Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  69 Irina Sirotkina, Svobodnoye dvizheniye i plasticheskiy tanets v Rossii (Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2012), 79 (quoting a 1924 article in the theater journal Novaya rampa). Additional information on the Duncan school in Moscow in this paragraph from 60–62.

  70 RGALI f. 1933, op. 2, yed. khr. 111, l. 1. The quoted words come from an April 7, 1931, report on Isadora Duncan’s art and its possible “Marxist” adaptation by the Bolshoi Ballet, with reference to the findings of the Duncan Commission of the Russian Theatrical Society.

  71 Unsigned, “Pavlowa’s Successor in Russian Ballet,” Musical America, January 13, 1912; NYPL clipping file.

  72 Sergey Konayev has reconstructed the 1913 film with the correct music. The version trafficked on YouTube is incorrect; the Schubert piano music it features is completely misaligned with the steps. See Sergey Konayev, “Muzïkal’nïy moment. Atributsiya, ozvuchaniye i pereosmïsleniye tantsev iz dorevolyutsionnïkh nemïkh lent,” in XVII Kinofestival’ Belïye Stolbï-2013. Katalog, ed. Tamara Sergeyeva (Moscow: Gosfil’mofund Rossii, 2013), 18–19.

  73 Herbert Corey, “Lithe Grace of Pavlowa Is Missing in Mordkin’s New Partner,” Cincinnati Times, December 23, 1911; NYPL clipping file.

  74 Vlas Mikhaílovich Doroshevich, “Pis’ma,” in Teatral’naya kritika Vlasa Doroshevicha, ed. S. V. Bukchin (Minsk: Kharvest, 2004), http://az.lib.ru­/d/doroshewich_w_m/­text_1220.shtml. Reference is made to the delicate marble sculptures of female nudes produced by Antonio Canova (1757–1822).

  75 Kolesnikov, “Yekaterina Gel’tser,” 128.

  76 Ibid., 129.

  77 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), 86.

  78 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 321, l. 1.

  79 Novaya faza bor’bï v Kitaye,” Pravda, January 9, 1926, 1; “Obïsk na sovetskom parakhode v Londone,” Pravda, January 9, 1926, 1.

  80 Sergey Prokofiev, Diaries 1924–1933: Prodigal Son, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 427; entry of January 23, 1923.

  81 RGALI f. 2085, op. 1, yed. khr. 68, l. 31.

  82 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 467, no. 62, l. 4. The recollection is dated June 6, 1952; it appeared in print as M. I. Kurilko, “Rozhdeniye baleta,” in Reyngol’d Moritsevich Glier: Stat’i, Vospominaniya, Materialï, ed. V. M. Bogdanov-Berezovskiy, 2 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Muzïka, 1965–67), 1: 105–09.

  83 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 467, no. 45, l. 1 (June 1, 1952, recollection).

  84 RGALI f. 2085, op. 1, yed. khr. 55, l. 7.

  85 Politbyuro TsK RKP(b) – VKP(b) i Komintern: 1919–1943 gg. Dokumentï, ed. G. M. Adibekov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 357 n. 1.

  86 Tyerman, “The Red Poppy and 1927.”

  87 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 467, no. 676, l. 1.

  88 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 467, no. 677, l. 6.

  89 Messerer, Tanets. Mïsl’. Vremya, 122.

  90 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 467, no. 677, l. 9.

  91 Vik., “Krasnïy mak,” Pravda, June 21, 1927. The music is discussed, negatively, by Yevg. Braudo, “Muzïka v ‘Krasnom make,’” Pravda, June 21, 1927.

  92 Quoted in Tyerman, “The Red Poppy and 1927.”

  93 Sadko [Vladimir Blyum], “The Red Poppy at the Bolshoi” [‘Krasnïy mak’ v Bol’shom teatre], in Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2012), 195.

  94 It was so popular, in fact, that it reached the “captive audiences” of the Gulag: The Red Poppy was performed by imprisoned dancers in at least one of the subarctic mining basin labor camps established by Stalin in the 1930s. The camps had cultural clubs, and some of the talent, artists who had been imprisoned for treasonous activities, escaped dangerous work in dangerous conditions by performing. Jake Robertson reproduces a photograph of a presentation of The Red Poppy in the late 1940s or early 1950s in Vorkuta (“Captive Audiences: The Untold Stories of Professional Theater in the Gulag Camps of the Komi Republic” [senior thesis, Princeton University, 2015], 186).

  95 Zapis’ besedï i. o. zaveduyushchego Otdelom Vostochnïkh narodnïkh respublik VOKS tov. Erofeyeva s kitayskim poetom Emi Syao ot 6 marta 1951 goda,” http://www.rusarchives.ru­/evants/exhibitions/prc60­-f/89.shtml. Quoted in part in Tyerman, “The Red Poppy and 1927.”

  96 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 681, ll. 18–19. The ballet was called The Soccer Player (Futbolist) and was performed in Kharkov, Ukraine, before being presented, on March 30, 1930, at the Bolshoi. The scenario emerged from a 1929 competition for a ballet on a sports theme.

  97 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 691, op. 1, no. 14; May 29, 1928, letter from Fyodorovsky to Lunacharsky.

  98 RGALI f. 2622, op. 1, yed. khr. 98, l. 8 ob.

  99 Unsigned, Two Dancers Leap to Death on Moscow Stage as Solution of Both Loving Scenery Painter,” New York Times, April 29, 1928; and Two Men Arrested in Moscow Suicides,” New York Times, April 30, 1928. The event received viral coverage in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Los Angeles Times, and New York Herald Tribune.

  100 Ibid.

  101 Geltser, “The Way of a Ballerina.”

  102 Kolesnikov, “Yekaterina Gel’tser,” 132.

  103 Ibid., 133.

  104 RGALI f. 2729, op. 2, yed. khr. 3, l. 23.

  105 Ibid., l. 37.

  6: CENSORSHIP

  On Le pas d’acier: Lesley-Anne Sayers and Simon Morrison, “Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier (1925): How the Steel was Tempered,” in Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin: The Baton and Sickle, ed. Neil Edmunds (New York: Routledge, 2004), 81–104. On Viktor Smirnov, I consulted S. Konayev, “Po pvozvishchu Uzh. O sud’be librettista,” in Bolt [Bolshoi Theater program booklet] (Moscow: GABT, 2005), 38–41. I also borrowed, on Shostakovich’s second ballet, from Simon Morrison, “Shostakovich as Industrial Saboteur: Observations on The Bolt, in Shostakovich and His World, ed. Laurel Fay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 117–61. For the peasantworker assessment of The Bright Stream I am indebted to Ye. S. Vlasova, 1948 god v sovetskoy muzïke (Moscow: Klassika—XXI, 2010), 155–64. The relevant material on the contract that brought The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District to the United States is in the Gosudarstvennïy arkhiv Rossiyskoy Federatsii (GARF), f. 5283, op. 3, d. 694. The proof of David Zaslavsky’s authorship of the one-two-punch Pravda denunciation of Shostakovich is furnished in a booklet by Yevgeniy Yefimov, which draws on Zaslavsky’s papers. See Sumbur vokrug ‘sumbura’ i odnogo ‘malen’kogo zhurnalista’ (Moscow: Flinta, 2006). Conditionally Killed is the usual translation of the title of the Shostakovich revue Uslovno ubitïy, but a better rendering might be “dead for now,” or “murdered for the time being.”

  Detailed information on Prokofiev’s three Soviet ballets is given in Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 31–39 and 106–10 (Romeo and Juliet); 258–65 (Cinderella); 348–56 and 368–69 (The Tale of the Stone Flower). On Grigorovich, the Komsomol, and The Stone Flower, I relied on Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 118–28. On Khachaturian’s three ballets, I referred to Harlow Robinson, “The Caucasian Connection: National Identity in the Ballets of Aram Khachaturian,” in Identities, Nations and Politics after Communism, ed. Roger E. Kanet (New York: Routledge, 2008), 23–32. On Happiness, I also consulted Aram Khachaturyan, “[O baletakh],” in Khachaturyan, Stat’i i vospominaniya, ed. I. E. Popov (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1980), 131; Khachaturyan, Noto-bibliograficheskiy spravochnik, ed. L. M. Person (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1979), 15–16; and www.khachaturian.am­/rus/works­/ballets_1.htm. On Mikoyan, Stalin, and the thermal waters of the Crimean spas: Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, 3 vols. (New York: Penguin Press, 2014–) 1: 465–66; on the purges more broadly, I benefited from Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2
008), including 246–47 (on Mikoyan), 306-07 (on Meyerhold and Raykh), and 431–35 (on Yezhov’s downfall). The arrest and death of Marina Semyonova’s diplomat husband is noted in her obituary in The Guardian, June 15, 2010, http://www.theguardian­.com/stage/2010/jun/15­/marina-semyonov­a-obituary. The 1948 scandal in the Union of Soviet Composers is assessed in numerous places, including, incisively, Leonid Maximenkov, “Shostakovich and Stalin: Letters to a ‘Friend,’” in Shostakovich and His World, ed. Laurel E. Fay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 43–58.

  On the imperial print censor (Glavnoye Upravleniye po delam pechati) and Bogdanov’s 1885 ballet Svetlana, the Slavic Princess, the source is RGIA f. 497, op. 6, d. 3679, l. 59.

  1 “Stalin Angry,” https://www.youtube.com­/watch?v=1YsL4HXZN9E, accessed January 20, 2016.

  2 RGIA f. 497, op. 18, d. 12, l. 1.

  3 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 653, l. 8.

  4 Sergey Prokofiev, Diaries 1924–1933: Prodigal Son, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 880–81; entry of November 14, 1929.

  5 D. Gachev, “O ‘Stal’nom skoke’ i direktorskom naskoke,” in Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2012), 242.

  6 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 702, l. 21.

  7 Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 94.

  8 Olga Digonskaya, “Interrupted Masterpiece: Shostakovich’s Opera Orango. History and Context,” in Shostakovich Studies 2, ed. Pauline Fairclough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 31. The librettist Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Starchakov were the principal authors of Orango, Digonskaya explains, and it was their second-guessing, as opposed to Shostakovich’s, that led to its cancellation. They missed the June 1 deadline for the submission of the completed libretto to the Bolshoi. Digonskaya speculates that Shostakovich had disappointed Tolstoy and Starchakov by rejecting a blander operatic project called A Partisan’s Son. Orango was the last-minute substitute. See ibid., 7–33.

  9 Olga Digonskaya, “D. D. Shostakovich’s Unfinished Opera Orango,” in Dmitri Shostakovich, Orango. Unfinished Satirical Opera. Piano Score (Moscow: DSCH, 2010), 49.

  10 From his farewell speech at the Bolshoi Theater, May 12, 1930, http://lunacharsky.newgod­.su/lib/v-mire-muzyki­/-novye-puti-opery-i-baleta.

  11 Vlasova, 1948 god v sovetskoy muzïke, 345.

  12 According to Reuters, the items supposedly stolen included “an umbrella, two pairs of gloves, a pair of cufflinks and a roll of tape.” The Bolshoi dismissed the matter as a “provocation.” See “Soviet Ballerina Scoffs at Accusation of Theft,” New York Times, June 30, 1958.

  13 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), 374–76.

  14 Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 265.

  15 Ravich., “Bol’shoi teatr na perelome (‘Futbolist’ na stsene mosk. Bol’shogo teatra),” Rabochiy i teatr, April 21, 1930, 12–13.

  16 Asaf Messerer, Tanets. Mïsl’. Vremya (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990), 124.

  17 RGALI f. 648, op. 2, yed. khr. 740, l. 15.

  18 Janice Ross, “Leonid Yakobson’s Muscular Choreography and The Golden Age (paper presented at the Columbia University symposium “Russian Movement Culture of the 1920s and 1930s,” on February 13, 2015).

  19 Janice Ross, Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 113–14.

  20 Manashir Yakubov, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Ballet The Golden Age: The Story of its Creation,”in Dmitri Shostakovich: New Collected Works, Vol. 60B, ed. Manashir Yakubov (Moscow: DSCH, 2011), 358; additional details from 355–39. The original scenario, by Alexander Ivanovsky, is included in Dmitri Shostakovich: New Collected Works, Vol. 60A, ed. Manashir Yakubov (Moscow: DSCH, 2011), 8–10.

  21 Letter of February 1930 from Shostakovich to Sollertinsky, in Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 103.

  22 Fedor Lopukhov, Writings on Ballet and Music, ed. and introd. Stephanie Jordan; trans. Dorinda Offord (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 11; on the Dance Symphony, see 69–96.

  23 I. I. Sollertinskiy, Kakoy zhe balet nam v sushchnosti nuzhen?,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, October 6, 1929, 5.

  24 Rabochiy i teatr, quoted in Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, 104.

  25 D. D. Shostakovich, Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu, ed. D. I. Sollertinskiy, L. V. Mikheyeva, G. V. Kopïtova, and O. L. Lansker (St. Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2006), 178; letter of November 17, 1935.

  26 Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 59.

  27 Vlasova, 1948 god v sovetskoy muzïke, 160.

  28 Dmitri Shostakovich: New Collected Works, Vol. 64A, ed. Manashir Yakubov (Moscow: DSCH, 2006), 8–9.

  29 RGALI f. 648, op. 5, yed. khr. 5, ll. 1–8, esp. 1–2. See Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 59, for other quotations from this document.

  30 Shostakovich, Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu, 176; letter of October 30–31, 1935.

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

  32 A. Zrlikh, “‘Svetlïy ruchey’ v Bol’shom teatre,” Pravda, December 2, 1935, 6. On the Leningrad run, see Georgiy Polyanovskiy, “Novïy balet Shostakovicha,” Pravda, June 6, 1935, 4.

  33 Nicolai Leskov, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Hudson Review, http://hudsonreview.com/2013­/02/the-lady-macbeth-of­-mtsensk/#. VQMyU0LWSIw.

  34 This point from an essay by Richard Taruskin on the moral “lessons” of Lady Macbeth and the scandal it precipitated. The fame of the opera in the West, he argues, stems in part from the fact of its censorship, which has granted it the benefit of the moral doubt. “So ineluctably has the opera come to symbolize pertinacious resistance to inhumanity, that it is virtually impossible now to see it as an embodiment of that very inhumanity.” But it should nonetheless be experienced “with hearts on guard.” Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 509–10.

  35 Nelli Kravets, Ryadom s velikimi: Atovm’yan i yego vremya (Moscow: GITIS, 2012), 222–23; biographical details on Atovmyan from 298–301.

  36 Muzïka vmesto sumbura: Kompositorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991. Dokumentï, ed. Leonid Maksimenkov (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2013), 135–36.

  37 See Platon Mikhaílovich Kerzhentsev, Zhizn’ Lenina. 1870–1924 (Moscow: Partizdat, 1936).

  38 Quotations in this paragraph from [David Zaslavskiy], “Sumbur vmesto muzïki. Ob opera Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo Uyezda,’” Pravda, January 28, 1936, 3.

  39 [David Zaslavskiy], “Baletnaya fal’sh,’” Pravda, February 6, 1936, 3.

  40 Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzïki. Stalinskaya kul’turnaya revolyutsiya 1936–1938 (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya Kniga, 1997), 112.

  41 Shostakovich, Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu, 188.

  42 Sulamif’ Messerer, Sulamif’. Fragmentï vospominaniy (Moscow: Olimpiya, 2005), 103.

  43 Muzïka vmesto sumbura. Kompozitorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991. Dokumentï, 138.

  44 Ibid., 139.

  45 Ibid.

  46 Prokofiev, Diaries 1924–1933, 411; entry of January 18, 1927.

  47 Morrison, The People’s Artist, 35.

  48 RGALI f. 1929, op. 4, yed. khr. 302, l. 124; letter of November 30 and December 1, 1935.

  49 Prokofiev, Diaries 1924–1933, 1027; entry of June 1–6, 1933. Besides Marina Semyonova, Prokofiev refers to the dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani, with whom he would work on his ballet Cinderella.

  50 Morrison, The People’s Artist, 37. The words are Radlov’s, as reused by Prokofiev in a 1941 squib about the ballet for the journal Sovetskaya muzïka.

  51 Ibid.

  52 Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennïy arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoy istorii (RGASPI), f. 82,
op. 2, d. 951, l. 1.

  53 RGASPI f. 178, op. 5, d. 5, 8769; document provided by Leonid Maximenkov.

  54 Bol’shaya tsenzura: Pisateli i zhurnalistï v Strane Sovetov. 1917–1956, ed. A. N. Yakovlev; comp. L. V. Maksimenkov (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2005), 463.

  55 Ibid.

  56 The URL was http://memoryfull.ru/purge­/repressions.html.

  57 On her survival of the Soviet penal camps, see Simon Morrison, The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev (London: Vintage, 2014), 257–79.

  58 Morrison, The People’s Artist, 49.

  59 Translation by Vera Tancibudek from the December 30, 1938, program.

  60 Morrison, The People’s Artist, 108–9.

  61 Ibid., 159.

  62 Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 352–53.

  63 RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 499, ll. 43–46.

  64 Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennïy arkhiv noveyshey istorii (RGANI), f. 5, op. 36, d. 42, l. 61.

  65 Agrippina Vaganova, Basic Principles of Classical Ballet: Russian Ballet Technique, trans. Anatole Chujoy (New York: Dover, 1969), 55; my thanks to Colby Hyland for this reference. Alastair Macaulay adds that the pedagogical method developed by Enrico Cecchetti (1850–1928), who danced and taught for Petipa in St. Petersburg and Diaghilev in Paris, likewise emphasizes épaulement and coordination, and that Vaganova borrowed from him. Email communication, December 1, 2015.

  66 The opinion of Mikhaíl Khrapchenko, Kerzhentsev’s successor as Chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs; Muzïka vmesto sumbura: Kompositorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991, 193.

  67 Valerie Hemingway, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways (New York: Random House, 2007), 114.

  68 David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 153.

  69 Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 378 n. 54.

  70 TASS, “Priyom v Kremle uchastnikov dekadï Armyanskogo iskusstva,” Pravda, November 5, 1939, 1.