Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov thought of the project in nostalgic terms, in the spirit of the factory dramas staged by the Theater of Worker Youth in the 1920s. Lopukhov pioneered a phenomenon nowadays known, derisively, as “mickey-mousing.” His Dance Symphony: The Magnificence of the Universe, for example, sets music by Beethoven to movements that trace harmonic shifts, phrases, and larger formal divisions. For The Bolt, Lopukhov thought in geometric terms, stacking and leaning together his lankier dancers, making two-story trapezoids and trapeziums out of them. He included a “multi-bodied pyramid formation” like that of the stars that used to top the corner towers of the Kremlin.22 He also thought in binaries, soft plié landings versus hard ones, relevés versus circus high-wire acts. But what was needed, according to the critics, was not a divide but a synthesis. Ivan Sollertinsky presented the challenge in a seminal article for Zhizn’ iskusstva (Life of art). Ballet had to avoid the abstract gesture—formalism—and choreographers needed to realize that new subjects demanded new “content.” Making the captain of the boat in The Red Poppy look and move like the handsome prince in The Sleeping Beauty was a mistake. And the floor of a metal shop was no place for the “pirouette” or “entrechat.”23

  Lopukhov mined athletics for ideas and studied the labor production model developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, known as Taylorism. He also drew from folklore and the burlesque, making the dancers look like the figures on the propaganda posters that hung in the windows of the Russian Telegraph Agency. The workers in The Bolt, his detractors claimed, were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, with nothing in their heads, no class-based consciousness. Lopukhov conceded the point, declaring that Soviet ballet could not live by the grotesque alone. The first performance of The Bolt, on April 8, 1931, at the Leningrad State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, was also its last. The criticism directed at Shostakovich centered on his multitasking (he was trying to do too much too quickly, and in too many genres) and his lack of seriousness. No one thought to consider that his approach to the score of The Bolt might exist in a realm beyond farce. The title of the “Dance of the Machines” is a grim joke, the stuff of urban nightmares everywhere. People dance, not machines, unless the machines in question have been made into people or people into machines, with tin skin and spark-plug sinew. The apotheosis of the ballet is a climax to nothing, and the brass and strings double, triple, and quadruple themselves like the demonic brooms in Goethe’s (or Mickey Mouse’s) The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

  Ultimately, The Bolt is about a machine being broken by a villain who does not understand the world in which he lives. It is fixed by those in the know. Ballet was a machine of a different sort, an old imperial machine in need of a Soviet upgrade. Shostakovich and Lopukhov, possessed of sufficient ego and genius, imagined themselves as the repairmen, and so the plot of The Bolt focuses on the boy caught in the middle. Their hero is the one who does bad in order to do good and the one with emotional and psychological appeal. But instead of being praised, even hesitantly, for their effort, the ballet’s creators read that “The Bolt is a flop and should serve as a last warning to the composer.”24 Smirnov alone escaped the flack, fleeing to New York to head the Amkino Corporation, which distributed Soviet films in the United States, while Shostakovich and Lopukhov went back to work in Leningrad.

  They teamed up once again to create The Bright Stream (Svetlïy ruchey) for the State Malïy Opera Theater (the former and present Mikhaílovsky Theater), which, backed by regional communist officials, had formed a comic ballet troupe in 1933. If they feared another flop, The Bright Stream betrayed none of it except insofar as its creators made sure to exclude negative characters from the script. The grotesque still had a place, likewise satire. The composer and choreographer knew the names of their enemies and the position on the political spectrum from which they were writing, but the bad boys of modern ballet welcomed any attention—even in the form of bad press. Judging from Shostakovich’s correspondence and Lopukhov’s recollections, fear did not yet hang in the air.

  Shostakovich’s letters to the erudite ballet critic Sollertinsky, his close friend from school as well as an adviser and champion, ironized the politics of the moment, including the hysteria surrounding a speech that Stalin delivered, in November 1935, to the “shocked” laborers who had exceeded a five-year plan for economic development. “Today,” Shostakovich wrote, “I had the enormous happiness of attending the concluding session of the congress of Stakhanovites,” as though pleased to have a break from the monotony of composing the classics of the Soviet repertoire. “I listened to the introduction of comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, and Shvernik. I was captivated by Voroshilov’s speech, but after hearing Stalin I could not hold back and shouted ‘Hurrah’ with the entire hall and applauded without end. You will read his historic speech in the newspapers so I won’t expound on it here. Today, of course, was the happiest of my life: I saw and heard Stalin.”25 He concluded his lampoon with a reference to the work at hand. “The meeting began at 1. In light of this I left the Bolshoi Theater rehearsal early,” referring to rehearsals for the Moscow premiere of The Bright Stream, which followed the reasonably successful Leningrad premiere by some five months.

  Attitudes remained positive in advance of the November 30, 1935, Bolshoi Theater production. Machinists from a suburban plant (SVARZ) that specialized in the manufacture of trolley buses were invited to a rehearsal, likewise ball-bearing makers and a group from a plant (DINAMO) that produced locomotive engines. This might not have been the ideal audience for a preview of a ballet about life on a collective farm, but the industrial workers enjoyed themselves, despite being baffled by the intrigues of the second act. Later, during the actual run at the Bolshoi, “a group of Don Cossacks” took in the show; having won dancing and singing contests in their local collective farms, they had earned the privilege of being “shown the wonders of the Soviet capital.”26 (Whether these were true farmers remains unknown, and in fact most of those forced onto Stalin’s collective farms lacked basic skills, which resulted, as Stalin’s braver aides suggested it might, in disaster.) Besides the Bolshoi, the tour of the Don Cossack “farmers” around town included a ride on the Moscow Metro, the first line of which had just been completed, the circus, the planetarium, the zoo, and the state stores for manicures, coats, boots, and gifts for people back home. The expenses were charged by Malinovskaya’s replacement, Vladimir Ivanovich Mutnïkh (1895–1937), to the Bolshoi account. His guests sent him a thank-you note printed in big, childlike letters in crayon: “We would ask you personally, Vladimir Ivanovich, when comrade Stalin next comes to the Bolshoi Theater, to tell him that we, the collective farmers of Veshensk, will never forget December 3, 1935, when we saw on that happy day our dearest friend, our great leader comrade Stalin.”27

  The scenario of The Bright Stream pits people from the city (in this case professional dancers) against country bumpkins in the form of workers on the “bright stream” collective farm and endearing cottage-dwelling retirees who have seen and done it all. The visitors bring along red communist banners to decorate the farm, but the peasants prove indifferent, even hostile to the communist court—as they had been to the imperial court. The banner-waving urban ballerina finds her double in Zina, a local entertainer. They had been friends in childhood and even attended the same ballet school together. The rest of the tale consists of amorous intrigues reminiscent of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which the scenarist, Adrian Piotrovsky, adored. Lopukhov underscored the two-world nature of the drama by matching the phrases of the female leads, formalizing and abstracting the gestures of the former while making the latter freer, looser, much more approachable. The ballet is for and about pantomime and character dances, with which all three acts are chockablock. Of course the unprepossessing rubes from the “small wayside halt,” as the setting is described in the scenario, emerge as superior in heart and mind to the sophisticates. Ultimately, too, “the festival ends with a general dance in which all, young and old, ta
ke part, together with the guest artistes.”28

  There were grumbles from other workers in the audience about the absence of North Caucasus flavor in the music; the collective farmers’ constant partying; the squandering of state produce in the apple-fight scene; and women being excluded from the “national” dances. Plus nothing in the ballet indicated “the role of Party organizers, Party leadership in the farm.” To gauge the ballet’s accessibility, after a performance, the workers in attendance were given a quiz: “Who is Zina?” Answers: “1/She came to the collective farm from the theater for charity work. 2/A boss, a city woman temporarily living on the farm. 3/Someone on a business trip from a factory to the farm. 4/A Komsomol representative. 5/A recreational activities organizer. 6/The leader of a shock brigade of collective farmers. 7/Someone who married a farmer and so lives on the farm.” There were other quizzes, about the other characters, the results a mixed bag. In surveys conducted after the test runs, “Comrade Postnikova” reported that she “had understood the ballet correctly.” Likewise “Comrade Kireyeva” thought it all easy to follow and, as if a student seeking a gold star, filled in answers about the plot that her colleague could not recall. The process was beautifully sincere, and everyone was grateful to be part of it.29

  The new Bolshoi Theater general director, Vladimir Mutnïkh, energetically supported the production throughout, but, as Shostakovich informed Sollertinsky, Mutnïkh’s assistant Boris Arkanov wanted it struck from the repertoire for lack of seriousness. And Arkanov, Shostakovich knew, had Kremlin connections. Given that Sollertinsky also found much to dislike in The Bright Stream, Shostakovich felt the need to ask his friend’s forgiveness. He described the ballet as his personal Waterloo, a “shameful failing,” adding that he himself would not object to its cancellation.30

  And when the noose tightened on artistic expression, Shostakovich was turned into just that—a shameful failure—in front of his colleagues, both those who had nurtured his precocious talent and those who resented him for it. The criticism that came from RAPM centered on the notion that he had spread himself too thin, flitting between film, young people’s theater, and the major ballet and opera houses. Once the criticism sharpened to suggest a lack of political seriousness, his support network shrank, and he was even compelled by the top cultural official in the land, Platon Kerzhentsev, to distance himself from Sollertinsky.

  In January and February 1936, Shostakovich was the subject of two damning critiques published in Pravda. Their appearance followed the successful run of The Bright Stream at the Bolshoi Theater, including a performance on December 21, 1935, Stalin’s fifty-sixth birthday. The Soviet ruler had taken in an earlier performance from his concrete-reinforced loge, and he had not, it seems, disapproved of what he saw—at least not at first. The newspapers endorsed both the Leningrad and Moscow versions of the ballet, emphasizing the tenderness of the adagios and the simple charm of the waltz. The cast, a gathering of sylphs on the steppe, was outstanding, and of tremendous significance to the future of ballet, Russian and otherwise. Among the coryphées were Pyotr Gusev, future founder of the Beijing Ballet Academy, as well as Sulamith Messerer, who as a ballerina “had technique and pushiness (in life, she was pushy too) and could take a lot; she danced almost the entire repertoire of the Bolshoi.” The quoted words, along with the put-down that Messerer “had no sense of line,” from her niece, the illustrious, all-conquering ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, whom Messerer fostered after the arrest of Plisetskaya’s parents in the late 1930s.31

  The lone complaint launched against The Bright Stream in the Soviet capital concerned the “naïve and primitive” libretto, though that was Piotrovsky and Lopukhov’s fault, not Shostakovich’s.32 Things turned sour for the composer, however, when his second opera, The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, began to be performed, simultaneous with the ballet, at the Bolshoi Theater’s experimental affiliate. The opera, from 1934, had been performed almost two hundred times, in Leningrad, Moscow, Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Prague, and had become an international sensation, one of two such hits in Shostakovich’s career (the other being his wartime Leningrad Symphony). There were also performances in Cleveland and New York, conducted by Artur Rodzinski in a high-stakes deal brokered through the offices of the American Communist newspaper Daily Worker, which published glowing reviews, and the cultural-exchange organization VOKS.

  The plot is a nightmare, but a politically correct one, being set in the depraved imperial era, when the lives of the working class were dreadful, services inadequate. The title character, Katerina Izmaílova, is the childless, uneducated wife of a tradesman. The source short story, published in 1865 by Nikolay Leskov, describes her as “only twenty-three years old; not tall, but shapely, with a neck as if carved from marble, rounded shoulders, a firm bosom, a fine, straight little nose, lively black eyes, a high and white brow, and very black, almost blue-black hair.”33 She semi-exists in the blandest part of the bland interior of Russia, a fate she sought to escape. She also wanted to exact revenge on her besotted, cheating husband.

  Thus Katerina takes an office clerk, Sergey, as a lover. Her loathsome father-in-law finds out about the affair and takes off his belt to beat her. She retreats to the larder, returns, and feeds him poisoned mushrooms. When her husband, arriving home from a business trip, discovers the rancid corpse of his father, he is strangled by Katerina and Sergey. The heroine now has two deaths to her credit, and she will have two more. Katerina and Sergey are sent to prison for their crimes, having been reported by a local drunk to the corrupt local police chief. En route to Siberia, Sergey becomes involved with another woman, the callous, selfish Sonyetka. Katerina sings a shattering lament before drowning Sonyetka and herself in the Volga River. Things could have been worse: the source text for the opera also includes the murder of a child, but Shostakovich excluded that.

  Shostakovich takes Katerina’s side in these terrible events, pushing his opera beyond the bounds of theatrical convention, and good taste, to assert a greater moral message. His heroine’s behavior might accord with certain vulgar Marxist-Leninist precepts about feminist liberation, but it is hard to defend a killing spree.34 It is a lurid entertainment, and seems, like Shostakovich’s ballet scores, meant to poke and prod, though one expects that the gentle workers who conscientiously vetted The Bright Stream would have fled for the exits. Forget folksiness. Shostakovich represents Katerina’s depraved, rubbish-filled existence with musical rubbish: paraphrases of lowbrow, popular musical genres such as the cancan, the polka, the gallop, and the kind of saccharine ditties that Shostakovich composed for silent films, music-hall revues, and his three ballets. His aesthetic was materialist, not idealist, but he assigned Katerina some of the most heart-wrenching passages ever conceived for coloratura soprano. The eminent Galina Vishnevskaya built her career on the role.

  Katerina is an unusual heroine, but also a great one: She avenges not only what she has suffered, but also what all the sopranos of the past have had to put up with, in the Russian, French, German, and Italian repertoires. Her predecessors achieved grace through their martyrdoms, but Katerina gets payback.

  STALIN LIKED PAYBACK, and opera, but he did not enjoy The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. On January 26, 1936, Stalin attended a performance led by the seasoned Armenian conductor Alexander Melik-Pashayev, whom Shostakovich accused, in racist fashion, of overzealousness at the podium. Details of the evening come from the memoirs of the composer’s helper Levon Atovmyan. A dashing, roguish figure, Atovmyan survived a stint in a Stalinist prison camp in the Northern Urals in 1938–39 and would later, in 1948–49, be at the center of a financial and political scandal in the Union of Soviet Composers.

  Shostakovich stayed at the time [1935–36] in a rented room on Petrovka. On the day he was due to leave for Arkhangelsk, his opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was being performed at the Bolshoi affiliate. I fetched him for the train station; by telephone, however, he said he’d been instructed without fail to attend
the performance. Shostakovich protested that he could hardly be there since he was heading to Arkhangelsk to perform a concert. “You know,” he implored, “I sense something unpleasant in this telephone call and the director’s invitation to the performance. Would you please go to the theater and call me to let me know what’s going on there?” I promised to stop by the affiliate but also said that I’d return to take him to the station. Shostakovich objected: “There’s no need for you to come to the station. Why rush about? Spare the tears for future goodbyes.”

  When I arrived at the affiliate I learned that members of the Politburo, including Stalin, would be present at the performance. It went smoothly, but in the entr’acte before the scene of Katerina’s wedding the orchestra (especially the brass section) became overzealous and played extremely loudly (I think that the brass section had been increased that day). I looked by chance at the director’s loge and saw Shostakovich entering it. He was called to the stage after the third act: he was as pale as a sheet and left the stage after a quick bow. I met him back in the loge: he was no less pale than before and said: “Come on, Levon, let’s go quickly. I should be at the station by now.”

  On the way he couldn’t calm himself down and irritably asked: “Tell me, why did the volume of the ‘band’ need to be increased so egregiously? Why did Melik-Pashayev over-pepper the entr’acte and the entire scene—is this his excessive, Armenian, shish-kabob-house way? The din from the brass group must have made those sitting in the officials’ loge deaf; I feel in my heart that this year, like other leap years, will bear new misfortune for me.35

  Indeed it did. Shostakovich had been set up, and he knew it, so it is no wonder that he spent the night after his concert in Arkhangelsk in the company of vodka. The Kremlin dropped the hammer on the composer in the form of two articles in Pravda. They were unsigned, signaling that they had received top-level approval, but came from the typewriter of a timorous journalist named David Zaslavsky on the instruction of the newly formed Committee on Arts Affairs (Komitet po delam iskusstv). This “mega-administration” was established on January 17, 1936, by decree of the Central Committee and Council of Peoples Commissars of the USSR.36 Its chairman, Platon Kerzhentsev, was a fifty-four-year-old career propagandist, censor, and Lenin hagiographer.37 He took on the task of eradicating formalism in the arts with extreme prejudice and launched smear campaigns against convicted “enemies of the people,” the victims of the purges.