Bakhchisarai launched Ulanova’s career, and she would be the reigning ballerina of the USSR, widely known and adored, until her retirement in 1960. Her image appeared in magazines and on postcards, and her performances were seen across the USSR on film and later television. People knew her as a dancer, but also as a model Soviet citizen: she dressed in modest suits and muted colors, and she had a straightforward and businesslike manner. The recipient of numerous official prizes and honors, she belonged to the Leningrad Soviet of Workers Deputies and later to the Moscow City Soviet. During the Second World War, postcards showing her standing upright in military dress, hair pinned softly back, were widely distributed. She was a favored cultural emissary: Stalin dispatched her to perform in the West in 1948–49, long before the full Bolshoi company—with Ulanova its star—went to Britain in 1956. Ever dutiful, she produced a stream of books and articles extolling the virtues of the Soviet system and its benefit to art. Official literature in turn made her out to be a perfect worker (and ballet a form of physical labor) whose discipline and self-sacrifice elevated her to a paradise of high ideals and feelings.10
Anything wooden about this official façade, however, fell away in her dancing. There was something direct and human about Ulanova’s dancing that endowed the dram-balet’s otherwise flat and didactic forms with depth and purpose. Her movements were quiet, private, and utterly unaffected in ways that seemed to cut through the stilted rhetoric of Soviet public life. Her steps appeared to contain her deepest thoughts and to unfold spontaneously, as if she too were just discovering them. If on the outside Ulanova projected the image of an exemplary Soviet citizen, inside—in her dancing—she expressed a kind of genuine emotion that was honest and self-reflective: a style and aesthetic otherwise barred from public discourse. Consciously or not, she stood both for and against: for the socialist state and its accomplishments but against its empty, canned slogans, its deceptions and lies.
Ulanova’s importance to the history of Soviet ballet cannot be overstated. She steered the Russian classical tradition away from the acrobatic modernism of the 1920s (she would never be caught in such exaggerated or sexually suggestive poses), and away from the old Petipa-style bravura that should have been her natural inheritance. Her commitment lay with Stanislavsky—with drama and revealing the inner lives of her characters in dance. This was new.
But Ulanova also, and importantly, drew on an earlier nineteenth-century heritage. She had made her debut (in 1928) in a dance from Chopiniana (Les Sylphides), Fokine’s long-skirted tribute to Marie Taglioni, to whom Ulanova, not coincidentally, was often compared. Her most famous roles were the title character of Giselle (created in Paris in 1841), the pristine and mysterious white swan of Swan Lake, and of course the fainting virginal girl in Bakhchisarai. Paradoxically, and perhaps without realizing it, Ulanova thus broke new ground by retreating into a Romantic past. She did not expand ballet or focus on innovative ways of moving; instead she circumscribed and elevated a particular aspect of the art.
If the dram-balet privileged women and Ulanova in particular, it had male heroes too. Vakhtang Chaboukiani, a Georgian who joined the former Maryinsky Ballet in 1929 (the year after Ulanova made her debut), was one of several male stars at the Maryinsky/Kirov in the 1930s. He danced in early productions of Bakhchisarai alongside Ulanova, and would go on to choreograph several important dram-balets of his own. Chaboukiani broke sharply with the noble stance of male dancers past, with their old-world manners and formal movements. Films of his dancing show a performer of tremendous charisma who devoured space with huge, bold movements. He could do any number of tricks and turns, but it was his sensuality and virility, his fulsome attack and the way he showed the labor and muscle that went into his steps, that set him apart from his more restrained and noble predecessors. An official press release noted the difference, proudly announcing that male dancers were no longer prettified “dragon-flies” or birds, but instead “powerful multi-motor flying machines,” more akin to athletes than dancers.11
Behind Ulanova, Chaboukiani, and the new generation of dram-balet dancers stood an extraordinary group of teachers, foremost among them Agrippina Vaganova. It was Vaganova who first codified and articulated the principles animating Ulanova and Chaboukiani’s dancing, and she too must be seen as an author of the dram-balet and the emotionally intense style of dancing that came with it. Born in 1879, she grew up with the tsar’s Imperial ballet and had worked directly with Petipa and Ivanov. A dyed-in-the-wool old-world classicist, she had stood against Mikhail Fokine, Tamara Karsavina, and the modernist vanguard at the Maryinsky in 1905; she was not part of the Ballets Russes. When the Revolution came, it brought personal tragedy: on Christmas Eve after the Bolsheviks took power, her lover, a retired colonel loyal to the fallen tsar, shot himself at their home in front of the festively decorated tree—the couple had a child and had lived together for a decade. Vaganova struggled: she taught, danced in movie theaters and music halls, and eventually returned to the fold of the former Imperial Theaters in 1920–21.
Stalwartly old-fashioned, she vigorously opposed Lopukhov’s choreographic experiments in the late 1920s and worked hard to rebuff revolutionary attempts to replace or supplement ballet classes at the theater with physical culture and gymnastics. When Lopukhov came under Party fire and was forced out, Vaganova eventually replaced him. Her natural conservatism dovetailed with Stalin’s rigid and distinctly lowbrow taste, and she worked hard to apply the ideas of socialist realism to dance. In 1933, for example, she staged a version of Swan Lake that kept many of the Petipa/Ivanov steps but made the story more “realistic”: blood spattered on the white swan’s wings, and the entire ballet was set as a decadent dream unfolding in the mind of a rich and corrupt count. Her most important contribution, however, was not choreographic. In 1934—the same year that Kirov was murdered and Ulanova first appeared in Bakhchisarai—Vaganova, working in collaboration with Lubov Blok (Alexander Blok’s widow), published Fundamentals of the Classic Dance, which systematized and codified the emerging Leningrad school and style of ballet.12
What was this style? First and foremost, it was a science and (in the words of one dancer) “technology” of ballet. Vaganova had a sharply analytic mind. She was a dancer’s dancer, a technician whose skill lay in her sure grasp of ballet’s mechanics. In her teaching, every aspect of a step was taken apart, examined, and then reassembled and described. Coordination was key, and Vaganova pioneered a way of training in which the head, hands, arms, and eyes all move in synchrony with the legs and feet. It was no good to practice intricate footwork at the barre with the arm held blankly to the side, as had been customary hitherto: without the arm (head, eyes) the step would lag. Every part of the body had to work at the same time and in close harmony, fluidly through the spine. Thus Vaganova’s barre was never a set of isolated scales and exercises; it was itself a fully developed dance—not flowery or ornamented but clean and precise. The idea of building blocks and moving from simple to complex was gone: why wait to pull the whole body into coordinated motion? Vaganova taught her students to perfect their steps while dancing, thus erasing the long-held distinction between technique and artistry.13
The result was impressive: Vaganova fine-tuned physical coordination so that even the most awkward steps appeared effortless, graceful, and above all natural—not divorced from life but part of it. Her ballerinas, moreover, were strong and independent. Vaganova herself had been a soloist, and she disparaged dancers who hung on a partner like a crutch. Jumps, turns, and long “Italian” adagio combinations (derived from Cecchetti) performed without support were a regular feature of her classes. Most important of all, Vaganova insisted that every movement be infused with meaning. For dancers trained in her method, movements do not exist without some kind of emotional impulse. The idea was not to graft meaning onto a step: that would have been far too crude and ornamented. To the contrary, and like Stanislavsky in theater, she asked dancers to find deep and convincing connections between mo
vement and emotion. There was no such thing as a neutral step: every movement had to be suffused with feeling. Vaganova’s teaching fit perfectly with the dram-balet: they were two sides of the same aesthetic coin. Thus with Ulanova and others, Vaganova managed to carry Russian ballet into the 1930s by carving a humanist school out of the wooden categories of socialist realism. It was an admirable achievement, and one which made an enduring mark on Soviet ballet.*
In 1934 Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk premiered in Leningrad. Hugely successful, it was mounted in theaters across Russia and played to critical acclaim in Europe and America. On January 26, 1936, however, Stalin and Molotov, along with Zhdanov and other high Party officials, attended a performance of the opera at the Bolshoi Theater; to Shostakovich’s horror (the composer’s presence had been officially requested), they walked out during the third act. Two days later, at Stalin’s direct instruction, Pravda published “Muddle Instead of Music,” a damning tirade against the opera and its composer. On February 6, Pravda expanded the attack and took aim at a new comic ballet, The Bright Stream, also with music by Shostakovich, choreographed by (the already beleaguered) Fedor Lopukhov.† The libretto was by Lopukhov and the writer Adrian Piotrovsky, an old colleague of Radlov’s who had also collaborated on Lady Macbeth. Like Lady Macbeth, The Bright Stream had been enthusiastically received in Leningrad (at the Maly Theater), and its success had led to an invitation to stage the work at the Bolshoi. Once again, however, Stalin was displeased. Pravda lashed out: “Ballet Fraud!”14
On the surface, The Bright Stream appeared harmless enough. It was a lighthearted celebration of life on a Cossack collective farm—a topical theme presumably chosen to celebrate Stalin’s plan to bring the Cossacks into the Soviet system (and especially into the Red Army). Its satirical tone and vaudeville sensibility, however, raised Party hackles, and Pravda attacked the ballet for making a mockery of Soviet peoples by portraying them as ballet “dolls” and “tinsel peasants” from a “pre-revolutionary candy box.” These were not folk dances, the authorities said, but “disconnected numbers,” vulgar balletic distortions of a vital people’s art. In the storm of meetings, debates, and humiliating self-criticism that followed, Asafiev condemned Shostakovich’s score for the ballet as “Lumpen-Musik” and Vaganova dutifully denounced The Bright Stream for having strayed from the “correct path” of art. Shostakovich retreated, and Lopukhov never made another important dance.15
“Ballet Fraud” unleashed a panic. Dancers and ballet masters scrambled to interpret the official pronouncements and to create or revise their productions to suit Stalin’s elusive tastes. As the Terror spread, dram-balets took on ever more ideologically strident tones and obvious themes. The stakes were high. Although dancers were spared the worst of Stalin’s horrors, the sense of danger was acute and pervasive—and not only for Lopukhov, whose past difficulties had made him an easy target. One morning in 1937 Vaganova arrived at the theater to find a note posted on the door stating that she had “resigned” her position as director; she quietly withdrew into teaching. The ballerina Marina Semenova’s husband (a high-ranking diplomat) was arrested and killed; Semenova was put under house arrest but eventually released (she was Stalin’s favorite dancer). In 1938 Meyerhold’s theater was shut down, and when he dared to speak out he was arrested, tortured, and shot; his wife was found stabbed to death in their home. Fear cast a pall over art, but the effect on dance was not always immediate or apparent. Whatever they were thinking at the time—and we really don’t know—Ulanova, Chaboukiani, and many others continued to dance their hearts out. Artists who were there will tell you that, the Terror aside, this was ballet’s golden age.
The peak of this golden age came in 1940 with Romeo and Juliet, perhaps the most important ballet produced in Russia since The Sleeping Beauty half a century earlier. A huge success in Leningrad, it would be transferred to Moscow in 1946 at Stalin’s personal request and subsequently made into a feature-length movie released in 1954 and eventually beamed into living rooms across the Soviet bloc. It was Romeo and Juliet, moreover, that would send British and American audiences into swooning admiration in 1956 and 1959, respectively. Twenty years later, in 1976, when the Bolshoi celebrated its two hundredth anniversary, it would do so with a performance of the ballet (featuring, in a sentimental touch, its choreographer’s son). Filmed for television by a West German producer, it was shown in over one hundred countries worldwide.
The origins of the ballet stretched back to 1934. Already that year Radlov had approached Prokofiev with the idea for the ballet. The two men were close friends: they had worked together at Meyerhold’s studio and Radlov had directed the opening of Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges in Leningrad in 1926, among other works. They often met to play chess. Radlov had in mind a dram-balet—a new Fountain of Bakhchisarai—with choreography by Zakharov and a libretto to be written in conjunction with Piotrovsky and Prokofiev. In the political shake-up after Kirov’s murder, however, Radlov lost his job at the theater. The Bolshoi Ballet eventually took over the commission, but Radlov and Piotrovsky somehow managed to stay involved, and in 1935 we find Radlov writing enthusiastically of his vision of a “Komsomol-like” morality tale of “young, strong and progressive people fighting with feudal traditions.” In an apparent attempt to placate the authorities—Stalin generally preferred happy endings—but also perhaps (and bizarrely) in keeping with Prokofiev’s Christian Science faith, acquired during an extended stay in the United States, the artists came up with a happy fairy-tale ending to the ballet. Through a contorted plot device, the star-crossed lovers did not die but were miraculously reunited amid merriment and celebration.16
As it turned out, however, none of this went over very well with the authorities. A 1936 recital of the music was sharply criticized: the music was deemed difficult and the happy ending an unnecessary deviation from Shakespeare’s classic text. The Bolshoi duly canceled the production. The ballet was subsequently revised: Prokofiev crossed out the happy ending and replaced it with suitably mournful music. Fearful that his ballet might never emerge from the political and bureaucratic traps that had ensnared it, he managed to arrange a performance in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in December 1938, with choreography (long since lost) by the local theater’s resident choreographer.
Just when the ballet seemed doomed to provincial obscurity, the Kirov took it up again. This time its choreography was assigned not to Zakharov but to the choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky (1905–1967). Lavrovsky was no novice. He had been classically trained in St. Petersburg and had joined the former Maryinsky Theater in 1922; he had worked with Lopukhov and Balanchine (as a member of the Young Ballet) and with Vaganova and Radlov and had been there for The Red Poppy (the Kirov version), The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, and The Bright Stream. He was an ardent and lifelong advocate of dram-balet. “At one time,” he later explained, “we used to depict princes and princesses, butterflies and elves—what you will, but Man as such was never shown in ballet.” In spite of Lavrovsky’s initial enthusiasm for Romeo and Juliet, though, the choreography did not come easily. He found Prokofiev’s music overly complicated and dissonant, and the dancers hated it: Galina Ulanova stubbornly dug in her heels and pronounced it undanceable.17
To Prokofiev’s dismay, Lavrovsky set about changing the score, cutting whole sections and simplifying others (the composer later unsuccessfully filed an official complaint), and he pressed Prokofiev to add heroic-sounding bravura variations and galvanizing group dances in the vein of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. The final score was thus a mangled distortion of Prokofiev’s original, and composer, choreographer, and dancers were all painfully aware of the ballet’s cobbled-together and difficult provenance. When it finally premiered in Leningrad on January 11, 1940, however, Romeo and Juliet was an instant and unqualified success. Even today we can see why (the ballet is still danced). Although Lavrovsky’s choreography is highly melodramatic and at times almost cartoonish in its portrayal of the clash between “young, s
trong, progressive people” (the lovers) and the clownishly formidable forces of “feudal traditions,” it is also remarkable for its clarity and sustained passion. The dram-balet had found its best advocate and master.
Lavrovsky created a deceptively simple choreographic blend of natural everyday gesture and classical ballet. This had nothing to do with conventional ballet pantomime, with its stylized signs and florid gestures. Instead steps dissolve into actions: Juliet’s urgent run toward Romeo breaks into arabesques and pirouettes with such ease that we hardly notice the transition from “run” into dance. Similarly, Romeo’s bravura jumps end dramatically on the knee, chest and head flung back in open-armed submission—it is the submission and not the steps that matter. Lavrovsky’s vocabulary was not new or innovative—in fact, it was deliberately old-fashioned—but he wove steps into story with consummate skill.
Ulanova danced the title role, and her heartfelt depiction of Juliet’s innocent passion became a touchstone of her career. But it was Prokofiev’s score more than anything that made the ballet great. Its epic scale and brassy tones, its tense rhythmic dissonance and sudden breaks into yearning lyricism, caught something of the compressed emotion and romantic longing that characterized Shakespeare’s drama—and, her initial skepticism notwithstanding, Ulanova’s dancing. Not since Tchaikovsky had Russian ballet found such a sympathetic composer (Stravinsky was in the West), and Prokofiev’s music gave Romeo and Juliet a depth and range that The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, with Asafiev’s shallow score, had quite lacked. Romeo and Juliet was programmatic music at its best, and it was no accident that it read as much like a film as a ballet, or that it was eventually successfully turned into a movie: in the years that it took to get the ballet to the stage, Prokofiev was also working with Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky (1938), one of several films he composed.
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