Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  71 G. Khubov, “‘Schast’ye.’ Balet A. Khachaturyana,” Pravda, October 25, 1939, 6. A photograph of act 1 appears at the top of the page. See, for the composer’s cautious thoughts on his achievement, Aram Khachaturyan, “Balet ‘Schast’ye,’” Izvestiya, October 20, 1939, 3.

  72 Information and quotations in this and the preceding paragraphs from RGALI f. 652, op. 6, yed. khr. 214. The file contains a collection of short articles on the ballet along with the scenario, assembled for publication by “Iskusstvo” through the Committee on Arts Affairs.

  73 Quoted in Robinson, “The Caucasian Connection: National Identity in the Ballets of Aram Khachaturian,” 28.

  74 Constantine Pleshakov, Stalin’s Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of WWII on the Eastern Front (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 101.

  75 L. D. Rïbakova, Voyna i muzïka: Bol’shoy teatr v godï voynï (Vladimir: Foliant, 2005), 163.

  76 Quotations and information in this paragraph from Lepeshinskaya’s 2004 interview for the newspaper Izvestiya, http://izvestia.ru/news/288937.

  77 Rïbakova, Voyna i muzïka, 35.

  78 Email communication, May 2, 2015.

  79 Balerina. K 70-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya O. Lepeshinskoy,” Moskovskaya pravda, September 28, 1986; Muzey Bakhrushina f. 749, op. 55, l. 5. Lepeshinskaya told the tale of her broken leg to interviewers over and over again; the medical records in her Bakhrushin Museum archive, and the letters from her fans wishing her a quick convalescence, all confirm her heroic service to the Bolshoi.

  80 Take Me on a Trip a Long, Long Time Ago,” Indypendent History (blog), http://indypendenthistory­.tumblr.com/post­/53237349769/ballet-class­-in-russia-during­-world-war-ii.

  81 Rïbakova, Voyna i muzïka, 103–04. The telephone exchange is with Natalya Sergeyevna Sadkovskaya.

  82 Ibid., 91.

  83 Ibid., 92; additional information in this paragraph from 93.

  84 RGALI f. 656, op. 5, yed. khr. 9740. The last comment is a quotation from a 1928 poem by the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Sekret molodosti” (The secret of youth), which has harsh things to say about idlers. The ballet’s scenario, by Isaak Glikman to a score by Stefaniya Zaranek (1904–62), was vetted, and rejected, on April 15, 1949. The composer’s previous ballets and operetta projects had better results.

  85 Such was the description of Razin in the preface to the scenario of the “ballet about the Volga” that was written by Nikolay Volkov for the composer Boris Asafyev and submitted for assessment by Glavrepertkom on March 2, 1939. RGALI f. 656, op. 5, yed. khr. 9687, l. 6.

  86 Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 48.

  87 Obrucheniye v monastïre,” Vechernyaya Moskva, January 17, 1941; in Prokof’yev o Prokof ’yeve: Stat’i, interv’yu, ed. V. P. Varunts (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1991), 189.

  88 RGALI f. 656, op. 5, yed. khr. 9685, l. 17.

  89 Ibid., l. 2.

  90 N. Volkov, Skazka dlya baleta,” Za sovetskoye iskusstvo, April 12, 1946, 4.

  91 N. D. Volkov, Teatral’nïye vechera (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966), 397.

  92 RGALI f. 656, op. 5, yed. khr. 9685, l. 10.

  93 Volkov, Teatral’nïye vechera, 398.

  94 RGALI f. 962, op. 3, yed. khr. 139, l. 3.

  95 Ibid., ll. 15–16.

  96 R. Zakharov, Vdokhnovennïy trud,” Sovetskoye iskusstvo, June 13, 1947, 3.

  97 RGALI f. 2329, op. 3, yed. khr. 1928, l. 81.

  98 Nicholas Thompson, “My Friend, Stalin’s Daughter,” The New Yorker, March 31, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com­/magazine/2014­/03/31/my-friend-stalins­-daughter.

  99 RGALI f. 3045, op. 1, yed. khr. 171, ll. 8–10; and f. 3045, op. 1, yed. khr. 170, l. 12.

  100 T. Khrennikov, “Obrazï ural’skikh skazov v balete,” Pravda, June 2, 1954, 6. The author, a party-minded composer often hostile to Prokofiev, knew little about dance, but that did not matter.

  101 Harrison E. Salisbury, “Prokofieff Work Divides Moscow,” New York Times, March 17, 1954.

  102 In his memoirs, he claims that his “prickliness” had damaged his relationship with the minister of culture, Nikolay Mikhaílov, but also that he had been made into a “scapegoat.” His return to the theater followed the appointment of Ekaterina Furtseva as minister, though she too would have him deposed. See M. I. Chulaki, Ya bïl direktorom Bol’shogo teatra (Moscow: Muzïka, 1994), 74–82 (on the “time out”), 82–83 (on his reappointment), and 126–32 (on his second dismissal).

  103 Ibid., 116, and, for broader context, 91–92. See also Tat’yana Kuznetsova,

  Khroniki Bol’shogo baleta (Moscow: RIPOL klassik, 2011), 12.

  104 Muzïka vmesto sumbura. Kompozitorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991. Dokumentï, 553.

  105 Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 21.

  106 Muzïka vmesto sumbura. Kompozitorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991. Dokumentï, 552.

  107 Osgood Caruthers, “Russians Cheer Bolshoi Ballet That Breaks Classical Pattern,” New York Times, March 8, 1959.

  108 Muzïka vmesto sumbura. Kompozitorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991. Dokumentï, 513–16, esp. 514; RGANI f. 5, op. 36, d. 99, ll. 33–38.

  109 Interview, February 15, 2015, Beijing, China. My thanks to Nicholas Frisch and Suhua Xiao for arranging and conducting this interview on my behalf.

  7: I, MAYA PLISETSKAYA

  From 1951 to 1955, the general director of the Bolshoi Theater was the choral conductor and composer Alexander Anisimov (1905–76); followed in 1955–59 by the composer Mikhaíl Chulaki (1908–89), and then, for two years each, Georgiy Orvid (1904–80), a trumpeter in the Bolshoi Theater orchestra in his youth, and Vasiliy Pakhomov (1909–89). After his “time out,” Chulaki returned to the position from December 1963 to September 1970. He was replaced in 1970–72 by the opera conductor and pianist Yuriy Muromtsev (1908–75); then for 1973–75 by the composer and Communist Party official Kirill Molchanov; in 1976–79 by the actor and Communist Party official Georgiy Ivanov (1919–94); and for 1979–88 by Stanislav Lushin (b. 1938). Vladimir Kokonin (1938–2005), a longtime Ministry of Culture bureaucrat, led the theater in 1988–95, seeing it through the end of the Soviet Union and the resignation of Yuriy Grigorovich. He was replaced as general director by the dancer and choreographer Vladimir Vasiliev (b. 1940), who served from 1995 to 2000. Kokonin stayed on with the theater in the newly created position of executive director. That position was dissolved following the establishment of a Bolshoi Theater Board of Trustees in 2001. The overcommitted, internationally recognized conductor Gennadiy Rozhdestvensky (b. 1931) briefly replaced Vasiliev as general director in 2000, before Anatoliy Iksanov (b. 1952) took over. Iksanov had previously administered the Malïy Theater in Moscow and the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. He oversaw the major rebuilding and restoration of the theater in 2006–11, but the turmoil in the ballet cost him his post in 2013. He was replaced that year by Vladimir Urin (b. 1947), who came to the Bolshoi from the Stanislavsky Theater.

  Following the departure of Grigorovich, the ballet was directed by Vasiliev, first in 1995–97 in an alliance with Vyacheslav Gordeyev, and then in 1997–2000 in an alliance with Alexei Fadeyechev and Nina Ananiashvili. Boris Akimov took over for 2001–03, followed by Alexei Ratmansky until 2008. Yuriy Burlaki ceded the position after just a year to Sergey Filin.

  I relied in this chapter on notes taken during my May 5, 2015, afternoon with Grigorovich at his dacha in southeastern Moscow. Thanks to Ruslan Pronin and Suhua Xiao for arranging this visit; to Sergey Konayev, who provided access at the Bolshoi to the conductors’ scores of Legend of Love and Spartacus; and to Matthew Honegger, whose research supplied some of the details on Spartacus and The Golden Age. On the Bolshoi Ballet’s tour to London in 1956 and on Grigorovich, I consulted Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 201
2), 137–68 and 201–31. On The Seagull, I consulted S. Davlekamova, “Ozhidaniye,” Teatr, no. 4 (1981): 21–30. On the failed coup of August 1991, I drew from Victor Sebestyen, “The K.G.B.’s Bathhouse Plot,” New York Times, August 20, 2011. The information on Anatoliy Kuznetsov and Swan Lake come from his daughter Tatyana Kuznetsova, in conversation in Moscow on May 2, 2015. I am also grateful to her for her insights about Grigorovich’s career. Details on Expo 67 come from http://www.collections canada­.gc.ca/expo/­053302_e.html.

  1 Maya Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 6.

  2 RGALI f. 3266, op. 3, yed. khr. 6, l. 2.

  3 Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, 6.

  4 Ibid., 26.

  5 Ibid., 27.

  6 V. Gayevskiy, Divertisment (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981), 238.

  7 Maya: Portrait of Maya Plisetskaya, directed by Dominique Delouche (1999; Pleasantville, NY: Video Artists International, 2009), DVD.

  8 If it’s swans you want, go to the zoo”; Arlene Croce, “Ballets Without Choreography,” 1967, in Afterimages (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 328. Alastair Macaulay, who brought this source to my attention, is slightly more generous, calling “Plisetskaya’s version of The Dying Swan a marvelous feat of poetic athleticism but not seriously moving”; email communication, September 24, 2015.

  9 George Feifer, Our Motherland, and Other Adventures in Russian Reportage (New York: Viking, 1974), 66.

  10 Ibid., 52.

  11 Gordeyev was a principal dancer in the 1970s and 1980s. His wife, also a Bolshoi star, divorced him in 1989, “citing Soviet laws saying a spouse cannot be ‘made to live with a homosexual’”: Alec Kinnear, “Gordeyev: A Tough but Talented Taskmaster,” The Moscow Times, May 30, 1995, http://www.themoscowtimes.­com/news/article/tmt­/338847.html.

  12 Feifer, Our Motherland, 52–53.

  13 Mayya Plisetskaya, Trinadtsat’ let spustya: Serditïye zametki v trinadtsati glavakh (Moscow: ACT, 2008), 142–43.

  14 Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, 35; additional information from 34.

  15 Sulamif’ Messerer, Sulamif’. Fragmentï vospominaniy (Moscow: Olimpiya, 2005), 114.

  16 Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, 37.

  17 Ya. Chernov, “Debyut molodoy balerinï,” Komsomol’skaya pravda, April 6, 1944; STD.

  18 RGANI f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 55.

  19 Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, 133. Formed in 1954, the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti/Committee for State Security), consolidated the secret police and intelligence-gathering operations of the NKVD and MGB (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti/Ministry for State Security).

  20 RGANI f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 62.

  21 The plot comes from Lope de Vega’s play Fuente Ovejuna (1619).

  22 John Martin, Moscow’s Ballet Attended by Tito,” New York Times, June 5, 1956.

  23 See, for example, V. Zlatogorova, O. Lepeshinskaya, and N. Shpiller, “V intimnoy blizosti so Stalinïm ne sostoyali” [We were not intimate with Stalin], Argumentï i faktï, no. 43 (October 26, 1994), http://www.aif.ru/­archive/1643162.

  24 RGANI f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 133.

  25 Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 143; RGALI f. 2329, op. 8, yed. khr. 234, l. 30.

  26 RGANI f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 125.

  27 RGALI f. 2329, op. 8, yed. khr. 234, l. 57.

  28 According to Alastair Macaulay, who attended the 1986 press conference in London, where Ulanova tenderly recalled the experiences of 1956. Email communication, June 9, 2015.

  29 RGALI f. 2329, op. 8, yed. khr. 234, l. 57.

  30 Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 157. Fonteyn’s worshipful biographer asserts that the restrained English ballerina” fell for “the wild Russian soul.” Through her contact with Ulanova, Fonteyn “broaden[ed] and loosen[ed] her neat contained style” (Meredith Daneman, Margot Fonteyn [London: Viking, 2004], 332).

  31 A. V. Coton, “Contemporary Arts,” The Spectator, October 12, 1956.

  32 Margaret Willis, Britain Welcomes the Bolshoi Ballet While US Waits its Turn,” Christian Science Monitor, October 21, 1986.

  33 RGANI f. 3, op. 35, d. 40, l. 126; May 22, 1958.

  34 Ibid., l. 125; May 12, 1958.

  35 Ibid., ll. 123–24; March 7, 1959.

  36 Ibid., l. 128.

  37 RGANI f. 5, op. 36, d. 99, l. 40; March 18, 1959, report from Polikarpov to the Central Committee. Lepeshinskaya commented as follows about Plisetskaya’s memoir and its criticism of her dancing and closeness to Stalin: “I like that book! It was written with absolute sincerity. Sometimes it’s a little harsh, but you know … you can understand where Maya’s coming from! She had such a difficult childhood! How else could she relate to a ballerina whose husband was in the KGB?” She noted that she had called Plisetskaya in Munich to congratulate her on the publication of her memoir, praising her as “a ballerina of fantastic talent.” “I didn’t change,” Lepeshinskaya concluded of their relationship, “but she did.” Mariya Vardenga, “Lichnost’. Ol’ga Lepeshinskaya. Memuarï na puantakh,” Argumentï i faktï, no. 43 (October 23, 1996): 8.

  38 Stav Ziv, “The Legacy of Maya Plisetskaya, Cold War–Era Bolshoi Ballerina,” Newsweek, May 4, 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/saying­-farewell-swan-328275.

  39 RGANI f. 5, op. 36, d. 99, l. 109; June 9, 1959.

  40 On the NYCB trip to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, and Baku, see Clare Croft, “Ballet Nations: The New York City Ballet’s 1962 US State Department-Sponsored Tour of the Soviet Union, Theatre Journal 61, no. 3 (October 2009): 421–42.

  41 RGANI f. 5, op. 36, d. 143, l. 140; August 29, 1962, Polikarpov to the Central Committee.

  42 Ibid., ll. 68–69; June 6, 1962, Semichastnïy to the Central Committee.

  43 Ibid., ll. 69–70.

  44 Ibid., l. 139; August 23, 1962, deputy minister of culture A. Kuznetsov to the Central Committee.

  45 Mayya Plisetskaya, “Iskusstvo shagayet v kosmos,” Molodyozh’ Gruzii, March 23, 1965; STD.

  46 Mayya Plisetskaya, “Russkaya terpsikhora pokorila Ameriku,” Izvestiya, December 30, 1962; STD.

  47 Laird Borrelli Persson, “Haute Cuisine: Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya’s Recipes from the Pages of Vogue,” Vogue, November 6, 2014, http://www.vogue.com/3705317/­haute-cuisine-maya-plisetskaya­-recipes-vogue/.

  48 Feifer, Our Motherland, 77.

  49 Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, 245–46.

  50 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 737, no. 7, l. 2; December, 1965.

  51 Interview, May 5, 2015, Moscow, Russia.

  52 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 737, no. 7, l. 3.

  53 B. L’vov-Anokhin, “‘Legenda o lyubvi’ v Bol’shom teatre,” Teatr, no. 9 (1965): 42.

  54 Arlene Croce, “The Bolshoi Bows In,” 1987, in Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 589, 592.

  55 Tat’yana Kuznetsova, Khroniki Bol’shogo baleta (Moscow: RIPOL klassik, 2011), 155.

  56 Interview, May 5, 2015, Moscow, Russia.

  57 Grigorovich missed the deadline, but not egregiously; his Spartacus was premiered on April 9, 1968.

  58 Quoted in Svetlana Borisovna Potemkina, “Osobennosti stsenarnoy dramaturgii baleta 1930–60 gg.: na materiale istorii sozdaniya baleta ‘Spartak’” (PhD diss., Gosudarstvennïy institut iskusstvoznaniya [Moscow], 2013), 22; additional information in this and the next paragraph from ibid., 20–46, 59–64.

  59 Quoted in ibid., 35.

  60 Ibid., 63.

  61 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 468, no. 1065, l. 1; translation from www.marxists.org/­archive/lenin/works/1919/­jul/11.htm.

  62 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 468, no. 1065, l. 5.

  63 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 548, no. 462, l. 2; Moiseyev’s “rezhissyorskiy stsenariy” (directorial scenario) for the ballet. Additional information in the paragraph from ll. 4, 6, and 8.

  64 Janice Ross, Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russ
ia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 275–76.

  65 Interview, May 5, 2015, Moscow, Russia.

  66 Ross, Like a Bomb Going Off, 250.

  67 Ibid., 256.

  68 Ibid., 269.

  69 Christina Ezrahi (Swans of the Kremlin, 206) reports that Yakobson’s 1956 Spartacus was revived by the Kirov in 1976, 1985, and 2010. According to performance statistics up to 1987, it had received 197 performances. Apparently the ballet was a success at the box office.”

  70 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 548, no. 182, l. 3ob. The letter is dated January 4, 1957, eight days after the Leningrad premiere of Spartacus.

  71 Ibid., l. 5.

  72 Ibid., l. 8ob.

  73 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 548, no. 268, l. 1ob.; letter to Yakobson from S. A. Reynberg, January 13, 1957.

  74 Muzey Bakhrushina f. 548, no. 1, l. 8. The partial manuscript from which this quote is taken, “Moya rabota nad baletami ‘Zhurale’ i ‘Spartak’” (My work on the ballets “Shurale” and “Spartacus”), became part of Yakobson’s memoir and treatise Pis’ma Noverru (Letters to Noverre), which made it into print posthumously, in 2001.

  75 Quoted in Potemkina, “Osobennosti stsenarnoy dramaturgii baleta 1930–60 gg.: na materiale istorii sozdaniya baleta ‘Spartak,’” 83; additional information in this paragraph from 68 (Asafyev likening Khachaturian to Rubens), 71–87.

  76 Joan Acocella, Man of the People,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com­/magazine/2014­/07/28/man-people.

  77 Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 205. In Moscow in 1961, the two of them glared at each other across the table during a meeting of the artistic council of the Bolshoi Theater. Yakobson grumbled about Khachaturian refusing to meet with him; Khachaturian saw no point in doing so, since he had been betrayed. “[Yakobson] bought six piano scores and made one piano score out of them—so you can imagine what became of the music!” Khachaturian alluded to the argument in Leningrad—“I stormed at him; he stormed back”—and a last-ditch effort at peace. “We came to an agreement, everything was confirmed, and then a slew of additional changes!” “Stenogramma obsuzhdeniya baleta ‘Spartak,’” l. 10; March 16, 1961/Bolshoi Theater Museum.