The purges—great and small, local and national—were managed by Nikolay Yezhov, the diminutive head of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Each cycle of biological and ideological purification begat another, until those responsible for fulfilling the arrest quotas began to turn against themselves. Yezhov would be beaten and dragged, weeping, on February 4, 1940, into an execution chamber that he himself had designed. The balding, bespectacled Lavrentiy Beria replaced him; he would be eliminated too. During their tenures as head of the NKVD, the arrest sweeps were concentrated in the elite north-central neighborhoods of Moscow. Interrogations occurred at the Lubyanka, the nexus of the police state, and such notorious prisons as Butïrskaya and Lefortovo. The Memorial Society of Moscow created a database showing the names and addresses of the more than eleven thousand people confirmed to have been purged, but it is no longer accessible.56 The House of Composers at 8/10 Bryusov Side-Street was spared; the building at 51 Bolshoy Karetnïy Side-Street, where Shostakovich rented an apartment before his marriage to Nina Varzar, was the site of numerous arrests; four tenants of the Zemlyanoy Val apartment building, where Prokofiev took up residence in 1936, disappeared.
Prokofiev survived, though the trauma damaged his health and warped the psyches of his children. His wife recalled hearing talk around their kitchen tables of class warfare, fascist menace, the capitalist encirclement of the USSR—in other words, ideas straight from the pages of Pravda. She did not want to join the discussion and suffered a nervous breakdown when Prokofiev told her that the Soviets would not allow them to return to Paris. Their marriage fell apart in 1941. Seven years later she was arrested on trumped-up charges of low-level espionage, tortured for months, and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor. She served eight, winning early release thanks in part to efforts on her behalf by Shostakovich.57
A PRODUCT OF the tsarist era, Prokofiev maintained the snobbish air of the noblesse, and condescended to the Soviets, which made them all the more committed to breaking his spirit, inveigling him into compromise, frightening him if need be. Kerzhentsev made this point clear in a 1937 memorandum to Stalin regarding Soviet musical affairs. Referring to Romeo and Juliet, he remarked that Prokofiev now recognized that he had to change his tune in order “to overcome formalism and approach realism.”58 Kerzhentsev had in mind two orchestral suites arranged from the ballet, which were all that could be performed of the grand 1935 score—pending its refashioning as a proper Soviet ballet.
A premiere of sorts took place in a provincial theater in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on December 30, 1938, a gesture of Soviet cultural support for the nation on the eve of its fall to the Nazis. Ivo Váña-Psota choreographed the ballet and took the part of Romeo.Zora Šemberová partnered him as a winsome Juliet. In her memoirs, titled Na št’astné planetě (On a happy planet), Šemberová confirms that it was a partial presentation, not the full score, and that the choreographer sought in the dancing to reflect the lean modernism of the music, though the novelties of the original scenario did not make it to Brno. The interruption of the quarrel between Montague and Capulet factions by a Soviet May Day parade never left its page in Prokofiev’s manuscript, and neither did the bizarrely retrospective exotic divertissement (involving bejeweled Syrian girls, moors, and pirates with contraband) that is seen just after Juliet imbibes the “death” potion prepared for her by Friar Laurence. In Brno, a chorus recited the end of Shakespeare’s play after Váña-Psota had run out of music for dancing. “Desolate Romeo, convinced that Juliet is indeed dead, finishes his suffering by drinking poison. Juliet awakes, sees her beloved, and leaves the world that had begrudged them their love. Did their love have to die in order that the hatred between the Montagues and Capulets would also expire?”59
So no happy ending, and no Prokofiev: By the end of 1938 he was barred from travel outside of the Soviet Union. The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs declined to issue him a passport: his status had been changed from vïyezdnoy (allowed to travel) to nevïyezdnoy (disallowed). He missed the production of Romeo and Juliet in Brno, which closed after seven performances on May 5, 1939, a victim of the Nazi German occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Yet the premiere foretold a change in fortune for the ballet. In August of 1938 Prokofiev received a telegram from the Mariyinsky–Kirov Theater in Leningrad expressing interest in staging Romeo and Juliet during the 1939–40 season. The invitation came from the choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky, who had earlier proposed performing the ballet with students. In his hands, Romeo and Juliet became a drambalet, a naturalistic production that blurred the line between acting and dancing even as the division between good and evil hardened. To be a heroine or a hero in Lavrovsky’s universe was to submit, to soften, to meld ballet and melodramatic acting. To be a villain was to remain trapped in the realm of stiff-boned caricature, the bland world of obvious political lessons. Prokofiev had no choice but to accept Lavrovsky as the choreographer of the Soviet premiere, but he resented it—especially after he learned that his score would be overhauled to be made more tragic, more Soviet. He had learned to compose ballet in Paris under the tutelage of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev loved scandal; Kerzhentsev and the Committee on Arts Affairs did not. The filigreed textures of Romeo and Juliet were thickened and slowed in revision until the music seemed to petrify.
Even after the required changes were made, some without Prokofiev’s permission, the dancers still struggled with the score. Galina Ulanova, the passionate ballerina who would forever define the role of Juliet, echoed various official complaints about Prokofiev’s clotted harmonies and tangled rhythms. “To tell the truth we were not accustomed to such music, in fact we were a little afraid of it,” she parroted. “It seemed to us that in rehearsing the Adagio from Act I, for example, we were following some melodic pattern of our own, something nearer to our own conception of how the love of Romeo and Juliet should be expressed than that contained in Prokofiev’s ‘strange’ music. For I must confess that we did not hear that love in his music then.”60
Ulanova’s complaints reflected both official opinion and her own—there was no separation between the two—and Prokofiev had to accommodate her. He dismissed her “hysterics,” as he quipped condescendingly, but lambasted Lavrovsky and the conductor Isay Sherman.61 Despite the discontent on all sides, Ulanova ensured that Romeo and Juliet was a success at its premiere in Leningrad during the dark days of the Soviet-Finnish War. She filled Prokofiev’s acerbic brass and string lines with feeling while enlivening the cartoonish didacticism of drambalet. Ulanova donned the air of a pensive innocent onstage and was occasionally criticized for appearing too submissive as she ran toward Romeo, nightgown fluttering, or too obligingly offering her breast to a knife in the Bakhchisarai seraglio. Yet her earnestness lent classical ballet a common touch. Her arabesques seemed unstudied but communicated passion between the lines. She was a prima ballerina, an actress inspired by silent movies, but also a real person. “Her steps appeared to contain her deepest thoughts and to unfold spontaneously, as if she too were just discovering them,” the ballet historian Jennifer Homans writes, then finds in her dancing a political force. Ulanova “stood both for and against: for the socialist state and its accomplishments but against its empty, canned slogans, its deceptions and lies,” Homans claims.62
Perhaps. But Ulanova also lobbied for state awards and ended up with a greater collection of them, before the Soviet Union collapsed, than her peers. She was treasured enough by the regime to be transferred from Leningrad to Moscow, removed from the theater of the tsars and brought to the theater of the Soviets, now the more officially prominent venue of the two. With Moscow now the seat of political power, the Bolshoi could claim cultural command both at home and abroad. Stalin saw Ulanova dance on its stage, more than once, and she received a Stalin Prize in 1947 for her outstanding interpretation of the lead role in Romeo and Juliet. The other performers in the production were not so recognized, a detail that the ballet master Lavrovsky timidly protested in
a letter to the ruler. First, of course, he expressed his deepest gratitude to Stalin for granting him his wonderful life, and pledged in return to continue sacrificing his health and strength for “our beloved Soviet art, which you so broadly protect.” He admitted that he had no business writing to the living god, but willed himself to mention that the wonderful Ulanova was the lone member of the cast of Romeo and Juliet to have a Stalin Prize pinned to her chest. It seemed, perhaps, that other deserving dancers had been “forgotten” by the Committee on Arts Affairs, including veterans of the iconic Soviet ballet The Flames of Paris, which, Lavrovsky knew, was Stalin’s favorite. Lavrovsky ended his terrified request for a review of the prizes, and for the ruler to “defend” the other dancers, with the words “forgive me.”63
The special treatment for Ulanova continued even after Stalin’s death. She all but awarded herself the Lenin Prize in 1957, promoting her candidacy in a speech to the nominating committee. The director of the culture division of the Central Committee, Dmitri Polikarpov, demurred, asserting, in a February 9, 1957, memorandum, that the award should go to new work rather than “for past services,” but she received it nonetheless.64
As a student of Agrippina Vaganova, Ulanova was the product of a pedagogical method that emphasized épaulement and thus the simultaneous coordination and harmonization of the head, torso, feet, and hands. The goal of this coordination was to align not only all the parts of the body but also to connect the body to the mind and heart; such perfect coordination was meant to open a line of communication with the audience. Vaganova dedicated a chapter of her 1934 treatise on Russian ballet to the proper support for jumps, and she devoted several pages to the poetics of the wrists, how they should flex, for example, to represent the ebbing into stillness of the wings of a dying swan. Vaganova placed a premium on tradition, by which she meant Russian tradition, as defined by a drawing, in her 1934 treatise, of three ballerinas from three different places in attitude effacée. The ballerina on the left-hand side, labeled “French,” tilts obsequiously forward; the ballerina on the right-hand-side, labeled “Italian,” stands rigid and upright, as if on a trampoline. The “Russian” ballerina in the middle tilts less severely in attitude and showcases an elongated back leg.65 That dancer is Ulanova, and, with even greater elongation, the great Soviet ballerinas who followed her.
Ulanova embraced Romeo and Juliet after Prokofiev disowned it. He had run into a wall of Soviet artistic and political resistance from Vaganova, Lavrovsky, and Ulanova, together with designers, instructors, and scenarists, all of whom believed, because they had to believe, that the salvation of their craft resided in drambalet. Prokofiev was instructed to embrace naturalism and reject the incoherence of experimental productions like The Bright Stream. He tried, losing his dignity and sacrificing his health in the effort, but never quite absorbed the lesson the censors set for him. His second Soviet ballet, Cinderella, likewise had a rough start before eventually earning accolades in a postwar Bolshoi Theater production. But his music was once more changed without his permission, and even nastier clashes with the censors lay ahead.
WHERE SHOSTAKOVICH and Prokofiev failed from an official standpoint, composer and conductor Aram Khachaturian succeeded. He was a colonial subject, a migrant from the distant Soviet republics, and he behaved as one. He conformed to the dictates of Moscow, wearing, when called upon, the ethnic costume of the Georgia of his birth and the Armenia of his ancestors. The son of a bookbinder, Khachaturian was raised in a simple house on a bleached Tbilisi mountainside; his humble proletarian origins appealed to Soviet sensibilities. He ended up becoming intricately involved in the Soviet musical administration, holding senior positions in the Union of Soviet Composers, though he would, in 1948, be sacked from the union in a political and financial scandal centering on excessive payouts and perks, including interest-free loans, to his colleagues. Khachaturian was eventually denounced for failing to uphold socialist principles in his music and dabbling in anti-populist experiments. But he and his assistant in the union, Levon Atovmyan, had really just been looking after their friends.
Khachaturian’s first ballet was a modest success, and his second, which knowingly derived from the first, a greater one. The third and most famous, Spartacus (Spartak), had a tough time reaching the stage, but the composer was not to blame, and ultimately Spartacus won international fame. Indeed, it survives to the present day in the Bolshoi repertoire. Khachaturian received his first Bolshoi contract in 1939, the year officialdom blandly deemed him a “talented young composer.”66 That talent rested less in his melodic and harmonic inventiveness than in his selection of sources, his ability to find what he needed in the nineteenth-century repertoire. Insofar as he could compose with more than two lines of motion, he far surpassed the hampered Asafyev. His orchestral imagination, moreover, eclipsed that of Glière, a composer who contentedly sat in the fat middle of the bell curve of Soviet music.
Khachaturian got his start in the theater collaborating with the Armenian scenarist Gevork Ovanesyan and the Armenian choreographer Ilya Arbatov. Backing came from an Armenian politician, Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin’s most devoted servants during the purges, a charmer and a monster. “It was hard to dislike him,” Valerie Hemingway, the author’s daughter-in-law recalled of a meeting with Mikoyan in Havana, but “he had the roundest, blackest eyes I have ever seen.”67 Mikoyan heaped praise on Stalin at a celebration of the NKVD on December 21, 1937, at the Bolshoi Theater; he was on hand for the culling of the Armenian communist ranks; and he signed the order for the 1940 massacre of more than 22,000 Polish officers and others at Katyn, a long-denied act of barbarism that haunts Russian-Polish relations to the present day. These activities fell outside Mikoyan’s official duties as Soviet minister of trade. In his own memoirs, Mikoyan rinsed the blood from his hands. Such were the times, he protested, and besides, he had children to protect. “I had no choice except complete submission,” he claimed.68
Although proud of his birthplace (the Armenian village of Sanahin) and often disdainful of Russians, Mikoyan capitulated to Stalin’s vision of a Soviet Union whose republics had but fictional control over their destinies. The RSFSR defined the USSR; Russians dominated the friendship of the peoples. The thick-haired, thick-lipped composer with whom Mikoyan shared a common heritage adapted accordingly. Some of Khachaturian’s music pretends to be 100 percent Armenian but actually derives from age-old Russian compositional practices. Just as Stalin once treated his rheumatism by leaving Moscow with Mikoyan to take in the thermal waters of the Caucasus, so too Khachaturian dipped his toes into original folk sources from the region. Atop a traditional Russian foundation, he erected elaborate musical structures of bright exotic colors, though paradoxically, even while privileging orientalism, he resented the trivializing labels that came with it. Khachaturian grumbled to his colleagues during the war about being stuck “within the boundaries of national music.”69 Such was his fate, but it kept him out of the classroom, in the spotlight.
Khachaturian developed a formula for the festive parts of his ballets, scenes much beloved by corps de ballets for their garish ease of comprehension. The adjectives accumulate when it comes to the music he created for all-male groups. It is potent, precise, pungent, and above all else wild, the perfect partner for physical virtuosity. Khachaturian’s recipe included up-tempo ostinato patterns; original tunes in the brasses and woodwinds offset by “folk” melodies in the strings; occasional pentatonic scales; even more occasional chromatic clusters. Semitonal displacements between the upper and lower lines are matched by misplaced accents in the rhythms. Such are the elements from which Khachaturian fashioned his famously raucous “Saber Dance.” The bends and turns in his slower pieces for dance match those of the torsos and arms of dancers in beaded costumes. Much of his contrapuntal writing has the texture of overcooked pasta in pots boiling over with emotion. The shared adagio music of his first and second ballets expressed the anxieties of a collective farm on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Bu
t it could also, as the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick demonstrated in 2001: A Space Odyssey, evoke the frigid solitude of outer space.
In 1939, Khachaturian composed music for a ballet on an Armenian theme. It was created on a tight schedule in the spring and summer, premiered by a relatively new company in Yerevan, then re-premiered at the Bolshoi Theater on October 24, 1939. This second performance was part of a ten-day festival, or dekada, dedicated to Armenian folk traditions—at least as defined by Moscow. Stalin welcomed the participants at a Kremlin reception, where Mikoyan was praised for having “motivated all of us, the Armenian workers, to raise our culture and art to the highest level.”70 At the peak was the ballet they had brought to town. Titled Happiness (Schast’ye), it was an obvious winner at the Bolshoi. Positive reviews overflowed the columns of newspapers otherwise committed to reporting on the war in Europe. The Pravda review opened with a reference to the French fairy-tale writer Countess d’Aulnoy—“This is not the blue bird fairy tale, about happiness being stolen away from the people”—but also took a veiled swipe at Lopukhov and his tippy-toed formalism. Happiness was considered “an authentic dance symphony,” depicting “the people’s happiness in their work, in love, in giving their all to glorify the Soviet homeland.”71
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