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

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СКАЧАТЬ gossip (about brides and the doddering “old mushrooms” in the civil service), teasing, and outrageous puns.²⁶ His pen and his tongue could be cruel, however, and he did not hold back when deriding critics and censors and all of the other people who had crossed him. He wrote in extreme haste but fluidly, especially when he vented spleen about his various peeves. These included same-sex relationships. In his letters from the late 1830s, he mocks the effeminate manners of male dancers, some openly homosexual, others not, by using feminine endings and misspellings to describe their behavior: “A new dancer has come to us in the theater with the grandest of pretensions; I don’t like him and most of our decent people agree with me entirely. Most of all I don’t like his girlish ways. He prances around as if to say ‘I’m sooo tired!’ ‘I daaanced until I practically faaainted on the stage!’”²⁷ Verstovsky could not help but wag his caustic tongue about the perceived lesbianism of the ladies in his circle as well: “The former actress Semyonova and Princess Gagarina have the most passionate correspondence, one can’t live without the other—it’s magical, simply magical!”²⁸ His letters often include strange drawings altogether unrelated to the subjects under discussion: a chap with a rooster’s comb bowing like an ape to a baroness; a Chinese man with an umbrella riding an elephant; the pope baptizing three babies in a pot.

      The group of nobles running the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg was small and tight-knit. The librettist of Verstovsky’s opera Askold’s Tomb, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, was director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from 1837 to 1841. Soon Verstovsky agitated to replace Zagoskin, pledging “to repair all of the cracks in the directorate” that had appeared under his leadership.²⁹ The largest, he complained, had been created by the choreographer Hullen, who was not, in his opinion, a progressive force at the Bolshoi but someone who had “pushed things back by five years, goaded by Zagoskin, and completely destroyed the ballet company. Many fine dancers dispersed and those who stayed were spoiled.”³⁰ The slander did not, however, help him to get the job, at least not immediately. He continued to report to the governor general of Moscow, Dmitri Golitsïn. Thus he was required to attend parties at Golitsïn’s home, which he found tiresome, “more like dusks than evenings,” and worse than the enervating occasions at the English Club that rounded out his social calendar. The older “bastards” at the parties “pranced like cranes”; the bearded, “greasy” youth put on a dissatisfied affect, pretending that they had better places to be.³¹ The social scene improved when the sovereign visited Moscow, at which time the city became like an “excavated anthill,” everywhere “busybodies sweeping and repairing,” “beards getting trimmed, moustaches already shaved, everyone cleaned up and sobered up!”³²

      Zagoskin was replaced, first by Alexander Vasiltsovsky, an anxious, humble individual much prone, in his letters to the court, to protestations of worthlessness. Finally, after Vasiltsovsky took sick and could no longer fulfill his duties, Verstovsky assumed the directorship of the kontora of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. He served in the position from 1848 until his own retirement in 1861, a year before he died. He did not like Moscow; its provincialism was not a virtue. But as he confessed at the start of his administrative ascent, “the grace of expected rewards” kept him there. Certainly he was able to reward himself by keeping his opera Askold’s Tomb in the repertoire. And when the management structure of the Bolshoi shifted, returning control from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Verstovsky gladly cast himself in the role of a dedicated public servant and hands-on reformer.³³

      Throughout the nineteenth century, the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reported to the directorate of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters—except between 1822 and 1841, when the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters were overseen by the governor general of Moscow and the Opekunskiy sovet, the governing board of the Imperial Foundling Home and its bank, to which the Moscow theaters still owed money from the Maddox era. After 1842 the administration of the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters resembled that of the main theaters in St. Petersburg. Repertoire was reviewed by the (initially) three-member Censorship Committee established within the Ministry of Education in 1804, and budgets were set by the State Treasury of the Ministry of Finance—all under the supervision of the Ministry of the Imperial Court and His Majesty the Emperor. Control of the Bolshoi and the Malïy Theaters reverted to St. Petersburg in 1842, when the elderly Golitsïn’s health began its final decline.

      The impetus for the administrative restructuring in 1842 was a report ordered by the Ministry of the Imperial Court on the condition of the Bolshoi. The report was compiled by Alexander Gedeonov, the director of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters, and by painting a picture of neglect, it suited Gedeonov’s needs—namely, placing the Moscow theaters under his personal control. The extremely biased conclusion was that Bové’s architectural marvel had not been properly cared for since its opening in 1825. The water tanks were empty, which created a serious fire hazard; the “mechanism” under the stage was insufficient for performances involving frequent set changes; there were not enough stagehands, and they often found themselves double-booked, scheduled to work at the Bolshoi and the Malïy on the same night; the costumes used by the opera were threadbare; those used by the ballet were newer but had been stitched together by a “rather mediocre tailor.”³⁴ The Malïy had a modest “shop” on its premises to store its costumes and props, but the Bolshoi was forced to lease “temporary wooden sheds in total disrepair.” Other difficulties at the Bolshoi included poor lighting. “All of the oil lamps are in a dilapidated state,” Gedeonov commented, “leaving the stage dark” even during performances. The ends of the ceiling beams in the hallways were rotting, posing an obvious danger, and the “retreats” (meaning the latrines) produced a noxious stench.

      He saved his harshest words for the Moscow Imperial Theater College, which supposedly existed in a state of “total destruction.” The students who did not live on the premises outnumbered those who did, and the non-residents caused the directorate difficulties: “They missed rehearsals and performances owing to bad weather, sickness, or even just problems in their homes attributable to their extreme poverty.” The college itself was inadequate for the needs of its residents, owing in part to the lack of water for bathing (which had to be brought in from the street and carried up a narrow staircase) and improper sanitation; such squalor, according to the college doctor, “caused the students colds and other serious illnesses with potentially lethal consequences.” The boys who fell ill were confined to a room with four beds on the second floor of the college, with a nurse and attendant next door. A thin wall made of wooden planks was all that separated the patients from the stage used by the students, so that “the dances and other activities held there throughout most of the day cause great concern to the patients and much harm.” The girls’ sick room was on the third floor and much roomier, but the windows had been installed less than a third of a meter above the floor, posing a safety hazard. “Obsessed with fever, suffering intense delirium and disorientation,” the report conjectured, “a patient might, irrespective of all precautions taken, potentially meet misfortune by jumping through the window.” And the teapot in the boys’ sick room had gone missing.

      Gedeonov commissioned two independent inspections of the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters and the Theater College in support of his claims and soon found himself in charge of the entire theatrical complex, along with a summer theater in Petrovsky Park in Moscow. When he took over, he arranged for the payment of the debt owed by the theaters to the Opekunskiy sovet. Since he also had to oversee the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters and could not be in two cities at the same time, he relied first on Vasiltsovsky and then Verstovsky to provide him with regular reports on the situation in Moscow. The offices of the Moscow directorate operated in a three-story stone building in the Arbat neighborhood before moving to quarters on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, just steps from the Bolshoi. According to one source, the bureau contained a small room known as a “lockup,” where artists and employees suspected of malfeasance could be placed under arrest.³⁵ Thus was discipline enforced.

      The first order of business in the reports for Gedeonov was financial: an accounting of box-office receipts. This was followed by a description of the success or failure of individual productions, followed by, in the case СКАЧАТЬ