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

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СКАЧАТЬ scraps of paper. In the absence of documents legitimizing Maddox’s theatrical activities, the governor general ordered the chief of police to extract an affidavit from Maddox “to add to the file.”⁵⁰ The noblemen running Moscow under Prozorovsky blanched at the thought of buying Maddox out for 250,000 rubles, as he proposed.

      Having failed to discredit Maddox, Prozorovsky resorted to extreme measures. He turned to the court with the unfounded allegation that Maddox’s house, which stood on the grounds of the Petrovsky Theater, had been built with embezzled funds. The petition failed, after which, with extreme malice, Prozorovsky directed the police to burn the house down, no questions asked. The order was not carried out. The denouement of the drama involved Prozorovsky ordering a punitive inspection of the theater and scolding Maddox for its deficiencies:

      It is my duty to say that you ought to endeavor to keep said theater unsoiled and maintain in it plentiful heat and yet forestall any suffocating fumes … The hall in which you perform is riddled with a multitude of grave errors of architecture, though for this not you but the architect is at fault, and in so great a hall there is but one ingress and egress, and the only other way out is by means of a vile rope ladder. My predecessor had ordered an atrium to be erected, several years have passed, and yet you are not even thinking about it, and so I demand and assert that you must at all costs this coming summer raise that atrium, or else I will order your theater shut down until such time as it is built.⁵¹

      In an attempt to deflect the criticism, Maddox reminded his antagonist of the good things that he had accomplished in his rotting theater, including the absorption of the school for thirty girls and boys and the promotion of the Russian repertoire. Prozorovsky changed the subject in response, shifting his invective from the sagging ceiling to the imperfect personnel:

      It surpasses all understanding that your choir master is deaf, and that the German master of dancing in that ballet was lame, or else crooked-legged, and your ballet master is also old, as is his wife likewise, and no good as a teacher, for you have not a single student of either sex who would be at least tolerable in their dancing.⁵²

      In January 1791 Maddox asked the Opekunskiy sovet to free him from his financial obligation to the orphanage (10 percent of the receipts), as a form of “compassion to the oppressed.”⁵³ The money would then be used to renovate the Petrovsky. The request was approved, but ultimately the matter rested with Betskoy. Maddox persisted, listing all of his services to the Moscow public: the building of the theater and its circular auditorium, the masquerades that he arranged in the Taganka Vauxhall, an investment of 100,000 rubles. The Russian (not Italian) ballets and operas that he produced needed to be taken into account, as well as their sets and costumes. The power brokers relented and, as a “good, humane deed,” bought out his exclusive rights for just over 100,000 rubles while also relieving him of his 10 percent financial commitment to the orphanage, which he had never actually honored.⁵⁴

      Maddox’s strongest supporters were dead and gone, and the new generation ruling Moscow proved hostile to his endeavors. He had maneuvered from the start to secure the protection of the crown, and he needed it to survive. In the 1790s his theater fell entirely out of fashion, and he into disrepute. His merchant creditors persisted in their campaign to prosecute him and took the time away from feasting, praying, and abusing their wives to dictate a letter to their literate sons for submission to Nikolay Sheremetyev, the owner of a first-class serf theater who had married, to the shock of the aristocratic establishment, his leading lady. The language of the complaint, dated July 4, 1803, is ornate, stuffed with proverbs, Ryazan dialect, and biblical arcana in the service of invective. The merchants sought to reclaim the 90,000 rubles they were owed, and hoped for Sheremetyev’s assistance in imprisoning Maddox, since he had played them for fools for years, “twisting like a snake and a toad” to avoid his obligations, and leaving them “as helpless as crawfish in a shallow” when it came time to collect.⁵⁵ Moreover, he had insulted their bushy beards. Arson was not an option. If the Petrovsky was, God forbid, to burn down, the merchants would not recoup their losses. The 90,000 rubles Maddox owed to them—on top of the 250,000 he owed to the governing board—could not be gotten from Maddox’s candle and firewood suppliers, who were also victims of his cunning, nor could it be beaten out of the orphans in the troupe, who would protest, should extortion be attempted, that they had earned their wages through hard toil:

      Verily is this Maddox the craftiest of all living beings, and back when we had not yet learned all his ways and taken full measure of his cunning—to wit, that he pays none of his debts and yet keeps putting away all the profit from the Theater into his own pocket on the sly—back then, while begging us for a reprieve in collecting a payment, would he bawl openly in front of us all, so much so that he could draw pity from stones. And what a master of trickery he is—you can be the smartest merchant in the world, and yet until you get to know him inside and out, he’ll fool you over and over. And towards the end, having dispossessed us of both our wares and our capital, he set off treating us in an impolitic way: in his house did he curse and shout at us, simpletons, solely for our asking for that which was due to us. “How dare you,” he says, “you beard-heads, set your foot in a house of a gentleman? Don’t you,” he says, “know that I, just like the local gentlemen here, carry a sword? And I am,” he says, “made as ever the master of the Theater for all perpetuity.” And so indeed we do believe that he is a man of magnitude, therefore, while all the local powers that be, may the Lord keep them in good health, we approach with no fear whatsoever, were we terrified to even think of showing ourselves before Maddox towards the end. For as it says in the Holy Scripture, “poverty doth humble a man,” and Maddox is nowadays so proud that no cat will want to sit in his lap, and there’s no sign that he is dwelling in poverty, but, he says, “I am only obliged to pay you one and a half thousand rubles a year; that,” he says, “is what it says in the paper that the governing board has. How dare you demand more from me?” And that’s his whole argument. Well, simple-minded as we are, we don’t buy that kind of reasoning and think to ourselves, “Was it not he himself who made it so that he only has to give us that much?” And so the trustees, in their kindness to us, did judge that “Maddox, as they say, is poorest of the poor, nothing more can be gotten from him, and it’s as good an end to a vile state of affairs as can be”—and thought that this would make us content. Will, now, Maddox succeed in having his way with us even here? For if he decided to pay us even one-and-a-half of ten thousand rubles a year, so we are certain as certain can be that the trustees would not hinder him in this but furthermore would commend him for dispensing with grace that which he gathered wickedly.⁵⁶

      The merchants wanted Maddox to sit in jail until his attitude improved and he opened his purse. But it was not, in the end, in the interest of the governing board to deprive him of the chance to settle his debts with the orphanage. In terms of his finances, Maddox was as “naked as a falcon,” the governing board advised the merchants, but he had the backing of the crown and could not be touched.⁵⁷ Their desire to see him in a cold, damp prison cell, tormented by parasites, or sent on foot to Siberia, betrayed their ignorance of the perks of aristocratic relationships. Maddox knew these very well. Connecting the budget of his theater with that of the orphanage had shielded him from arrest, leaving his merchant creditors powerless. He would “dive to the bottom of hell” with the 90,000 rubles they had lent him, leaving their children with “no meat for their soup.”⁵⁸

      By 1794, he was having trouble meeting payroll and found himself begging his stars to accept, in place of a salary, the chance to perform whatever and whenever they liked and keep a large percentage of the proceeds. The arrangement he made along these lines with Pyotr Plavilshchikov, a pudgy, doe-eyed actor committed to representing the plights of the lower ranks, was advertised in Moskovskiye vedomosti on December 13, 1794. “The performance is a benefit for M. Plavilshchikov, who receives no payment from the theater” and asks for “the indulgence of the esteemed public” in “flattering his hope” by attending.⁵⁹ He performed, then he quit, taking with him the conductor of the orchestra and leaving the public, which took the side of the actors over Maddox, disgusted.

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