Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  This reading of the ballet stuck. More than that, it set down deep roots that then became entangled with Nijinsky’s own life story and eventual descent into insanity. In the years after Sacre, the dancer’s life unraveled. He impulsively married a Hungarian woman whom he barely knew: in a jealous rage Diaghilev cut him off. Banned from Russia (he had failed to apply for deferral of his military service), Nijinsky tried to make it on his own but was woefully incapable of managing his affairs. A season at a music hall in London all but undid him, and he recoiled at the prospect of prostituting himself (as he saw it) to a public hungry for exotic Russian dances. During the war, he was interned in his wife’s native Hungary, trapped and dependent on a hostile mother-in-law and removed from the sources of his art. A brief tour to America (engineered by Diaghilev, who did not forgive the dancer but needed his fame) did not help: ill health, artistic frustration, bitter disputes with Diaghilev, and a growing obsession with Tolstoyan religious dogmas—Nijinsky liked to dress in peasant tunics and dreamed of returning to Russia to work the land—eventually resulted in physical and financial collapse.

  In 1919, in the first stages of the madness that would overtake him, he performed a final solo dance in St. Moritz. It was the last dance he would ever perform: he was subsequently institutionalized and died in 1950. Dressed in simple loose-fitting pants and shirt with sandals, he placed a chair in the center of the room and sat stoically staring at the fashionably dressed audience while the pianist played uncomfortably on. Finally, in silence, he took two bolsters of fabric and rolled out a large black and white cross. He stood at its head with arms open, Christ-like, and spoke of the horrors of the war: “Now I will dance the war … the war which you did not prevent and are also responsible for.” Nijinsky’s final Rite of Spring.40

  When the war broke out in 1914, the Ballets Russes disbanded. Some of the dancers, including Karsavina and Fokine (who had returned briefly to the company after Nijinsky’s departure), made the arduous journey home. Fokine staged several works in St. Petersburg but soon left for engagements in Scandinavia—he was there when the Russian Revolution broke out—and eventually made his way to America, where he settled in 1919. Karsavina resumed her career at the Imperial Theaters (she too would eventually settle in the West). Although conditions were difficult, the war had the paradoxical effect of restoring the Imperial ballet to its former grandeur. As Maurice Paléologue, then French ambassador to Russia, noted in his memoirs, the heroism and “dash” of the tsar’s military found their civilian counterpart in the full-dress formality of the Imperial ballet. Indeed, as war losses mounted and the country’s situation grew increasingly dire, classical ballet served as a wistful reminder of past grandeur. Paléologue’s own tastes were more modern (he adored Karsavina), and he was amazed at the latent enthusiasm in high quarters for the “archaic” dancing of Kschessinska, with its “mechanical precision” and “giddy agility.” An old aide-de-camp explained:

  Our enthusiasm may seem somewhat exaggerated to you, Ambassador; but Tchechinskaïa’s [Kschessinska’s] art represents to us … a very close picture of what Russian society was, and ought to be. Order, punctiliousness, symmetry, work well done everywhere…Whereas these horrible modern ballets—Russian ballets, as you call them in Paris—a dissolute and poisoned art—why, they’re revolution, anarchy!41

  To Paléologue’s more skeptical eye, however, Kschessinska was a painful reminder of Russia’s incipient decline: when the French embassy was refused coal to sustain its vital diplomatic activities in 1916, he grimly observed military trucks unloading a large order of the precious fuel at the ballerina’s home. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in October of the following year, with violent strikes, bread riots, and calls for the tsar’s abdication, Kschessinska’s town house was among the first to be sacked and occupied: Lenin made it his headquarters.

  The Revolution should have spelled the end of the Imperial ballet. And indeed, after the initial uprising in February 1917, the former Maryinsky Theater had changed: the Imperial arms and golden eagles once prominently displayed over the boxes had been ripped out, leaving an ugly hole, and the ushers’ elegant gold-braid uniforms discarded. The new ushers wore drab gray jackets. A disapproving foreigner noted the alterations, lamenting that the diamond row had given way to “soldiers in mud-stained khaki” who “lolled everywhere, smoking evil-smelling cigarettes, spitting all over the place and eating the inevitable sunflower seeds out of paper bags.” Worse were the profiteers and nouveaux riches, “overdressed, over-scented, over-jewelled.” In 1918 a writer for a Petrograd newspaper described the situation in uglier tones: “The boxes remind one of Jewish carriages on a day at the bazaar. The gallery blackens, like a half-eaten piece of watermelon thickly covered with flies.” Yet the ballet went on: more than that, when the Bolsheviks took power, they made it a prominent cultural institution in the emerging socialist state.42

  One reason was Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), appointed by Lenin as commissar of education in charge of cultural affairs. Lunacharsky was an enlightened and literary man who saw himself as the “poet of the revolution.” A powerful orator with a long history of involvement in socialist and revolutionary causes, he had been jailed by the tsar for his incendiary political activities, and had also spent time in exile in the West (he first met Lenin in Paris). He was, as it were, the soft face of the Revolution, a man preoccupied with the spiritual and artistic future of the socialist state—a self-proclaimed “godbuilder” who believed in the revolutionary necessity of “an infinite higher force” and “the world-wide development of the human spirit toward the Universal soul.” It would be wrong, Lunacharsky believed, to throw out Beethoven, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky and replace them with “The Internationale”—a course of action aggressively recommended by many at the time. Instead, he insisted, the proletariat must “appropriate” and build on the aristocratic and bourgeois culture that was now theirs by right of revolution and history. Lenin was skeptical: he harbored a deep suspicion of the “pure landlord culture” and “pompous court style” of the Imperial Theaters. But thanks to Lunacharsky, he yielded: in 1919 Lenin designated the former Imperial Theaters a national property dedicated to bringing theater—socialist theater—to the masses.43

  Thus the Revolution became the savior and protector of an old-world Imperial classicism, and Petipa joined Pushkin and Tchaikovsky as cultural pillars of the emerging socialist state. The former Maryinsky Theater carried on its performances of The Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda, Esmeralda, and other Petipa ballets, and in a further sign of this artistic retrenchment, Fokine’s ballets were officially deemed immoral and unfit. Yet the situation was complicated: even Petipa’s classics were often revised along ideological lines and suffused with new revolutionary fervor. The dancer Fedor Lopukhov, who had toured America with Anna Pavlova before the war and would go on to direct the ballet at the former Maryinsky from 1922 to 1930, restored several Petipa ballets that had fallen into disrepair. Yet, judging from Lopukhov’s own account of his work, these restorations were also an excuse and occasion to “correct” what he took to be Petipa’s musical “errors,” and to bring dance and music into tighter synchrony. By cutting out purportedly aristocratic mime sequences and reducing Petipa’s gracious etiquette to pure, abstract form, he hoped to reveal the true nature of ballet as “an international and classless art.” In the interests of this goal, Lopukhov did not hesitate to modify Petipa’s ballets as he saw fit, even inserting music Petipa himself had cut. For Lopukhov, this corrected art was a realer, more evolved—and radical—Petipa. As he liked to say: “Forward to Petipa!”44

  But Lopukhov’s ideological agenda paled by comparison with the activities of organizations like Proletkult, also supported by Lunacharsky and founded in 1917 to forge a new revolutionary culture from the ground up, by and for the proletariat.* In this spirit, Lunacharsky worked closely with the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Blok, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and the director Vsevolod Meyerhold,
all of whom were passionately taken up with the idea of bringing the Revolution to art—and art to the Revolution. Meyerhold emphasized physical training for actors and developed what he called “biomechanics,” a rigorous system of exercises inspired by assembly-line work rhythms and military tempi. He wanted to forge a new, muscular plasticity in performers and to break down the barrier between stage and street. To this end, he drew freely on mime, fair theater, acrobatics, and the circus. Eisenstein had similar ambitions, which he brought to life in films such as The Battleship Potemkin, commemorating Bloody Sunday, and October, a visceral, on-the-streets portrait of the Bolshevik takeover. At first glance, this kind of art seemed to be drawn directly from life: in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was now called), vast outdoor revolutionary spectacles featuring military troops and actors in commedia dell’arte masks and costumes depicted “The Overthrow of the Autocracy” or “The Taking of the Winter Palace,” with a cast of no less than eight thousand. But in a sharp departure from these official events, Meyerhold and Eisenstein also (and increasingly) built distance and irony into their art, asking performers to play a role and comment on it at the same time. All of this had implications for dance, and Meyerhold’s work in particular influenced ballet masters for years to come.

  The choreographer Nikolai Foregger, for example, staged industrial and machine dances with sirens, whistles, and rattles, featuring dancers moving like conveyor belts or portraying (dead seriously) saws and nails. Lopukhov joined the revolutionary fray with his own original work Dance Symphony: The Magnificence of the Universe (1923), set to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony (Beethoven was an official favorite owing to his sympathy for the French Revolution). In it, Lopukhov dispensed with literary plot in favor of an abstract and musically driven “dance symphony.” The ballet began with a forceful image: a chain of male dancers (no ballerina or female corps de ballet in sight) walking across the front of the stage, one arm raised with the palm of the hand shielding the eyes, and the other groping forward into the darkness. The dances that followed bore titles such as “The Birth of the Sun” and “Thermal Energy,” and Lopukhov said he hoped to harness what he called “cosmic forces” in a surging, rhythmic spectacle.45

  One of the dancers in Lopukhov’s Dance Symphony was the emerging young choreographer Georgi Balanchivadze (George Balanchine).* Born in 1904, Balanchine had been a thirteen-year-old student at the Theater School in St. Petersburg when the Revolution broke out. He was old enough to have a strong and enduring sense of the pomp and splendour of Imperial Russia, but young enough to experience the Revolution firsthand. His father was a composer and former student of Rimsky-Korsakov with a strong interest in folk forms. After the Revolution the family moved to the new Georgian Republic, where they settled in their native Tbilisi. Balanchine, however, stayed behind to complete his studies. Life was difficult and lonely: shortages and hunger—he later recalled stealing army rations and skinning alley cats—and the bone-chilling cold of winters with little heat made study difficult. Nonetheless, he continued to dance and performed in workers’ halls and Communist Party meetings (years later he could still do a wicked imitation of Trotsky). He also continued to play the piano: he performed for silent films to make money and in 1919 enrolled at the Conservatory of Music to study composition and piano.

  In 1920 Balanchine met (and later married) the young dancer Tamara Gevergeyeva (Geva) and plunged headlong into the world of revolutionary, avant-garde art. Geva’s father was a sophisticated and scholarly man who had owned a factory that made religious supplies. He had a huge library, collected modern paintings and ballet prints, and had been an early supporter of Meyerhold’s theatrical innovations and the prewar Ballets Russes. Briefly arrested by the Bolsheviks for his religious and Imperial ties, he had been released when prominent artists and intellectuals rallied to his cause, and although his collection of books and art was claimed by the state, it was turned into a museum with him as resident director. His home continued to draw cultural luminaries: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Kazimir Malevich, and others came, bringing with them their fervent interest in revolutionary art, icons, religious mysticism, and folk mythologies.

  Balanchine came of age in this high-octane artistic atmosphere, and he was anxious to bring classical ballet—dismissed by many as an outmoded “aristocratic” relic—into the world of “progressive” ideas and art. He read widely, cultivated a dark and moody Byronesque image (hair oiled flat, doleful eyes), and idolized Mayakovsky, whose ferocious passions and anarchic impulses seemed to capture the mood of the time (when the poet committed suicide in 1930, he left a note: “Love’s boat has smashed against convention”). Balanchine memorized Mayakovsky’s work, and a caricature of Balanchine in the early 1920s bore a caption drawn from a well-known poem: “All is new! Stop and marvel!” In the early 1920s, Balanchine also worked briefly with the FEKS, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, a group of performers who sought to translate the rhythms of everyday life onto stage and screen (Eisenstein joined them briefly). Like them, Balanchine admired Chaplin, the circus, jazz, and cinema. He saw Forreger’s machine dances and wrote a vigorous defense of Lopukhov’s Dance Symphony, which had been coldly received. He later recalled: “Others stood around and criticized Lopukhov, but not I.…I learned from him.”46

  Balanchine was especially taken with the dances of the Moscow choreographer Kasyan Goleizovsky. Goleizovsky was classically trained and had danced at the Bolshoi from 1909 to 1918. Discouraged with the theater’s conservative artistic direction, however, he had set out on his own: working in smaller venues and Moscow cabarets, he created dark, sexy, and highly gymnastic dances. He saw himself as a “leftist ballet master” bent on unseating the “old men” who reigned at the Bolshoi, and he performed with Meyerhold and eventually opened a school and formed his own avant-garde company. He admired Fokine and Nijinsky (noting ironically that these innovators had been embraced by the West but rejected in their own revolutionary homeland) and created sensuous ballets about love and death to music by composers such as Scriabin and Debussy, with (as one disapproving critic put it) scantily clad dancers, “twisted poses,” and “everlasting embraces of legs.” It was Goleizovsky’s work that inspired Balanchine to create his own troupe in 1922: he called it the Young Ballet.47

  Balanchine’s Petrograd choreography was by all accounts dramatic, erotic, and mysterious. His dancers split their legs, bent into backbreaking bridges, and opened their mouths in Munch-like screams; Tamara Geva remembers holding her leg high in arabesque and supporting herself “by a kiss on his lips.” The work also had religious and mystical overtones. Funeral March (1923), for example, to music by Chopin, featured twelve dancers in linen tunics with tight-fitting hoods, and Geva recalled “changing from the mourners into the dead … our bodies twisting into arches and crosses.” In a similar vein, in 1923 Balanchine staged Alexander Blok’s apocalyptic poem The Twelve, written in 1918 with (the poet later said) the “roar of the collapse of the old world” in his ears. The poem ends with the “hungry dog” of the old regime limping behind the cruel and triumphant guards who carry a blood-red flag, led by Jesus Christ. To capture the raw, almost ferocious energy of the work, Balanchine created a pulsating and rhythmic pantomime dance accompanied by fifty chanting choristers. That same year, he applied to the Soviet authorities for permission to choreograph Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.48

  Permission was refused. By this time, the political climate was hardening, and those in charge of the former Maryinsky Theater disproved of Balanchine’s bold choreographic innovations: dancers who participated in the Young Ballet, they threatened, would be fired. Exhausted, frustrated, and sensing perhaps the tightening of the totalitarian reins (one of the choreographer’s closest friends, a dancer with ties to high government circles, had mysteriously drowned), Balanchine took the first opportunity out: when an acquaintence managed to organize a Ballets Russes–like touring company with the ostensible purpose of showing off Soviet culture abroad, the choreographer and several da
ncers immediately signed on. It was a momentous decision, though at the time they might not have known it would be forever. Early one morning in the summer of 1924 this small group of artists left by steamer for Stettin, and would soon join Diaghilev in Paris.

  As it turned out, they left just in time. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Lunacharsky was gradually marginalized and the former Imperial Theaters were on their way to becoming bastions of an ideologically hardened and wooden classicism. It was an ironic situation. The Revolution had unleashed a maelstrom of artistic activity which the revolutionary regime itself could not contain—or, in the end, tolerate. Once-innovative ballet masters such as Goleizovsky and Lopukhov turned their skills and talent to shallow, agitprop dances and eventually stepped aside: Lopukhov to teaching and other theaters and Goleizovsky to sports festivals and folk dance. In a pattern that would become tragically familiar, the Revolution turned on its own, suppressing—or worse—the artists who had thought themselves its vanguard. The future of the art form once again lay, as it had before with Fokine and Nijinsky, with Diaghilev in the West.