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

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СКАЧАТЬ illuminated the cart-jammed bridges, the shredded, discarded uniforms, and the human and animal waste on the streets. The flames spread easily in the late-summer breeze, ravaging block after block of wooden buildings, engulfing a hospital, and forcing the rabble onto the river’s edge. Voices of the doomed mingled with the echoes of prayer and discordant singing. The flames increased the strength of the wind and the wind the strength of the flames. When the fire threatened his quarters in the Kremlin, Napoleon gathered his precious articles de toilette and left. He and his commanders took in the spectacle of the city in self-immolation from a suburban palace.

      One of Valberg’s (and Didelot’s) distinguished students, Adam Glushkovsky, would become the first great ballet master of the post-Napoleonic era; during the war, he served as a teacher and ballet master in Moscow, reporting firsthand from the front lines. Relying on his own memories and those of his peers, he compiled a harrowing true-life account of the Napoleonic invasion.

      Nine months before the Napoleonic invasion, in January of 1812, Glushkovsky arrived in Moscow. A mustachioed man with a wide-open face and the wardrobe of a musketeer, he was touted less for his leaps and jumps than for his acting. He danced at the Arbat Theater and taught at the Imperial Theater College, passing the lessons he had received from Didelot on to the children in his classes. He lived at the college but took his meals gratis in the home of the ballet master Jean Lamaral. When word came from the Moscow governor general that he would have to evacuate, he buried a trunk of his belongings in the woods. (The trunk stayed safe; he found it intact upon his return.) He spent his final wages, a bag of copper coins handed to him on the eve of the French attack, on boots and a coat for the road. Then he seated himself in a cart with his students, bound for the church towns northeast of Moscow known as the Golden Ring. The famished horses could barely lift their hooves, and the procession bogged down. He and the students settled for the night in a refugee camp before receiving word that the French would soon be upon them. The convoy lurched onward.

      They moved through hamlets to the town of Vladimir, in hopes of taking shelter and refreshing their horses. The town was crammed with Russian soldiers, French captives, and assorted people of rank. The scene was repeated farther along the road, in the town of Kostroma. There the vagabond entertainers performed in the local wooden theater in exchange for food, a bath, and a bed. After just two days, however, the regional governor announced that he could not accommodate the theater school refugees in Kostroma, despite being directed to do so, on official paper, by the theater directorate in Moscow. Housing was instead found in the picturesque fishing village of Plyos. For three months, the students occupied merchant dwellings built into the hill above the Volga River. Glushkovsky and the other teachers who had evacuated (the instructors of holy law, diction, voice, and drawing) settled into buildings on the shore. To the horror of the eavesdropping local crones, Glushkovsky’s girls lifted their skirts above their ankles and hopped about while practicing their fandangos with the boys. Word spread of the “unclean spirit” that had taken hold, and of the “devil’s helper” teaching them their steps.¹⁶

      Snow fell, and the students sledded down the hill to their classes. News of their presence spread to the aristocratic families residing in the area, and Glushkovsky became the featured entertainment as well as the instructor, in character dancing, of the darlings of the households. He took sick, however, after performing a solo from an Anacreontic Didelot ballet in a cold hall wearing only a light silk tunic. The fever threatened his life, but he declined the treatments offered by the village doctor—tea laced with vodka and bloodletting—in favor of hot wine and chest compresses soaked in vinegar. He convalesced back in Kostroma, where the governor finally found space for him and his students. The governor lived “like cheese in butter,” staging operas on birthdays and hosting dance events capped with fireworks displays over the Volga.¹⁷ The students of the Moscow Imperial Theater College continued their education in exile in the governor’s private theater. Glushkovsky boasts of having a contented French prisoner as a servant, touting the lad’s skills as a basket weaver and tooth puller.

      He recorded what he heard from his friends still in Moscow about conditions in the city beset by the French. One of those left behind was a touring violinist, Andrey Polyakov, who told Glushkovsky about the filth and the smell of the invasion, how the fire flowed up and down and all around the boulevards of the city:

      Buildings on both sides of Tverskoy Boulevard burned; the heat was so intense that it could barely be withstood; in places the ground cracked and buckled; hundreds of pigeons rose over the wall of flame, then fell, scorched, onto a bridge girder; the smoke corroded the eyes; the wind carried embers a great distance; sparks fell like rain onto people; the thunder of collapsing walls sent them into terror; the aged and women with babies at their breasts fled their homes moaning and wailing and beseeching God’s protection; others, the weak, died in the fire; charred dead dogs and horses littered the road in places; French soldiers fell to their deaths from roofs while trying to put out the fire.¹⁸

      Polyakov’s description of wartime Moscow evokes the horrors of Dante’s Inferno and the divine last judgment. These points of comparison were made knowingly, as a best attempt to get across the inexplicable misery. He did not see everything that he describes, but his account is convincing and in keeping with other eyewitness descriptions of water boiling in wells from the heat of the flames and charred paper falling from the sky far outside Moscow. At the end of Tverskoy Boulevard, Polyakov saw two Russian soldiers hanging from a lamppost. It had been turned by the French into a gibbet. The signs in Russian stuck to their chests identified one as an arsonist, the other a defector to the French side who had second-guessed his decision and so met his end. Upper Petrov Monastery offered another ghastly scene. The sacred fourteenth-century grounds had become an abattoir. Pigskins sagged from hooks in the walls, cattle and lamb parts slicked the floors. French soldiers with bloodstained hands carved and distributed slabs of meat from the altar. Horses whinnied for food from the choir lofts.

      After three days the fire had run its course, and the September weather turned glorious. Napoleon returned to the Kremlin, instructing his officers, in between card games and reports from the field, to reestablish order on the streets. Polyakov witnessed French soldiers smoking, eating, and mucking about before forming ranks for morning inspection. One or two trumpets blared; drums rattled. Napoleon himself arrived on a white horse, and the soldiers smartened themselves up. Napoleon gave them a quick, bored glance, ignored their salutation, then released them back to their tobacco. Thus the occupation settled into a routine. Millers returned to their mills, washerwomen to their washing. Theatrical life also resumed, after a fashion, with the performance of six French comedies and vaudevilles in a pleasant serf theater on an undamaged street. The texts were tweaked in honor of Napoleon and the depleted Grande Armée. Among the performers were Frenchmen employed by the Imperial Theaters alongside officers who had once trod the boards in Paris. The audiences were uncouth, with Glushkovsky describing undisciplined adjutants in berets “coolly smoking tobacco from Hungarian pipes with small stems,” unresponsive to the performances except during the patriotic speeches, at which point they leapt to their feet to shout “Vive l’empereur! Vive la France! Vive l’armée française!” During the intermission they swilled wine and gorged on chocolates and fruit; afterward they remained in the halls of the theater dancing polkas.

      Russian forces refused to capitulate, and engaged in a war of attrition. The people of Moscow starved; pigeons and crows were killed for soup. When they had all been eaten, only the sourest of staples remained—cabbage. Napoleon’s men roamed the ashes “as pale as shades, searching for food and clothing but finding nothing, wrapping themselves in horse blankets and torn coats,” with “either peasants’ hats or women’s thick, torn scarfs” covering their heads. “It was like a masquerade,” Glushkovsky recalled of the weird getups on the streets. Nothing remained of the belief in liberating conquest that had borne the French into Moscow, a city with a texture that they could not fathom. Napoleon ordered the Great Retreat, but not before imagining a heroic return and, in a letter to his aide Hugues-Bernard Maret, vowing to blow up the Kremlin. Rumors of the impending bombing reached Polyakov’s mother, who died of fright. Marshal Éduoard Mortier carried out the СКАЧАТЬ