sent Tikhomirov tedious lists, in a mishmash of French and Russian, of the lexicon she had absorbed in the studio with the other girls (the boys chiefly being in a separate studio with Enrico Cecchetti): “assemblé, jeté, ballonné, brisé, glissade, entrechat six, sissonne-simple, sissonne fondue, saut de basque, cabriole fouettée, pas de basque.” She fell ill from overexertion, worn down by the relentless criticism—“now for the fact that my arms have no life, as he says.” But Geltser progressed, dazzlingly, her effort unbroken, her recall perfect. “Today, for example, included a very hard coupé balloné, côté, pirouette en pointe à la seconde, then from fourth position, and then two pirouettes en pointe, and on Saturdays there will be so-called steeplechase exercises, taxing but useful,” she reported. “And they say my legs have gotten thinner.”65

  She danced the White Cat in The Sleeping Beauty, then each of the jewel fairies, and finally starred at the Bolshoi, with Petipa’s blessing, as the heroine Aurora for a benefit for her uncle, a theater designer. Inspiration came from Pierina Legnani. Legnani was not the fairest princess of Russian ballet, in Geltser
’s opinion, but the pure verticality of her pirouettes had made an unforgettable impression. Geltser left St. Petersburg in 1898, bringing her refined Franco-Italian steps back to Moscow with her, determined to make a name for herself. She interacted with Anna Pavlova, Johansson’s greatest student before her, to whom she would on occasion be compared, negatively. Tikhomirov mentored and partnered her throughout the transition to soloist. The last tsar entrenched the privileges that allowed her, for example, to recover from a leg sprain amid the flora and the fauna of the Crimea, tanning her injured limb in between massages and swims.

  Gorsky came to Moscow in 1900, but he and Geltser did not get along. She was investigated in 1906 when it was determined that she had simplified her variations in Gorsky ballet’s The Golden Fish (Zolotaya rïbka) and, much more egregious, had swapped out the harder numbers for dances from other ballets. Geltser claimed illness but made no secret of her dislike of Gorsky’s dances. They would clash again over Gorsky’s decision to assign the part of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake to two separate dancers; she wanted to take both parts herself. Gorsky scolded her, then flattered her, and then grew exhausted and indifferent. He found an alternative muse in Vera Karalli, a ballerina extolled in the reviews more for her radiance, her glowing skin, than her technique. She partnered with Mikhaíl Mordkin, an exhibitionist dancer who left the Bolshoi for the circus. (His engagement as director of the Bolshoi Ballet in 1922 lasted all of twelve days.) Karalli took the melodramatic overacting that she learned from both of the men in her creative life to the silent screen. Her films are transpositions of ballets, set in another language, calibrated to the rhythms and meters of celluloid.

  Geltser took a pass on film but absorbed Gorsky’s flair for the overdramatic as well. He cared about the emotions behind the moves and considered symmetrical movement overrated. She did too. Geltser’s opinion of Gorsky changed over the course of her career but settled, as she put it to a group of students in 1937, in the belief that he was a “talented innovator” with a weakness: getting carried away with “the new, and sometimes forgetting about the old classical heritage.”66 Her eyes glowed, however, as she recalled his ballet Salammbô (1910). It was perhaps his greatest achievement, lost to posterity after a warehouse fire destroyed the sumptuous costumes. She took the lead role as the daughter of Hamilcar I, king of Carthage, and priestess of a city’s moon goddess, to whom children are sacrificed. The handsomest mercenaries in pursuit of the king’s head fall in love with her. The ballet abandoned conventional syntax in favor of orgiastic mayhem. Geltser found her true, heroic, demi-caractère self in the mix. “I absorbed each movement, each gesture, each turn of the head of the greatest ballerinas of the past: Zambelli, Brianzzo [Carlotta Brianza], Bessoner [Emma Bessone]. And having mastered the art, I understood that only a gesture that is inspired by feeling, lives. If a movement lacks feeling, then it is a dead copy instead of being a living creation; a caricature instead of an artist’s invention.”67

  Dancing with such passion came at a cost. She accrued an impressive list of injuries as an imperial dancer: one from an accidental pirate pistol-whipping in Le corsaire, another from slipping under a horse in Schubertiade. Photographs show her indulging the Hellenic dancing popularized by Isadora Duncan and adopted by Michel Fokine for the Mariyinsky and later the Ballets Russes. Before the revolution, Duncan’s bare feet, loose-fitting tunics, fevers, and furies became “a symbol of freedom” on the imperial stage.68 She opened a school for dance in Moscow in 1921, encouraging the children of workers to express themselves freely, helping them to realize their dreams of flight. The school existed for three years, and Duncan fed the children and kept them warm using some of the income she earned on tour. In her absence from Moscow the enrollment increased to five hundred pupils, who greeted her with hurrahs, red kerchiefs, and an outdoor performance on the grounds of a stadium when she returned. The influence of her teaching outlasted her presence in Moscow, and likewise outlasted the private dance studios in the city. These taught Free Movement and improvisation to proletarian children. Mossovet ordered them closed in 1924 owing to their “unhygienic and unsanitary conditions,” “amoral atmosphere,” and appeal to “crass” sensibilities.69

  On the professional front, Duncan’s “authentic classicism” was seen as a potential means of inoculating the Bolshoi Ballet from the feudalism, the “inauthentic classicism,” of the court style.70 Geltser embraced the Hellenic trend, but she never forgot her imperial training, “the seven exercises which I must take every day of my life.”71 One of the first ballet films ever made shows her and Tikhomirov in one of Schubert’s Moments musicaux. The selection was choreographed by Gorsky, as influenced by Isadora Duncan, to music by Chopin and Schubert as orchestrated by Anton Arensky.72 It gives a sense of Geltser’s unsettled acting skills, not to mention her partner’s generous proportions. The thin thighs, slim calves, sharp knees, and swollen foot muscles of dancers of later generations would have been thought unnatural at the time. Tikhomirov represented the übermasculine norm. Geltser, no stick figure herself, performed with the Ballets Russes in Paris in Les orientales (1910). She also appeared in Brussels, London, and New York City. Cultural-exchange initiatives took her to Harbin, China, where she collected antiquities. She dallied with diplomats and Russian émigré artists, and even, in Berlin, arched to a violin played by the physicist Einstein, but her thoughts, she reassured Tikhomirov during her seasick journey to the United States, remained of home. Her reception abroad was mixed. She triumphed in Great Britain, but was found lacking in the “finish and refinement” of Pavlova in the United States, though Herbert Corey of the Times-Star newspaper bureau conceded Geltser’s auburn good looks—she was a “pretty little trick”—and her “spirited, startling” manner.73

  In Moscow in 1914, the critic Vlas Doroshevich sent her a tender letter after seeing her perform Gorsky’s The March of Freedom (Marsh svobodï) outside in the cold in support of Russian soldiers. She rallied the troops to battle against unspeakable horrors, high-stepping in her tunic and helmet to the music of three brass bands and pretend-blowing a bugle. “You are a God; you danced amazingly!” Doroshevich gushed. “You are a Canova statue come to life! … But to dance outdoors when it was seven degrees! This is the height of madness!”74 She had conquered the classical repertoire, but she also connected with the public on the street, becoming “a hero of socialist labor” even before the phrase was coined.

  She missed the revolution while on vacation in southern Russia. Soon after, on tour in Ukraine, she declared her allegiance to the Bolsheviks. When the Germans invaded Kiev during World War I, she traveled back to Moscow in a cattle car with Russian troops. Thereafter Geltser became everything that the Soviets needed her to be, and they to her as well: obliging, benign, useful. She performed for peasants, soldiers, and laborers, donating the proceeds from benefits to political causes. The Swan Lake “Russian” dance she had learned from Anna Sobeshchanskaya became a hit with the proletarian public. In 1921, Lunacharsky honored her quarter-century of service, noting the Soviet people’s love of dance and, crucially, pledging the preservation of the Russian balletic tradition.

  Geltser had saved Russian ballet, or so thought no lesser a light than Konstantin Stanislavsky, the pioneer of method acting, whose influences ranged from constructivism to yoga. “It seems we can be assured that Russian ballet has escaped deadly danger,” he wrote. “Its salvation is greatly indebted to you, to your keen devotion to art, the enormousness of your achievement, your tirelessness, your sparkling technique, and that fire within that has enabled you to create enduring, living characters and maintain ballet’s high standards.”75 Geltser was the model of a Soviet diva, humbly surrendering without fuss her luxurious living quarters in an artists’ building in the center of Moscow for a smaller space. She did not miss the en-suite bath, because, she said, she was “aquaphobic.”76 She willed her 100 paintings and portraits to the Tretyakov Gallery for the people to see.

  Geltser’s artistry made a cas
e for the survival of the Bolshoi Ballet. Her body demonstrated that service to the Bolsheviks and to classical ballet might not be incompatible. Her aspiration to become the lodestar for the integration of the two enjoyed the obvious support of Soviet critics, especially those allergic to the decadence of the Silver Age and the experiments of the 1920s. “After the winds and storms of sexual passion, after the extensive flood of all manner of eroticism onstage, with all its ruinous hypnoticization,” the critic Akim Volynsky wrote in 1923, “a new and fresh historical dawn will arise … Everything will be explained and justified in the rays of Apollonian sunlight: the toes, turnout, the hidden wisdom of the human body itself, which has awakened to prophetic speech after a long, lethargic sleep.”77 His article was titled “What Will Ballet Live By?” The answer was Geltser, possessed of talent, malleable technique, and great political savvy.

  A year later, the government decided that ballet would “live” by taking on modern themes and privileging collective athletic movement. And so Geltser, the People’s Artist, would in 1925 inspire the first ballet to be endorsed by the Soviet regime, The Red Poppy (Krasnïy mak). The Bolsheviks were desperate to impose order on chaos, to put the past in service of the present and the imagined future. Here was a ballet that, at least in terms of its plot, represented the triumph of “new” civilization over “old” barbarism. The dance and music, however, actually imposed imperial-era constraints on the messiness of proletarian artistic experiments.