Not surprisingly, Plisetskaya became obsessed with foreign travel. She besieged officials, wrote letters of carefully worded “repentance,” complained loudly in front of admiring foreign dignitaries, dressed inappropriately at public functions—anything to attract official attention. (She got it: her own KGB watchdog.) The struggle seeped into her dancing: she saw every ballet, performance, and role as a political battle, “who’ll get whom!” Perhaps her greatest “victory” came in 1956, when the KGB insisted that she be prevented from touring with the Bolshoi to London. Plisetskaya’s “revenge” performance of Swan Lake in Moscow was, she claims, among the best she ever gave. All Moscow came, including the “colorless, bedbug face of a eunuch, Serov [head of the KGB]…I wanted to let the authorities have it. Let Serov and his wifie burst their gall bladders. Bastards!” Every move she made was for him—that is, against him—and even in her own account of it we can feel the steely contempt and defiance taking hold of her dancing. When the curtain came down on the first act, the crowd exploded. KGB toughs muffled the audience’s applauding hands and dragged people out of the theater kicking, screaming, and scratching. But the show went on, and by the end of the evening the government thugs had retreated, unable (or unwilling) to contain the public enthusiasm. Plisetskaya had won.41
In 1959, Khrushchev personally authorized her participation in the Bolshoi tour to New York. In his memoirs, he proudly recalls his decision to make an example of the dancer: his advisors all warned that she might cause trouble or even defect, but he insisted that “open” borders were an important proof of Communism’s success. If Plisetskaya returned, she would be living evidence that artists worked in the Soviet Union because they chose to work there, and because they understood that in the West artists were slaves and puppets of the rich. If she defected, then so be it: the country would be better off without people “who don’t deserve to be called scum.” To Khrushchev’s immense satisfaction, Plisetskaya behaved herself perfectly, danced to the hilt, and dutifully came home. He embraced her upon her return: “Good girl, coming back. Not making me look like a fool. You didn’t let me down.”42
In the years that followed, Plisetskaya became an international superstar. She was a favored cultural emissary (the dancer who did not defect), a glamour girl (Bobby Kennedy had “a thing” for her), and a box office hit around the world. Richard Avedon photographed her, and she worked with Halston and Pierre Cardin. Back at home, she settled into a life of luxury: she had two imported cars, a chauffeur, a lovely apartment, a dacha in a fashionable area close to Moscow, furs, designer clothing, and all of the accoutrements of foreign travel. But the battles still continued, and she was never allowed to forget that her artistic and material privileges could be revoked at a moment’s notice. She traveled, but not freely. Each foreign engagement had to be approved, forms filled out, humiliations endured. She was allowed to dance, but the range for experimentation and new work was strictly limited and her projects subject to constant and unremitting battles with the censors. The systematic intrusion of politics into art was insidious: they were always in her head. Indeed, she measured artistic challenge by the strength of official resistance: “Would they really allow this?”
Plisetskaya was a tangle of competing emotions and loyalties: she was against Stalin but in tears at his funeral, dismissive of Khrushchev but also his puppet, proudly Russian and defiantly Soviet, among the privileged elite but forever under the thumb of KBG thugs. Ulanova’s dancing bespoke a focused engagement with literature and Stanislavskian acting techniques, and in her dancing she projected a powerful, uncomplicated self-assurance. But Plisetskaya’s self-image and motives were, by her own account, far more clouded and troubled. She turned her talent into a weapon to be wielded against apparatchiks: the force and anger in her dancing, her steamroller bravura and martyred egoism, and her unblanching pride all pointed to her obsession with power. Her dancing had nothing to do with beauty or harmony: it was a fight.
Fittingly, Mikhail Fokine’s Dying Swan became her signature dance. As we will recall, Fokine had choreographed this short solo in 1905 for the delicately graceful Anna Pavlova as “a poetic image, a symbol of the perpetual longing for life by all mortals.” Plisetskaya was hardly the frail and yearning type: her Dying Swan was not a fragile, broken-winged creature, but an agitated, asymmetrical, eagle-like bird. She did not slowly weaken, surrender, and fold into a gentle heap, like Pavlova—or Ulanova—but remained energetic to the end, insisting on the unjust claims that death makes on physical vitality. Her movements were forced and imposed: she would not follow tradition but go her own way. “Let me reiterate,” she later asserted, “I was independent.”43
What subtleties Plisetskaya did possess seemed to derive from pain: a prominent feature of her dancing, for example, lay in her big, manly hands. She held her palms wide open and never arranged her fingers in artful flower-like poses as most dancers are trained to do. Her hands grabbed, held, gripped, trailed, and flicked. They seemed to carry and balance her whole body. She has said she was interested in hands and wrote of her admiration for her father’s beautiful hands: she imagines that they tortured him by breaking his knuckles. But even the pain was rarely on show: it was denied, closed off, turned to defiance and a palpable I-dare-you self-confidence—a fierce and undying swan.
Even at her brashest, however, Plisetskaya represented the Bolshoi’s soft side. Its hard core and furthest extreme lay in the work of Yuri Grigorovich. Grigorovich had begun, as we have seen, in Leningrad with The Stone Flower, but this was only a hint of the kinds of ballets he would produce in his Bolshoi years. He reigned there for some thirty years, from 1964 to 1995, and in that time became the USSR’s most important and powerful choreographer. He produced dozens of ballets, including several remakes of Petipa’s classics, but his most representative work was Spartacus, premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1968. This ballet should not be confused with Yakobson’s earlier version, which had been abruptly withdrawn after its miserable reception in New York, or with the version created by the folk dance choreographer Igor Moiseyev some years earlier for the Bolshoi (also withdrawn, although Plisetskaya thought it blazing and sumptuous, “practically Hollywood”). Grigorovich used Khachaturian’s score but otherwise completely rethought the work. His ballet was no fanciful experiment in sensual plastique: instead, Grigorovich created an epic revolutionary allegory. Spartacus would be the Bolshoi’s calling card for decades to come and its most emblematic ballet.44
The story is canonic revolutionary fare: it concerns Spartacus, the heroic gladiator-slave who leads his men in an uprising against the cruel and odious Roman tyrant Crassus. In the opening scene, Grigorovich set the choreographic tone: the ballet begins with a corps de ballet of muscular men with bare legs and arms, equipped with armor and shields and performing a heavy, stomping, warlike dance—a rhythmically pounding statement of power and virility. As the rebellion unfolds, Spartacus performs pained and arduous solos, bare-chested and in chains with arms raised Christ-like on a cross; his fellow slaves, also bare-chested and in chains, accompany him, and masses of men fill the stage. There are women—lovers and concubines—but they are slinky, seductive creatures, as hardened and steely as the men they serve. Their movements are masculine and bravura: leaps and turns alternate with spectacular lifts, in which the men press the women high into the air to crescendos in the music.
The ballet’s central metaphor is violence, its themes war, confrontation, and self-sacrifice. The climax comes when Spartacus and Crassus confront each other: a competition ensues in which their men vie to outdo each other in martial dances. Grigorovich excelled at these crude but galvanizing folk-style group dances, and the sheer force of that many men plowing through knee drops, acrobatic extensions, and lunging poses was impressive. When Spartacus is finally killed, he is impaled on a cross of swords by Crassus’s men and lifted high in the air, head hung limply. His lover mourns and eventually throws herself across his dead body. He is lifted again, and as his bo
dy rises, she places his shield on his breast and raises her arms to heaven in anguish. The curtain falls.
Spartacus was tasteless and bombastic. It was also extraordinary to watch. It had all of the faults of The Stone Flower, magnified: the flat and inexpressive steps, the empty caricatured drama, and the forced physicality of Grigorovich’s earlier work were elaborated and enshrined in Spartacus. But with Spartacus, Grigorovich went further. He expanded the scale of his work exponentially, welding his own preoccupation with steps to the big and brash I-dare-you Bolshoi style. It was as if he had turned up the kinesthetic volume: the steps were still classical, but his dancers seemed to shout their movements, pushing and straining their bodies to a degree heretofore unimaginable. This did not have anything to do with women or ballerinas. Spartacus was a predominantly masculine enterprise. Indeed, you hardly notice the women: what matters are the martial and Russian-folk-dance-inspired movements—weighted, bent-kneed, stomping, or hurtling through the air—performed by large groups of men (preferably bare-chested) or soloists.
At one point in the ballet, Vladimir Vasiliev, the dancer who performed the role of Spartacus in the original production and became its most celebrated interpreter, performed a series of fantastic jumps traveling diagonally across the stage, legs splitting and cutting and body thrust high in the air in a tremendous display of physical exertion. He did not fly gracefully through space; instead you saw—and felt—his sweat and labor. Not as work, but as sheer prowess: with every step, he exceeded his own limits. Chaboukiani and others had pioneered this kind of balletic athleticism in the 1930s, but their dances had still been marked by a basic attention to form. Vasiliev had no interest in any of that: he was an iconoclast possessed of iron discipline and an almost religious zeal. His dancing was physically transcendent, charismatic.
Vladimir Vasiliev and the Bolshoi Ballet performing Yuri Grigorovich’s Spartacus. (9.1)
Spartacus was the high-water mark of Soviet ballet. Hugely successful, it was staged in theaters across the USSR, Europe, and America and eventually captured on film; it remains a signature Bolshoi work. It is not hard to see why. Spartacus was not subtle or tasteful, but its forced exertion and shameless grandiosity could be breathtaking—and very entertaining. Nor was it an exception: indeed, it was the model from which most of Grigorovich’s other ballets derived. They too were monumental and masculine, an expression of collective glory and national pride. This did not mean, however, that he did not have his own struggles with the authorities. In 1969 he created a new Swan Lake, recast (he said) as a psychological struggle between good and evil told from a masculine point of view. Siegfried and Rothbart—not the Swan Queen—were the protagonists. At the final dress rehearsal, however, Ministry of Culture officials suspended the work: it was a travesty, they said, to invest Swan Lake with “idealistic philosophy” and symbolic intent (whatever that meant). In 1975 Grigorovich created another epic spectacle, Ivan the Terrible, inspired by Eisenstein’s film. But it came across instead as another portentous display, Spartacus redux.
Grigorovich’s ballets were the clearest statement yet of a “special” path for Soviet ballet. For nearly two hundred years Russian ballet had looked to the West: centered first at the court in St. Petersburg and then in Leningrad at the Kirov, it had been absorptive, taking in European ideas and styles and projecting them back to Europe in Russia’s image. Even the dram-balet, for all its socialist realist credentials, was deliberately and conventionally classical. Spartacus renounced all of that: it was a wall, a barrier, a complete rejection of outside influences—of the West and of the Kirov. It appeared classical—the steps were all there—but it was not. Grigorovich had crushed ballet’s delicate internal filigree and erected an arduous athleticism in its place. It was this violent undercurrent and the dancers’ extraordinary commitment, what one critic has called their “rage to perform,” as exemplified by Plisetskaya and Spartacus, that defined the Bolshoi.
Even at its height, however, the Bolshoi’s way of dancing was a dead end. Its dancers’ outwardly confident stance had little inner resonance. Plisetskaya’s more complex and ambiguous style was too brittle and harsh to sustain a tradition in art, and Grigorovich was more extreme still. Plisetskaya at least had her own voice, however conflicted—there was a real person in her dancing. Grigorovich’s ballets allowed no such intimacy: his physical fireworks expressed official rather than human sentiments. More seriously still, the Bolshoi had no “school,” no rules or formal requirements: instead it depended almost entirely on personality and iconoclasm—on bravado and bluster. The result, even when it was exhilarating, favored egotistical posturing at the expense of subtlety. It is no coincidence that both Plisetskaya and Grigorovich burned through their talent and then fell into sharp decline—Plisetskaya into bitterness and envy of the West, Grigorovich into arrogance and inflexibility. The Bolshoi kept going, but after Spartacus it was running on old energy, recycling past glories, fighting old ideological battles.
How good was ballet in the USSR? The answer depends on who you ask: people who saw it in the West or former Soviets who were there. For although the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets had great successes abroad, it is worth remembering that many Soviet ballets acclaimed in Moscow and Leningrad did not translate well to stages abroad. Indeed, most Soviet works never even made it across the Iron Curtain: they were strictly for domestic consumption. It was really just the old reworked Petipa classics (and Swan Lake in particular) and a few dram-balets such as Romeo and Juliet that linked Soviet and Western dance. Otherwise, the gaps in understanding and judgment were enormous—and remain so today.
During the Cold War, a common refrain about dance in the USSR took hold in the West (especially in America) that has since been elevated to orthodoxy: the Soviets, it was said, produced great dancers but terrible ballets. To many who were living in the USSR and saw these ballets firsthand, however, this is a naive and ill-informed judgment and a gross misreading of their history. Critics in the West, they insist, simply do not understand just how important ballet was and what it meant to Soviets at the time, nor do they appreciate the ideological constraints that shaped Soviet thinking and art. It is a valid point. Under Soviet rule, the whole meaning and experience of art changed: East and West diverged dramatically in ways that were not always apparent or obvious, even (especially) to those who were there.
Consider two ballets, Romeo and Juliet and Spartacus. Romeo and Juliet seems easy. As we have seen, audiences both East and West immediately embraced it: even British and American critics who found it hammy and overwrought saw its qualities and recognized its art. But this should not fool us. The reasons that people in the West loved it were distinctly their own, and although there was overlap, they did not, could not, know or appreciate Romeo and Juliet or Ulanova as the Russians did. In the USSR, Romeo and Juliet was not just a beautiful ballet passionately performed: it was a new and very Soviet form of art that took its aesthetic cue from Communism itself. As we have seen, its creators had fitted it to socialist realism, but that was only the beginning of its appeal. Many Soviet citizens lived in what one scholar has called “dual time”: their own lives were difficult, but on some level they were nonetheless quite sure that they were speeding toward an ideal future, a paradise of harmony and social cohesion. Ulanova was that future, and the dram-balet really was a new socialist fairy-tale art. Romeo and Juliet was beautiful—an escape from a dreary reality—but it was also, perhaps, at the same time an affirmation that the course was right, that the fairy tale really could become reality.45
None of this was cynical. The dancers and choreographers of the 1930s and ’40s tapped into a strain of heroic Romanticism that had always been present in Marxist and revolutionary thinking, even as it was distorted by Party ideologues. Dancers like Ulanova, whatever their private misgivings (if they had them), conveyed a supreme confidence—in themselves, in their socialist mission and their past traditions—which translated into performances of breathtaking conviction and sweep.
After the war, and because of it, this intensity and emotion only increased. Thus although even the best dram-balets can appear thin and overwrought to Western eyes, it would be wrong to underestimate their grip on the Soviet imagination or their deep ideological resonance. The dram-balet was Stalinism’s most convincing aesthetic pose; it was also, and especially for those who saw its greatest actors, a genuinely moving form of art. It is not enough to say that Ulanova was a great dancer: she was above all a great Soviet dancer.
Spartacus was different. It is harder to appreciate, and many in the West—especially those whose tastes had been formed by Balanchine—hated it for its “bludgeoning” aesthetic and grandiloquent pretenses, even when they admired its dancers’ bravura performances. Even its advocates in the West (and there were some) tended to damn Grigorovich with faint praise, noting that ballet had always had a circus-like aspect. Never had Soviet and Western taste stood so opposed. With Romeo and Juliet, it was still possible to believe that Peter the Great’s “window on the West” was open, at least a crack. With Spartacus it had been slammed shut: this was the Bolshoi, the East, and a defiantly Slavophile form of art. There was no common ground. This is what made it exciting, of course, but it is also what put it beyond the critical pale. Compared to the sophisticated dances of Balanchine, Ashton, Robbins, and others in the West, Spartacus fell woefully short: even at its most thrilling (Vasiliev), it was quite clearly a degraded form of art.46
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