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

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СКАЧАТЬ baton used to count time. Bruises and loving pats on the head were the measure of a dancer’s promise.

      One of his most famous disciples, Yevgeniya Kolosova, had first been a student of Valberg’s. Her physical expression was considered more nuanced, more natural, than speech. The ballets Didelot conceived for her were lavish productions with elaborate scenarios drawn from a conflation of pseudohistorical sources. He found his ideas in books on history and mythology, which he took to the studio in the afternoons. More than one of his plots pivoted around the rescue of the hero or heroine from boulder-throwing, earthquake-generating brutes. Didelot was also fond of Cupid and virgin sacrifices, and dabbled, toward the end of his career, in Orientalism. He liked to assign himself the roles of powerful gods, in defiance of his skeletal frame and oversized nose.

      To simulate great windstorms, Didelot made his dancers flap their arms until dizzy and faint. To suggest spiritual flight, he came up with the idea of suspending dancers from wires and had his technicians raise and lower them with blocks and ropes. Didelot scorned gravity in various other ways. For his 1809 ballet Psyché et l’amour, a demon flew up from the depths of the stage and sailed, torch in hand, over the heads of spectators. Venus was once carried into the clouds in a chariot pulled by fifty live doves. Biographer Mary Grace Swift happily ignores the likely carnage: “It is interesting to imagine the care that had to be taken to harness each dove with its little corselet, which was then attached to wires guiding each bird.”¹⁰

      In 1811, Didelot was forced out, placed on a leave of absence for what the administration of the Imperial Theaters billed as ill health. In truth, a series of personal disputes resulted in the nonrenewal of his contract. Back from Paris, Valberg took over his overlapping responsibilities as imperial ballet master, choreographer, and pedagogue. The thirty-seven ballets that Valberg himself created combined the feet placements and body alignments associated with the French style and the technical displays of Italian entertainers. Val-berg also tapped into his humble origins (his father was a tailor) for creative material. One of his earlier ballets, from 1799, is set on the streets and in the salons of Moscow. A man from the lower ranks loves an aristocratic woman, and passion defeats reason with disastrous results. Although it deeply affected the audience, Valberg was rebuked by the cognoscenti for using modern-day costumes. “Oh! How the wise men and know-it-alls rose up against me! How, they asked, could a ballet be danced in tail-coats!” he remembered of the fracas.¹¹ He subsequently produced a series of fantastic ballets and several domestic dramas that served the cause of moral and ethical enlightenment. In one, a girl named Klara must be educated in the rewards of virtue; another ballet teaches an American heroine the price of betrayal.

      Valberg came into his own, and distinguished himself from Didelot, with a folk-dance-based divertissement about a Cossack maiden who, disguised as a man, becomes a heroic chevalier. Following its successful performance in St. Petersburg, Valberg took it to Moscow. There followed a series of pieces that combined dances, songs, and dramatic dialogues expressing love for Russian peasants and the sacred soil on which they toiled and for which they would fight. Gone were the pixies, sprites, and chariots of the gods; in came peasants, soldiers, and peasants-turned-soldiers. The choreographic dimension was reduced, but the overall popular appeal increased. The most significant of these divertissements dates from the height of Napoleon’s invasion. Just four days after the pivotal Battle of Borodino, which left both the French and Russian armies depleted and out of position, Valberg staged Love for the Fatherland (Lyubov’ k Otechestvu, 1812) in Moscow. The music was written by Catterino Cavos, Didelot’s preferred composer. According to an “eyewitness,” Love for the Fatherland was so patriotic it convinced audience members to sign up for military duty.¹²

      THE GRANDE ARMÉE entered Russia in the summer and fall of 1812. It has been estimated that 400,000 of its troops died for a cause that had lost meaning even before the crossing of the Niemen River of Belarus and Lithuania into Russia. Perhaps the same number of Russians lost their lives, perhaps more. The struggle was not, as it tends to be constructed, ideological, pitting the forces of revolution against monarchic rule. By 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte had declared himself emperor and exercised powers no less absolute than the Russian tsar. His relationship with Alexander I had at times been respectful; their emissaries had mooted the signing of the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. Even the possibility of a dynastic liaison through marriage loomed. But Alexander’s decision to move his troops to the western borders of the empire created the pretext for the French invasion. Napoleon interpreted the move as a provocation and used it to recruit Polish forces for the battles in Smolensk, Borodino, and Moscow.

      The war was a catastrophe for both sides. Cossack and Russian peasant conscripts under the control of Field Marshal Barclay abandoned their positions over and over again, ceding the soil of Holy Rus to the French without a fight. The behavior was passive-aggressive: the Russians neither laid down their arms nor engaged in traditional warfare. Instead, Barclay ordered the Cossacks to burn everything left behind: food sources, houses, modes of transport, and communications equipment. Barclay’s aides, seeing the wasteland of overturned carts and dead or dying horses and men, challenged his judgment. The tsar sacked him, appointing Prince Mikhaíl Kutuzov in his place. Kutuzov was not a brilliant strategic thinker—by most accounts he was inert and rather clueless—but he benefited from being in the right place at the right time. He achieved victory after Napoleon essentially defeated himself by overextending his troops in hostile Russian territory. The scorched-earth practice deprived Napoleon of the spoils of his conquest. Supplies dwindled. Marauding Cossacks harassed the French encampments at night and captured and tortured to death those soldiers caught foraging for food on their own. Napoleon persisted, insisting upon the eight days’ march from Smolensk to Moscow. When Napoleon’s aides second-guessed his thinking, he fatefully declared, “The wine has been poured, it has to be drunk.”¹³ The horrendous battle of Borodino delayed, but did not stop, the French siege of the city. The cost in terms of lives and materiel on both sides was exorbitant.

      Napoleon’s soldiers entered Moscow on September 14, 1812, after exchanging grapeshot and cannonballs with the surrounding Russian positions. The colorful cupolas and golden spires of the city had made a fairy tale–like impression on the French from afar. But the streets were quiet, save for scattered drunkards and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Napoleon established quarters in the Kremlin without fanfare the following morning; he assumed administrative control of the ancient capital without such control having been ceded to him. The tsar and Moscow’s ruling class ignored his arrival and refused to meet with him. Tolstoy imagined Napoleon’s disappointment in a single sentence: “The coup de théâtre had not come off.”¹⁴

      Two-thirds of the population of just over a quarter million had evacuated. Before the invasion, the muddle-headed governor general of Moscow, Fyodor Rostopchin, had regaled the population with tales of French sadism. He acted surprised, however, when the terrified masses packed up and left. Rostopchin predicted Napoleon’s defeat in his proclamations, but also pledged to leave him nothing but ash. The noble class locked up their stone manor houses and headed to their rural homes. Their carriages clogged the road. They packed up their human goods (cooks, maids, nurses, footmen, and jesters) along with their dressing tables and portraits. The carriages mingled with carts containing merchants and tradesmen and their families, along with injured Russian soldiers and—according to anecdote—deserters disguised as women. “Moscow was shaken with horror,” a noblewoman recalled of her pampered exodus. She responded to Rostopchin’s exhortations to stay in the city and accusations of treason by planning her “flight” and the packing of her precious objects.¹⁵ The poor had no choice but to heed Rostopchin and take shelter in churches. Shopkeepers guarded their shelves against looting. The governor general ordered saboteurs, traitors, and spies for the French captured. Then he unlocked the prisons and madhouses. He ordered business papers destroyed and treasuries emptied. The looting began.

      Rostopchin had been told by Kutuzov that Moscow would not be defended, so he fulfilled his promise to burn it down. The city had been tactically abandoned; sacrifice would be the price of its survival. Rostopchin ordered water tanks drained and charges СКАЧАТЬ