Yurovsky, Vladimir, 310
Zagoskin, Mikhaíl, 73–74
“Concert of Demons,” 16–17
Zakharov, Rostislav, 291, 319, 320, 321, 350
Zakharova, Svetlana, xxii, 353, 416
Zambelli, Carlotta, 240
Zampa, ou la fiancée de marbre, 97, 104
Zarutsky, Yuriy, xx, xxiii Zaslavsky, David, 284–85
Zhikharev, Stepan, 41
Zimin Opera, 260
Znamenka Playhouse, 11–13, 34
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE DEBTS OF GRATITUDE I have accrued in researching and writing this book are immense, and I am proud to bear them. First and foremost, I bow low to my research assistant in St. Petersburg, Ilya Magin, a polyglot genius of encyclopedic knowledge and a wonderful interlocutor about politics, culture, and life in Russia during the nineteenth century. Ilya followed his intuition through the catalogs and collections of the historical archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg to unearth crucial documents—especially about Michael Maddox and the Imperial Theaters. The donkey tale is his, as are the Bolshoi Theater incident reports. I thank him for meeting me in Moscow to discuss the project over pilsner, and for locating, in another historical archive (RGANI), the letters from Maya Plisetskaya to Nikita Khrushchev. Ilya’s presence is felt on nearly every page in the opening chapters, and I consider the entire book as much his as it is mine, though I lay claim to all of its inadequacies.
I am also most grateful to Sergey Konayev, whose knowledge of Russian ballet and its archival sources is peerless. He answered numerous questions by email and in person, supplied essential sources, corrected my misrendered names and dates, and brought me into the precious rooms of the Bolshoi where the 1877 rehearsal score of Swan Lake is preserved on steel shelves in steel cabinets, along with other treasures. Sergey is in great demand in ballet circles, as he should be, lending his erudition to historically minded productions in Moscow, Paris, and New York. Thus I am ever the more grateful to him for his time and his counsel.
I rush as well to thank Alastair Macaulay, who has been the truest of friends to me this year and last. He has generously shared his profound knowledge of and love for ballet, which I consider to be the most complicated of the arts—in some ways as demanding of its admirers as its performers. He rises to meet the challenge like no other. His affectionate scoldings, which pointed out mistakes and misconstruals as well as infelicities, immeasurably improved the draft chapters. Always his advice is relentlessly correct, and I hope that I have incorporated it all into the final product with something nearing the grace and precision of his own prose.
My gratitude extends to Tatyana Kuznetsova for having educated me in Russian dance and opened the archive of her grandfather to me. Tatyana comes from a long line of ballet legends, and I was honored to receive her advice on the later chapters. Thanks as well to Nina Nikolayeva, for materials on Matilda Kshesinskaya; to Pilar Castro Kiltz, who researched Sergey Filin’s career for me while also working at the New York Public Library to retrieve and annotate biographical materials on Plisetskaya; to Lisa Snyder, who accessed and assessed films of Plisetskaya’s performances; to Darya Koltunyuk, for finding reviews in Helsinki, expressing enthusiasm for the book, and lending insight to chapter 7; and to the versatile Laura Ong, who gathered useful articles on the Bolshoi from historical newspapers. The eminent Slavist Boris Wolfson improved, and sometimes provided, the translations of numerous passages, and cast his erudition across the whole. Everything in the translations that reads properly, with archaisms intact, reflects his immense kindheartedness. Bruce Brown provided missing information and so rescued me from ruin in chapter 1, while Roland John Wiley, the leading English-language historian of Russian ballet, provided essential guidance in chapter 4. His book on Marius Petipa is eagerly awaited. As ever, I am deeply grateful to my beloved friend and colleague Caryl Emerson, who holds fast to high concepts that elude my grasp and motivates me to do better through the sheer impulse to follow her example.
I am also indebted to the esteemed Russian ballet historian Elizabeth Souritz. It was a pleasure to be welcomed into her home and hear her recollections of the Soviet-era Bolshoi Ballet, including the fracas over the Grigorovich production of Swan Lake. My thanks to Christina Ezrahi, for sharing her thoughts and advice on Khachaturian’s ballet scores; to Elizabeth Stern, for information gathered from the St. Petersburg archives on Flames of Paris and The Red Poppy; to the dance critic Marina Harss, for reading through early drafts of two of the chapters; and to my ballet-devoted students for their insights, including Morgan Nelson on the intricacies of Russian ballet auditions, and Colby Hyland on the specifics of the Vaganova method. I am also grateful for questions answered, assistance provided, and therapies administered, to Ellen Barry, Anthony Cross, Tina Fehlandt, Gemma Farrell, Lynn Garafola, Leslie Getz, Robert Greskovic, Wendy Heller, Sandra Johnson, Vladimir Jurowski, Julia Khait, Nelly Kravetz, Stephen Kotkin, Natalya Parakhina, Dmitri Neustroyev, Serge Prokofieff Jr., Tim Scholl, Samuel Steward, Natalya Strizhkova, Raymond Stults, Richard Taruskin, Edward Tyerman, Suhua Xiao, Shaun Walker, and Jenn Zahrt.
My treasured friend Galina Zlobina provided the photographs and essential documents from the Russian Archive of Literature and Art. I owe Galina the bulk of my existence in print, and the contents of some Princeton theatrical performances as well. Mariya Chernova and Natalya Mashechkina of the Bakhrushin Museum offered their patience, kindness, and hotfoot, light-fingered retrieval of documents from the shelves; likewise Lyudmila Sidorenko of the Moscow Theater Union library-archive; and Lidiya Kharina along with her spirited staff at the Bolshoi Theater Museum. My gratitude as well to the effortlessly multitasking Katerina Novikova, whom the Bolshoi Theater is privileged to have in charge of public relations, and to the theater administrators and dancers whom Katerina arranged for me to meet. Of the dancers, I must thank in particular Svetlana Lunkina, who spread her prima ballerina magic across the Princeton campus during a visit in 2013.
My editor at Norton, Katie Adams, bucked me up with unwarranted praise and often explained to me what I actually meant to say. She possesses the power of alchemy, turning ore into malachite, and I will henceforth and evermore acknowledge the importance, in nonfiction, of chronological organization. Likewise I am grateful to Pamela Murray, of Knopf, for her comments on the draft, and to John Everett Branch Jr. and Rachelle Mandik for their proofreading and copyediting.
Will Lippincott convinced me that this book could be written, improved the proposal, taught me how to talk about it, and placed it under contract.
The heart and, indeed, soul of it all belongs to Elizabeth Berg-man, who scrutinized the draft and revision, eliminating nonsense, improving transitions, teasing out new rhythms, and retrieving pages out of the hearth to convince me of their worth. She has done so much for me, for so long now, and we find the greatest meaning and purpose in the gift of our daughter, to whom this book is dedicated.
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mon Morrison, Bolshoi Confidential
Bolshoi Confidential Page 55