Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  So great was the ensuing panic on the streets of Moscow that few beyond Prokofiev’s sons, second wife, and inveterate hangers-on learned of the composer’s own passing. The Bolshoi’s ballet master marked the event in the studio with his dancers, and briefly noted the funeral in his diary. On Saturday, March 7, Lavrovsky wrote: “S. S. Prokofiev buried.” On Monday, March 9: “I went to Red Square. Burial of I. V. Stalin.” Tuesday, March 10, found him back at work in the studio with Ulanova, setting The Stone Flower: “I set Katerina’s dance in the cottage. I think it turned out well.”99

  Lavrovsky brought The Stone Flower to the stage on February 12, 1954, only to be scolded, gently but firmly, in reviews published throughout the season. Pravda suggested that he should enliven the ensembles and enrich the adagios. The ballet seemed to commentators a hesitant draft of something, an illustration of allegorical conceits yet to be made plain. Prokofiev might have been chided as well, but he could finally rest at peace in the grave. Thus it was Lavrovsky’s responsibility “to find choreographic expression of the central concept: the people’s spirit as manifested in their work and their constant striving towards beauty and perfection.”100

  Foreign reporters found some good in the ballet beyond Prokofiev’s score. For Harrison E. Salisbury, Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, Ulanova was a “dream fairy,” impressionistically contrasting the “sinister glimpses of chained workers heaving precious stones in subterranean chambers”; the “flashing and sparkling stones and stalactites” of the mistress’s cavern; and “the strange surrealistic green stone toads along with asbestos-like gnomes who might have come from another planet.”101 The Stone Flower was Lavrovsky’s last major work.

  AFTER STALIN’S DEATH, and with Nikita Khrushchev’s elevation as supreme leader, the Soviet Union entered a period known as the “Thaw.” It was marked by a reassessment, even a rejection, of Stalinism and the “cult of personality.” Once again as the political winds shifted, so too did aesthetic diktats. Lavrovsky struggled to shed the constraints of drambalet and failed to impress the decidedly second-tier composer Mikhaíl Chulaki, who served as general director of the Bolshoi after Stalin’s death, from 1955 to 1959, and then again, after a forced “time-out” from the theater, from 1963 to 1970.102 In Chulaki’s opinion, Lavrovsky was squandering his talent in “strange experiments,” such as an attempted production of Béla Bartók’s expressionist ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin. “He completely destroyed the integrity of that ballet,” Chulaki fumed, “turning romantic mountain robbers into Parisian gangsters.”103 In fact, Lavrovsky had done no such thing: Bartók’s ballet has no mountain robbers. Chulaki confused Bartók’s ballet with a merrier one by Karol Szymanowski called Harnasie, about the robber bands of the Tatra Mountains.

  Regardless, The Miraculous Mandarin was an unusual project for the Bolshoi, and provoked the ire of the Central Committee, which in 1961 chastised Lavrovsky for his cynical attempts to “propagandize from the stage of the Bolshoi Theater anti-realistic compositions alien to the spirit of our art.”104 Even by the more fluid cultural standards of the Thaw, he had gone too far, and he needed to be reined in again. The censure went down the chain of command from the Central Committee to the Ministry of Culture (which had replaced the Committee on Arts Affairs under Khrushchev) to the Bolshoi and Lavrovsky’s studio. Chulaki took part in the drubbing, in part because he had never much liked Bartók, insulting his music as “formalist” and “bourgeois” during a 1949 visit to Budapest.105 He repeated the Central Committee’s talking points about Lavrovsky’s fondness for “pathological experiences,” thus demonstrating his own trustworthiness as a party loyalist.106 The Thaw, Chulaki knew, did not melt everything.

  Lavrovsky’s time had passed—politically as well as artistically. In 1963, Chulaki prevented Lavrovsky from joining the ballet on its second London tour, despite pleas from the dancers. Ulanova claimed that the choreographer needed to be on-site to stage his chef d’oeuvre from 1940, Romeo and Juliet, but she did not protest too loudly, perhaps because she nurtured an ambition to take over his duties. The following season, Chulaki packed Lavrovsky off to the Theater College and replaced him at the Bolshoi with the handsome, chiseled face of the future: a thirty-seven-year-old choreographer from Leningrad named Yuriy Grigorovich.

  Lavrovsky knew his successor well, since, in Leningrad, Grigorovich had exploited the grumblings about The Stone Flower to stage his own version of the ballet with dancers from the Komsomol. He faced resistance at first from his supervisors (he was an assistant ballet master at the time) but eventually won their support. Grigorovich took the best features of Lavrovsky’s staging while tossing out the enervating pantomime along with its music. Dance suites, some premade, replaced it. Grigorovich opened up the hero’s heart, and softened the heroine’s backward leans. He deployed fewer gestures than can be counted on the hands, and despite being credited with restoring a long-lost symphonism to the ballet, he struggled to build meaningful choreographic phrases.

  Grigorovich’s adapted version of The Stone Flower took five years to reach the Bolshoi stage, but audiences at its premiere, on March 7, 1959, embraced the ballet and its young choreographer. The newly arrived Moscow correspondent for the New York Times made the obvious connection between the production and the tentative reforms of the Thaw. “A grand evening,” Osgood Caruthers concluded, having been in attendance at the Bolshoi with Shostakovich and the US ambassador to Russia, Llewellyn E. Thompson, “and if not exactly a forward-looking one from where we stand, undoubtedly an adventure in the development of the Bolshoi’s particular progress.” The first act had its stumbles, and the phrases lacked the qualities of growth and change needed for richly expressive narration, but the chain dances of the second act represented “one of the marvels of the repertory. The scene is a market, and every conceivable Russian type is there, dancing his (and her!) head off. In contrast to the vehemence of most of it, there is a gypsy ensemble done in terms of exaggerated relaxation, and this theme is topped by a gypsy threesome of fantastic brilliance.”107

  If the Americans liked it, then something must be wrong with it. Or so concluded the Kremlin. Enthusiastic telegrams sent to the United States by correspondents for United Press International and the Associated Press were intercepted and translated into Russian for the Central Committee. The director of the culture division, Polikarpov, came to this conclusion about the 1959 version of Prokofiev’s The Stone Flower, as now set by Grigorovich: “The mistress of Copper Mountain comes across in the production not as a symbol of the might of Ural Mountain Russians, not as a fetchingly half-fantastic depiction of Russian woman, but as an ‘enigmatic’ image of a female serpent whose dancing is much beholden to Western artistic fashion … The movements and costuming of those dances depart from the Russian and Soviet classical ballet traditions.”108 The Central Committee reported the ballet’s flaws to the minister of culture, Nikolay Mikhaílov, and asked him to make it a teachable moment, so to speak, by arranging a critique to be published in Pravda. Mikhaílov and the newspaper complied, as did, in his own way, Grigorovich.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, ballet was a private art, an entertainment for the few, hardly the pretext for geopolitical intrigue. Imperial censors awoke to its powers during the second half of the nineteenth century, when ballet, no longer the plaything of Catherine the Great, was cast out of the royal garden and into the public theaters. The moment the art was freed from the government and let loose in the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg, it was enslaved by the imperial censors; scenarios were vetted and critiqued. Alexei Bogdanov’s Svetlana, the Slavic Princess, for example, had to be reviewed by the print censor at the Ministry of Internal Affairs just in case the heroine came too close to impersonating an actual royal figure, even though the princess in question is completely fictional, an early nineteenth-century invention. What was kept inside the realm of the court could be trusted as elite entertainment, but as a public performance, ballet required oversight.

  Stalinis
m all but collapsed the distinction between public and private, government and art, performances at the court at the Kremlin and those for audiences at the theater. The Bolshoi was bound up with the government both physically and politically, and censorship intensified to the point where almost nothing new could be approved for performance—despite best efforts from all involved, including the censors themselves. The tsars were gone, and fear reigned; the political uncertainty and creative anxiety could be seen and heard in those few new performances that made it through the filter. The oversight increased through the revolution and the civil war, hung over the killing fields of the purges, the Second World War, and the height of Stalinism. It relaxed but never relented, and it persists to the present day with the hand-in-glove involvement of politicians and priests, even though top-down government meddling in the arts is prohibited by the constitution of the Russian Federation. In 2015, while in Beijing staging his version of Romeo and Juliet, Grigorovich himself remarked, with a tired shrug, “there was censorship; there still is.”109

  . 7 .

  I, MAYA PLISETSKAYA

  MAYA PLISETSKAYA EMBLEMATIZED the power and might of the Bolshoi Ballet in the mid-twentieth century. This decorated, Moscow-trained ballerina had the essential elements of the Bolshoi style: vigor, luster, fearlessness, and a showiness that admittedly appealed to Soviet audiences more than sober-minded adjudicators of her performances in the West. She also possessed, at her peak, complete command of the big Bolshoi roles, boasted a packed international touring schedule, and indulged endless curtain calls before her obsessed fans.

  Born on November 20, 1925, she was the daughter of a silent-film actress and a Soviet businessman. Maya’s mother, Rakhil Messerer, found herself tied to the tracks on screen and once, as the little girl recalled, “trampled by horses.”1 From her father, Mikhaíl Plisetsky, Maya inherited her facial features and brook-no-fools temperament. He worked for the commissariat of foreign affairs and trade before becoming the director of the Soviet mining concession Arktikugol (Arctic Coal). Maya’s erudite, polyglot grandfather, a Lithuanian Jew, made his living as a dentist. Her parents, grandfather, some of her aunts, uncles, and cousins, plus a pianist of no relation lived together in a large, fourth-floor apartment on Sretenska Street, a historic market district tucked inside the Garden Ring Road in central Moscow. Her uncle Asaf and aunt Sulamith danced with the Bolshoi.

  Nature endowed Maya with red hair, lissome arms and legs, a long neck, over-gesticulating hands, a pliant spine, and a restless mind. Her athleticism would exceed even that of the daredevil Asaf. Maya danced before she could walk, her mother claimed, and as a toddler liked to balance on her father’s extended hands, stretching herself upward and outward in delight. Once, when she was twenty-one months old, she climbed out a window of her apartment. She stood outside on the brick ledge and perched four floors above a cluttered courtyard with one arm hooked around the handle, calling to her mother for help. An uncle rescued her from a potentially fatal fall. On another occasion, “Mayechka” disappeared into the traffic-filled streets, prompting a frantic search. Her mother guessed that she might be lost within an enormous crowd that had gathered on the boulevard, between tramcar lines. “I thought that there might be a bear on show and that she might be here,” her mother recalled. But Maya herself was the star attraction. “I fought through the crowd, looked, and saw Mayechka dancing, with everyone gasping about how good she was.”2 Plisetskaya recalled the anecdote similarly: “I naively loved Delibes’s waltz from Coppélia. On holidays a cadet band played it on Sretensky Boulevard—out of tune but with feeling … I pulled my hand from Nanny’s tight hold and unexpectedly—even for me—started to dance. Improvising. A crowd gathered; a few loafers.”3

  She was admitted into the Bolshoi ballet school without debate. It had been a part of the Theater College during the imperial era, but dancers aspiring to the stage of the Bolshoi no longer studied alongside the actors of the Malïy Theater. Plisetskaya trained at the barre under the patient guidance of Yevgeniya Dolinskaya, whom she remembered setting part of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings on her and three other little girls: “We danced in the kingdom of an abstract pastoral as graceful, mythological shepherdesses bathed in the sun and sky, catching floating butterflies.”4 Such was both the beginning and end of her interest in dancing delicate, Arcadian roles. Her regal appearance and impulsiveness ruled them out.

  Plisetskaya spent less than a year at the school before her family moved to Spitzbergen, the island of permanent winter that crowns Norway. Her father had been appointed the general counsel and director of the Soviet mining complex there. “Suitcase, trains, Berlin, German lawns, ferry, seasickness, high waves, snow, plank stairs, albatrosses, cold, and wind,” Plisetskaya wrote of her miserable trip to and life on the island.5 Her mother also remembered skiing, bears, and frostbite. In the spring of 1935, Maya’s father arranged for his daughter to travel back to Moscow, by icebreaker and then train, in the care of an Arktikugol accountant, who arrived at death’s door, suffering from the cold and coal dust. Thus Plisetskaya returned to the ballet school, now under the direction of Elizaveta Gerdt. The broader curriculum included reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with French (which she failed to grasp) and piano (which she mastered). Stardom seemed destined.

  Later in life she would rail against the Soviet system that she believed compromised her career. Yet that same system—with its instabilities, its traumas, the artists it ruined—cleared the path for her ascent. Plisetskaya joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 1943 at the nadir of the Second World War, and after less than a season in the corps de ballet she became a soloist. She said no to Giselle but yes to the frolicsome free-spirited Kitri, a girl of the streets, much like her beloved Carmen. Maya was impatient, paradoxical, and according to a devotee, a “Futurist” capable of expressing the most extreme of emotions in the coolest of manners.6 Her beautiful back, the merriment and sauciness of her acting (she danced Juliet like a teenager who had just rolled out of bed with her boyfriend, as opposed to a naïf falling in love), the ease of her overextended splits, and her incautious attitude inspired the choreographer Yuriy Grigorovich to create demanding, even dangerous roles for her that she herself rejected. Once cordial and mutually supportive, their relationship eventually deteriorated, turning hostile.

  From her aunt, Plisetskaya learned the solo miniature that would become her signature role: Michel Fokine’s The Dying Swan, set to music from Le carnaval des animaux by Camille Saint-Saëns. Her interpretation swept aside the traditional sense of quiet surrender to assert an unexpected defiance. The swan is a cruel, harsh creature, she suggests in footage from the 1950s. Her range became bigger and motion faster in the 1970s, her arms and neck more refined, the torso longer and leaner. French choreographer Maurice Béjart found in her performance a “sweetness” and “joie de vivre.”7 But Plisetskaya was one of his muses and he was biased, not to mention inaccurate. Critics outside of Russia mocked the dance as a crowd-pleasing cliché, an unsubtle exercise in zoological mimesis.8

  She performed The Dying Swan as late as her seventieth birthday, turning her back to the audience for her metamorphosis. She did it two or more times in a row—undyingly, yielding to public demand. “It’s not a question of whether I personally like ‘the dying swan,’” she told the Moscow-based British journalist George Feifer after enthralling an enormous crowd of villagers brought to the Kremlin to see her. “I dance for them not myself; to give them aesthetic pleasure,” she said. “Of course I like the ballet, but I could live without it, I get no dazzling joy from it. But the public expects something from me, and I have no right to let them down.”9

  Feifer had fought hard to get access to the ballerina—to the point of being told by a midlevel foreign-affairs official to cease and desist. But he persisted, and so attended both the performance of The Dying Swan and a Bolshoi Ballet class, where she was the lone female dancer in the room, “in striking black practice dress, cream mohair leggings and full kit of m
akeup.”10 The gorgeous men in the studio were all straight, Feifer underscored, insisting that the culture of the Soviet Bolshoi Ballet was entirely heterosexual. (It was, at least in terms of appearances and mixed-orientation, or lavender, marriages, such as that between Vyacheslav Gordeyev and Nadezhda Pavlova.)11 He extolled Plisetskaya’s musicianship and—noting the leaps she made but fairer, gentler dancers might not attempt—he identified one of the secrets of her success: intense self-love. “After the round of exercises she moves to an inch from the mirror and stares at herself with the same penetration and lack of affectation as she stares at others. This dazzling narcissism, her total absorption with herself goes beyond egotism to an honest leveling with herself—the perception of Plisetskaya as an object which is essential to her approach to art.”12

  She owned her roles, among them Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, which she performed, according to her own generous estimate, eight hundred times—including, for the fifty-fifth time, on the evening of February 28, 1953, just a week before Stalin’s death. Legend has it that Stalin was in the audience that night, but Plisetskaya actually denied this, pointing out, in an otherwise inconsequential 2008 sequel to her 1994 memoir, that she would have been warned about Stalin’s attendance in advance. Whenever the supreme leader of the Soviet Union came to the Bolshoi, “dim-witted but vigilant spies” swarmed the theater, setting everyone’s nerves on edge. She only wished that the “demonic charm” of her Odile had actually occasioned the fatal stroke of “the best friend of the working man.” And she regretted the fear she felt on those occasions when she had danced for Stalin. “We were all slaves then of totalitarian terror.”13