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

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СКАЧАТЬ citadel. But rain, or perhaps heroic Cossacks, put out the fuses attached to the barrels of gunpowder. Most of the towers and walls remained intact.

      The French retreat was a pitiful sight. Battered, famished soldiers skittered along litter-strewn, stench-filled streets in twos and threes to their formation points. Most made it out; some were killed on the spot, others were captured. Those who had tended to sick Russian babies at the start of the occupation or otherwise demonstrated a human touch were given shelter in cellars. Mobs awaited the retreating soldiers in the forests, seeking revenge for the burning, the looting, the desecration of churches, the butchering of livestock. Tools of iron and wood gouged out eyes and vital organs.

      The withdrawal continued into November. The temperature dropped. Subzero winds put out campfires; frozen corpses were cannibalized. Napoleon survived to regroup, but his command was fragile and his straggling forces humiliated. European allies became foes, and after a series of defeats he was forced to abdicate. Ambitions crushed, Napoleon would be imprisoned in exile on the island of St. Helena, where at least the climate was more forgiving.

      WHEN DIDELOT RETURNED to St. Petersburg in 1816 from his purported leave, he resumed his duties in an utterly transformed political and cultural landscape. Tsar Alexander I recognized that he had the self-sacrificing Russian masses to thank for rescuing his rule from Napoleon. Their triumph against improbable odds inspired the cultural shift, the enthusiastic embrace of all things Russian. Cossacks took the stage to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat. Gypsies and peasants joined them and were paid to give lessons in their native crafts to performers otherwise trained in pliés, battements, ronds de jambe, and courtly dances. The new fad for the prisyadka squatting position and choral round dances, accompanied by pipes, hurdy-gurdies, and assorted noisemakers, did not last but left an impression nonetheless. Didelot adapted to the patriotic turn by adding Russian dances of the streets and the fields to the pedagogical curriculum of the ballet school in St. Petersburg. In 1823 he staged the second ballet to be based on a text by Alexander Push-kin. Titled The Prisoner of the Caucasus, or The Shade of the Bride (Kavkazskiy plennik, ili Ten’ nevestï), it included a dark-eyed oriental heroine, lasso-wielding barbarians, a ghost, and, in the final act, a chorus of praise for the tsar. It had little to do with Pushkin, but Pushkin was not in the slightest offended. Rather, he wanted to know everything about it, telling a friend that he had once courted the beloved ballerina in the lead role.

      Moscow, the battered survivor of the siege, became the seedbed of the new nationalism. Plans for rebuilding included a colossal theater for ballet and opera, one that would surpass Maddox’s long-gone Petrovsky Theater, an enterprise tainted by corruption and its owner’s English origins. A proper school would be established, with a proper curriculum, headed by an exceptional pedagogue: Glushkovsky. His first and ultimately greatest contribution to ballet in Moscow was as a teacher, and he carved out a chapter for himself in ballet history. He correctly described keeping his students alive during Napoleon’s invasion, providing them with a school (three of them, in fact, between 1814 and 1829, the year of his retirement as teacher), and improving every aspect of the training for everyone.

      Glushkovsky formed a professional troupe from his most talented disciples and set about enriching the theatrical repertoire with patriotic pageants, after the example of Valberg, and longer plot-based ballets based on the texts of Pushkin, following Didelot. In his account of the period, Glushkovsky described the installation of boards, straps, and cushions in his classrooms to help the students develop lift and improve their turnout at the hip and ankle. He spoke about the types of movements privileged by his teachers and which of their ballets he resurrected once a new theater was opened in Moscow—ballets that emphasized gracefulness and flow over coarse contrast. The repertoire changed to mirror the newly nativist cultural context. “In 1814, 1815, and 1816,” he claimed, “in the Petersburg and Moscow theaters, Russian national dances reigned supreme.” These dances supplanted “the French recherché manner.”¹⁹ The French element eventually reasserted itself, but he continued to make room for folk fare. He blended materials of diff erent urban and rural origins in order to represent magical extremes or the desire to overcome commonplace situations.

      Glushkovsky took on overlapping duties and honed his ballet-making skills during the rebuilding of Moscow, its fantastical rise from the ruin of total war. Juggling the positions of dancer, teacher, and ballet master caused him great stress, however, and he begged the directorate for help. Yet in 1831 his duties only increased when he was appointed chief inspector of the ballet and its director. Glushkovsky had to be present at rehearsals and oversee the staging of up to eighteen ballets in a single season, by his own count. He had to haggle for funding, find replacements for ill and injured dancers, and provide both dancers and dances for operas, melodramas, and the ballet groups inserted into vaudevilles, among other things. Out of consideration for the colossal load on his shoulders, the directorate of the Imperial Theaters allowed him and his wife, Tatyana, herself a dancer, to escape Moscow for a month each summer to “correct” what he termed his “ruined health.”²⁰ Having served with what his overseers termed “great zeal” and “commendable behavior,” Glushkovsky petitioned for retirement in 1838, at the age of forty-six, and thereafter received a pension of 4,000 rubles along with a parting gift of a pair of diamond rings. The pension was impressive for the middle class, though an abyss below what an aristocrat earned each year from his serf estates.

      GLUSHKOVSKY’S CAREER IS associated with the invention of “Russian” ballet, which emerged at once as an assemblage, an orientation, and an ideal. The East Slavic Cossacks brought some of their traditional dances to the theaters and schools of the post-Napoleonic Russian imperial ballet, as did the inhabitants of the interior steppe, Siberia, and the Caucasus Mountains. Glushkovsky and his successors also had access to the dances of nomadic peoples. These were altered and exaggerated, losing their ethnographic substance to become symbols, stylized representations, of the “Russian” empire. Later, the folk fare would be relocated to dream scenes, hallucinations, or the parade-of-nations pageants as found in French ballets dating back to the time of Jean-Georges Noverre and Louis XIV. “Dances of the peoples” in nineteenth-century Russian ballets would be confined to the margins and would fall out of the plot.

      Into the mix of Russian ballet was also added imperial court dances from Europe. The blending of non-Russian elements into Russian ballet seems paradoxical, but such was Glushkovsky’s aesthetic—at odds with itself. The more his dancers sought an angelic escape from gravity’s pull, the more important it became to have them step on the soles of their feet, flatly, in a flesh-and-blood, human manner. And the more important the plot, the freer the performers felt to shift out of character, to break the emotional and psychological frame for the sake of bravura athletic display. The divertissements of the post-Napoleonic period included a lot of talking and singing; muteness, the defining element of ballet, was surprisingly rare. Ballet in Moscow thus developed along its own lines, reflecting local conditions much like species of birds evolving on a remote island—particular, even peculiar, in its adaptations. Elsewhere, popular ballets and operas imported from the West ensured ticket sales. But Moscow offered a bounded space for Russian ballet, like Russian opera, to flourish.

      A new public theater in Moscow was constructed under the administrative umbrella of the St. Petersburg court between 1821 and 1825, toward the end of Glushkovsky’s career. It rose from the craggy gorge where the old Petrovsky Theater once stood, yet was meant to represent a clean break from the past and reflect the new nationalist ambitions. Despite the patriotic turn in the arts, however, the spacious new theater, like the performances within, still derived from continental European models. Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and Paris’s Salle Le Peletier lurked in the conscience of the architect. As a symbol of a city making a new start, a city of the future rather than the past, it needed to be bigger, grander, than the theaters of France and Italy, standing above if not apart from them. Thus Imperial Russia’s orientation toward, yet projected dominance of, the West was translated into marble and plaster.

      The impetus to build the theater came from Dmitri Golitsïn, who replaced the disgraced arsonist СКАЧАТЬ