Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Elizaveta Gerdt rehearsing Plisetskaya and Vladimir Preobrazhensky, 1947

  Grigorovich’s long-time set designer Simon Virsaladze, Alexander Lavrenyuk, and Plisetskaya, Legend of Love, 1972

  Vladimir Vasiliev and Natalya Bessmertnova in Spartacus

  The Bolshoi Theater, May 15, 2015

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  The description of the near-blinding of Sergey Filin comes in part from conversations with Katerina Novikova, Olga Smirnova, and Nikolay Tsiskaridze in March of 2013; earlier in February, I interviewed Svetlana Lunkina at Princeton University; later in November, I communicated with Dilyara Timergazina. For a fuller account of these exchanges than I provide here, see Simon Morrison, “More Tales from the Bolshoi,” London Review of Books, July 4, 2013, 21–22; and “The Bolshoi’s Spinning Dance of Power,” International New York Times, November 25, 2013. The point about Balanchine and Ashton as inheritors of the Petipa tradition comes from Alexei Ratmansky, by way of Alastair Macaulay, in an as-yet-unpublished questionnaire concerning Ratmansky’s 2015 staging of The Sleeping Beauty.

  1 Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 511.

  2 Ibid., 514, 517.

  3 Wendy Perron, “Inside Sergei Filin’s Bolshoi Ballet (expanded version),” Dance Magazine, January 2013, dancemagazine.com/issues­/January-2013/Inside-Sergei-Filins­-Bolshoi-Ballet-expanded­-version.

  4 Chyornïye lebedi. Noveyshaya istoriya Bol’shogo teatra, ed. and comp. B. S. Aleksandrov (Moscow: Algoritm, 2013); Bolshoi Babylon, directed by Nick Read (New York: HBO Documentary Films, 2015).

  5 Ellen Barry, “Harsh Light Falls on Bolshoi After Acid Attack,” New York Times, January 18, 2013.

  6 Ellen Barry, Wild Applause, Secretly Choreographed,” New York Times, August 14, 2013.

  7 Shaun Walker, “Bolshoi Dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko Jailed for Six Years over Acid Attack,” The Guardian, December 2, 2013.

  8 Ismene Brown, Opinion: How Can the Bolshoi Rise Again?,” thearts desk.com, December 4, 2013, http://www.theartsdesk.com/­dance/opinion-how-can-bolshoi­-rise-again.

  9 Kseniya Sobchak, Nikolay i chudotvortsï,” snob.ru, October 29, 2013, http://www.snob.ru/­profile/24691/blog/67131.

  10 Profile: Pavel Dmitrichenko,” BBC, December 3, 2013, http://www.­bbc.com/news/world-­europe-21697765.

  11 Maya Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 158.

  12 Ibid., 246.

  13 Simon Morrison, “The Bolshoi’s Latest Act,” NYRblog, November 12, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com­/blogs/nyrblog/­2011/nov/12/the-bolshois-­latest-act/.

  14 Mark Monahan, “Olga Smirnova: Dancing in the Dark,” The Telegraph, March 25, 2013.

  15 Sarah Crompton, “Mikhail Baryshnikov: ‘Everything in Russia Is a Damn Soap Opera,’” The Telegraph, July 3, 2013.

  16 Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 382.

  17 Makhar Vaziev Appointed Bolshoi Ballet Head,” Ismene Brown Arts Blog, October 26, 2015, http://ismeneb.com/­blogs-list/151026-makhar-vaziev­-appointed-bolshoi­-ballet-head.html.

  1: THE SWINDLING MAGICIAN

  The largest holdings of material on Michael Maddox and the Petrovsky Theater are in the Russian State Historical Archive (Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennïy istoricheskiy arkhiv/RGIA) in St. Petersburg and the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennïy arkhiv drevnikh aktov/RGADA) in Moscow. Some of these materials are quoted in the 1927 monograph by Olga Chayanova that I reference below and relied on throughout this chapter. A crucial document in RGADA, Maddox’s 1802 petition to Empress Consort Mariya Fyodorovna, is available in the original French in M. P. Pryashnikova’s article “Angliyskiy Predprinimatel’ M. Medoks,” also referenced below. Additional sources for the chapter include D. Blagovo (Elizaveta Petrovna Yan’kova), Rasskazï babushki. Iz vospominaniy pyati pokoleniy, zapisannïye i sobrannïye yeyo vnukom (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1885), 203–05; Gerald R. Seaman, “Michael Maddox: English Impresario in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Slavic Themes: Papers from Two Hemispheres, ed. Boris Christa et al. (Neuried: Hieronymus, 1988), 321–26; and Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnhim, and Edward A. ‘ Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993), 10: 49. On Betskoy and life in the orphanage, I drew from David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 31–61. Petrovsky ticket information was obtained from the playbills reproduced in N. P. Arapov and Avgust Roppol’t, Dramaticheskiy al’bom s portretami russkikh artistov i snimkami s rukopisey (Moscow: V Universitetskoy Tipografii i V. Got’ye, 1850), 417 and 419. Mention is made in a document dated February 21, 1782, in RGADA (f. 16, d. 575, ch. 1, l. 7) of Maddox wittingly or unwittingly including fifteen counterfeit rubles in the theater receipts. The detail about the buffet comes from RGIA 758, op. 5, d. 626 (the French caterer was obliged to pay the governing board 300 rubles a year from his receipts) and the Russian culinary dictionary: http://dic.ac­ademic.ru/contents.nsf/dic_culinary/. Information on the conflict between Maddox, Leopold Paradis, and the orphanage is from RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 314, 316, 441; Paradis’s contract details, and those concerning the 250 rubles he was owed from the St. Petersburg court musician Bachman are contained in RGIA f. 757, op. 5, d. 441, f. 758, op. 3, d. 314, and f. 756, op. 5, d. 511, respectively. For details on the “travestied masquerade,” I consulted Colleen McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 39–61. Alexander Ablesimov’s Dialog stranniki, na otkrïtiye novogo Petrovskogo Teatra (Dialogue of the wanderers, on the occasion of the opening of the new Petrovsky Theater) was published in 1780 by N. I. Novikov; it can be accessed through Google Books. On the clock Maddox made for Catherine the Great, see http://kraeved­1147.ru/chasyi-m­-medoksa-hram-slavyi/. On Noverre, see Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 68–97, esp. 73–74.

  1 Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennïy arkhiv literaturï i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329 (A Osipov, “Antreprener proshlogo veka”), l. 5.

  2 This according to the undiplomatic Russian diplomat Filipp Vigel (1786–1856), one of the great dirt-dishers of the era; http://elcocheingles.com­/Memories/Texts/­Vigel/Vig_I_3.htm.

  3 Quotations in this paragraph from Aleksandr Chayanov, “Venediktov,” in Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century, trans. Muireann Maguire (New York: The Overlook Press/Ardis, 2013), 69–70. Gothic fiction flourished in Russia during an anxious time of political transition, the interregnum between the eradication of the decaying imperial regime and the consolidation of Soviet power. Most of the great tales in the genre were suppressed, along with their authors. Chayanov was shot for treason during the great terror of 1937, but not, however, for his writings. He was an agrarian by training, and branded a traitor for calling into question the wisdom of forced collectivization of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Kazakh farmlands. For that he was sentenced to five years in the Kazakhstan labor camps. He survived, only to be rearrested and executed by firing squad. The lives of his two sons were ruined owing to their blood relation to an anti-Soviet saboteur. His wife, Olga, a theater historian and expert on the Petrovsky Theater, was also arrested, in 1937, though she survived, granted release from the labor camps after Stalin’s death.

  4 Stanley Peerman Hutton, Bristol and Its Famous Associations (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1907), 23.

  5 Sybil Marion Rosenfeld, Strolling Players & Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 149.

  6 Ibid., 196.

  7 Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti no. 81, vo vtornik, oktyabrya 9 dnya, 1767 goda [Tuesday, October 9, 1767], 3. The
advertisement is reprinted in the newspaper three days later.

  8 M. P. Pryashnikova, “Angliyskiy predprinimatel’ M. Medoks v Rossii,” in Pamyatniki kul’turï. Novïye otkrïtiya. Pis’mennost’. Iskusstvo. Arkheologiya. Yezhegodnik 2005, ed. T. B. Knyazevskaya (Moscow: Nauka, 2013), 223.

  9 Ol’ga Chayanova, Teatr Maddoksa v Moskve, 1776–1805 (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniya, 1927), 23.

  10 Moskovskiye vedomosti no. 77, v sredu, sentyabrya 23 dnya, 1780 goda [Wednesday, September 23, 1780], 477.

  11 Moskovskiye vedomosti no. 79, v sredu, sentyabrya 30 dnya, 1780 goda [Wednesday, September 30, 1780], 642.

  12 Moskovskiye vedomosti no. 24, v subbotu, marta 21 dnya, 1780 goda [Saturday, March 21, 1780], 185.

  13 John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 149.

  14 The Memoirs of the Empress, Catherine II, Written by Herself, with a preface by A. Herzen (London: Trübner & Co., 1859), 346–47.

  15 Ibid., 349.

  16 L. M. Starikova, Teatr v Rossii XVIII veka: Opït dokumental’nogo issledovaniya (Moscow: Gos. in-t iskusstvoznaniya, 1997), 140.

  17 RGALI f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329, l. 2.

  18 Carlo Brentano de Grianti, Journal, 1795–1801,” Princeton University Manuscripts Collection no. 649.

  19 Moskovskiye vedomosti no. 18, v subbotu, fevralya 29 dnya, 1780 goda [Saturday, February 29, 1780], 137. The fire received front-page coverage.

  20 Moskovskiye vedomosti no. 19, v sredu, marta 5 dnya, 1780 goda [Wednesday, March 5, 1780], 145.

  21 Ibid.

  22 A. Novitskiy, “Rozberg, Khristian,” Bol’shaya biograficheskaya entsiklopediya, http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_biography/107194/.

  23 RGALI f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329, l. 4; Pryashnikova, “Angliyskiy predprinimatel’ M. Medoks v Rossii,” 219.

  24 Journal of Charles Hatchett’s Journey to Russia, August 1790–November 1791”; quoted in Anthony Cross, “By the Banks of the Neva”: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 42.

  25 Moskovskiye vedomosti no. 76, v subbotu, sentyabrya 19 dnya, 1780 goda [Saturday, September 19, 1780], 618. The advertisement is reprinted in the newspaper four days later.

  26 Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 131.

  27 Michael Zagoskin, Tales of Three Centuries, trans. Jeremiah Curtin (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1891), 99.

  28 Ibid., 102.

  29 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Miss Sara Sampson, 1755, in World Drama: Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Russia, and Norway, ed. Barrett H. Clark (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1933), 467.

  30 RGIA f. 787, op. 5, d. 441, l. 2. Paradis’s original contract is dated November 23, 1778. According to documents preserved in the fond (No. 127) of the Imperial Foundling Home in the Central State Archive of Moscow, the contract was renewed on January 28, 1782, and once more on February 14, 1784. In between the renewals, Paradis lost some of his students to a public theater in St. Petersburg. An additional, somewhat more enigmatic, document finds him supporting the request of the Moscow major of artillery, F. N. Ladïzhensky, for the rescue by the orphanage of three children. Paradis retired with an imperial pension in 1797.

  31 A Russian ambassador promised to pay the debts of the “poor devil” in exchange for service at the Russian court. Quotation provided by Helena Kazárová from a 1758 letter concerning Hilverding’s financial troubles. It was sent by Prince Joseph Adam von Schwarzenberg to Maria Dominika Thürheim. Email communication, February 8, 2014.

  32 S. Gardzonio, “Neizvestnïy russkiy baletnïy stsenariy XVIII veka,” http://pushkinskijdom.ru/­Portals/3/PDF/XVIII/21_tom_XVIII/­Gardzonio/Gardzonio.pdf.

  33 RGALI f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329, l. 11.

  34 Moskovskiye vedomosti no. 23, v sredu, marta 18 dnya, 1780 goda [Wednesday, March 18, 1780], 177.

  35 RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 58, l. 1.

  36 RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 747, l. 1. The letter dates from 1784; Tanauer was the orphanage’s bookkeeper.

  37 Quotations in this paragraph from Lincolnshire Archives, Yarborough Collection, Worsley Manuscript 24, 188–89, 193–94.

  38 RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 313.

  39 RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 755.

  40 Information and quotations in this paragraph from William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, Interspersed with Historical Relations and Political Inquiries, 3 vols. (Dublin: S. Price, 1784), 1: 416–20.

  41 Dvenadtsat’ let iz zhizni Ya. B. Knyazhina (Po neizdannïm pis’mam G. Gogelyu 1779–1790 gg.),” ed. L. V. Krestova, http://az.­lib.ru/k/knjazhnin_j_b/­text_1790_pisma_gogelu.shtml.

  42 Ibid.

  43 RGALI f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329, l. 16.

  44 Ibid., l. 17; RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 755, l. 6.

  45 RGALI f. 758, op. 5, d. 739, l. 24. The quoted words are Betskoy’s, from a letter to Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine the Great’s secretary, dated July 24, 1783.

  46 This quotation and the remaining information in the paragraph from RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 748, ll. 5–6.

  47 RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 748, l. 8. The complaint, dated October 2, 1784, was written by Mikhaíl Golitsïn for Georg Gogel.

  48 RGIA f. 758, op. 5, d. 1063, l. 2.

  49 RGALI f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329, l. 23; also quoted in Chayanova, Teatr Maddoksa v Moskve, 1776–1805, 92.

  50 RGALI f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329, l. 26.

  51 Chayanova, Teatr Maddoksa v Moskve, 1776–1805, 97.

  52 Ibid., 97–98.

  53 RGALI f. 2, op. 1, yed. khr. 329, l. 30.

  54 Ibid., l. 31.

  55 RGIA f. 13, op. 1, d. 92, l. 2.

  56 Ibid., l. 3.

  57 Ibid.

  58 Ibid.

  59 Chayanova, Teatr Maddoksa v Moskve, 1776–1805, 99.

  60 RGIA f. 759, op. 94, d. 102 [1799–1800 g.], l. 2.

  61 Ibid., l. 4.

  62 S. P. Zhikharev, Zapiski sovremennika, 1890, quoted in Chayanova, Teatr Maddoksa v Moskve, 1776–1805, 220.

  63 Ibid., 219.

  64 RGIA f. 759, op. 94, d. 101, l. 14.

  65 Hutton, Bristol and Its Famous Associations, 23.

  66 Chayanova, Teatr Maddoksa v Moskve, 1776–1805, 20; the calumny is from the memoirs of Elizaveta Yankova (1768–1861).

  2: NAPOLEON AND AFTER

  I benefited throughout this chapter and the next from the foundational ballet scholarship of V. M. Krasovskaya, Russkiy baletnïy teatr ot vozniknoveniya do seredinï XIX veka (St. Petersburg: Lan’, 2008). On Didelot, I relied on Mary Grace Swift, A Loftier Flight: The Life and Accomplishments of Charles-Louis Didelot, Balletmaster (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), 81–114 and 136–76. On the fire in Moscow and life in the city in general in 1812, including (via Tolstoy) the earnings of aristocrats, I used Alexander M. Martin, “Moscow in 1812: Myths and Realities,” in Tolstoy on War: Narrative Art and Historical Truth in “War and Peace,” ed. Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012), 42–58. An excellent source on Napoleon’s Russian fiasco is Adam Zamoyski, Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), to which I referred for background information on Kutuzov, Borodino, and Napoleon’s campaigns in general. Information on the Imperial Theater College comes from M. K. Leonova and Z. Kh. Lyashko, Iz istorii Moskovskoy baletnoy shkolï (1773–1917). Chast’ 1 (Moscow: MGAKh, 2013). (This publication lists the graduates of the college year by year and provides biographical information on all of the ballet masters and choreographers associated with the college and the Moscow Imperial Theaters from its foundation to the middle of the nineteenth century.) The construction of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater is chronicled in A. I. Kuznetsova and V. Ya. Libson, Bol’shoy teatr: Istoriya sooruzheniya i rekonstruktsii zdaniya (Moscow: Al’fa-Print, 1995), 35–63, 18
4–91.

  Of the ballerina, Evdokya (Avdotya) Istomina, who took the lead role in Prisoner of the Caucasus, Pushkin urged his brother to “Write me about Didelot, about the Circassian girl Istomina, whom I once courted, like the Prisoner of the Caucasus”; Swift, A Loftier Flight, 171. Istomina, Didelot’s longtime muse, is known as the first Russian dancer to perform en pointe.

  For the details on Verstovsky’s musical career I consulted Gerald Abraham, “The Operas of Alexei Verstovsky,” 19th-Century Music 7, no. 3 (1984): 326–35; the web page at http://www.greatwomen.­com.ua/2008/05/07/nadezhda­-vasilevna-repina-­verstovskaya/tells the grim tale of the resignation of Nadezhda Repina from the Imperial Theaters. On Glinka’s musical Russianness my sources were Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 25–47; and Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), passim.

  A companion to this chronicle of Napoleon and Russian ballet is that of Napoleon and French ballet. On French ballet during the Revolution, Napoleonic era, and the Restoration, the finest source remains Ivor Guest, Ballet Under Napoleon (London: Dance Books, 2002). Valberg is mentioned in passing here and Didelot’s fraught period in Paris discussed at length here–here.

  1 A. P. Glushkovskiy, Vospominaniya baletmeystera (Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1940), 83.

  2 Natal’ya Korol’kova, “Istoriya Teatral’nogo uchilishcha pri Malom teatre,” http://www.maly.ru/pages­.php?name=shepka_hist.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ivan Val’berkh, Iz arkhiva baletmeystera. Dnevniki. Perepiska. Stsenarii, ed. Yu. I. Slonimsky (Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1948), 82 and 83 (letters from Ivan Ivanovich Val’berkh to Sof’ya Petrovna Val’berkh dated December 19 and December 21–22, 1807).

  5 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2007), 561. The Imperial Arbat Theater is reimagined by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Postmark: Moscow,” in Autobiography of a Corpse, introd. Adam Thirlwell; trans. Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 186.