Most simply blamed the fire on carelessness in the cloakroom. Someone had knocked over a candle, setting the lining of a coat alight; his or her frantic efforts to stamp out the flames had failed. Such would have been typical of Maddox’s underpaid employees, the nobleman playwright Stepan Zhikharev explained, “the whole lot, each one being thicker-headed than the next.”62 Zhikharev watched from a distance: “We saw the enormous glow of a fire over Moscow and stood for a long time in bewilderment, wondering what could be burning so intensely. A postman coming from Moscow explained that the theater on Petrovka was on fire and that the fire brigade in all of its strength was unable to defend it.”63
Maddox was done. He stayed in Moscow for a time, trolling the streets outside of his home in his familiar crimson cloak. There was talk of eviction, but the empress consort intervened to let him keep his house, instead of giving it to his actors. Eventually, he retired to the dacha and garden that he had bought years before, at the height of his powers, in the village of Popovka. He died there on September 27, 1822, at age seventy-five. His dancers and singers had become wards of the state and the Moscow division of the Imperial Theaters. Besides the remnants of Maddox’s troupe, the Imperial Theaters absorbed a serf theater with a staff of seventy-four as well as the French public theater operating in the city at the time. Maddox’s native Russian actors elegantly assured the empress consort that their pursuit of fame was not affected by “self-investment” but a desire to bring Russian theater to its “highest perfection.”64 Even in its ruin, the forerunner of the Bolshoi staked its claim as a source of national pride. The ambitions—and the failures—of Maddox’s theater would also haunt the Bolshoi, which would likewise endure corrosive conflicts between the coldhearted management and the disloyal performers, succumb to government oversight, adjust the repertoire in search of audiences, struggle with stagecraft, and squander huge sums. And the theater would burn, repeatedly, but always be rebuilt.
Maddox retired without a title in the Table of Ranks, but with a generous pension of 3,000 rubles and “six horses to his carriage.”65 Maddox and his wife, a woman of German aristocratic lineage, had, among their eleven children, a son with a stutter whom they turned out for bad behavior. The stutterer in question, Roman Maddox, became the greatest Russian adventurer of the nineteenth century. He spent a third of his life in prison or exile for swindling, assembled a militia of mountaineers against Napoleon’s troops, and, it was said, ravished more maidens than Casanova. Banished to Siberia, he conducted geological expeditions. The son’s exploits fueled anti-Semitic gossip about the father. The slander increased after his death. Without pretense to subtlety, one Soviet-era source claims that Maddox’s posthumous reputation ranges from a “prominent Englishman who was forced for political reasons to abandon his homeland” to a “thieving speculator and money-grubbing ‘Yid.’”66
In the end, Maddox was no less an illusion than those he created.
THE CHARRED REMAINS of the Petrovsky Theater moldered in the bog under its former foundation, home again on summer nights to “birds of prey,” “lots of frogs,” and their music.1 Maddox’s free-enterprise experiment in dance and song had failed; the tsar stepped in, and ballet and opera in Moscow became, with the exception of the serf theaters, a government operation. The Moscow Imperial Theaters administration was established under the control of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters and the aegis of the court, which oversaw artistic, educational, and financial matters.
The children were the first order of business. Their training in dance and music had taken place in the Foundling Home before being absorbed into Maddox’s operation. The orphanage remained proudly perched on a bend in the Moscow River, but it no longer privileged training in the arts. The Enlightenment educational principles of Catherine the Great and her personal assistant Ivan Betskoy were pursued instead in a separate building. Its name, the Moscow Imperial Theater College, was cumbersome, but it stuck. Throughout the nineteenth century the college expanded, its curriculum encompassing not only the arts but also the sciences, and enrollment increased. In the twentieth century, the prestigious dance division was renamed the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Moscow Imperial Theater College moved around as it grew: from a building in the market district near the old Maddox theater, to a series of stone manor houses. Three of the manor houses belonged to generals of long and distinguished service, one to a lieutenant colonel, another to a court chamberlain. The residence of the court chamberlain, an elegant structure of yellow pastel that still stands on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, housed first the college and then, after 1865, the business office, or kontora, of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. Toward the end of the century, a larger space was found in a building on Neglinnaya Street that had once been a canton school, an institution that readied the sons of conscripts for military service with lessons in everything from fortification to penmanship to shoemaking.
When the Imperial Theater College first opened, in 1806, it enrolled fifteen girls and fifteen boys. Far fewer students completed the course of studies in the first years than began it, because many chose to pursue other vocations. Tuberculosis also took its toll, as did personal problems. When the college could not fill the rosters of ballet performances, itinerant performers from the provinces and serf actors from Moscow’s manor houses stepped in. The reputation of the art improved, as did the training, and by 1817, the number of students had doubled. Five years later, eighty-six students were in attendance: forty-one girls and thirty-four boys in the dance program, three concentrating in drama, and eight in music. By the end of the 1820s, when the college moved to the manor house on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, enrollment exceeded two hundred.
Students entered the college between ages nine and twelve and graduated between eighteen and twenty. Those living in residence included orphaned wards of the state and children of people working for the Imperial Theaters. The college limited the number of boarders to fifty students of each gender; by an odd quirk, those living at home could train in dance but not drama or music. The curriculum for the beginning students included, besides dance, classes in holy law, Russian grammar, arithmetic, handwriting, geography, history, drawing, gymnastics, piano, and violin. Later, mythology, fencing, and mime were added. Once it was codified, the routine in the college was invariant: rise at eight, common prayer, breakfast, dance classes until noon or one, lunch, academic subjects, dinner, carriage to the theater for those performing, permission to visit home on major holidays. Dance rehearsals were often held off site; on Saturdays, the classes were inspected. Those students who did not, in the end, exhibit talent were given training in costume- and prop-making and the science of set changes. Those with some promise were assigned to theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg as needed, with an obligation to perform for ten years.
Tales of life in the college are scarce but suggest a no-frills yet nurturing environment. One early graduate described being dressed “disgracefully, ridiculously, in trousers and coats of putrid light green fabric, patched here and there.”2 But the college was not Bleak House. Mikhaíl Shchepkin (1788–1841), a serf actor destined for greatness, taught at the college in the decades after Napoleon. He described his hard work there in a kindly cant: “Having taken on these responsibilities and accustomed myself to performing them conscientiously I seldom missed a day at the school. I soon became acquainted with all of the children, and we lived as friends, studying a little, but seriously.”3
The next concern was rebuilding the theater itself. For the first two years after the fire, Moscow’s entertainers performed on estates and in summer gardens around the city. Theatrical life once more ended up in the homes of noblemen, many of whom maintained private serf theaters within their sprawling compounds. The largest exploited the talents of