Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Serf theater had its origins in 1762 when Catherine the Great broke the hold that Peter had exerted on the nobility, freeing them from their obligation to serve the state. Many noblemen took advantage of their newfound liberty to return to their country estates. Catherine, moreover, was generous: to her most loyal servants she awarded large tracts of land complete with the peasants who lived on them, and during her reign, some eight hundred thousand peasants were transferred from state service (a slightly better condition) into serfdom; her son and successor Paul added another six hundred thousand.

  Russian country manors were often miniature replicas of the autocratic state, with the lord acting as tsar and presiding over his people with absolute and arbitrary authority. Although there was certainly nothing original in this repressive social arrangement (Russians liked to point out that Americans too had their slaves), there was something uniquely Russian in the theatricality of life on these estates. Indeed, the drama of “acting European” at court was ritually reenacted, at enormous cost, in manors across the countryside, and many noblemen went to great trouble to educate their house serfs in Western languages and literature, manners and dancing, in order that they might convincingly “play” the role of courtiers to the nobleman’s tsar—female serfs in particular were trained to attend balls and ceremonial functions. In this spirit, aristocrats also built and staffed imitation court theaters to entertain themselves and the local population. The productions they mounted were modeled on the French and Italian operas and ballets performed at court, and were often of high quality.

  The extravagance of these country estates is hard to grasp today. By the late 1780s, Count Nikolai P. Sheremetev, one of the wealthiest men in Russia, owned as many as one million serfs. He had eight serf theaters. His modest estate at Fountain House, for example, had 340 servants, and almost everything in the manor—food, clothing, art, furniture—was imported from western Europe at staggering cost. Paintings by Raphael, Van Dyck, Correggio, Veronese, Rembrandt, and others decorated the galleries and there was a library of some twenty thousand books, mostly in French. At his estate at Kuskovo (similarly outfitted) there were two theaters, one indoor and another for fresh-air entertainments, along with a large lake on which sea battles could be staged for the pleasure of his guests, who sometimes numbered up to fifty thousand. At Ostankino, Sheremetev built an even more sophisticated theater with state-of-the-art technology, designed by a French architect. His serf performers were beautifully trained by the best available teachers—many imported directly from Europe, including the French ballet master (and student of Noverre) Charles LePicq.

  For the serfs it was a contradictory existence. Freed from their menial tasks and often well educated, many became genuinely cultivated artists and individuals. Yet their lives were also harshly constrained: women were especially burdened since they often doubled as concubines or staffed private harems. The line separating sex and dance was notoriously thin: to take just one example, Prince Nikolai Yusupov, an estate owner and director of the Imperial Theaters in the 1790s, liked his female serfs to undress onstage at the end of performances; whips and canes were favored props.

  Serf theater was not exceptional: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were serf theaters on more than 170 estates, and armies of serfs were trained to man them. Far from being an eccentricity, they stood at the center of Russian aristocratic life. Yet although serfdom would endure for some time, serf theater did not last. Economic hardship in the wake of the 1812 war dealt the first blow, and by midcentury most country estates were empty or abandoned and their theaters dispersed. Many of the dancers were sold off: in 1806–7, A. L. Naryshkin, chief court steward and member of an old boyar family, folded his own serf theater into the Imperial Theaters; Alexander Stolypin later sold his seventy-four-member group to the state, and others followed in a pattern that continued well into the 1830s. For the serfs, sale to the state theaters technically meant freedom, but in fact most serfs simply traded one master for another—like Prince Yusupov, the noblemen who owned serf theaters often also held important positions at court, and their authority remained largely intact. Indeed, Yusupov was succeeded in his position as director of the Imperial Theaters by Nikolai P. Sheremetev.*

  Despite its relatively short life, serf theater cast a long shadow over ballet. For generations to come, dancers were generally serfs or children of serfs, orphans, or from other low backgrounds. They were “civilized” and “made European” at state expense: at the Imperial ballet school in St. Petersburg, dancing lessons took several hours a day and alternated with academic subjects and religious studies (in 1806 the authorities even built a small church next to the school). Students were ranked and uniformed according to merit, and perfect obedience was expected: visits from friends and family were strictly regulated, and the tsar and his authorities controlled almost every aspect of a performer’s life. Upon graduation, artists owed ten years of service to the state, which was free to deploy them as needed; even the most highly trained dancer could be assigned or transferred against his will to another profession. Like their serf forbears, dancers were subject to arbitrary incarceration, and sexual exploitation remained commonplace. Permission was required to leave the city, and marriages had to be approved from above.

  Today it is easy to think of these Imperial dancers as repressed and unfree, and in many ways they were. But there was also a protective (if no less arbitrary) side to this paternalism: favored dancers were rewarded with boxes of fancy chocolates, jewelry, and other expensive gifts, and although many were desperately poor, the authorities did on occasion grant loans and offer support. Some ballerinas married up, and others were richly kept, though still more were impoverished and perished forgotten and ill-fed. But whatever their fortune in the demimonde adjoining ballet, most dancers—like most peasants—accepted their position unconditionally, and their devotion to the tsar bordered on religious. Few thought to question authority, and even a glimpse of His Majesty, as one ballerina recalled, “was like being lifted to Paradise.” To this day Russian classical ballet bears the imprint of its roots: the way that Russian dancers submit to authority, their sense of duty, and the reverence and humility they bring to their tradition far surpass that of French or Italian dancers.4

  In 1801, the French-trained ballet master Charles-Louis Didelot (1767–1837) was appointed to direct the Imperial ballet in St. Petersburg. Didelot was an intense and quick-tempered man with steely eyes and a pockmarked face, noted for his sharp discipline and focused mind. He had been a modest success in the West, but in Russia he was an immediate sensation, and except for a brief interval he remained in the country for the rest of his life. His success was partly a matter of timing. The French Revolution of 1789 had terrified and alienated many aristocratic Russians, and Didelot was reassuringly old-fashioned. A student of Noverre, he had a solidly ancien régime artistic sensibility and trained his students on a strict diet of menuet à la reine. Eschewing fashionable polkas and waltzes, he railed against dancers who performed turns and high jumps (disparaging them as “steeplechasers”) or women who breached propriety by throwing their legs indecorously over their heads. His most famous ballet, Psyché et l’Amour (1809), was a rococco affair full of spectacular effects, including fifty real white doves outfitted in mini-corsets and attached to wires: they helped to fly Venus’s chariot into the clouds.5

  But as it turned out, Didelot was more than just a throwback to the ancien régime. He became close friends with Prince Alexander Shakhovskoi (1777–1846), an author and playwright who worked in various official capacities for the Imperial Theaters in the early decades of the century, and with Catterino Cavos (1775–1840), a Venetian-born composer and son of an Italian ballet master who was principal conductor of the Russian Opera for over thirty years, from 1806 until his death. Together Shakhovskoi, Cavos, and Didelot stood at the forefront of an emerging movement to reorient Russian culture away from what Shakhovskoi called the “powder, embroidered coats
and red heels from Paris” and to create a new kind of “national theater.” “Even Russian bread,” he liked to say, “won’t grow in the foreign manner.”6

  This did not mean outright rejection of the West. Didelot never compromised his French training, and most of his early productions were imported directly from Paris. Cavos had been educated in Venice, and Shakhovskoi translated French vaudevilles and comic operas into Russian as well as writing his own. But it did mean pressing the forms of European art into a more Russian mold. Didelot invested his considerable talent in reinvigorating the school, which had stagnated since its founding. The idea was not just to produce a serviceable corps de ballet but to make Russian stars. Considering the expense of importing foreign celebrities, the Imperial authorities much appreciated this money-saving endeavor. Under Didelot’s leadership, the school grew and training for students (many of them former serfs) intensified, with dance classes lengthening from two hours to grueling four-hour training sessions, Didelot presiding. Properly trained Russian dancers, it was hoped, would give French ballet a native pulse.

  The year before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, Didelot left the country and went back to western Europe. After Russia’s victory in the war, however, the Imperial authorities implored him to return. In his absence, the ballet had fallen into disarray, and as an enticement they doubled his salary and gave him a private carriage with coachman and an ample supply of firewood for the winter. Didelot was not, however, returning to the same place. The war with Napoleon had radically transformed Russian politics and society: in the fighting, the aristocracy—Russia’s traditional military elite—had been miserably divided and conflicted, whereas armies of peasants had rallied to die in defense of the homeland and Holy Rus. To many, the lesson seemed clear: the Frenchified court was weak and corroding the country from within. It was the people, not the privileged and service nobility, that represented the real Russia.

  Even Alexander I, whose sympathies with Western culture had heretofore been the defining feature of his reign, was a changed man. The violence and destruction of the war—and especially the burning of Moscow—undid him, and he turned increasingly away from the West and toward Orthodox mysticism and an almost missionary militarism. This had consequences for Russian ballet: when the tsar returned exhausted but victorious from Paris, where his forces had finally occupied the city, he staged vast martial spectacles with powerful religious overtones celebrating the victory of Russia’s Orthodox armies over the French. The Russian ballet master Ivan Valberg—who had taken over many of Didelot’s duties during the war—obliged with works such as The Russians in Paris and The Genius of Russia, with Alexander bent over a crushed and repentant France.

  At court, where fashion was always beholden to politics, the Europeanized elite hastily set out to “Russianize” themselves, as the grand duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna put it. They threw sarafan tunics over their customary silk and zealously donned headdresses from old Muscovy; they set aside French ballroom dances and performed the native pliaska instead. The fashion for folkways turned out to be a boon for dancers, many of whom had already begun to capitalize on their lowly roots by giving private lessons to the aristocracy—not in classical ballet but in the traditional folk dances of their ancestors. Those who did not already know these dances sought out Gypsies and peasants who did, and so acquired secondhand the authenticity deprived them at birth. Upon his return in 1816, Didelot did not miss a beat: he immediately implored the empress, “I need Russian peasants, all Holy Rus. Let them do their folk dances.…Your guests have become enough like Parisians; let them again feel that they are Russians.”7

  In the early 1820s Didelot mounted a series of ballets on Russian themes, including The Fire-bird (1822), from a Russian folktale, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1823), after a poem by Alexander Pushkin—both with music by Cavos. Didelot, however, could not read Russian, and in the program notes for The Prisoner of the Caucasus he apologized to his audience for working from an excerpted translation. Indeed, the ballet bore little relation to Pushkin’s famous work. Didelot moved the action from the sixteenth century back to a wild and mountainous ur-Slavic world with romanticized tribal folk sharpening weapons on rocks and cradling babies in jackal skins. He also added a happy ending. In Pushkin’s story the Circassian girl drowns, but in Didelot’s ballet a prince (another obligatory addition) wins her love and the couple are married; the wicked khan, so the libretto says, “willingly becomes a Russian subject and kneels before his sovereign,” no doubt a dutiful nod to recent Russian military expansion into the region.8

  If the ballet had a distinctly French feel, however, the lead roles were performed by Russians. The hero was danced by Nikolai Golts, who had been trained by Didelot and was one of the first great male Russian dancers; and the Circassian girl was Avdotia Istomina (1799–1848), also trained by Didelot and by the ballerina Evgenia Kolosova, a dancer known for her subtle rendition of folk dances. Istomina’s dark beauty and impassioned dancing, which (according to an admirer) “breathed of the East,” were widely celebrated and attracted the attention of prominent writers and artists, including the playwright Alexander Griboyedov and Pushkin himself.9

  Griboyedov and Pushkin had a curious and revealing relationship to ballet. They were both drawn to St. Petersburg’s glamorous court milieu and for a short time attended the ballet regularly, but each also despised the court’s glittering dissipation and lingering subservience to Western ways. Griboyedov’s comic play Woe from Wit, published the same year that Didelot presented Prisoner of the Caucasus, struck a sharp blow at Russia’s “sick craving for abroad” and amounted, as the critic Vissarion Belinsky later put it, to an “outpouring of bilious thunderous indignation at a rotten society of worthless people.” And although the drama was situated in Moscow, it broadly targeted the whole corrupt structure of autocratic rule—and was seen as among the first examples of a truly Russian theater. Officially banned, manuscript copies nonetheless circulated widely. Pushkin greatly admired the work and later expressed his own misgivings about Russia’s western excesses in Eugene Onegin, in which he described ballet as an entrancing entertainment and feckless pastime, emblematic of the seductive and superficial world that made Onegin a dissolute fop.10

  But Istomina was different: Pushkin wrote fondly of the “soulful flight and free” of “My fair Russian Terpsichore” and made rough, urgent sketches of her pointed feet in ribboned ballet shoes. By the time she performed Prisoner of the Caucasus, he was in exile (for political sedition) and wrote longingly to his brother asking for news of “the Circassian girl Istomina, whom I once courted, like the Prisoner of the Caucasus.” Griboyedov also knew and admired Istomina and wrote his own verses honoring the dance, though his were addressed to the ballerina Ekaterina Teleshova, another of Didelot’s Russians. Adding to Istomina’s romantic aura, she became the cause of a double duel (another Parisian fashion) that took the life of an admirer and cost Griboyedov his left hand. Pushkin later planned to write about the dramatic events, but before he could do so he was himself killed in a duel.11

  With Didelot and Istomina the idea that French ballet might “make Russians European” was turned on its head. For the rest of the century a new theme would dominate: “make ballet Russian.” This would not be easy. Griboyedov and Pushkin counted among the founders of the Russian literary tradition, but their achievements could not be easily harnessed to ballet: Russian poetry danced by Russians to Cavos’s tunes with Didelot’s steps did not necessarily add up to Russian ballet. Didelot’s ballets had an exotic perfume, but they were still incontrovertibly French. There was no real merging of folk and balletic forms, and in his ballets Russian dances were more like exotic color—similar to the national dances so popular in contemporary French and Italian Romantic ballet. Tellingly, when Didelot staged Russian folk dances, he often sought the advice of a renowned expert in the field (and personal teacher to the tsarevitch): the French ballet master Auguste Poirot.

  Yet we shoul
d not underestimate the importance of Didelot in the development of Russian ballet. In this period, and for the first time, dancers and ballet masters were part of a lively intellectual milieu galvanized by the War of 1812 and the circumstances of their own lives to discover and invent new forms of art; imitating the West was no longer enough. The overlap between court and literary circles that inspired so much of Didelot’s work and made Istomina a source of erotic and vaguely nationalist and poetic inspiration was new. Classical ballet, as we have seen over and again, is a deeply conservative and insular art that resists change; the Russians, more French than the French, had made it more conservative than ever. But for a brief moment in the early nineteenth century, Didelot unlocked the doors of French ballet and let the “other,” Slavic Russians in, opening the way for a rush of literary and folk influences on the art. To be sure, his own choreography was limited, but we should remember just how far he had traveled. Even the mere fact of training and promoting Russian dancers represented a radical reorientation and new possibilities.

  But the moment was lost. In December 1825 a group of reform-minded noblemen and intellectuals, many of them former officers who had served in the 1812 war and who (like Pushkin and Griboyedov) admired the West but despaired of Russia’s subservience to it, staged a coup in St. Petersburg. The new tsar, Nicholas I, rashly ordered the Imperial guns turned on them: some were killed, others tried and executed or exiled to Siberia for life. The Decembrists, as they were known, became martyrs and a symbol of the lost opportunities and severe repression that followed. In the wake of their revolt, Nicholas tightened the reins: censorship, restrictions on travel, arbitrary arrests, and establishment of the notorious Third Section (secret police) made Russia, as Alexander Herzen later recalled, a “nastier and more servile” place. The nascent intelligentsia retreated into private clubs and societies and circulated their work in clandestine “thick journals.” In a general shake-up of the Imperial Theaters, Shakhovskoi was fired and Didelot was incessantly harassed by petty autocratic officials until, in 1829, the old ballet master was finally arrested on trumped-up charges and resigned his position.12