The announcement that she would be joining her comrades on tour came as a surprise. The program for the performances at the Metropolitan Opera did not even include Plisetskaya’s name; inserts had to be printed. On April 20, 1959, Plisetskaya appeared on the cover of Newsweek, dressed as the mistress of Copper Mountain in The Stone Flower. The blurb writer speculated that the Kremlin had “turned her loose” in order to “attach the upmost propaganda value to her appearance here.”38 Yet for the Kremlin, filling coffers remained paramount, above even the health and well-being of the dancers. Plisetskaya offered a long and bitter description of the meager rations she and the rest of the Bolshoi Ballet survived on during their American tour.
Thanks to Plisetskaya’s “triumph,” the Ministry of Culture was able to report to the Central Committee that the foreign funds equivalent of “3.5 million rubles” had been injected into the “USSR state budget.”39 A second tour in 1962 was planned. Plisetskaya was now less of a concern to the KGB. For holding her tongue in the presence of foreign reporters, for dancing, as it were, with her mouth shut, she earned permission to travel again to North America, which in turn earned her limited freedom of movement elsewhere.
The 1962 tour was the most elaborate one to date, part of an exchange that brought the New York City Ballet to the Soviet Union, a homecoming of sorts for the illustrious émigré choreographer George Balanchine.40 The KGB had more influence on the planning than Plisetskaya or the other participants would have known at the time, weighing in on who would be allowed to go as well as what might be performed. The “measures” put in place to protect the “interests” of the USSR included assessing the repertoire to be performed, changing that repertoire if necessary, and presenting it in the proper perspective.41 The KGB, competing for control of Soviet affairs with the Central Committee, worked to ensure that the cultural product sold abroad conformed to official artistic policies. Hence the report prepared for the Central Committee by the director of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastnïy, decrying “the serious inadequacies in the preparation of the Bolshoi Ballet’s tour abroad in 1962.” Of special concern was the ballet Spartacus, as choreographed in Leningrad by the iconoclastic, temperamental Leonid Yakobson. “Several leading performers are concerned about the repertoire scheduled for the US and Canada,” Semichastnïy began. “They object in particular to the inclusion of the ballet Spartacus,” which “has big drawbacks: the absence of dancing, first of all, but also inaccurate interpretation of the characters, and the presence of sex scenes adopted from Western art.” He added that staffers with the US embassy in Moscow sensed trouble for Spartacus in America, but did not say why. “It would be wiser to include Cinderella and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai in the repertoire rather than Spartacus,” he wrote. It was also essential “to take urgent measures to upgrade the concert program, to include numbers that reflect Soviet life.”42 Semichastnïy meant, of course, the exoticized life of imagination, what art alone could create. Soviet life as such was not to be staged. Spartacus was eventually allowed to make the trip, once the ballet had been reworked and American audiences properly primed for its size.
Meantime there was the all-important task of checking and rechecking personnel. Semichastnïy laid out the pluses and minuses of each person scheduled to tour. He agonized the most about sending the Bolshoi ballet master Lavrovsky. His colleagues “characterize him as conservative and biased,” the KGB director wrote. “He has not paid the required attention to the tour’s success, being more concerned with promoting himself and the productions he has staged, while at the same time ignoring other ballets, for example, The Stone Flower, during the 1959 tour to the U.S. In previous trips abroad Lavrovsky made extensive contacts with Russian emigrants and other foreigners without approval from the leadership of the delegation.” This made him a traitor. Having analyzed the intelligence gathered, Semichastnïy proposed a coup: Lavrovsky would be replaced by Ulanova, who “conducts herself abroad with utmost dignity and modesty.”43 The Central Committee objected to the plan, however, and Lavrovsky remained in his job for another year.
Of particular concern was Māris Liepa, the dancer cast as Spartacus. Semichastnïy worried that Liepa might follow the example of Rudolf Nureyev, who turned himself in to Paris airport police in 1961, betraying the Soviet people on whose bread and salt he had been raised. To assuage the “doubts” about Liepa’s trustworthiness, the “leadership” of the Bolshoi Theater argued that, despite his bulging muscles (he had bulked up for the part of Spartacus), he was “exceptionally loving,” wholly devoted to his “young son, mother, father, and his sister, who lives in Riga.”44 His family, effectively held hostage by the state, would ensure his return. Liepa received permission to take the tour and came back as promised.
Like the theater itself, Plisetskaya had by the time of her second American tour become a trusted Soviet brand, a marketable commodity at home as well as abroad. During her ascent, jingoistic articles appeared in the Soviet press under her name, some short and sweet, like the January 1, 1960, New Year’s proclamation, “Proshchay, starïy god!” (Farewell, old year!) in Sovetskaya kul’tura, and a March 23, 1965, piece titled “Iskusstvo shagayet v kosmos” (Art steps into the cosmos), extolling the first spacewalk. “As a Soviet person, I’m inspired by this latest victory of our science and technology. As a ballerina, I envy Lieutenant Leonov; I’d so like to experience the feeling of freedom and lightness that must come from weightlessness.”45 Of freedom and lightness Plisetskaya knew more than the cosmonauts: Leonov’s spacewalk lasted just over twelve minutes, and he had a hard time squashing himself back into the hatch, since his spacesuit had puffed up in the vacuum.
Also bearing Plisetskaya’s name was a half-page gloss in Izvestiya of the 1962 US tour under the title “Russkaya terpsikhora pokorila Ameriku” (Russian Terpsichore conquers America). It describes how President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis congratulated her for her performance in Swan Lake, and reports that average Americans commended the “wise” leadership of the Soviet Union for bringing the Cuban Missile Crisis to an end, thus preventing the US government from blowing everyone to smithereens.46 Most of these articles were command performances, commissions, typed up by journalists in house agitprop style and presented to Plisetskaya for her signature. Other celebrities exploited by the state, including Shostakovich, tended to ignore the prayers for peace and fanfares for the common man published under their names in the Soviet press, but Plisetskaya was a bit more attentive. She clipped them and might even have read them. She countered the blandness of her official pronouncements by granting interviews in which she spoke in no-nonsense terms about the future of her art.
In 1966, she was interviewed for Vogue about, of all things, her favorite recipes. The reporter traveled to Moscow from the haute cuisine capital of Paris to learn about the “rustic, stick-to-your-ribs” fare that the ballerina prepared at home. The expectation had less been peasant beef stew, which Plisetskaya indeed fed to the reporter, than lighter-than-air angel food: “the yolk of an egg and two rose petals.”47 The British journalist George Feifer, who also enjoyed some of this nosh, added that she and her husband lived in a two-bedroom apartment with “Canadian” wallpaper and “American” telephones. Their personal surroundings were “sumptuous” by Soviet standards, the art collection rivaling that amassed by Ekaterina Geltser during her life. The apartment had two grand pianos; piles of coffee-table books; and a “collection of paintings, drawings and lithographs” from Braque and Chagall, among others; an “early Picasso dish”; and a “superb Léger rug.” Plisetskaya harvested these items on tour, which somewhat compensated for the confiscation of her earnings. Her home also included “Woolworth-like portraits of herself in oil and watercolor” and tacky souvenirs, “the casual mixture of masterpiece and carnival doll” lending “an air of artlessness to the flat, a lack of pretension, even order, which is characteristic of many poorer Russian homes.”48
Her activities abroad were carefully monitored, her co
nversations with foreigners transcribed and translated throughout the administrations of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the fleeting Andropov and Chernenko interregna, the twilight era of Gorbachev, up to the end of the Soviet Union altogether. But her keepers so often let her out of the keep that the impulse to defect, never that strong, faded to null. She found her escape on the stage, making the once-chic act of defecting déclassé while increasing her Cold War mystique. She played the role of cultural diplomat abroad, charming foreign heads of state and serving as muse to Parisian fashion designers and filmmakers along with choreographers. Pierre Cardin fetishized the minimalist, black-on-black aesthetic she cultivated on the Soviet runway.
Plisetskaya’s oft-stated reasons for remaining in Russia included her husband, a prominent composer who made the case for artistic experimentation in speeches delivered at the Union of Soviet Composers. He was her best friend; their love proved steadfast, their marriage rock-solid. Plisetskaya also claimed that her “conscience” prevented her defection, knowing the anguish she would have felt about breaking her promises, even those made to the besotted, bumbling politicians. She recalled pleasure beaming from Khrushchev’s “pancake face” after she came back to the USSR from America in 1959; he called her a “good girl” for not making a “fool” of him. And there was always the Bolshoi, her true home and the source of her strength. The Bolshoi granted license, freedom, for her semi-improvised, dangerous-looking recalibration of newer and older roles. Such freedom did not require an exit visa. “There was no stage so comfortable, the most comfortable in the entire solar system, in the entire universe, as the Bolshoi!” she rhapsodized.49 The theater had endured tragedy and triumph. Maintenance was haphazard, the budget for upkeep inadequate. The Bolshoi had survived attacks from inside, outside, and—owing to the concealed tributaries of the Moscow River that flowed under the foundations—from below. But its big stage and excellent sightlines remained. It maintained its neoclassical composure even as it fell into ruin at the end of the Soviet era. Perhaps the theater’s past mattered to Plisetskaya. Certainly its future did.
FOR A TIME, that future resided with a dancer and choreographer from Leningrad, Yuriy Grigorovich, a disciple of Fyodor Lopukhov’s who represented an exciting break from convention, a muscular retort to Zakharov, Lavrovsky, and the stagnant strictures of drambalet. Ulanova endorsed his appointment as Bolshoi ballet master in formulaic terms, ticking, as it were, the right boxes on the recommendation form. Grigorovich sought “new rhythmic and figural language” but resisted the “cold, formalist” experiments of European and American choreographers, she wrote. Tick. He was a dramatist, interested in “conflict” and its resolution, and he cared about the “inner world,” the emotions and thoughts of his characters.50 Tick tick. And so forth. Ulanova would find little in his muscular, alpha-male ballets to suit dancers of her modest, serene disposition. But Plisetskaya could power through them, and she performed the parts assigned to her as though her very life depended on it—which, for a time, it did.
A showman, Grigorovich organized mass forces for mass entertainment, geared toward seemingly superhuman dancers of astonishing physical strength. He made use of folk dance but excluded character dance, a sin that Moscow balletomanes will perhaps never forgive, given its importance to the Bolshoi tradition. His inspiration, he claimed, came from Marius Petipa, but he also found artistic stimulus on the streets, in the behavior of people at bars, brothels, gyms, and on battlefields. His choreography possessed a hard-angled grit unknown to the ballets of the past—the prettier, blurrier spectacles after which Soviet hair salons were named: Giselle, Paquita, and Raymonda. The sex and violence irritated the censors, but still his works set forth the proper lessons about good and evil, patriots and traitors, oppressors and liberators. Politically, he largely had his way; clashes with officialdom never lasted more than a few days. “She loved me,” Grigorovich said of Ekaterina Furtseva, the minister of culture from 1960 to 1974.51
He came to the Bolshoi in 1964 with two notable successes under his belt. He had turned The Stone Flower from a work of late-Stalinist paralysis into an international box office success, and although his Legend of Love (Legenda o lyubvi, 1961) ran enough fingers down enough thighs to provoke howls of protest from Soviet ballet hardliners, Plisetskaya enthusiastically embraced the work. Even less ardent supporters like Ulanova considered Legend of Love a revelation for its “symphonic construction,” in which dance and music coalesced to push the plot forward and add depth to the characterizations. Everything counted; there were no pointless “concert numbers.”52 And Grigorovich had managed to solve the problem that had brought woe to his teacher, Lopukhov: He had figured out how to make his dances musical without making them abstract.
Legend of Love takes its plot from a 1948 poem by the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, with décor by a Georgian designer, Simon Virsaladze, and music by an Azeri composer, Arif Melikov. The multiethnic collaboration, guided by a Russian ballet master, offered a clinic in the friendship of the peoples. It is an angst-ridden nocturne. Hearts are exposed, swords drawn, breasts and chests angled to the ground, and love trampled on in a tale of a queen’s sacrificing of her beauty and a court painter’s impossible heroism; he vows to chip through a mountain to a secret water source, thus ending a fierce drought. The movement is ritualistic, somber and austere, but there is also the sultriness of the Orient.
For the sake of symmetry, if not symphonism, Grigorovich altered the music. The composer pretended to go along, but had little say in the matter, since he had returned to his native Baku for a political appointment during a crucial phase in the rehearsals. In his absence, the ballet achieved balance. Grigorovich added repeats and excised transitions to keep the action flowing in the allegorical mass movements. The scenes of farewell and prayer, the people’s dances, and the court dances recur in variation, as does the figural language in the gut-baring monologues. The conductor’s score for the 1965 Bolshoi Theater premiere records Plisetskaya’s cues: the arabesque and finger point that chase the courtiers into the wings; the twirling, leaping explosion of emotion; the hard landings on Melikov’s chords of doom. Everyone understood what everything meant—the public, the politicians, and Grigorovich’s allies among the critics. As one of the reviewers determined, the opening court tableau symbolized “powerless servitude,” the procession of soldiers “terrible, blind, and soulless despotism,” and the shower of gold coins that the queen pledges to a dervish “deceptive and transparent vainness.”53
Legend of Love is bleak and spare. The movement is “anti-mime” without being “pro-dance,” to quote Arlene Croce, one of Grigorovich’s sternest critics outside of Russia. Croce concedes that “simplified and serious is not a bad thing to be” in ballet, but “simplified and mediocre is.”54 Moscow dance critic Tatyana Kuznetsova agrees, arguing that the storytelling in Legend of Love is blunt to the point of obtuseness, the syntax barren, ballet’s Sahara Desert. Certain gestures became terrible tics for Grigorovich: “falling to the knees” in supplication, for example, or standing split patterns and crazed dashes from one corner of the stage to another. They recur in this long, three-act ballet, and in all of the long, three-act Grigorovich ballets created after it, regardless of where the action is set—the Near East, the Rus of Ivan the Terrible, the ancient Rome of Crassus and Spartacus, or Shostakovich’s Soviet Russia. Most galling is that Grigorovich’s preferred movements occupied the grand stage for “almost forty years.”55 Legend of Love remains in the repertoire, with Plisetskaya’s role taken by Svetlana Zakharova in the most recent Bolshoi Theater production, from 2014.
IN 1966, GRIGOROVICH ascended to the position of ballet master in chief. That same year he received the assignment for his third major ballet, Spartacus. The score by Khachaturian had twice been choreographed for the Bolshoi, in 1958 and 1962, but the ballet had failed at home and on tour. Grigorovich had himself danced the part of a gladiator in an earlier setting, and joked about being the “first one killed” in the ballet—wh
ich suited him fine, since he was then first in line at the buffet backstage.56 Yet when the general director of the Bolshoi, Mikhaíl Chulaki, handed over the scenario and the score to Grigorovich to set anew, there was nothing to laugh about. Spartacus had long been an irresistible subject for the Soviets, and Grigorovich’s new ballet was slated to premiere on an important date, the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution.57
Spartacus projects had been planned, replanned, and unplanned since close to the founding of the Soviet Union, and ballets, operas, and films on the topic of the Spartacus-led slave uprising timed for the fifteenth and fortieth anniversaries of the revolution. A who’s who of greater and lesser Soviet talents had tackled the subject. An elaborate silent movie treatment was released in 1926 by the Turkish-Soviet director Muhsin Ertuğrul, and the proletarian composer Georgiy Dudkevich completed a Spartacus opera in 1928. Dudkevich received permission from Glavrepertkom for a production, but only if it happened outside of Moscow and Leningrad, his music having been deemed too amateurish for the “general worker-peasant public.”58 It was heavy on choral singing, light on action—a passable historical epic, in short, but not an especially compelling one. The opera house in Perm staged it. Petipa’s niece Kseniya took a stab at the story as scenarist, and the composer Boris Asafyev pounced on the subject in 1934 when he thought the political moment apt. In 1935, however, he retreated hotfoot when he realized that the music would have to come from his imagination, there being no ancient Roman musical sources to base it on.
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