Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  98 The liberalization began in 1858.

  99 Val’ts, 65 let v teatre, 108. In the draft of the Soviet-era memoirs from which these lines come, Valts adds that “none of this is in the current [circa 1926] production; everything is simplified” (Muzey Bakhrushina f. 43, op. 3, no. 3, l. 10 ob.). Since imperial-era ballet could not be seen as superior to Soviet-era ballet in any respect, Valts’s complaint was excluded from the published text.

  100 N. K[ashki]n, “Muzïkal’naya khronika,” Russkiye vedomosti, February 25, 1877, 1; see also Wiley, Tchaikovsky’s Ballets, 57.

  101 And, Alastair Macaulay notes, simultaneously became part of productions in Russia, England, and the United States. Email communication, August 7, 2015.

  102 Chaykovskiy, Lebedinoye ozero. Balet v 4-x deystviyakh. Postanovka v Moskovskom Bol’shom teatre 1875–1883, 28–29. Rothbart wore a more flamboyant and expensive costume in 1877: “Waist-length jerkin of colored satin on buckram base, trimmed in black velvet, lace and soutache of foil and bullion fringe - 1 pc.; matching slacks - 1 pc. (31 rub[les]. 50 kop[ecks].). Sash with pockets trimmed in black velvet and satin, and a gilded buckle - 1 pc. (3 rub. 60 kop.) The outfit with webbing: hip-length jerkin of colored velvet on base of white paduasoy and colored silk, trimmed in beaded webbing, soutache, foil silk webbing, white ribbons of gros-de-Naples silk on thread with rings and hooks - 1 pc., matching overcoat - 1 pc. (145 rub. 79 kop.). Sash with a pocket trimmed in colored velvet, with tassels and a gilded buckle - 1 pc. (4 rub. 96 kop.).” Ibid., 27.

  103 Titled Watanabe, it was to tell the tale of an ancient samurai clan known for fighting demons, dragons, and man-eating hags. The project had captured Tchaikovsky’s fancy, and so, after cautioning Valts that the scenario was better suited to a spectacular ballet-féerie than an opera-ballet, he pledged to take it on. “I look at Watanabe as a great subject for a ballet and I’m prepared to write the best music I possibly can for this well-chosen, well-planned scenario,” he told Valts. The composer had estimated completing it in time for the 1893–94 Bolshoi season. Muzey Bakhrushina f. 43, op. 3, no. 14.

  104 Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky’s Last Days: A Documentary Study (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 71.

  105 Frank Clemow, The Cholera Epidemic of 1892 in the Russian Empire (London and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893), 55, https://archive­.org/details/39002­086311652.med.yale.edu.

  106 Marius Petipa, The Diaries of Marius Petipa, ed. and trans. Lynn Garafola (Pennington, NJ: The Society of Dance History Scholars, 1992), 14.

  107 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 205, no. 230, l. 2 ob.

  108 RGIA f. 497, op. 18, d. 495, l. 2. An eyewitness fills in the details: “The Mariyinsky Theater came up with an interesting activity for the bird. She appears on the stage, sitting on a rock or flying, just when Rothbart wants to be invisible or to see what the swan maidens do in his absence. The owl, flying excitedly from place to place, reacts as though greatly impressed by the amorous dialogue and meeting between Odette and the prince” (G. A. Rimskiy-Korsakov, “Iz rukopisey o russkom balete kontsa XIX-nachala XX v.,” in Mnemozina: Dokumentï i faktï iz istorii otechestvennogo teatra XX veka, ed. V. V. Ivanov [Moscow: Indrik, 2014], 21).

  109 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 205, no. 230, l. 2 ob.

  110 Akim Volynsky, Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911–1925, trans. and ed. Stanley J. Rabinowitz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 118. From a recollection passed to the critic by Ekaterina Geltser.

  111 Ibid., 17 (from a 1911 appreciation).

  112 Ibid., 19.

  113 H.S.H. The Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky, Dancing in Petersburg: The Memoirs of Kschessinska, trans. Arnold Haskell (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 74.

  114 RGIA f. 652, op. 1, d. 404, l. 4; f. 497, op. 5, d. 1708, l. 51.

  115 Wortman, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II, 321.

  116 Romanovsky-Krassinsky, Dancing in Petersburg, 77.

  117 RGIA f. 497, op. 5, d. 1708, l. 108.

  118 The target of the chicken attack was Olga Preobrazhenskaya (Preobrajenska, 1871–1962). See Coryne Hall, Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs (Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud: Sutton, 2005), 109.

  119 Romanovsky-Krassinsky, Dancing in Petersburg, 58–59.

  120 Wortman, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II, 357.

  121 Romanovsky-Krassinsky, Dancing in Petersburg, 59.

  122 Wortman, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II, 350.

  123 Memories of Alexei Volkov, trans. E. Semonov Payot (1928); trans. Robert Moshein (2004), “Chapter Four: The Coronation of the Tsar,” http://www.alexanderpalace­.org/volkov/4.html.

  124 Information and quotations in this paragraph from RGIA f. 652, op. 1, d. 523 (Pchelnikov’s letters and telegrams to Ivan Vsevolozhsky, 1884–91).

  125 I hope to be better on Wednesday,” his April 1, 1883, request concludes. RGIA f. 497, op. 2, d. 25346, l. 5.

  126 RGIA f. 497, op. 2, d. 25074, l. 371.

  127 Krasovskaya, Russkiy baletnïy teatr vtoroy polovinï XIX veka, 506.

  128 Hence the fussiness of his petition for repairs to a fire-singed overcoat; RGIA f. 468, op. 13, d. 680, ll. 1–3 (1890).

  129 Telyakovsky, “Memoirs,” 41.

  130 Tim Scholl, “The Ballet’s Carmen,” in Don Quixote [Royal Opera House program booklet] (London: ROH, 2013), 17.

  131 Ibid.

  132 G. Khummayeva, “‘Peterburgskaya gazeta’ protiv ‘Don Kikhota’ Aleksandra Gorskogo,” Vestnik Gosudarstvennogo khoroegraficheskogo uchilishcha Belorussii 1, no. 2 (1994): 73–87 (information and quotations).

  133 A. G., “Obrashcheniye k baletnoy truppe,” August 1, 1902, in Baletmeyster A. A. Gorskiy: Materialï, vospominaniya, stat’i, 90.

  134 Tat’yana Saburova, “Fotoetyudï Aleksandra Gorskogo,” in Moskovskiy Imperatorskiy Bol’shoy teatr v fotografiyakh. 1860–1917 gg., ed. L. G. Kharina (Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2013), 282.

  5: AFTER THE BOLSHEVIKS

  On the murder of the last tsar and his family, I relied chiefly on Robert K. Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (New York: Random House, 1996), 3–11; and Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Random House, 2012), 533–62. I also consulted Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, 3 vols. (New York: Penguin Press, 2014–), 1: 280–81, and derived my description of the revolution and civil war from pages 86–421 of his magisterial publication. For Gorsky in 1917–18 I used E. Surits, “A. A. Gorskiy i moskovskiy balet,” in E. Surits and E. Belova, eds., Baletmeyster A. A. Gorskiy: Materialï, vospominaniya, stat’i (St. Petersburg: Dmitriy Bulanin, 2000), 49–55. Biographical information on Elena Malinovskaya is taken from the preface to her RGALI fond (1933); details about the price of the shoes used by the dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet in 1917–19 are in RGALI f. 648, op. 3, yed. khr. 31. I am most grateful to the Moscow dance critic Tatyana Kuznetsova for detailing by email (on January 3–4, 2015) the career and fate of her grandfather, Vladimir Kuznetsov. As the relative of a victim of the Stalinist repressions, Kuznetsova received access to his Cheka dossier. Kuznetsova relates that his “archive” consists of a last letter from Tomsk, a few photographs, and bureaucratese.

  Most of the documents on the period immediately after the revolution are in the RGALI Bolshoi Theater fond, but I also made use of copies of protocols preserved in the library-archive of the Theater Union (Soyuz teatral’nïkh deyateley/STD) in Moscow. Biographical information on Geltser comes from Aleksandr Kolesnikov, “Yekaterina Gel’tser,” in Russkiye bogini, ed. T. Derevyanko (Moscow: Act-Press, 2011), 118–33. I also drew from V. V. Makarov’s unpublished 1945–46 monograph on the ballerina, including interview transcripts, a 1909 contract, and other materials: Muzey Bakhrushina f. 152, no. 205. F. 257, nos. 1–2, contain Geltser’s undated letters to Sobeshchanskaya about learning the “Russian” dance. For her record of service from 1909 through 1917, I consulted RGALI f. 659, op. 3, yed. khr. 802. Details on Geltser and Mannerheim come
from http://photo-element­. ru/story/nappelbaum­/nappelbaum.html (on the photograph taken of the ballerina in 1924); Jonathan Clements, Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy (London: Haus Publishing, 2010), 42 and 298 n. 13 (discounting the rumors that she had a son with Mannerheim).

  I benefited throughout this chapter from Elizabeth Souritz, Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, trans. Lynn Visson with Sally Banes (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990), esp. 142–53, 162–65, and 231–54. For political context on The Red Poppy I drew from Kotkin, Stalin, 1: 625–33, and especially from Edward Tyerman, “The Red Poppy and 1927: Translating Contemporary China into Soviet Ballet” (paper presented at the Columbia University symposium “Russian Movement Culture of the 1920s and 1930s,” on February 13, 2015). Tyerman notes the relationship between The Red Poppy and the contemporaneous Meyerhold Theater production of Sergey Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, a play that told of an English gunboat on the Yangtze River that threatens the destruction of a village as revenge for the drowning of an American hide-trader. The villagers are forced to sacrifice two of their own, by coin toss, to the English.

  The rivalry between the designers Kurilko and Fyodorovsky is touched on in S. Chekhov, “Vblizi Mikhaíla Chekhova,” in Voprosï teatra: Sbornik statey i publikatsiy, ed. K. L. Rudnitskiy (Moscow: VNII Iskusstvoznaniya, Soyuz Teatr. Deyat. RSFSR, 1990), 136.

  1 No newspaper, no program, no performance”; Marius Petipa, The Diaries of Marius Petipa, ed. and trans. Lynn Garafola (Pennington, NJ: The Society of Dance History Scholars, 1992), 64 (January 12/25, 1905).

  2 R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (London: Pan, 2002), 258–59.

  3 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 781. Stephen Kotkin clarifies “that there is no solid, direct evidence of Lenin’s involvement in the murder, or of his reaction to it.” Email communication, November 29, 2015.

  4 S. Rakhmaninov, Literaturnoye naslediye, ed. Z. A. Apetyan, vol. 1, Vospominaniya. Stat’i. Pis’ma (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1978), 57–61.

  5 According to the intendant of the Imperial Theaters at the time, Vladimir Telyakovsky; see Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 115.

  6 Walter Duranty, “Russian Revolution ‘Interrupted’ Ballet,” New York Times, March 22, 1923.

  7 V. I. Lenin, “Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” Marxists.org, http://www.marxists­.org/archive/lenin/works­/1918/jan/03.htm.

  8 Sally A. Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case, 1906: Terror, Myth, and Martyrdom,” in Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia, ed. Anthony Anemone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 137.

  9 Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 300.

  10 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 12 (Ye. K. Malinovskaya, “Bol’shoy teatr po imeyushchimsya material. Vospominaniya”), l. 2.

  11 This was Gorsky’s 1903 version of the ballet, which derives from the 1885 Petipa-Ivanov version. The title is also translated as The girl who needed watching.

  12 Surits, A. A. Gorskiy i moskovskiy balet,” 49.

  13 Otkrïtiye Gosudarstvennïkh teatrov,” Iskrï, March 26, 1917, 96.

  14 Alexandre Gretchaninoff, My Life (New York: Coleman-Ross, 1952), 118.

  15 Surits, A. A. Gorskiy i moskovskiy balet,” 51.

  16 Souritz, Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, 89.

  17 RGALI f. 659, op. 3, yed. khr. 932, l. 127.

  18 Arkhiv Bol’shogo teatra/STD; “‘Tayna ministerskoy lozhi’ (iz gaz. ‘Vremya’ ot 10/V-1917 g.).”

  19 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 12, l. 5.

  20 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 58, l. 10.

  21 Ibid., l. 3.

  22 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 13, l. 2.

  23 Ibid., l. 3.

  24 Sergey Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923: Behind the Mask, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 279; entry of April 7, 1918.

  25 Rimskiy-Korsakov, “Iz rukopisey o russkom balete kontsa XIX-nachala XX v.,” 76–77.

  26 Roland John Wiley tangentially reports the absence of “standard bureaucratese”—permissions for Petipa’s travel, for example—from the records on Petipa stored in St. Petersburg. Email communication, November 10, 2014. The papers that survived the ransacking of the apartment ended up in the theater collection established by the industrialist Alexei Bakhrushin.

  27 L. Sabaneyev, “Bït’ li Bol’shomu teatru?,” Ekran 7 (November 15–17, 1921): 3. The author comes to the conclusion that the theater had outlasted its purpose even before the revolution.

  28 P. N. Lepeshinskiy, Na povorote (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1955), 111–12.

  29 Ibid. Although allowed to continue operating during the crisis, the Bolshoi could not count on the government to provide fuel to heat the theater and so was encouraged, by the theater division of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, to purchase firewood on the black market (RGALI f. 649, op. 2, yed. khr. 177, l. 14).

  30 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 12, l. 6.

  31 Asaf Messerer, Tanets. Mïsl’. Vremya (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990), 70.

  32 RGALI f. 764, op. 1, yed. khr. 192.

  33 Email communication with Tatyana Kuznetsova, Vladimir Kuznetsov’s granddaughter, January 3, 2015.

  34 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 13, l. 18.

  35 Protokol obshchego sobraniya artistov baletnoy truppï Gosudarstvennogo Bol’shogo teatra, December 17, 1919, l. 1. Personal archive of Tatyana Kuznetsova.

  36 Arkhiv Bol’shogo teatra/STD; letter of April 10, 1923 from Lunacharsky to the “M. G. O.” (Moskovskaya gorodskaya organizatsiya).

  37 Personal archive of Tatyana Kuznetsova.

  38 Personal archive of Tatyana Kuznetsova.

  39 Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 71; additional information in this paragraph from 68–73.

  40 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 13, l. 20.

  41 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 54, l. 81.

  42 Bella Cohen, “The Women of Red Russia,” New York Times, November 25, 1923.

  43 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 128, l. 19.

  44 E. A. Churakova, “Fyodor Fyodorovskiy i epokha eksperimentov: 1918–1932,” in Fyodor Fyodorovskiy: Legenda Bol’shogo teatra, ed. E. A. Churakova (Moscow: SkanRus, 2014), 83.

  45 RGALI f. 658, op. 2, yed. khr. 351, l. 18; minutes of the Bolshoi workers’ assembly, June 21, 1924.

  46 Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya: Dokumentï TsK RKP(b) – VKP(b), VChK – OGPU – NKVD o kul’turnoy politike. 1917–1953 gg., ed. Andrey Artizov and Oleg Naumov (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2002), 31–34; and Muzïka vmesto sumbura: Kompositorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991. Dokumentï, ed. Leonid Maksimenkov (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2013), 40–45.

  47 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 185, l. 2.

  48 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 187, l. 106; minutes of the March 10, 1924, meeting of the council of artists.

  49 Ibid., ll. 45, 48; May 24 and May 26, 1923.

  50 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 13, l. 15.

  51 The location of this affiliate changed, but it settled in the building of an abolished private opera enterprise. Malinovskaya had lobbied for it to be housed in a historic church on the river (RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 734, l. 21; December 8, 1934).

  52 Arkhiv Bol’shogo teatra/STD; undated.

  53 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 187, l. 77.

  54 Arkhiv Bol’shogo teatra/STD; RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 339, l. 1. Bryusov’s draft resolution for the Central Control Commission is dated January 9, 1924.

  55 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 315, l. 19.

  56 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 315, l. 36.

  57 Malinovskaya’s two tenures as director of the theater effectively framed the existence of Glaviskusstvo, a political watchdog administration formed under the People’s Commissariat
for Enlightenment. It oversaw the Bolshoi in the late 1920s, during the worst of the ideological attacks mounted against the theater by the Communist Union of Youth and other proletarian organizations. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Emergence of Glaviskusstvo: Class War on the Cultural Front, Moscow, 1928–29,” Soviet Studies 23, no. 2 (October 1971): 236–53.

  58 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 124, l. 22; minutes of the December 22, 1923, meeting of Glavrepertkom.

  59 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 187, l. 34; Souritz, Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, 83.

  60 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 695, ll. 1–2. Reed, an American journalist famous for his account of the Bolshevik coup, Ten Days That Shook the World, was buried a hero in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in 1920. The libretto for the proposed opera about his socialist radicalism, adapted from a play by Igor Terentyev, sought to depart from old-fashioned opera conventions, but it was derided by the artistic and political council as a “kaleidoscope, the likes of which we haven’t seen before.” Terentyev was sent back to the drawing board, told that he needed “to show Reed’s death at that moment when Russia had regained her strength, and to depict his burial on Red Square.”

  61 Cohen, “The Women of Red Russia.”

  62 This quotation, and information in the following paragraph, from Ivor Guest, Ballet Under Napoleon (London: Dance Books, 2002), 481; and from Alastair Macaulay, email communication, July 22, 2015.

  63 Unsigned, “Quiet Tea Shop League Formed in Moscow to Get Peaceful Places to Talk of at Night,” New York Times, January 15, 1928.

  64 RGALI f. 2729, op. 2, yed. khr. 3, l. 1; letter of October 5, 1896.

  65 Ibid., ll. 4, 6; 1897.

  66 Iz stenogrammï besedï E. Gel’tser s baletnoy molodezh’yu 16 iyunya 1937 g.,” in Baletmeyster A. A. Gorskiy: Materialï, vospominaniya, stat’i, 124.

  67 Yekaterina Geltser, “The Way of a Ballerina”; New York Public Library (NYPL) clipping file.

  68 Elizabeth Souritz, Isadora Duncan and Prewar Russian Dancemakers,” in The Ballets Russes and Its World, ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 108.