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 plan in the middle of the night on October 20, laying the charges to raze the 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,