Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today. Simon Morrison

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      As a result of various rumors circulating here I have learned that the wards, especially those of the female sex, are being brought up in a manner quite disgraceful; I do not mean that they should be taught to be vain and prideful, for true education cannot consist in that, but one ought to find a mean, so that a human being could esteem the human in himself and yet know how to be equal to one’s station, whatever that may be, and, allowing no one to treat him as if he were a beast, would wish to fulfill, with diligence and as if it were an honor, all obligations imposed upon him in accordance with said station. Above all they say about those wards who have been apprenticed to manufacturers, and in particular about those assigned to Tanauer, that they are being kept in conditions that are in no way commensurate with human society, and are worse than those befitting servile commoners.³⁶

      As always, ideals collided with reality, one that clean forks and bowls and napkins changed every three days could not conceal, except for foreign guests, whose impression of the place was that of a Potemkin village, the children dancing around the beaming director in gratitude for their lamb and rice and iron beds. Behind the scenes, maidens were raped by the staff—a serious matter, since pregnant single women risked savage beatings to precipitate miscarriages and the perilous disgrace of banishment to Siberia. For other wards, the experience of the Enlightenment consisted of toiling in overheated, unventilated rooms, winding cotton and spinning flax, being flogged with knouts if their quotas went unmet. Few of them sang; even fewer danced.

      Betskoy, the proud, stout representative of the proud, stout empress, ensured that visitors came away with a positive impression. In the autumn of 1786, Sir Richard Worsley (an English statesman and antiquities collector) traveled to Moscow on the back end of a European tour, noting the potholed roads leading into the city but also the “noble view” of churches and palaces from six kilometers out. He dined with Maddox on September 27 and 30, going to the theater after the first meal and raising glasses to the health of counts, countesses, and their children at the noblemen’s club after the second. The singers were better than the actors in Maddox’s enterprise, Worsley believed, adding that just one of the actors survived the merciless heckling from the parterre to give “general satisfaction.” Worsley included a visit to the orphanage on his itinerary, and describes in his memoirs the “innocuous” but soon-to-be “augmented” building that gave shelter to 4,000 orphans “who are taught music, geography and moral history.” The girls, he adds, “embroider and make very good lace.” The director, Georg Gogel, talked him through the budget: “The expense of the different masters and teachers who overlook the children amounts annually to 40,000 rubles, the fixed pension of this hospital from the crown is 70,000 rubles, besides which they are supposed to have a fund of some 3 million, which they lend out at interest.” Overall, Worsley found the place “admirably well conducted, and each child has a bed, the girls are in a ward by themselves, and the dinner throughout the whole is changed twice a week. There is also a small collection of natural history, to instruct those who are to follow that pursuit, a music room and a library. The wards for the lying-in women are in another separate building, where the women may come when they please, and return home without the least expense, nor can any question whatever be asked them.” A touch of wryness: “I was informed by the director that great advantage of this part of the institution was taken by the nobility.”³⁷ (Worsley could sympathize: His estranged wife, Seymour Fleming, had given birth to a boy fathered by another man and was rumored to have taken more than two dozen lovers in 1782 alone.)

      At least at first, the entertainments put on by the orphans were intended just for the children themselves, their minders, and visiting dignitaries. Little survives of these performances beyond playbills and unspecific anecdotes. In 1778, Count Pyotr Sheremetyev attended a play and a Russian comic opera and was impressed enough to “perpetuate the pleasure he had expressed verbally by donating one hundred rubles” for distribution to “orphans of both sexes in the theater.”³⁸ The children also put on a ballet on a subject of dubious moral content: Shakespeare’s lascivious poem Venus and Adonis, in which a goddess takes a mortal lover by force. On other occasions they performed “Chinese shadows,” which entailed speaking their lines behind screen partitions and waging great battles with their hands and fingers.³⁹ Since these were private events, the performances did not pose a threat to Maddox. But in 1783 a baron and donor (Ernst Wanzura) petitioned the empress to license the in-house theater for public performances. Catherine agreed, and the orphanage went into the entertainment business, mounting French and Russian dramas, operas, and pantomime-harlequinades.

      The English cleric William Coxe supplies a precious, albeit vague, eyewitness account of one of these shows, coupled with an expression of surprise at the absence of “unwholesome smells” in the nursery and the sweetness of the bread baked by the oldest orphans for feeding to the youngest at sunrise and sunset. The performers “constructed the stage, painted the scenes, and made the dresses” for the comic opera he attended. During the performance, they “trod the stage” with ease. “There were some agreeable voices,” and “the orchestra was filled with a band by no means contemptible, which consisted entirely of foundlings, except the first violin, who was their music master.” Coxe heard the singers but did not see dancers, since “on this occasion the play was not, as usual, concluded with a ballet, because the principal performer was indisposed, which was no small disappointment, as we were informed that they dance ballets with great taste and elegance.”⁴⁰

      Seeking permission to continue operating the theater, the director of the orphanage boasted of the success of these performances to Betskoy in a letter dated June 13, 1784: “Each day our theater gets a little better, to the greatest satisfaction of the public. The directors of the noblemen’s club … informed me that their members intend to send a letter of gratitude to the governing board, including 2,000 rubles in this letter to be shared among the orphans who have distinguished themselves in the theater.”⁴¹

      Betskoy did not share the noblemen’s delight and abandoned his phlegmatic demeanor to voice his outrage. He attended one of the ballets and was appalled, seeing not images of “great taste and elegance” but filthiness, postures fit for a “brothel theater.”⁴² He feared the orphanage theater becoming like the larger serf theaters operating in Moscow during the period—places of impure pleasures, whose vulnerable female performers did more for their masters than dance and sing.

      Unaware that Betskoy was planning to abolish the orphanage theater, Maddox flew into a rage, or at least pretended to, about the violation of his privilege. First he sent the police to warn the publisher of Moskovskiye vedomosti against promoting the orphanage theater, and then he took the matter to the imperial court. Long forgotten was Maddox’s own plan, back in 1779, for the orphanage to invest in the building of his theater. For his change of heart, Betskoy turned against him and judged his character suspect. Soon Maddox had a different agenda, one that he expressed to the governor general of Moscow, Zakhar Chernïshov. “Lend the hand of benevolence to a foreigner who surrenders his entire being to the justness of your Most Gracious Majesty,” he pleaded with fake innocence, and “consider the unfortunate predicament of my family and those who have entrusted their capital to me.”⁴³ The rhetoric did Maddox no good. The governor general took the matter to the empress, who instructed him to settle it on his own. Betskoy, for his part, also sent a letter to Chernïshov, expressing astonishment that a “foreigner who has come to enrich himself” could have the “impudence” to claim control over that which was most “sacred”: control of the nation’s culture.⁴⁴

      The court declared that the orphanage was permitted to operate a theater irrespective of Maddox’s exclusive rights. Incongruously, given his initial protests, the decision allowed him to solve his financial problems—at least for the moment. He proposed absorbing the orphanage theater into his own enterprise, pledging to cover the costs of “an apartment and firewood” and restraining himself from “selling” the girls “for money.”⁴⁵ He also proposed helping those orphans “who wished to pursue happiness elsewhere” by negotiating their contracts with other parties—a sly way of keeping tabs on the competition, but also perhaps СКАЧАТЬ