PLISETSKAYA DERIDED GRIGOROVICH for losing his edge in the 1960s, and for rejecting progress by affixing his name to modest revisions of the classics. The worlds before and after the revolution were worlds apart, but, like other choreographers of his time, Soviet and otherwise, he reverted to the narrative ballets of the past. It was not, as Plisetskaya doubtlessly recognized, entirely a matter of creative impoverishment. Soviet audiences liked the classics, and in most instances preferred them, even in bowdlerized versions, to ballets about insurgencies and five-year plans. So Grigorovich put his personal stamp on the canon. Other choreographers, East and West, do the same, which makes authorship a fraught matter. Additions, subtractions, augmentations, diminutions: who is to tell who did what?
The question was raised at the Bolshoi in 1969 about the most classic ballet of all, Swan Lake. Grigorovich wanted to restore to Tchaikovsky, the machinist Karl Valts, and the Bolshoi Theater of 1877 the dark, grim ballet they had conceived. It was not a research project, more an effort to return Swan Lake to the Romantic era, which for Grigorovich meant E.T.A. Hoffmann. He restructured it to make the sorcerer Rothbart the Hoffmannesque double of Prince Siegfried—his shadow, dancing together with him in unison, peering over his shoulder, pulling his emotional and psychological strings. (Gayevsky claims that the problem faced by Siegfried is typical of Grigorovich’s heroes: They seem to be free, but they are in fact “prisoners, hostages, and also somewhat like marionettes,” beholden to ideals that sow confusion in their heads.)108 Had the sorcerer been given some mime he might have cast spells, but mime was, for Grigorovich, taboo, along with earthiness in the national dances, which are performed en pointe in the ball scene.
The prince does not see what is happening. He imagines escaping his pseudo-aristocratic knightliness for a future with Odette in a realm of pure divine love, but the evil spirit offers him destructive Romantic passion in the form of Odile. He succumbs, and then everything is eradicated in a restoration of the 1877 storm scene. Siegfried is left alone after Odette/Odile and all of the white swans are washed from the black stage “like chalk from a chalkboard.”109 Whereas the Stalinist conclusion had the prince finding redemption through his love for Odette, in Grigorovich’s conception there is no saving the prince or his would-be princess, no triumphant conquest over Rothbart in a sword fight. Fate leaves him on the shore alone, possessed of nothing but the knowledge of his own delusions.
“Everyone dances,” one of the in-house assessors of the new production declared, and all of the dancing mattered, since Grigorovich had excluded “the window-dressing of the old production.” The act 1 waltz was “festive,” a guileless celebration; the polonaise served as the balletic equivalent of a ballad, introducing intrigue, trouble, into the proceedings: “As the goblets are clinked in the middle of the polonaise, it becomes mysterious, magical. Using this effect Grigorovich reveals his hero’s internal aspirations, exposes the split between his world and external events.”110 Act 2 came from Ivanov, and parts of the framing acts from Gorsky and Petipa, but the borrowings were neither criticized nor challenged, since Grigorovich got out front to defend them. He had kept the best of the past, he said, in the service of the new. The absence of specialist national dancers doing the Hungarian czardas along with the Spanish, Italian, and Polish dances in the ball scene, however, became a point of contention in the closed-door discussions of Swan Lake. Grigorovich opted for a “pathetic imitation of Balanchine” in his “illogical” and “monotonous” ballet, in the brutal assessment of the critic Elena Lutskaya.111
But a larger group in Grigorovich’s camp, including the dancer Māris Liepa, predictably defended the production from the first step to the last. Grigorovich had established himself as a choreographer by rejecting realism and the silent-movie-acting style of drambalet; his ballets were meant to occupy a higher plane, and his version of Swan Lake put a stake through the heart of the Lavrovsky realist tradition. The ethnic dances, he decided, needed to be poeticized, classicalized, which meant eliminating the heeled shoes and commedia dell’arte shenanigans. Grigorovich’s teacher, Fyodor Lopukhov, further defended the production on the grounds that his prize pupil had been “exceptionally attentive to Tchaikovsky’s music,” restoring, for example, the Russian dance that had been tossed even before Gorsky (by Petipa and Ivanov in 1895). And just what was so “Polish” about Gorsky’s Swan Lake mazurka anyway?112 Nothing. Plus it was profoundly unmusical, attaching a male national dance pair to a national princess.
The minister of culture attended the dress rehearsal on December 18, 1969, after which a discussion of the pluses and minuses of the Hoffmannesque production was to be held. But it did not happen. Furtseva appeared to inform the group who had packed themselves into the tiny waiting room outside the director’s office that everything was understood, everything was “clear.”113 She smiled left and right but refused to comment further, offering only to deliver her verdict in the morning, since, in accord with the Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening. Grigorovich met with her the next day and learned that Swan Lake had been canceled, despite being slated to open a New Year festival. He must have been devastated, but he remembered defending himself. He did not invent Romanticism, he told Furtseva, and insisted that his version of Swan Lake remained faithful to Tchaikovsky’s great score and to something that the composer understood very well: an ideal is a cruel, evil thing. To pursue an ideal is to invite ruin, and the ballet reckoned with this truth. Furtseva said, “All right, all right, stage it.”114
But that “all right, all right” was contingent on the ending being changed to a sunrise and light, and Odette remaining a princess, as opposed to turning back into a swan, in that glow. Grigorovich headed back into the studio and came up with the required alternate. The discussion that followed the second general rehearsal, on December 23, 1969, reflected the tensions. The final act “moves the entire struggle into the spiritual realm. It speaks of devotion and the triumph of love,” one of Grigorovich’s lieutenants commented, before hinting at the drama behind the scenes. “I want to add that another concept was planned and realized as an alternate. It was a profound one, but it did not get to be fully expressed. Two paths led from it: one with a tragic finale, and the other path Grigorovich took to preserve and complete it as conceived.”115 So in this convoluted formulation, the radiant central conceit of the ballet did not find its true expression in the tragic ending but instead found its proper realization through the merciful intervention of the minister of culture.
Grigorovich assigned the role of the sorcerer Rothbart to Spartacus—that is, to the soloist Boris Akimov, who alternated with Vasiliev in the role of the slave-rebel.116 Akimov cavorted and gamboled in a manner that some in the Bolshoi Theater audience found “hard to take” once the ballet was allowed to be publicly performed, on December 25, 1969.117 It trafficked in an implausible contrivance. Rothbart ran circles around Siegfried, mocking his knightly affectations and throwing the royal ball into chaos, only to be “crushed by the spiritual force of the love of the Prince for Odette.”118 That is the metaphorical interpretation of the happy ending. Onstage, Siegfried prevents the sorcerer from slaying the swan-maiden by blocking his path to her and covering her with his own body. The sorcerer collapses dead at the lovers’ feet. The opposite of this ending, the tragic finale, was never shown to the Soviet public.
THE ROMANTIC INTERPRETATION of Grigorovich’s career marks Swan Lake as both the end and a beginning: the end of an experimental and explorative phase, and the beginning of a period of frustration, when the creative well (never especially full) began to run dry. Plisetskaya began to distance herself from Grigorovich, hand over her roles in his ballets to younger dancers, and suggest that, having shifted from the acquisition of power in the theater to the protection of it, he had become boring. In her memoirs, she avoided mentioning his name as much as she could but, close to the end, settled the score that, in her creative life, most needed settling. “I have not changed my opinion of Stone F
lower and Legend of Love,” she wrote long after the fact. “They are the peak of his work. All his subsequent works—this is my opinion—went downhill. Fast.”119 She twisted the dagger, describing Grigorovich as a dictator, a Stalin in the Bolshoi Theater, who shaped the entire Russian ballet tradition in his image. “He changed the good old classical ballets, adding just a slight retouching but not forgetting to add his name. And then he took on Petipa, Perrot, Ivanov, Gorsky. In the last ten years he didn’t even bother making changes.”120 In truth, he did make some changes, but Plisetskaya was not to be dissuaded from her assessment—a vile tale that had Grigorovich, notoriously repetitive at the start of his career, repeating himself long into his dotage.
Grigorovich still relied in his ballets on classical steps circa 1910, kept the women in pointe shoes, and preserved the traditional architecture of ballet. His setting of The Stone Flower, for example, retains the familiar balance between soloists, coryphées, and the corps de ballet. As a dramatist, however, he was more of a modernist, stripping plots down to bullet points. About Spartacus he said simply, “This production is conceived as a tragedy of personality.”121 The hero chooses his own fate (he errs by sparing Crassus’s life, a mistake that Crassus does not replicate when the tables are turned). To stage that conceit, Grigorovich could not count on soloists and the corps de ballet alone. Paradoxically, then, as he stripped down the story he filled up the stage. His Legend of Love adds a pair of youths and a buffoon; Spartacus features a mix of shepherds and profligates; his 1975 ballet Ivan the Terrible, also known as Age of Fire (Ognennïy vek) includes heralds, bell ringers, and both male and female boyars. In his version of The Golden Age from 1982 there are gangsters, robbers, and fishermen. Like everything else in Grigorovich’s ballets, however, the characterizations are compressed, reduced to one or two defining features, outlines. And compression leaves little room for error.
Thus in the 1970s, the Bolshoi Ballet, like the Soviet political structure itself, failed to combat inertia. Faith in the Soviet cause flagged. Everyone under Brezhnev, and indeed Brezhnev himself, contented themselves by going through the motions, and even as Grigorovich tightened his fist around the reins of power within the theater he seemed to be playing a part too long rehearsed. For Plisetskaya and his other critics this was the truth of Grigorovich’s career: having remade the classics in his own symphonic choreographic image, having laid to rest plot and pantomime and the traumas of the drambalet years, Grigorovich ended up, after a scintillating start, marking time, moving bodies across stage without much inspiration.
PLISETSKAYA, HOWEVER, HAD a vision. The seasoned dancer became an unseasoned choreographer who brashly imagined herself, her husband, and their allies establishing an alternate repertoire. They believed that the old classics of the ballet stage needed to be replaced by new classics: the sacred masterpieces of Russian literature that had resisted adaptation through traditional means and had not been reinterpreted by the Soviets along socialist-realist lines. Thus she based a ballet on a masterpiece that no choreographer had hitherto dared to touch, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
To consider the choice imprudent would be an understatement, but Plisetskaya maintained, as did her husband, that the capacious novel could be contained. His music and her dance were meant to capture a specific aspect of the deep and rich internal life of Tolstoy’s heroine: her increasing inability to distinguish the real from the imagined. The ballet was conceived in 1967 with the help of Plisetskaya’s trusted colleagues, Natalya Ryzhenko and Victor Smirnov, who co-choreographed the ballet with her. Some of the dancers were, like her, veterans of Grigorovich’s ballets eager to try something new; others were untested.
The first script, by Natalya Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilyov (not to be confused with Vasiliev), reduced the novel to eleven scenes with a prologue. Each of the discrete plot points would be “depicted, as it were, through the feelings and imaginations of the characters.”122 The ballet was to have opened with a blizzard, the howling wind becoming the sound of a bell becoming the light of a candle that illuminates Karenina and three other characters at the heart of the story. Shaking the stage-set snow globe in the first scene revealed the sparkling interior of a St. Petersburg ballroom. Karenina and Count Vronsky, who will indulge in a scandalous high-society affair, collide with each other at the end to music that suggests, according to the script, the screeching brakes of a train—the harbinger of Anna’s suicide when faced with the impossible choice between her lover in exile or the son she has had in St. Petersburg with a Russian imperial minister. That scream of the brakes resonates throughout the score such that Karenina dies continually in her imagination before the train actually arrives.
Plisetskaya rejected this extremely compact original scenario. The treatment was too terse, and as such too harsh. In search of something more literal, she passed the project along to Boris Lvov-Anokhin, an experienced theater director who came with strong recommendations. Lvov-Anokhin preserved the opening snowstorm and claustrophobic concept of the first script but expanded it into a full-evening production of three acts. His scenario opens with Karenina alone in the drifts, then moves to the silent crowd, which makes the heroine seem all the more alone. The train wheels running over her body is presaged by the death, also under a train, of a holy fool-like figure. At the end of the ball, Karenina runs into her future lover, and their relationship is carried out discreetly until the pivotal episode at a racetrack. The din from the orchestra pit, representing the heroine’s innermost feelings and thoughts, is joined by the racket of an onstage band: the real world. Shchedrin’s score is a brooding, throbbing affair that privileges the low registers of the instruments and tritone-based, dissonant harmonies. Karenina is assigned a cluster of melodies that depict the conditions imposed on her, by her, and outside her as others witness her disintegration.
The steeplechase race ends in mild embarrassment for Vronsky, who slips from his saddle after his horse loses its footing. For Karenina, it is a catastrophe. She gasps in shock, instantly exposing the affair to the public and severing all relations with her husband. Cue the train music. The epilogue finds the tragic heroine alone in the murk as the light of the locomotive comes into view. Afterward, everyone involved in the production would breathe a sigh of relief that the ballet had not turned out to be the train wreck its detractors joked it would.
Among the skeptics were the two general directors of the Bolshoi Theater between 1967 and 1972. Plisetskaya faced resistance first from Chulaki and then from Yuriy Muromtsev, who served as head of the Bolshoi from September 1970 to December 1972 as the ballet crawled toward the stage. In her memoirs, Plisetskaya cast the story of her ballet’s tortured path from page to stage as a bleak comedy, describing locked doors, bad lighting, unfinished Pierre Cardin costumes, and missing dancers. It was finally produced thanks to Shchedrin’s political savvy during the initial planning stages and a fortuitously timed attack on the Bolshoi repertoire.
On April 5, 1968, Shchedrin announced in the pages of Pravda his and his wife’s ardent desire to create a ballet on Anna Karenina. In an article titled “Uznayem li mï Annu?” (Will Anna be recognizable?), Shchedrin vowed that the ballet would not be a “profanation of the novel” because “we have taken a different approach.”123 It would be a distillation, not a wholesale adaptation. The minister of culture knew nothing of Shchedrin’s and Plisetskaya’s intention and did not appreciate learning about their plans from the newspaper. Furtseva called Chulaki to demand that he issue a denial. He refused, and Furtseva’s anger was enough to shelve the project until 1972.
By that time—and in that year—the lack of innovation in the repertoire, the Bolshoi’s stagnation, had become a serious concern to the government. The Central Committee signaled its concern publically in Pravda. A long-retired dancer and a prominent journalist, Viktorina Kriger, was either asked or moved to rebuke the Bolshoi Ballet, and by extension Grigorovich, for the predictable performance schedule. The New York Times picked up the report and summar
ized it from top to bottom, embarrassing the theater internationally. “The posters of the Bolshoi Ballet cannot exactly be called diverse,” Kriger deadpanned. “Today is Swan Lake, tomorrow Giselle.” Then Swan Lake would be performed again. And then Giselle again. Grigorovich’s Legend and Love and Spartacus appeared now and again, along with Romeo and Juliet and a couple of other lesser-known ballets. But the offerings truly did exceed the dull. The sameness of the repertoire had begun to affect the box office and impede the development of young talent.124
Desperately seeking something new, the government gave the green light to Plisetskaya and Shchedrin to stage Anna Karenina. It premiered on June 10, 1972, just before the season ended. Their “profanation” of Tolstoy had little of the shock effect of Carmen Suite; letters to the editors of the Soviet culture desks reiterated now-familiar complaints about Plisetskaya’s affront to grace. Her “suffering is not profound,” objected one writer. “It is not affecting. Tolstoy’s aristocratic Anna is missing from her character.” And although “skirts flounced in the air,” another observer failed to “see any other emotions expressed.”125
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