The ballet received support in learned circles, before and after its premiere, and Plisetskaya tried to prepare the audience of the Bolshoi for a different experience, explaining, in her essay for the program booklet, that “ballet these days is without a doubt strongly influenced by gymnastics, acrobatics, and figure skating. If earlier an abundance of pantomimic gestures obscured the meaning of the drama, then the current emphasis on sophisticated virtuoso technique also distances the viewer from understanding the events on the stage.” Her choreography strove for the middle ground in its representation of Anna as “the supreme symbol of femininity.” Her anguish exposes “the ‘total’ lie of high society, its hypocritical claims to morality and decency.”126 Such was the ideological justification for bringing Tolstoy’s novel to the Bolshoi. The cost? When Plisetskaya, her co-choreographers, and her husband created Anna Karenina, they melodramatized the heroine’s death but left out the release of the spirit that Tolstoy describes in the final pages of his novel. Here Konstantin Levin, the character with whom the author identifies and whose trajectory in the novel is the opposite of Karenina’s, has an epiphany. He looks up into the cosmos and feels it opening up, enveloping him, bathing him in radiance, truth, and inner peace. This apotheosis could not be represented on the Soviet stage.
Anna Karenina proved too austere for the old guard, the Carmen Suite too inflamed, and a third dance, called Bach Prelude, too spiritual.127 Didacticism and nationalism remained the moribund emphasis in the repertoire, not Plisetskaya’s decadent deviation from this static thralldom. In the Bach Prelude, Plisetskaya performs steps of Eastern derivation and some basic ballet moves, bourrées en couru, piqués en arabesque. She seems to be tasked with communicating that these positions contain the spirit, entrap it. The performance begins as a solo before her romantic partner turns up—another form of containment. A striking passage has Plisetskaya moving perpendicular to the floor, legs split in a manner that seems to negate the pull of the Earth. Her leg rises in the other direction and then to a grand battement en rond. Then she repositions her body and moves her traveling leg in the opposite direction, in seamless fashion. Space becomes fluid, likewise time as she appears to be moving in slow motion against the flow of the music.
WORRIES ABOUT THE repertoire of the Bolshoi had been made public, but opposition to Grigorovich’s rule within the theater remained hidden behind the scenes. It was real, and it involved dancers young and old, conservative and progressive. Some of them protested, anonymously, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On April 3, 1973, its chief ideologue, Mikhaíl Suslov, received an unsigned letter advocating that Grigorovich be deposed—or at least demoted. He had been removed from his previous post at the Kirov Theater in Leningrad, the letter began, owing to his mistreatment of the talented dancers there, and since his appointment to the Bolshoi in 1964 had not staged an original ballet. “He is occupied with redoing, ‘perfecting’ old productions,” even though the productions in question, by Ivanov, Petipa, Gorsky, and others, held a place of distinction in their original form, praised both at home and abroad. Such was Grigorovich’s artistic “credo,” his raison d’être as a choreographer. Meantime, the denunciation continued, efforts by talented newcomers to create ballets on Soviet themes had been suppressed.
The subject turned to Grigorovich’s quest for power: “For completely inexplicable reasons Grigorovich simultaneously occupies two different positions: artistic director and ballet master in chief, even though our collective includes other capable, talented people who have devoted their entire lives to the art of ballet.” He had become a “dictator,” aided by the minister of culture, which had allowed him to handpick the Bolshoi’s artistic council, even though Grigorovich was not a member of the Communist Party and “had declared, insolently, that the criticism he received from the party organization interfered with his work.” (The decorated ballerina Marina Kondratyeva held the post of Communist Party secretary for the Bolshoi Ballet during the period in question.) Grigorovich further “allows himself to be rude, tactless, callous, and creates a tense atmosphere,” the hostilities fueled by the division within the ballet between those dancers who belong to the troupe that travels abroad, and the troupe that stays at home. The letter included an invidious suggestion, meant to cement the case against the ballet master: “Since Grigorovich’s arrival homosexual activities have been promoted within our collective, despite being illegal in our society. On tour in Paris in 1971 Grigorovich informed our younger members about his meetings with the homosexuals Jean Marais, Lifar, Roland Petit, and Béjart.”
The cure for the malaise included elections for a new artistic council by secret ballot and the naming of a new artistic director, a “Communist, an honest, objective individual, someone as clean as crystal, an ideal citizen of the Soviet Union.” The minister of culture needed to make some corrections.
The complaint—both the parts that had merit as well as the homophobic prattle about Grigorovich’s meetings with France’s leading artists—ended up being ignored. Grigorovich was called in for tea and a chat with the assistant minister of culture, Vasiliy Kukharsky, who reported the substance of the conversation to the minister of culture herself, Furtseva.128 The Bolshoi had achieved remarkable things despite the strife, and perhaps even because of the strife, and so, Furtseva concluded, perhaps nothing needed to be done. She had engineered a confrontation with Grigorovich over Swan Lake, less because of the substance of the ballet than a need to remind him that she controlled him, not the opposite. “She would dismiss directors, rebuke critics and ban productions in a peremptory manner of the ‘Off with his head’ of Alice’s Queen of Hearts,” her biographer observed.129 He had been checked, and so there was no need to use his problems with his dancers to check him further.
FURTSEVA HAD TRAINED as a textile worker in a town near the village of her birth. She married a pilot, and they had a daughter. After he flew away for good, she found support in the greater family of the Communist Party. She moved to Moscow and rose through the political ranks to a position not unlike that of a big-city mayor. Malicious tongues wagged about her relationship with Khrushchev after he promoted her to the Presidium of the Central Committee, though she did not last long in the post. Her phone was tapped by the KGB, as was everyone’s, and in 1961 she was overheard criticizing Khrushchev’s muddleheaded pseudo-liberalism. She knew she was in trouble. Sensing the loss of everything she had worked to achieve, she “opened her veins in her bath,” according to her biographer.130 She was found alive, and Khrushchev, who had the suicide of another official on his hands, granted her a pardon in the form of a demotion from the Central Committee to the position of minister of culture. She remained the most powerful woman in the Soviet government, an elegantly attired and modishly coiffured figure in a sea of dull pinstripe suits.
Those who knew her well, including Grigorovich and Plisetskaya, described Furtseva as seemingly confident but deeply insecure, aware of her limited knowledge of the arts and hostile to those who reminded her of it. When Chulaki did just that, his tenure as general director of the Bolshoi abruptly ended. At least so too did his shouting matches with her over the appointment of a chief conductor, his choice of repertoire, and personnel for foreign tours. The soprano Galina Vishnevskaya recalled the men of the Bolshoi, including Chulaki, being pulled into Furtseva’s office to explain why they had spoiled Vishnevskaya’s tour to America by denouncing her to the KGB. Lined up against a wall, they sputtered apologies like badly behaved schoolboys in front of a headmistress. Vishnevskaya received permission to tour, but the singer first had to meet, on Furtseva’s insistence, with a “vile, grey creature” of the Central Committee.131
Furtseva’s misogynist male detractors claimed that she used her feminine wiles to get her way and staged spectacular “temper tantrums” in her office when she did not.132 She was also an inconsistent enforcer of official artistic policies. Furtseva had her pet peeves and indulgences, according to this same critiqu
e, and maintained a stable of handsome aides and advisers. She liked receiving expensive gifts from her petitioners but was capable of turning on her supplicants for thinking that she could be bribed. Shchedrin gave her a diamond; she accused him of purloining Bizet’s music.
Furtseva was known as “Catherine the Third,” as if she were the rightful heir to Catherine the Great and her enlightened reign.133 A truer assessment of her administrative style finds her struggling to reconcile competing interests and achieve some kind of balance within the theater. Thus both Grigorovich and Plisetskaya could claim her support as well as the lack of it. At times her favor turned to dogmatic hostility. She did not referee their dispute, recognizing that the conflict between the two weakened each against her.
In 1974, Furtseva came under political attack, charged with abuse of power by the Party Control Commission of the Central Committee. Her daughter and son-in-law had been caught stealing from party coffers to build “the family’s palatial dacha.”134 Furtseva accepted blame and pawned her jewels to settle the bill, but Brezhnev, with whom she had clashed, denied her a pardon. He had built an even gaudier dacha for himself from the state coffers, but he wanted her out and so had her family’s petty corruption exposed. She drank; she lost her bid to be elected to the Supreme Soviet, and she was told, on the day before she died, that someone else would read the speech she was supposed to give at the Malïy Theater.
These events precipitated a fatal heart attack on October 24, 1974, according to the official account. Either that or Furtseva had opened her veins again, successfully this time. She was sixty-three. The joke went around Moscow that she turned up at the pearly gates for admission to heaven just after Pablo Picasso had arrived. Having forgotten her passport, she could not prove her identity. So Saint Peter gave her a quiz. Who was Pablo Picasso? he asked. She did not know, and her ignorance was proof enough that she was indeed the Soviet minister of culture. Saint Peter opened the gates and welcomed her inside the clouds, with Pyotr Demichev assuming her former role on Earth.135
For Grigorovich, Demichev seemed better than Furtseva, who had given him grief over his monopolization of his position, and he turned out to be right. For Plisetskaya, he also seemed an improvement, for he had earlier, as a member of the Central Committee, granted her permission to stage Anna Karenina. But as minister of culture he wanted to avoid the drama that had engulfed Furtseva, and thus he trusted Grigorovich to enrich the repertoire on his own terms, muzzle dissenters, and keep the dirty laundry in the hamper.
The conflicts inside the theater persisted, and the repertoire did not receive the enrichment it needed. To Plisetskaya’s disgust, Grigorovich blamed the absence of new offerings not on himself, but on his powerless dancers, accusing them of dragging their feet in the studio. “It’s the opposition in the ballet that’s keeping me from working,” she remembers him grumbling on Soviet television.136 She rejected his claims, thought his bellyaching feeble. The resistance he claimed he faced was just an excuse for his own failings, according to Plisetskaya. How could he feel so aggrieved, she wondered, when he had at his disposal more than “two hundred” dancers, the support of the Soviet government (even its “missiles, tanks, and aircraft carriers,” she claimed), and the time and space to do as he liked?137 She contrasted his situation with that of repressed Soviet geniuses like Shostakovich, who kept working, creating, kicking against the pricks, trying to maneuver around the censors—all of which only made things worse, drove the thorns in further.
Plisetskaya knew Shostakovich and had once hoped that he would collaborate with her on Carmen Suite, but, tired of being pricked, he declined her invitation. Grigorovich also knew Shostakovich; his mentor Fyodor Lopukhov had collaborated with the composer on The Bright Stream, the ballet that ended Shostakovich’s career in ballet. Same hopes for a collaboration, same result. The all-powerful Grigorovich imagined another of the neglected scores from Shostakovich’s experimental youth coming to his creative rescue. That did not happen until 1982, seven years after the martyred composer had died. Plisetskaya sarcastically noted Grigorovich’s effort to get a new ballet, any new ballet, onstage earlier: “He would announce one work, then another. Then silence. Quiet. As if people had misheard him.”138
GRIGOROVICH MOOTED SEVERAL possible projects. Of special interest was a ballet to be based on Mikhaíl Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a dense, scary novel begun in 1928 and almost finished in 1940, the year Bulgakov died. It was never published during Stalin’s rule and only made it into print in the late 1960s. It was the book of the Thaw: demonic, religious, psychiatric (the Master of the title takes residence in a madhouse to write a book about Pontius Pilate), and rich with subtext. Life is difficult for the artists in the novel, likewise for the bureaucrats who abuse them, and the layers of political pragmatics offered Grigorovich the opportunity to stage particular scenes from competing perspectives or perhaps have the corps de ballet switch allegiances in curious fashion. The novel also featured sex, magic, jazz, and an outrageous party inspired by a lavish ballet held at the Moscow residence of the American ambassador in 1935. The obvious composer for such a riotous romp was Shostakovich, but he would not—could not—take it on. He remained “spooked,” Grigorovich explained, by previous experiences in the Bolshoi Theater and preferred composing symphonies and string quartets.139
Another possible subject from fiction was the Soviet classic The Quiet Don (or, at it is commonly translated, And Quiet Flows the Don), by Mikhaíl Sholokhov, a sprawling saga in four parts that won the Stalin Prize in 1941 and did much to win for its author the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. It involves a love triangle with a hero who switches sides between the Reds and the Whites during the civil war that followed the revolution—a theatrically viable topic. But the novel has a massive number of characters, including the brooding Don River of the title and the black Russian earth. Grigorovich claimed that Shostakovich took to the idea of a partial adaptation and even played through some sketched-out musical ideas. But these might actually have been written for a potential opera based on the novel rather than a ballet, or perhaps he merely plinked out some of the folksongs referenced by Sholokhov. Author and composer had met in May of 1964, but besides a great affection for vodka, they had little in common, Grigorovich claimed. Even if Shostakovich’s imagination had been inflamed, and even if the idea for the opera had morphed into a ballet, Grigorovich might have had a hard time selling The Quiet Don to the artistic council of the Bolshoi Theater. He laughingly recalled the wry response to his initial pitch: “Too many Dons,” since Don Quixote, Don Carlos, and Don Giovanni were already in the repertoire.140
Still seeking a new subject, and heeding the advice of the conductor and composer Abram Stasevich, Grigorovich listened to the music Prokofiev had composed for Sergey Eisenstein’s two-part film Ivan the Terrible (1944–46). Here at last was a suitable topic and workable score, at least after Chulaki shaped it to suit Grigorovich’s needs by nipping, tucking, and threading in passages from other Prokofiev scores. Copyright was not a consideration—Soviet art belonged to the Soviet state—so they had license to do as they liked. Prokofiev was long dead anyway and could not defend his work. Perhaps in his stead, Shostakovich blanched at some of the cuts and additions after seeing the ballet in rehearsal. Yet he believed that Prokofiev ultimately would have wanted his music to be heard no matter the context, so he stuttered faint praise to Grigorovich. Perhaps bowdlerizing the soundtrack for a ballet might not have infuriated Prokofiev after all.
The project was first called Age of Fire before reverting to the title of the film that inspired it, Ivan the Terrible. The ballet defends the violence of Ivan’s reign in keeping with Soviet historical accounts of the origins of the tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire. Looking back on the sixteenth century from the middle of the twentieth, Ivan was said to have taken the throne as a teenager and thereafter (in a blending of fact and fiction) consolidated the Russian state by first liquidating the Tatar inhabitants of the impor
tant trading center of Kazan. That ended the exterior threat to his rule. He then subdued the boyars of Moscow, the interior threat. The corps de ballet, in the role of the People, defend the tsar, even when he establishes a cruel personal guard, the oprichniki, to menace them into submission.
Grigorovich made sure that the oprichniki recalled the KGB, even as he sidestepped the troubling features of Ivan’s psychology that had obsessed Eisenstein. The dancers in the lead role did not. Yuriy Vladimirov exposed Ivan’s barbarousness in a performance of disturbing contortions, after which dark-eyed Tatar dancer Irek Mukhamedov took the part, bringing greater introspection, according to the consensus of Moscow balletomanes. The tsar’s doomed bride Anastasia bears the emotional burden of Ivan the Terrible, its pathos, but at its core the ballet is about fire, blood, swords, and the pursuit of power in Russia. As Grigorovich put it, “To be in power is to have unclean hands.”141 Those hands caress Anastasia, strangle a traitor, and become tangled in the ropes of the bells that rang in his coronation. That final image, intended as a coup de théâtre, took time to perfect.
AFTER SHOSTAKOVICH’S DEATH in August 1975, Grigorovich decided to revive one of his ballets, something the composer himself had not endorsed. “I don’t want them reconstituted,” Shostakovich insisted.142 In his later years, he had been plagued by nervous tics, seemingly tormented by something dark and deep—the sheer terror of the 1930s, Grigorovich surmised. He decided to overcome the fear that the composer himself could not by staging the first of Shostakovich’s ballets, The Golden Age. Progress was sluggish; creating the dances meant changing the music, which meant changing the dances again. The plot too. The Golden Age did not reach the stage until November 4, 1982. It was Grigorovich’s last original work.
The period in between the conception and the completion of the ballet was acrimonious. Tensions increased between Grigorovich and the Bolshoi Ballet’s stars, including the emblematic Moscow virtuoso Vasiliev, who would, in 1995, replace Grigorovich as artistic director, lasting five years in the job before being removed by presidential decree; Vasiliev’s partner, Ekaterina Maksimova, a glamorous student of Ulanova and darling of the foreign press; and Plisetskaya, who overambitiously aspired, despite her international commitments, to create a de facto troupe of her own within the Bolshoi. Rancor led to schism, a split between those who supported the status quo, the larger “Bolshevik” faction, and those who did not. The latter, the smaller “Menshevik” faction, faced the wrath of the ballet master in chief, whose consumption of Ararat cognac increased along with his invective against Plisetskaya, the brightest of the stars. He punished the dancers who gravitated toward her, excluding them from productions of his own ballets and denying opportunities to perform on tour. Since the dancers worked without the protection of legal contracts, Grigorovich did not need to threaten to dismiss them. He could just do so.
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